[{"id":16662,"date":"2026-09-22T14:56:45","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T14:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/?p=16662"},"modified":"2026-09-22T14:56:57","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T14:56:57","slug":"governance-in-an-anti-system-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/82\/governance-in-an-anti-system-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Governance in an Anti-System Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

Liberal democracy is in crisis in the United States, and the roots of that crisis go far deeper than any single politician or political party. Almost 70 percent of Americans<\/a> do not believe our democracy is working well. Governing elites and the institutions they run have lost credibility. Pervasive and justified anger has led many to embrace dangerous alternatives or to sit out the democratic process altogether. Ours is an anti-system age.<\/p>\n

But surprisingly, many policymakers and civil society leaders seem to believe that upcoming elections will allow for a return to \u201cnormal,\u201d and enable them to work more or less as they always have. Legislative advocates are now sharpening their campaigns, jockeying over which issues\u2014health care, voting rights, housing, child and elder care, and so on\u2014should take priority. Political and communications consultants are parsing which policies might address voters\u2019 focus on the affordability crisis. Some problems are new, as recognized by experts puzzling out how to rebuild federal agencies decimated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But overall, the approach to governance that seeks to make relatively modest change within a broken system has come roaring back. Even recent ideological debates feel like the rehashing of decades-old arguments. We have seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. The gravitational, habitual pull toward familiar ways of working is very strong.<\/p>\n

The hard truth is that in the absence of a dramatically different approach to governing, authoritarianism and oligarchy will become even more entrenched, and far harder to uproot. Both have deep roots in the country\u2019s history. These forces will not go away no matter what the next elections bring. Another even more devastating authoritarian breakthrough is the almost predictable result unless future governance makes a break from the past. The stakes are very high.<\/p>\n

We are calling for future governance that is affirmatively pro-democracy. This means that it must deliver visibly and effectively, fulfilling people\u2019s material needs in ways that are responsive to what they have been asking for. It means unequivocally upholding people\u2019s fundamental rights and protecting against violations of those rights. And it means building governing institutions that reinforce participatory practices, including voting and other ways of shaping policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is tough. It will require bringing together reforms to the structure of our democracy and reforms to the structure of our economy\u2014even though this isn\u2019t how civil society advocates currently work. It will mean bringing outside movement forces productively into governing, which previous administrations have struggled to do. And it will mean actually countering concentrated wealth and power, something previous administrations have never successfully achieved.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that supporters of pro-democracy governance today seem well positioned. The current Administration\u2019s governing choices have led to pervasive anxiety about war around the world, the violation of people\u2019s basic constitutional rights, and the effects of rising prices on families\u2019 economic futures.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a mass pro-democracy movement has changed the terrain. Everyday people are exercising the right to protest at scale, strategically organizing in states like Minnesota, and taking action across the country to protect their neighbors. All these expressions of dissent have delegitimized recent authoritarian actions and policies in the eyes of millions of Americans.<\/p>\n

But, as people pivot from \u201cno\u201d to \u201cyes,\u201d counting on a return to the country we had before the authoritarian breakthrough is wish-casting. The United States has endured an onslaught of authoritarian policies not once, but twice over the past decade\u2014precisely because \u201cnormal\u201d governance was judged to be a failure by many Americans.<\/p>\n

The \u201cnormal\u201d approach rests on untenable, and usually tacit, beliefs. First, that public officials will be able to enact policies opposed by finance and tech oligarchs without confronting that power directly or building alternative sources of power. Second, that the good intentions and competence of dedicated policy professionals will translate into viscerally felt improvements in people\u2019s lives that engender more trust in American governance and each other. Third, that the structural obstacles to major change baked into our constitutional order can be overcome through skillful legislating or messaging alone.<\/p>\n

In practical terms, the standard-issue playbook assumes that major policy reforms can find a path through a severely gerrymandered Congress and Senate rules requiring supermajorities, and further that muscular use of executive authority will avoid the buzz saw of litigation and adverse rulings from the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, the back-to-normal approach to governance rests on an unspoken belief that authoritarianism is a unique, albeit terrible, aberration in a long arc of progress.<\/p>\n

We would not bet on these premises.<\/p>\n

Americans deserve\u2014and have been calling for\u2014a complete change of course. We need a new roadmap for governing.<\/p>\n

The work must begin with a sober and realistic recognition of the enduring and entwined powers of American oligarchy and American authoritarianism. This is about much more than the ongoing fights around economic inequality and voting rights, as important as those are. Inequality has now morphed into oligarchy\u2014with extremely wealthy people controlling pinch points of the democratic process\u2014and into entrenched minority rule. The rollback of voting rights<\/a> is now one piece of a systematic authoritarian plan to take us back to a pre-1965 political order. Even our basic First Amendment rights\u2014the freedoms of speech, religion, press, and assembly\u2014are now regularly violated<\/a>. The promise of equal rights is threatened by racially discriminatory<\/a> government practices and explicit calls for the restoration of gender hierarchies<\/a>, including some musings about \u201chousehold voting,\u201d in which the head of the household, presumably male, would cast a single vote for all.<\/p>\n

Americans deserve\u2014and have been calling for\u2014a complete change of course. We need a new roadmap for governing.<\/div>\n

Oligarchy, authoritarianism, and hierarchy are not the only notes in the American songbook. But they have always been there and are now the dominant chord. In the face of these dramatic asymmetries of power in our politics, economy, and society, restorationist governance simply won\u2019t get the job done. Before any new governing moment, regardless of party, we must consider and begin to design different kinds of governance.<\/p>\n

The good news is that it is not yet too late. Authoritarian rule has proven to be unpopular<\/a> on a range of issues. Authoritarian governing failures have created a rupture. Abundant anti-system energy can propel change. Prior reformers have seized on comparable openings to remake our democracy and economy. Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the civil rights\/Great Society eras were all powered by vibrant movements, transformational visions, and strategies for earning, wielding, and holding power. They showed that power, once legitimately earned, can be used to launch a cycle of transformations, making our economy more equal and our political system more democratic.<\/p>\n

Reformers today must be just as audacious.<\/p>\n

How We Got Here<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The United States over the last two-plus decades has confronted crisis after crisis\u2014a terrorist attack, a financial meltdown, a pandemic. Each administration in place during those crises\u2014 Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden\u2014was forced to make difficult and consequential choices, even as our governing system became increasingly dysfunctional. Of course, each of them also fought for their own core policy priorities. For the Bush Administration, it was education reform and tax cuts; for Obama, health care; for Trump, tariffs and tax cuts; for Biden, infrastructure and a green economy.<\/p>\n

All of these administrations handled crises and pushed their policies against the backdrop of a growing imbalance between the power of working people and the power of concentrated wealth. Each President handled these forces differently. The Bush Administration talked about compassionate conservatism<\/a>, but made the power of concentrated wealth worse<\/a> and turbocharged the surveillance state<\/a> and the dismantling of civil rights<\/a> after 9\/11<\/a>. The Obama Administration fought hard and won historic health-care reform, but chose not to confront corporate power or build countervailing power. The Biden Administration regularly supported<\/a> working people\u2019s right to organize, but also failed to reckon sufficiently with corporate power and the escalating democracy crisis<\/a>. For its part, the Trump Administration has in both its terms wielded existing executive authorities to consolidate economic power for the wealthiest Americans, limit the institutional checks and balances necessary for democratic accountability, and reverse the civil rights advances of prior decades.<\/p>\n

For all the different policy choices each administration made, authoritarian and oligarchic aspects of our society emerged stronger.<\/p>\n

Oligarchy<\/h6>\n

Every modern U.S. President has made economics central to his agenda, pledging to bring more economic stability to working people. But none of the administrations over the past two-plus decades, even those that took inequality seriously, saw that oligarchic power\u2014meaning not only wealth and income gaps, but also the direct capture of decision-making and adjacent systems, like mass communications platforms, by a wealthy few\u2014was becoming the central problem of our time.<\/p>\n

The threat of oligarchy runs deep in our history. Since the nation\u2019s founding, American capitalism has both fueled and plagued us. Governing decisions have often determined which side of that ledger we are on. In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used every tool at his disposal, and invented a few more along the way, to break the power of the Gilded Age monopolists, strengthen the power of labor unions, and tame the Supreme Court. The 50 years of working-class and middle-class growth that followed were marred by racial and gender exclusions<\/a> baked into policy design, but it was a time when many Americans credibly believed that, in David Leonhardt\u2019s words, \u201cOurs was the shining future.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the 1980s, the New Deal consensus was battered by oil-shock-driven economic crises and the social and cultural upheavals of the Vietnam War era. This opened the political door for the pro-\u201cfree enterprise\u201d thinking<\/a> long nurtured in the academy. American presidents helped build the neoliberal order. President Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers\u2019 union<\/a> in 1981 and installed pro-management lawyers<\/a> to lead the National Labor Relations Board. President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, ushering in an era in which hundreds of thousands of union jobs<\/a> were outsourced and working families\u2019 expectations of a good life were decimated.<\/p>\n

Presidents of both parties doubled down on the financial sector. Reagan deregulated<\/a> the savings and loan industry. Clinton helped usher in \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d on Wall Street by removing barriers<\/a> between commercial and investment banking. All of this gave birth to the tech sector, flooding<\/a> then-young and newly deregulated Silicon Valley with speculative capital. Obama took the side of bankers rather than homeowners facing foreclosure during the financial crisis.<\/p>\n

As it rose to power, neoliberalism disguised itself as neutral economic theory. But in reality, it was a deeply anti-democratic and racialized project. Neoliberalism was not just about lower taxes and less regulation, though it was certainly that. Neoliberal thinking also meant that all of our social institutions, from schools to families, conditioned Americans to believe that they should make choices through the lens of individual responsibility and individual freedom. Neoliberals said that under market freedom, racism would compete itself away<\/a>. But this of course ignored our country\u2019s deep history of structural bias and racial repression, and market freedom instead ultimately deepened both racial and gender wealth disparities<\/a>. There was always an authoritarian substrate in neoliberalism\u2019s real-world effects. An embrace of hierarchy and yawning inequality in the economy inevitably erodes democratic culture and practice.<\/p>\n

Challenging oligarchy, and weakening its power to uphold authoritarianism, must be a central goal of future governance.<\/div>\n

Today, the tech and finance industries and their leaders have become politically dominant. The evidence is everywhere, from donor-driven political appointments<\/a> to record political giving to pay-to-play personal enrichment at the uppermost echelons of leadership. The evisceration of government at the hands of tech executives<\/a>, with whole agencies eliminated and federal workers laid off en masse, has resulted in clear public harms, from a global health crisis to massive cuts in federal scientific research. Challenging oligarchy, and weakening its power to uphold authoritarianism, must be a central goal of future governance.<\/p>\n

Authoritarianism<\/h6>\n

Authoritarianism also has deep roots in our nation\u2019s history. For the last decade, scholars and practitioners have vibrantly debated the reasons for the rise of modern authoritarianism. (By authoritarianism, we mean the use of state power to repress dissent, intimidate or capture civil society institutions, and rig the rules of the political system to keep power for a minority faction.)<\/p>\n

One take is that the movement is the latest expression of a hierarchical project\u2014both racist and sexist\u2014that is as old as the country, reanimated by backlash in recent decades to the growing population<\/a>, rights, and political power<\/a> of people of color, as well as to changing gender roles and the expansion of rights for women and LGBTQ+ people.<\/p>\n

Another view<\/a> is that contemporary authoritarianism is the political project of an increasingly wealthy oligarchy, especially in Big Tech, that sees democracy as incompatible with its vision for the future of the world and our species.<\/p>\n

Many argue that deeper social trends fostered by neoliberalism\u2014especially the erosion of civic and membership institutions, from public libraries<\/a> to bowling leagues\u2014have created fertile soil for authoritarianism\u2019s growth. The demise of unions, which provide vehicles for working people\u2019s day-to-day practice of democracy, is strongly correlated<\/a> with the rise of authoritarians.<\/p>\n

And democracy advocates argue that the very structure of our constitutional order enables authoritarianism by allowing parties with minorities of the popular vote to capture the presidency, Senate, and House, and by enabling these minorities to block popular policies through the filibuster and the courts.<\/p>\n

We see evidence for all these explanations.<\/p>\n

Authoritarianism\u2019s power lies precisely in its multiple origins and stakeholders. It is an elite project and<\/em> a mass movement, a grift and<\/em> a plan based on a real vision for remaking society. It feeds on popular resentment of the outcomes of neoliberal policies, and<\/em> it supercharges inequality, oligarchy, and corporate power.<\/p>\n

We can argue about the relative importance of different causes of the authoritarian turn. But the reality is that authoritarianism has been the default setting for long periods of our history, in large parts of the country, and for large numbers of people\u2014especially Black Americans and Indigenous peoples, people of color and immigrants, women and LGBTQ+ people. Recent leaders\u2019 failure to proceed from that premise\u2014their embrace of a na\u00efve story of American progress with the occasional wrong turn\u2014has near-fatally compromised democratic strategies for governing.<\/p>\n

Taking authoritarianism to be a chronic condition in American history, as many Black activists and scholars do<\/a>, has profound implications for how we think about the project of pro-democratic governance.<\/p>\n

Three Failures<\/strong><\/h5>\n

All of our twenty-first century presidential administrations inherited both the consequences of neoliberal thinking\u2014weakened unions and strengthened financialized capitalism\u2014and the country\u2019s deep authoritarian roots. This set of beliefs, institutions, and norms constrained decision-making for the Bush, Obama, and Biden Administrations in ways that led millions of working-class Americans to lose faith<\/a> in the democratic system. The critical question before us now is whether future administrations will try to chart a different course.<\/p>\n

Building the Surveillance State<\/h6>\n

President George W. Bush\u2019s embrace of the \u201cWar on Terror\u201d was a reaction to 9\/11, the defining crisis of his presidency. But it was also built on a long history of conservative agitation for a more muscular, neoconservative foreign policy, which proceeded alongside conservatism\u2019s embrace of neoliberalism. After 9\/11, Bush\u2019s policies did not narrowly respond to specific terrorist networks, but instead made a civilizational argument. The President\u2019s declarations<\/a> discouraging anti-Muslim bias in the immediate days after the attack notwithstanding, the Bush policy agenda targeted<\/a> millions of Muslims, Arabs, Middle Easterners, and South Asians as threats and suspects. This created a discriminatory infrastructure<\/a>\u2014most prominently in the form of the massive new Department of Homeland Security\u2014to consolidate and expand surveillance, detention, and deportation powers.<\/p>\n

The Patriot Act, passed a few weeks after the 9\/11 attacks, created baseless government authorities and empowered actions<\/a> in violation of constitutional, civil, and human rights on everything from domestic surveillance, detention, and deportation to interrogation and torture. This weaponized Americans\u2019 fear and grief, justifying xenophobia and paranoia about Black and brown people and immigrants generally. The U.S. Treasury\u2014the backbone of global finance\u2014and the U.S. banking system gained vast powers to surveil and, often, to cut off capital based on discriminatory \u201cterrorist watch lists\u201d and investigations of nonprofits that never established guilt. Decades of hard-fought civil rights protections crumbled swiftly under this assault.<\/p>\n

The growing national security state after 9\/11 depended on a supercharged financial system and in turn benefitted that system. Investment banks and venture capital poured billions<\/a> of dollars into national security tech startups, defense contractors, and privatized military ventures. National defense itself became even more of a privatized commodity as the surveillance state grew. This amplified the power of the oligarchic elite and the instruments of authoritarian control simultaneously. The symbiosis of a corporation such as Palantir and the surveillance bureaucracy is but one example.<\/p>\n

The Party of FDR Becomes the Establishment<\/h6>\n

President Barack Obama also faced a crisis from the beginning of his presidency. Progressives have long criticized his response to the global financial meltdown he inherited on economic grounds, as too small and with benefits that weren\u2019t visible enough. Whether Obama ever could have done more remains the subject of fierce debate, given that the 60-vote Democratic majority in the Senate in his first term was undermined by fiscally conservative Democratic senators and a unified Republican bloc. But governance failures in the Obama years were a turning point. The backlash<\/a> that emerged in 2009-12 led to tectonic shifts in our culture and politics.<\/p>\n

For hundreds of millions of people, the Great Recession years were a major part of a long-term decline<\/a>\u2014a deep, resounding loss of faith in the American promise. The federal government provided close to $250 billion<\/a> to Wall Street, many times what it provided to homeowners. Banks returned to profitability, while an estimated ten million mortgage holders<\/a> lost their homes. Despite clear evidence of criminal wrongdoing<\/a>, no big bank executives in the United States were prosecuted or went to jail. For the vast majority of Americans, this was when the government that was supposed to fight for working people\u2019s interests in an economic crisis became the establishment.<\/p>\n

Overall, the Obama Administration focused squarely on moving policy within existing strictures rather than on making new rules that would change power structures. Health-care reform was the top policy priority, and Obama expended Herculean energy mobilizing Congress, especially the critical handful of conservative Democrats who always threatened to vote against the White House. This approach worked to pass the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which helped tens of millions of Americans<\/a> afford health care but left the power of the health insurance industry intact. More generally, this approach proved insufficient to achieve structural reforms that would have changed the balance of power itself, such as strengthening union rights or reforming the immigration system.<\/p>\n

At the same time, conservative movement energies were massing. The Tea Party\u2019s founding<\/a> in February 2009 with Rick Santelli\u2019s on-air rant against Obama\u2019s support for homeowners was the beginning of the public declaration<\/a> of a new iteration of right-wing populism in the United States. By April of that year the movement had become nationalized, with an estimated 750 rallies <\/a>across the country. A significant number<\/a> of the Tea Party\u2019s economic populists were also \u201cbirthers\u201d who falsely claimed that the nation\u2019s first Black President was ineligible for office because he was not born in the United States. In uniting neoliberal and authoritarian tropes, the movement gave permission for outright racists to become ever louder within conservative popular culture and its increasingly powerful media and social media platforms.<\/p>\n

In 2008, Obama won the presidency because he had built an inspirational nationwide movement. But his team chose not to continue to support outside movement power once in office. White House officials instead worried that movement forces\u2014a \u201cliving, fire-breathing entity,\u201d<\/a> as one adviser later put it\u2014could turn against the Administration if not controlled. The movement Obama built was deliberately demobilized<\/a>, while other forces, such as labor, got weaker without help from the White House.<\/p>\n

Newly energized conservative populists had plenty of room to push their own narrative about who was to blame for working-class people\u2019s falling economic prospects.<\/div>\n

Obama\u2019s approach to governing\u2014push within the existing system, demobilize movements, accommodate corporate power, and deprioritize countervailing power\u2014left the field open for a resurgent right wing and a return of the oligarchs who were briefly humbled during the financial crisis. Newly energized conservative populists had plenty of room to push their own narrative about who was to blame for working-class people\u2019s falling economic prospects. They marshaled many working- and middle-class white Americans\u2019 energies and resentments against elites of all stripes\u2014but also, perversely and bitterly, against homeowners of color and immigrants, who were the hardest-hit victims of the Great Recession and the jobless recovery.<\/p>\n

The Administration\u2019s failure to address economic inequality meant that the ardent hope of 2008 had by 2016 curdled into a sour anti-system cynicism<\/a>, paving the way for an authoritarian upsurge. The United States has never been the same.<\/p>\n

Paradigm Shift, But Not for the People<\/h6>\n

President Biden came into office promising to \u201cshift the paradigm\u201d on working-class economics. The COVID-19 pandemic gave permission for more spending, and the Biden team drove the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was both bigger and more directly distributed to working people than the 2009 stimulus. Some Biden appointees had a laser focus on fighting the stranglehold of corporate power. On climate, the Biden team took cues from the climate and justice movements pushing for a Green New Deal.<\/p>\n

For a brief moment, it seemed that an administration understood that fighting against corporate extraction could be a powerful tool. Market-first, neoliberal thinking could not tackle COVID-19 and climate change, the biggest problems of our age.<\/p>\n

But in the end, Biden-era economic initiatives\u2014limited by an even thinner congressional majority in Congress than during the Obama Administration\u2014were ambivalent about both power and populism. The Biden Administration, on balance, cut<\/a> both corporate and individual taxes despite its promise to make the wealthy \u201cpay their fair share,\u201d<\/a> and it did not try to reverse wholesale the tax cuts passed into law in 2017. The Administration\u2019s tentative relationship to union power showed up in divergent responses to worker actions. Biden weighed in against<\/u><\/em> the full <\/u>package<\/a> of worker demands in the railway strike of 2022, but he did walk the picket line<\/a> for auto workers a year later.<\/p>\n

Flawed policy design and communications mistakes didn\u2019t help build popular trust in governance. The stimulus\u2019s child tax credits just showed up in people\u2019s bank accounts without any explanation. The Inflation Reduction Act\u2019s (IRA) \u201cgreen credits\u201d were technocratic and confusing. Of course, in the end, inflation was the weighted anchor on the Administration\u2019s ambitions, and the Administration handled rising public anger at prices badly.<\/p>\n

But in retrospect, public anger at Biden\u2019s economic efforts was also based on the priorities themselves. The policies that made it through Congress were climate, transportation infrastructure, and industrial policy investments\u2014important for our long-term economic and planetary health, but not the health-care, child-care, and elder-care investments that support the personal and family well-being, and time, of the American people. More on care, and a more direct, less distant set of climate and infrastructure investments\u2014money to offset people\u2019s rising energy bills, for example\u2014could have met the public moment in a way that the IRA did not.<\/p>\n

Already saddled with decades of deep public distrust and facing a country furious and fearful about COVID-19, by the end of his presidency, the visibly older Biden could not respond to or channel public anger. Terrible foreign policy choices, especially with respect to Israel<\/a>, and a confused and confusing immigration and border policy<\/a> only contributed to public ire. This reflected the widening gulf between the interests of working people and what policymakers understood about their concerns and their lives. If the battle was really about a paradigm shift for the people, authoritarian populists won the fight handily.<\/p>\n

Governance in an Anti-System Age: Matching Power With Power<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Almost 20 years after the financial crisis, most Americans are disillusioned and jaded. The number of people who say they hate both political parties has doubled since 2020<\/a>. Most people do not trust the federal government or see it as helpful to their lives.<\/p>\n

This is fuel for authoritarianism. Large numbers of people may not be ideologically committed to strongman rule, but they see that existing economic and political systems are failing them. For many working people, elected officials and leaders on both sides of the aisle, along with educated elites more broadly, are the problem. They designed, benefit from, and now uphold a system that only works for them.<\/p>\n

But this also means that some people who have supported authoritarianism may hold their allegiance lightly and be open to new ideas. And a far bigger group of people who don’t currently participate at all can perhaps be persuaded to engage.<\/p>\n

What does all of this say about an effective approach to governance that will strengthen democracy today? We see four critical shifts from what has come before.<\/p>\n

1. Our Democracy Needs New Rules<\/h6>\n

Even before we get to specific policies, we must consider the system in which those policies are made. By design, our constitutional order prevents majorities from translating their preferences into action. The undemocratic structure of our political system has helped enable the authoritarian turn. Multiple veto points thwart popular will, including the Electoral College, the filibuster, and the unrepresentative structure of the Senate. Add to that the recent wave of Supreme Court decisions, like the undercutting of voting rights, that weaken democratic participation. When popular demands are dismissed or defeated, cynicism grows, and authoritarian leaders who promise to break the rules to get things done gain genuine appeal.<\/p>\n

Twice in the last 25 years, the person who lost the popular vote has become President. The Supreme Court has upheld unpopular and anti-democratic policies on issues from civil liberties to civil rights. The Senate is heavily weighted to rural, whiter states\u2014dramatically diminishing the voting power of people of color and others who live in more densely populated regions. These anti-democratic rules are compounded by state legislatures\u2019 gerrymandering<\/a>, money in politics<\/a>, and laws that suppress voting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Any advocate who has pursued change on any issue in the last three decades, from gun control to health care, has their own story of how these systemic government failures have blocked reforms that have majority support. Some issues, like immigration reform, have fallen victim to different traps at different times. \u201cDeliverism\u201d isn\u2019t enough<\/a>, but certainly democracy must function well enough to deliver benefits for working people.<\/p>\n

Reformers have a long list of potential fixes: abolishing the Electoral College via the National Popular Vote, eliminating the filibuster, developing a multi-party system and proportional representation, adding additional states to the union, significantly reforming the Supreme Court, amending the Constitution itself. All are worth exploring seriously. The point here is not to present a fully formed strategy for renovating our democracy. It is to say that governing will require that such a strategy be a top priority.<\/p>\n

\u201cDeliverism\u201d isn\u2019t enough, but certainly democracy must function well enough to deliver benefits for working people.<\/div>\n

In addition to pursuing structural democracy reforms, pro-democracy advocates must take building levers of governing power for the public\u2014and against private concentration\u2014seriously. We need to develop a new constitutional politics<\/a>. Under the \u201cunitary executive theory,\u201d<\/a> authoritarians are claiming powers to tax and spend, to police and deport, to investigate and terrorize, that are illegitimate and, often, violate existing rights. The pro-democracy response must be a comprehensive and lucid approach to using governmental power, restoring checks and balances, and at the same time delivering for the American people.<\/p>\n

Who should legitimately wield governmental power, and on what terms? When and how should pro-democracy reformers use the powers of the presidency\u2014more imperial now than ever\u2014to oppose authoritarian policies, and instead promote ones backed by democratic claims of justice? When and how should pro-democracy efforts remake the Supreme Court, which, in a historical first<\/a>, a majority of Americans now view as biased<\/a>? Court reform is central to any reconstruction project. And how should pro-democracy forces reform Congress, which is now so broken as to be unable to govern in any meaningful way?<\/p>\n

These are not questions that any governance experts had to address even a few short years ago. Answering them well will be a monumental and consequential task. Perhaps the solution for now is, as Cornell Law\u2019s K. Sabeel Rahman argues<\/a>, that pro-democracy forces must use all tools at their disposal\u2014even the expanded powers of the executive\u2014while at the same time working towards legislative primacy and court reform and maintaining the authority of courts that have not been corrupted. The purpose must always be to restore public trust, with a rebalancing across all three branches of government as the North Star.<\/p>\n

2. Policies Must Matter to Working People<\/h6>\n

In addition to truly democratic systems, we also need policies that are popular, tangible, and meaningful to regular people. This is not about policy lists. It is about having a strategic approach to policy prioritization and design.<\/p>\n

The first step is picking policies that can build public trust. This will require more than tweaking around the edges of private-sector domination. Especially in our highly financialized economy, market forces will never provide, universally and at reasonable prices, what people need to live a good life<\/a>, especially care, education, and housing. Delivering for working people will mean public action, public options, and public funding.<\/p>\n

Affordability\u2014the ability to pay for life\u2019s necessities, and a few extras too\u2014will doubtless be critical to any agenda. Fixing housing will require everything from eviction moratoriums and rent freezes to more public financing dedicated to building<\/a>. Addressing health care, now so radically underfunded that more than five million people<\/a> lost Medicaid or ACA coverage in 2025, will clearly require more federal funding, but also the revival of \u201cMedicare for All\u201d and perhaps the direct delivery of care through publicly funded clinics. The same is true for child care<\/a> and elder care\u2014think Head Start at scale, as well as guaranteed, affordable care that ensures that care workers can organize.<\/p>\n

We will need not just public funding of existing programs, but also brand-new ideas. Promising ideas include some that are familiar, like tuition-free public colleges<\/a>, and some that are fresh, like a People\u2019s College<\/a> that would guarantee every adult a fully paid-for two-year college degree, or making school lunch free<\/a> for all kids. We also need more people-focused policies<\/a>. Imagine national service or jobs programs wherein benefits arrive in a matter of days or months, as New Deal programs did. Imagine accessing public benefits without degrading or Rube Goldberg-like application procedures. Imagine programs where beneficiaries see themselves as deserving claimants\u2014as the elderly feel about Social Security. Government policy can honor social identities like being a parent, worker, or student, just as it has done for older Americans.<\/p>\n

Transformational policy design will also have to tackle people\u2019s fears about the near future, which are in large part driven by worries about artificial intelligence. A much more robust social safety net\u2014from unemployment insurance to job training\u2014is table stakes<\/a>. We should also work now to build jobs that are pro-worker<\/a> and \u201cdouble-dignity<\/a>,<\/a>\u201d<\/a> providing dignity both to the worker and those their work serves. Tech worker organizing, various efforts to slow or put moratoriums on AI development, and building public checks on AI using all government tools\u2014from comprehensive safety regimes<\/a> to equity stakes to national ownership of AI companies to public options<\/a>\u2014should all be on the table.<\/p>\n

The proposals that leaders put forward can\u2019t be symbolic, incremental, or weak gestures in the face of titanic problems. We need transformational policies that speak to the core of the pain people are experiencing and that an everyday person would understand to be an effective response that would actually fix the problem. Governance in an anti-system age requires honesty and directness about the level of change required\u2014and about who and what stand in the way.<\/p>\n

3. Power-Shifting Must Be a Central Metric of Policy<\/h6>\n

Pro-democracy efforts must also use policy to tame power at the top and build countervailing power for working people. That power-building must be sufficient to contain and oppose extractive corporate power and its authoritarian allies.<\/p>\n

Some power-shifting priorities are age-old. Taxation is of course important as a matter of federal revenue. But it is also a critical tool for blunting the power of corporations and oligarchs. We know that taxing wealth and power is politically very difficult\u2014most recent tax legislation has in fact moved in the opposite direction\u2014but the status quo is dire and may be unsustainable<\/a>. Wealth is skyrocketing, and the ultrawealthy, using perfectly legal \u201cbuy, borrow, die\u201d<\/a> strategies, often pay absolutely nothing in income or estate taxes. The untaxed accumulation<\/a> of income and assets has worsened<\/a> significantly over the last 20 years. Many ideas should be in the mix: raising the current tax rates, focusing on wealth taxation, taxing inheritance and capital gains, or something even more far-ranging, like a global wealth tax. This will be an ongoing struggle, but it must be central.<\/p>\n

Directly strengthening working people’s civic power is also essential. Unions and other institutions that create solidarity among working people are a crucial antidote<\/a> to both authoritarianism and oligarchy. Labor law has been made into a tool of anti-union employers; rewriting it so that the record numbers of workers who want a union can have one should be a cornerstone of economic policy. And it\u2019s not just workers. The federal government could also actively support organizing and social bargaining by other groups, such as tenants<\/a>, consumers, patients<\/a>, parents, and students. More agency for everyday people in the economy supports democratic vitality.<\/p>\n

Breaking corporate monopolies and confronting oligarchic rule must be part of the plan. The concentration of media ownership as well as the outsize power of AI, crypto, and social media companies must be confronted directly. Solutions will require federal action: putting AI under federal control, including through public ownership. Breaking up media conglomerates. Chartering large corporations so they are accountable to the public<\/a> and required to balance profit-seeking with worker empowerment, limit executive compensation, place limits on political spending, and reverse environmental harms. Breaking the power of corporate behemoths isn\u2019t optional if we wish to live in a democratic society.<\/p>\n

Deconstructing the massive surveillance and carceral state is another necessity. Its exponential growth further strengthens the hand of industries and oligarchs predisposed to support authoritarian policies. The growing (and increasingly privatized) workforce of people whose job is to arrest and incarcerate others\u2014the majority of whom are people of color and immigrants\u2014creates a powerful voting bloc for authoritarianism.<\/p>\n

Federal action will not be easy given the roadblocks to sweeping change\u2014even change supported by majorities\u2014that are baked into our political system. That is why making structural changes that enable the government to serve the public interest is an essential first step.<\/p>\n

Lawmakers must not avoid the difficult but essential work of remembrance, accountability, and repair that is necessary to prevent future authoritarian upsurges.<\/div>\n

A final and controversial element of power-shifting involves honestly reckoning with hard truths about our past. Lawmakers must not avoid the difficult but essential work of remembrance, accountability, and repair that is necessary to prevent future authoritarian upsurges. This story has replayed itself over and over throughout American history. Premature reincorporation of former Confederates undermined the first Reconstruction. Policymakers of both parties failed to take decisive action after the January 6 insurrection. Finding the form that accountability takes will not be easy and demands deliberation\u2014but we cannot afford to make the mistake of willful forgetting.<\/p>\n

4. Successful Governance Needs Strong Movements<\/h6>\n

Outside agitation has always been fundamental to social change. Our country has had only three periods in which democratic rights, economic equality, and social and cultural belonging all expanded: Reconstruction, the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and the civil rights movement. The common factor in each era was nonviolent movements featuring massive popular protest and nonviolent, constitutionally protected actions like strikes and boycotts. Broad-based organizing by Black people, pastors and faith leaders, workers, tenants, committees of the unemployed, women, and LGBTQ+ people created a climate of urgency that led leaders to embrace bold and transformative policies once seen as far outside the mainstream. Abolition of slavery. Women\u2019s suffrage. The right of working people to form a union. The income tax, meaning taxing the wealthy. Voting rights.<\/p>\n

The New Deal policy revolution was made possible by highly disruptive outside movements: tenants fighting evictions and workers going on strike. The Voting Rights Act came only after Selma and Bloody Sunday. Movements create moral, economic, and political crises that force politicians to choose sides, which many hate to do. Movements always engender backlash from those benefiting from the status quo they challenge, but they are essential for expanding the terrain of what’s possible.<\/p>\n

Success in pro-democracy governance demands an inside-outside strategy. People in office can\u2019t will movements into being, but they can encourage and validate them. FDR famously said<\/a>, \u201cIf I went to work in a factory, the first thing I\u2019d do is join a union.\u201d President Lyndon B. Johnson used<\/a> the language of the civil rights movement\u2014\u201cWe shall overcome\u201d\u2014to show his support. Public officials should accept that movements will often frustrate them. They will make big demands and criticize elected leaders; this is necessary to the messy process of governing. Emancipation needed Abraham Lincoln, but equally Frederick Douglass and a broad-based, boisterous abolitionist movement that sometimes criticized Lincoln to make it possible.<\/p>\n

Outside groups must also shift their orientation. They will need to build new habits and strengths. Organizing muscles have atrophied in the age of online organizing and social media, which has made fast but shallow mobilization easier. Too many groups talk to shrinking numbers of the already converted rather than reaching out to the millions of people who are not yet activists, but who might join because they, too, seek community, agency, and the outcomes born of solidarity.<\/p>\n

And pro-democracy movements\u2019 policy demands must be bolder, in line with the ideas we outline above. Too many groups have defaulted to highlighting the abuses of authoritarianism or rehashing incremental policy proposals developed in another era. The moment now is different. They should be making more ambitious demands of our entire governing system and speaking to their members\u2019 hunger for a vision for our shared future.<\/p>\n

An American Strategy<\/strong><\/h5>\n

A new approach to governance would challenge undemocratic rules that are unfair and unrepresentative, rebalance power in society and the economy, and invite popular movements into an ongoing conversation. This playbook would be a dramatic break with the overly technocratic, insider-oriented governance of prior administrations and with the imperial approach of the current one. This is not a fantasy. It is an approach that has long been central to our American story. While oligarchy and authoritarianism are as old as the country, so too are reform movements that have enhanced our democracy and made our country more equal.<\/p>\n

Radical Republicans and a grassroots Reconstruction movement of formerly enslaved people enacted three amendments to the Constitution and created and then used the Freedman\u2019s Bureau to deliver material benefits and political rights to formerly enslaved people\u2014and also to disrupt, for too short a time, racial hierarchies in the South. The New Dealers inside and outside the government made unions central to the lives of American working people and forged a national liberal coalition that included Black Americans and Catholic and Jewish immigrants. The civil rights movement continued that tradition, winning landmark legislative victories and making racial equality the new common sense.<\/p>\n

This deeply American lineage of reformers working both inside and outside the system has overcome challenges worse than what we face. They can inspire and instruct us today.<\/p>\n

Even a fresh approach to governance will not succeed, however, in the absence of a compelling vision\u2014a deep<\/a>, broadly appealing, and solidaristic story of what makes for a good life and how we should live with each other in this new era. Authoritarianism\u2019s current cruelties have weakened its appeal, but authoritarians still have a vision of the good life that is emotionally compelling. Their vision of a life that purports to \u201coverthrow elites\u201d; centers family, neighbors, religion, and virtue; and provides order and safety will remain a source of power, no matter how hypocritical it may be.<\/p>\n

But that is not the only plausible vision for a post-neoliberal order. We believe that the coming years are a crucial opportunity for moral and prophetic leadership focused on justice and equality to invite us into a new American story of who we are and can be.<\/p>\n

We understand the temptation to \u201crestore\u201d rather than ask for more, especially since authoritarianism has brought so much pain and fear. And we also understand the inclination to prepare for the future based on what we know about the past, have trained for our whole lives, and are good at.<\/p>\n

But the strange paradox of our times is that only by pursuing changes that seem impossible can we realistically avoid the entrenchment of authoritarianism and oligarchy for decades to come. Playing incremental small ball is the real risk. People want new policies and systems that work for them, not small improvements. The viable path, both practical and inspirational, requires a new worldview and strategy for governing that reconstructs our society in service of human flourishing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What if returning to \u201cnormal\u201d is not the safest path for our democracy, but the most dangerous one?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":16737,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1920],"tags":[1161,1017,1156],"class_list":["post-16662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1920","tag-democracy","tag-features","tag-governance"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16662"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16740,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16662\/revisions\/16740"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":16710,"date":"2026-09-18T14:37:56","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T14:37:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/?p=16710"},"modified":"2026-09-18T14:37:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T14:37:56","slug":"whose-fourth-of-july","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/82\/whose-fourth-of-july\/","title":{"rendered":"Whose Fourth of July?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n

America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation\u2019s Anniversaries<\/a><\/strong> by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. \u2022 Crown \u2022 2026 \u2022 288 pages \u2022 $31<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

On April 15, 2026, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered \u201cRemarks on the 250th\u00a0Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.\u201d The talk, sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin\u2019s Civitas Institute, focused on the role the values and principles expressed by the Declaration of Independence played in his own life (even and perhaps\u00a0especially<\/em>\u00a0during Jim Crow segregation), the importance of devotion and courage in spreading those principles and values, and the need for their return. Speaking of how his own illiterate sharecropping grandparents utterly devoted themselves to his care, Thomas exhorts his audience to evince the same type of dedication to the nation: \u201cSimilarly, it is the devotion expressed in the final sentence of the Declaration, the willingness to do anything for our principles that has, throughout American history, been most indispensable. It is that devotion that we are missing today, and that we must find in our hearts if this nation is to endure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomas\u2019s speech is on my mind as I turn to Eddie Glaude\u2019s\u00a0America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation\u2019s Anniversaries.<\/em> Glaude, the James S. McDonnell distinguished university professor at Princeton University and a well-known and frequent commentator on MS NOW, offers America, U.S.A.<\/em>\u00a0as the follow-up to Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul<\/em> and Begin Again: James Baldwin\u2019s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. <\/em>The latter work, published in 2020, was Glaude\u2019s response to President Donald Trump\u2019s first term.\u00a0America, U.S.A.<\/em>\u00a0uses the nation\u2019s semiquincentennial to wrestle with Trump\u2019s return to power.<\/p>\n

The book shares conceptual elements with W.E.B. Du Bois\u2019s work and John Dos Passos\u2019s U.S.A. <\/em>trilogy, published during the Great Depression. Glaude adapts Du Bois\u2019s concept of \u201cdouble consciousness\u201d to explain the gap between how America sees itself and how America is. Du Bois introduces each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk<\/em> with a stanza of poetry and a Negro spiritual; Glaude also begins each chapter with music, in his case bars of a piece composed for the book by Houston Grand Opera composer-in-residence Joel Thompson. The opening chord, Glaude writes, \u201ccaptures the core idea of the book and sets the stage for the elegy that mourns the country we thought we knew.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen several attempts to commemorate the semiquincentennial, including the Ultimate Fighting Championship event held on the White House lawn and sponsored by, among others, Crypto.com and Ram trucks. The official semiquincentennial was celebrated in July, 19 months after Trump returned to the Oval Office; he has since radically transformed both the presidency and the nation. Comparative politics experts who were concerned about democratic backsliding in the United States after Trump\u2019s first election in 2016 no longer see our nation as a liberal democracy but rather as a competitive authoritarian state\u2014a state that maintains the veneer of free and fair elections but persistently uses them to serve the venal interests of the political party in power. In America, U.S.A.<\/em>, Glaude argues that Trump\u2019s election is the byproduct of American double consciousness. America sees itself simultaneously as a nation of freedom and as a white republic. The contradiction between these dueling ideas generates both sentimentality and a rage that threatens to tear the nation, divided soul and all, apart.<\/p>\n

A<\/span>lthough we see the consequences of this contradiction every day, for Glaude, the nation\u2019s anniversaries are especially catalytic. \u201cWhat and how we remember\u2014and what and who we exclude from our stories\u2014matter, because those memories and stories shape how we act today and how we fight for our future,\u201d Glaude writes. \u201cI turn to American anniversary celebrations not simply as a chronicle of the wrongs of our past, but as a resource (as revelation!) to help us imagine a way forward out of this madness.\u201d How the nation chooses to narrate its history, he suggests, determines and reflects its moral capacity.<\/p>\n

How the nation chooses to narrate its history, Glaude suggests, determines and reflects its moral capacity.<\/div>\n

Beginning with 1776 and continuing through the present, Glaude uses America, U.S.A.<\/em>\u2019s six chapters and three periodizing interludes to narrate several state-based commemorations and other key historical moments (the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the March on Washington, among others). As one exceptionally important consequence of American double consciousness is the tendency to ignore or dismiss Black attempts to weave themselves into the American ideational tapestry, Glaude notes these attempts: Frederick Douglass\u2019s metaphoric rewrite of the Constitution through his classic July 5, 1852 speech \u201cWhat to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?\u201d; A. Philip Randolph\u2019s sesquicentennial address; New York Abolition Day; and Carter G. Woodson\u2019s creation of Negro History Week, among others. He uses them to repeatedly return to one point: \u201cNo matter what is said about us as the fever dream spikes again, we are not interlopers who need to prove ourselves repeatedly.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first three chapters, plus an interlude, wrestle with the nation\u2019s transition from a slave state to a free one. In the first chapter, Glaude visits Philadelphia\u2019s Congress Hall, the seat of the U.S. Congress from 1790 to 1800, using the occasion to weave together the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, the 1797 suicide of Moses Gordon (a formerly enslaved Black man who killed himself rather than be remitted as a result of the act), the 1619 Project, and Trump\u2019s 1776 Commission. In the second chapter, Glaude plaits early nineteenth-century Abolition Day commemorations together with three other events: Douglass\u2019s 1852 speech; Reverend Henry Highland Garnet\u2019s \u201cAddress to the Slaves of the United States,\u201d delivered at the 1843 National Convention of Colored Citizens; and the tragic 2022 mass murder of ten African Americans by white supremacist Payton Gendron at a Buffalo supermarket. The third chapter revisits the nation\u2019s first centennial, coming ten years after one of the bloodiest civil wars in world history ended and one year before the 1877 Tilden-Hayes Compromise, which ended Reconstruction once and for all. Glaude focuses on the 1873 Colfax and 1874 Vicksburg freedmen massacres and President Ulysses S. Grant\u2019s decisions in both. (Grant used state power aggressively in response to Colfax, but after taking a political beating, idled in Vicksburg.) He then returns to Douglass, who in his prophetic July 5, 1875\u00a0speech suggested that the forthcoming centennial would see the North and the South come together not for the country\u2019s sake, but for the benefit of the white race.<\/p>\n

The first interlude begins with Douglass\u2019s death in 1895. Although the cessation of the Civil War saw Douglass as momentarily hopeful, by the end of his life, with the rise of Jim Crow, voter suppression, and state-sanctioned racial violence, Douglass expressed bone-weary frustration and indignation. Glaude notes that with the beginning of the twentieth century we see the rise of lynching and the Ku Klux Klan, but we also see the emergence of influential Black organizations like the National Urban League and leaders such as Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey.<\/p>\n

Glaude organizes the second half of the book differently, with major chapters alternating with interludes. Chapter four reckons with the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, where President Woodrow Wilson delivered a forward-looking speech to a group of Union and Confederate veterans in which he glossed over the causes of the Civil War; the 1926 sesquicentennial; the rise of the Klan and state-sanctioned racial violence; attempts to stave off rising anti-immigrant sentiment; and one of the first public speeches delivered by Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who used the opportunity of the sesquicentennial to argue that Black Americans were the quintessential Americans. The second interlude begins in 1939 with fascism\u2019s rise and ends in 1976. Chapter five spends most of its time on the 1976 bicentennial celebration with detours devoted to comparatively robust white and Black attempts to generate counternarratives, such as the 1970 Black Panther-sponsored call for a new constitutional convention and the 1971 People\u2019s Bicentennial Commission. The third interlude deals with the rise of Ronald Reagan, as well as his decision to sign the bill establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday. The final chapter brings us to the present.<\/p>\n

I<\/span> found America, U.S.A. <\/em>to be a difficult read, and not because of the subject matter. It functions as an indictment of where we are right now, but given the 2016 and 2024 elections, writing a book that indicts America isn\u2019t difficult to do\u2014a seemingly thriving cottage industry of anti-Trump jeremiads now exists. Rather, I found it difficult because I find the conceptual backbone of the work problematic.<\/p>\n

Glaude\u2019s central argument is that the nation\u2019s character is profoundly shaped by the story it tells about itself. If we somehow change this story, we change the nation\u2019s identity. This idea isn\u2019t new: Glaude made a similar argument about African American identity almost 20 years ago in In a Shade of Blue<\/em>. But even if we were to assume that Glaude\u2019s assertion applies to African Americans, taking that argument and applying it to the United States as a whole makes Glaude guilty of committing a scaling fallacy<\/em>. The consequences of committing this fallacy should become obvious by way of a thought experiment.<\/p>\n

Race has served as a particularly powerful technology for dividing the polity.<\/div>\n

Think about the nation, its struggles over time, and then the role race plays within both. Now think about the nation in two ways. First, think about it the way Glaude does, as an entity with a divided soul, wracked by double consciousness. Then, alternatively, think about it as a nation-state with a political economy, political institutions, and interests that are comprised of two forces\u2014one democratic and one antidemocratic. The nation moves toward democracy when the pro-democratic force is in power and away from democracy when the antidemocratic force is in power. If you had to choose one, which better describes the nation, its struggles over time, and the role race plays within them? Which one offers a better way of thinking through what should be done?<\/p>\n

For me the answer is crystal clear. Thinking of the nation as divided between pro- and antidemocratic forces is far too simplified\u2014but it better describes the past 250 years, as well as the last ten. And it better describes the role race played and continues to play in the nation. Race has served as a particularly powerful technology for dividing the polity. The various and sundry attempts to carve out benefits for populations defined as white and then withhold them from populations defined otherwise have been undertaken to undercut democracy itself. America\u2019s race problem is a democracy<\/em> problem.<\/p>\n

Glaude\u2019s inability or unwillingness to see this causes some problems. In the first chapter, he asks whether the nation would still \u201cbe saddled with the race problem\u201d if Congress had made different choices in 1800 vis-\u00e0-vis early free Black responses to the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. If he saw America as a divided polity, he\u2019d be more likely to see how race functions\u2014as a politically constructed means of dividing populations to create durable interests, ideas, and institutions devoted to extraction and nondemocratic rule. Almost 200 years after slavery had become part and parcel of the United States, different decisions could have altered<\/em> the race problem, as they would have given freed Blacks (and their pro-democracy allies) more political capacity to contest the slave regime. But given the signal importance of trade with Caribbean colonies, to say nothing of the growing role cotton played in the Deep South, the \u201crace problem\u201d would still be here.<\/p>\n

In the second chapter, Glaude focuses on Douglass\u2019s Fourth of July speech, one of the most important speeches in American history. If Glaude saw the nation as a divided polity, rather than as a nation possessing a divided soul, perhaps he\u2019d have not only told us where<\/em> Douglass gave his famous speech, but about Douglass\u2019s audience. Douglass delivered the speech to the Rochester Ladies\u2019 Anti-Slavery Society, an organization comprised of white female abolitionists. The speech was designed as a means of mobilizing and organizing an increasingly pro-democratic constituency, as well as a means of critiquing the nation-state from below. In other words, it had a political purpose as well as a moral one. Understanding the nation as a divided polity, but one capable of development, would have perhaps made Glaude more attentive to the instances where Blacks used commemorations as a tactic to generate political cooperation if not comity.<\/p>\n

In the third chapter, Glaude addresses Douglass\u2019s profoundly pessimistic 1875 speech, in which he described Black freedom as a byproduct of happenstance (\u201cThe white people of this country quarreled and came to blows, and it was our lot to be on the side of the victorious party\u201d). Here Douglass was most decidedly wrong. Blacks didn\u2019t just happen<\/em> to choose the winning side. Rather, Blacks determined <\/em>the winning side, and the terms and conditions of its victory, by generating a general strike that brought the Confederacy to its knees and forced President Abraham Lincoln to change his calculus. We use the term \u201cReconstruction\u201d to define this period, but what we\u2019re really looking at is the active construction<\/em> of one of the most robust democracies the modern world had seen at that point. That robustness did not last, of course. And it\u2019s this non-durability that Glaude suggests emanates from the nation\u2019s double consciousness, but I\u2019d suggest it has another root: politics<\/em>. The antidemocratic forces in this nation did not simply die out when the Civil War was over. And after a contested presidential election, they took advantage of preexisting institutional elements to re-embed antidemocratic policies into state and national politics.<\/p>\n

Glaude lets stand Douglass\u2019s statement that Blacks just so happened to choose the winning side, rather than deciding both the winning side and the nation\u2019s trajectory. And he never picks up on Douglass\u2019s call in the same speech for Blacks to develop their own institutions, institutions with the potential to further sustain and develop Black democratic capacity.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>aking the \u201cdivided soul\u201d approach has another consequence. Glaude argues that focusing on commemorations doesn\u2019t just give us resources for understanding America\u2019s condition, but resources for effectively changing<\/em> America\u2019s condition. He spends far too much time on America\u2019s problematic commemorations\u2014which failed in many key aspects (particularly financially), suggesting that the nation wasn\u2019t as committed to them as one might think\u2014and far too little time on the commemorations that have<\/em> had a decisive impact on American life. Here I refer to the various and sundry commemorations developed by Black Americans. In Abolition Day (celebrated historically on July 5), Black History Month (originally started as Negro History Week in February 1926 to coincide with Lincoln\u2019s and Douglass\u2019s birthdays and then extended to a month in 1976), Juneteenth, and MLK Jr. Day, we see durable efforts to tell the type of stories Glaude seems to suggest have emancipatory capacity.<\/p>\n

Glaude has too little faith in the capacity of Black populations to durably shift the course of the nation.<\/div>\n

Why not spend more time on commemorations like Abolition Day that\u2014although centering on Black populations\u2014actively commemorate freedom writ large through<\/em> Black freedom? These Black attempts to develop alternative institutions may have had the effect of not just protecting Black life, but creating means whereby even Blacks today are less likely to support backsliding. I suspect that one of the problems with this book is that Glaude has too little faith in the capacity of Black populations themselves to durably shift the course of the nation. African Americans are, like Americans in general, caught in a whipsaw. Yet and still, Black Americans exert\u00a0and have exerted<\/em>\u00a0a disproportionate influence on the nation\u2019s democratic development. It\u2019s this dynamic that America, U.S.A.<\/em> does not do enough to examine, to the work\u2019s detriment (and our own).<\/p>\n

And this brings me to the final problem. In the first sentence of the introduction, Glaude states, \u201cI do not love America, and never have, especially now.\u201d He comes back to the issue of love over and over again in the text, connecting it to the issue of worthiness: whether the nation, given its racism, is worthy of love; whether the nation, given its racism, is capable of loving Black people. Indeed, his last sentence (which ends with \u201c[T]hese people have done this shit again in the 250th year of America, U.S.A., a semiquincentennial blues\u201d) reads as if it were written by a spurned lover. Seeing the nation as an entity capable of loving, as opposed to a nation-state that oscillates between democracy and antidemocracy, renders one far less capable of committing oneself to the realities of long-term political struggle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What 250 years of American commemorations reveal about our racial divide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":16593,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1920],"tags":[1027,1062,1065],"class_list":["post-16710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1920","tag-book-reviews","tag-inequality","tag-race"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16710"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16717,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16710\/revisions\/16717"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":16581,"date":"2026-09-17T18:16:58","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T18:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/?p=16581"},"modified":"2026-09-17T18:16:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T18:16:58","slug":"how-monopoly-fascism-rose-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/82\/how-monopoly-fascism-rose-again\/","title":{"rendered":"How Monopoly Fascism Rose Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just a few days before Christmas 2024, and a month or so before Donald J. Trump would be sworn in for his second term, Jeff Bezos arrived at Trump\u2019s South Florida Mar-a-Lago estate to offer the incoming President an olive branch.<\/p>\n

The founder and chairman of Amazon was to have dinner with Trump and fellow multibillionaire (and briefly trillionaire) Elon Musk. During much of his first term, Trump viewed Bezos with contempt and frustration. Bezos\u2019s newspaper, The Washington Post<\/em>, frequently criticized Trump and published dogged coverage of his Administration. Trump\u2019s response was predictable: He lashed out at Bezos, instructed the government to cancel Post<\/em> subscriptions, and used his platform to accuse Amazon of not paying enough in taxes.<\/p>\n

Whether it was how definitively Trump had won or backlash against the Biden Administration, this Trump term would be different. Bezos arrived in Florida having praised Trump\u2019s electoral victory, both with words and cash: Bezos called Trump\u2019s win \u201can extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.\u201d A month later, Amazon donated<\/a> $1 million to his inauguration fund. Trump could feel the changing tone, from Bezos as well as other former critics from big businesses who had journeyed to Mar-a-Lago to make peace with the once and future President. \u201cIn the first term, everybody was fighting me,\u201d he told reporters<\/a> during his first post-election press conference. \u201cIn this term, everybody wants to be my friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Mar-a-Lago dinners Trump hosted for Bezos and other Big Tech executives in the days and weeks after his reelection were simply the first overtures in the increasingly close relationship between the Administration and our new class of corporate oligarchs. Now, some of the country\u2019s most powerful corporations and their ultrawealthy executives have woven their businesses into the fabric of Trump\u2019s increasingly authoritarian government\u2014and in return, the Administration has cemented their stranglehold on the economy by permitting their dangerous mergers and wrongdoing.<\/p>\n

Cartels and monopolies\u2014companies powerful enough to dominate industry and, in some cases, act as private governments in the economy\u2014have operated in lockstep with authoritarian governments throughout history. In Francisco Franco\u2019s Spain, for example, cement and sugar cartels worked at the behest of the regime throughout World War II and beyond. In fascist Italy<\/a>, as in Nazi Germany, turning over state-owned monopolies to private ownership was seen as a crucial step toward building industrial support for their respective regimes and political programs. That same kind of monopolistic privatization<\/a> was carried out by Augusto Pinochet\u2019s neo-fascist government in Chile (at the urging of pro-monopoly U.S. academics).<\/p>\n

That transactional relationship has rekindled today in our country. For Trump, the reward is partially the praise and capitulation he so clearly craves. To stay with the example of Amazon, the company once kept an arm\u2019s length from Trump and his inner circle, but since that Mar-a-Lago dinner, Bezos and chief executive Andy Jassy have publicly embraced the Administration. \u201cTrump has lots of good ideas, and he has done a lot,\u201d Bezos told CNBC<\/a> in May. \u201cHe\u2019s been right about a lot of things, and you have to give him credit where credit is due.\u201d Amazon has since donated to Trump\u2019s $400 million ballroom project, and the company\u2019s in-house movie studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, paid $75 million to produce and market a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, which promptly bombed<\/a> at the box office. On the same day Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis, Jassy and other executives attended<\/a> a gilded White House screening of Melania<\/em>, to kiss the ring, as it were.<\/p>\n

Trump also gets the industrial help he needs carrying out his anti-immigrant campaign. While CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have together paid hundreds of millions in contracts to Amazon for years, Trump has weaponized Amazon\u2019s tech and infrastructure contracts to fuel his Administration\u2019s deportation machine. Amazon Web Services and its related programs act as the backbone for numerous ICE operations and much of the agency\u2019s infrastructure, including the \u201cICE Cloud,\u201d which allows it to store information and share it<\/a> with local police and law enforcement. ICE\u2019s fascist immigration crackdown would struggle to function with the same level of efficiency but for the tacit and explicit cooperation of the Amazon monopoly.<\/p>\n

The relationship has been lucrative for Amazon. Since Trump took office a second time, Amazon has been handed new or increased federal contracts worth more than $255 million, according to an analysis<\/a> by watchdog group Public Citizen. Then, in June, the company secured<\/a> a staggering $2.5 billion contract to provide department-wide cloud infrastructure and software to the Department of Homeland Security, including data storage, virtual workspaces, online tools, and other cloud-based services.<\/p>\n

There was a time, some generations ago, when the symbiosis between monopolies and fascism, and the existential threat corporate power poses to freedom and democracy, was ingrained in the American psyche. The monopolists who fueled two world wars and the horrors of Nazi Germany drove policymakers at home to stop monopolies from forming and attempt to deconcentrate American industries. But in the last four or five decades, those lessons have been lost\u2014or, more accurately, buried by a corporate-led coup to undo our democratic control of the economy. As the Trump Administration and America\u2019s corporate titans consolidate their power, these are lessons we must quickly relearn.<\/p>\n

Americans must take decisive action if we\u2019re to avoid teetering over the precipice of monopoly fascism.<\/div>\n

Remembering the antimonopoly lessons of the past is just the start. Americans\u2014the Democratic Party in particular\u2014must take decisive action if we\u2019re to avoid teetering over the precipice of monopoly fascism where we as a country are currently perched. It cannot be piecemeal, and there can be no half measures. The margins are no place to fight fascism. Rescuing the republic will require a kind of bravery in the face of corporate power that we have rarely demonstrated over the past half-century. Luckily, history has lessons to teach us about bravery as well.<\/p>\n

The Third Reich\u2019s Monopoly Machine<\/strong><\/h5>\n

On June 11, 1948, a man named Carl Krauch walked to a lectern beneath the towering, ornately carved wooden ceilings of Courtroom 600 in the Justizpalast<\/em>, or Palace of Justice, in Nuremberg, Germany, to defend himself one last time.<\/p>\n

Clean-cut and dressed in a boxy suit and a dark striped tie, Krauch stood before a military tribunal of American judges as a senior executive of Interessen Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie, or IG Farben\u2014at the time the most powerful corporate conglomerate in Germany and a domineering force in chemical engineering worldwide. For years under Nazi rule in Germany, Krauch was head of Farben\u2019s \u201cWehrmacht Liaison Office,\u201d which facilitated Farben\u2019s cooperation with the German military. By the late 1930s, Krauch had fully moved into government service, acting as a chemical production liaison reporting directly to Hermann G\u00f6ring, the head of the Luftwaffe (the German air force) and the Nazis\u2019 second in command. Two years after the Red Army captured Berlin and the Nazi regime collapsed, Krauch and 22 of his Farben colleagues stood trial in Nuremberg for aiding and abetting the Nazi death machine.<\/p>\n

At Nuremberg, the Farben executives pleaded what many Nazi officials and collaborators had: that they were merely following the regime\u2019s orders, and that if they had refused, they feared the regime would turn on them. Krauch asked the tribunal<\/a> to \u201creturn to me my honor, which was taken away from me by the prosecution.\u201d But his plea meant little. The judges convicted Krauch<\/a> and a dozen of his Farben colleagues of war crimes. He received a six-year sentence, one of the longest for a Farben executive.<\/p>\n

Cartels and trusts dominated the German economy before, during, and after World War I. As the Nazis rose to power, Hitler came to rely on those firms to carry out the regime\u2019s horrors. And no combine was more paramount to German fascism than the German mega-monopoly IG Farben.<\/p>\n

The first incarnation of Farben began in 1904, a year after Carl Duisberg, the head of chemical firm and drugmaker Bayer and Farben\u2019s future chairman, visited the United States and returned impressed by the sheer size of the outright or near monopolies held by firms like Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and the Aluminum Company of America, or Alcoa. On his return, he proposed that Germany\u2019s major chemical firms embrace the country\u2019s long tradition of cartels and monopolization and combine with one another rather than compete. Duisburg suggested an informal merger of the three largest chemical firms\u2014BASF, Bayer, and Agfa\u2014to form the first version of IG Farben. By 1916, the major players in the industry were locked<\/a> into a cartel tie-up.<\/p>\n

As imperial Germany dove into World War I, the government rapidly subsumed Farben and other German monopolies into the war effort. Many of the chemical products Farben made had both civilian and military uses: The hydrogenation process Farben had perfected, for example, was used to make ammonia and nitric acid, which are necessary both to fertilize plants and build bombs. The Farben companies received significant government support to expand production, including of the poison gas that Germany deployed extensively during the war.<\/p>\n

By the time Hitler took power, years of unchecked mergers had compressed many industries into outright monopolies. Robert Bosch had cornered the market for fuel injection equipment and magnetic devices; Henschel und Sohn dominated locomotive manufacturing; Vereinigte Kugellager Fabriken, or VKF, monopolized the antifriction ball-bearing industry; while other combines dominated film, raw metals, detergent, matches, and more.<\/p>\n

Then there was the chemical combine, Farben, which, through the formal merger of six companies including BASF, Bayer, and Agfa, became one all-powerful industrial giant in 1925. Hitler was keenly aware of Farben and its vast industrial machine by the time he took over as chancellor in 1933. Four months before his appointment as chancellor, at the behest of Farben co-founder Carl Bosch (nephew of Robert Bosch), Hitler met with one of the technical directors of the company\u2019s synthetic fuel project, which Bosch had fought hard to maintain during the Depression. Hitler was just as enthusiastic as Bosch about the project. Germany\u2019s ability to create its own fuel would mean independence, particularly during a wartime blockade. During the meeting, Hitler appeared deeply knowledgeable about the intricacies of the synthetic fuel process and excited about its prospects. Bosch reflected after the meeting, \u201cThe man is more sensible than I thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even as chancellor, Hitler\u2019s consolidation of power was incomplete. A new round of Reichstag elections in March 1933 represented the party\u2019s opportunity to seize total control of the German government. A month before the election, Nazi financier Hjalmar Schacht organized a meeting of German monopolists to pool money to support the Nazis in the upcoming election. At the meeting Hitler detailed his vision for what he deemed the final election in Germany. Either the Nazis would win at the ballot, or they would win by the barrel of the gun. Either way, he implored the industrialists, \u201cPrivate enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy.\u201d Farben pledged 400,000 reichsmarks to the campaign, by far the most of any firm.<\/p>\n

Monopoly cash in hand, the Nazis won the elections, held just six days after the Reichstag fire, and the subsequent passage of the Enabling Act allowed Hitler to rule by decree. Farben was quickly subsumed into the Nazi government. By the summer of 1934, Farben was helping to rearm the regime\u2014in violation of the Treaty of Versailles\u2014using a newly discovered light metal manufacturing process to build military planes. Farben executive Krauch had become the company\u2019s main liaison to the regime to assist in its military buildup. In a deal brokered in December, the party agreed to buy all the synthetic fuel Farben produced that was not already sold at market, ensuring Farben a 5 percent profit on the purchase. The deal thus tied Farben\u2019s finances to that of the Nazi regime. As British journalist and historian Diarmuid Jeffreys writes in his history of the Farben monopoly, \u201cThe future was not yet visible but the cartel had in essence committed to providing Hitler with the means to launch the most devastating conflict in human history.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Hitler, the job of subsuming industry for murderous purposes was simple: He needed only to enlist one company, Farben.<\/div>\n

In the fall of 1936, Hitler travelled to Nuremberg for a party convention, where he announced a four-year plan to prepare Germany for war. To fulfill the plan, the Nazis needed synthetic rubber, nitrates for making explosives, and synthetic fuel. Germany spent more than 90 percent of its war preparation funds on chemicals. More than three-fourths of those funds went to Farben, which had by then become the industrial wing of the Nazi apparatus. As the head of chemistry in the German Ministry of Economics would later remark, \u201cThe Four Year Plan was, in fact, an I.G. plan.\u201d The plan meant fortune and power for IG Farben. Between its formation in 1925 and the dawn of global war in 1939, Farben more than doubled in size, and its profits grew by a staggering 500 million reichsmarks in a decade.<\/p>\n

By the time the Nazis began to invade their neighbors and march across Europe, Farben had also restarted one of its key wartime activities from a generation before: manufacturing poison gas. This time, a Farben subsidiary named Degesch made the gas\u2014a cyanide-based pesticide called Zyklon-B\u2014but instead of deploying it to the frontlines of the war, the Nazis deployed it to Auschwitz and other death camps, where the gas was used to kill millions of Jews<\/a> and other victims of the Nazi death machine.<\/p>\n

As Hitler relied on Farben to produce the poison gas needed to run the death camps, so Farben relied on the Nazis\u2019 work camps for labor. Farben had vastly expanded its production of synthetic rubber and gasoline, and it needed the workforce to make them to meet the demands of war under the four-year plan. In 1941, the Nazis approved a new Farben synthetic rubber and fuel plant to be built at Auschwitz. The SS provided Farben with as many as 12,000 slave laborers from Auschwitz to build the plant, and untold thousands more workers once the plant was open. Farben constructed its own concentration camp nearby to house its slave labor, and if any worker fell behind in their arduous, breakneck work at the plant, Farben would send them back to Auschwitz to die.<\/p>\n

For Hitler, the job of subsuming industry for murderous purposes was simple: He needed only to enlist one company, Farben, which had grown to include the materials, modes of transportation, and finished goods necessary for war and genocide. Farben made everything for the Nazis: the gas to carry out the Holocaust; the wheels, rubber, and gasoline to propel the tanks; the explosives in the bombs; and the metal of the Luftwaffe bomber planes. Germany\u2019s intensely monopolized economy made the march of fascism not only possible, but straightforward for Hitler and the Nazis.<\/p>\n

Why De-Nazification Also Meant Decartelization<\/strong><\/h5>\n

As Hitler consolidated power and rearmed Germany, American leaders began connecting the rising fascist regime there with the country\u2019s long history of industrial monopolies and cartels. The United States had antitrust laws on the books\u2014notably the Sherman Act, which bans cartels and monopolies, and the Clayton Act, which prohibits dangerous mergers. But they were largely ineffective, and giant, dominant corporations had grown in both size and number at home. The Clayton Act was particularly problematic: While the 1914 law banned mergers via stock purchases, it allowed companies to buy their rivals\u2019 assets freely, a major loophole that led to consolidation across industries. In the 1920s, the power that massive companies held over society and the economy raised little domestic concern. But the twin shocks of the Great Depression and the rise of the Nazis refocused the country\u2019s attention, and concern, on corporate power at home.<\/p>\n

The legislative record from the mid- to late 1930s is filled with debates and proclamations about the deep dangers of concentrated corporate power in the United States, and the need to preserve a democratic economy to avoid the fates of Germany and Italy. In 1937, a Senate debate around a bill to regulate the coal industry devolved into vitriol against monopolies. Vermont Senator Warren Austin, a Republican, blasted the bill for exempting the coal industry from antitrust\u2019s ban against cartels: \u201cWe know that the cartels of Europe afforded Mussolini and Hitler the ready means, the equipment, the implements, with which to seize\u2026industry.\u201d Moments later, senators paused their debate when a commotion broke out on the Senate floor, as several lawmakers read and reacted to the opinion of Justice Louis Brandeis in Liggett vs. Lee<\/em> detailing the extent of monopolization in the economy. William Borah, a progressive Republican from Idaho, read the opinion aloud, then barked to his colleagues<\/a>, \u201cThere is only one remedy for monopoly, and that is to destroy it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sentiment was spreading. In his second term, Franklin D. Roosevelt had left behind many of the policies and programs of the first New Deal and turned instead to strict enforcement of the antitrust laws to redistribute economic prosperity widely and avoid the corporate concentration that contributed to the Great Depression. Roosevelt\u2019s famous 1938 address to Congress made clear his understanding of the connections between private industrial power and the rising threat of totalitarianism across the Atlantic. \u201cUnhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people,\u201d Roosevelt told lawmakers. \u201cThe first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism\u2014ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.\u201d<\/p>\n

“[T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.”<\/div>\n

To implement his antimonopoly program, Roosevelt put in place two trustbusters to operate the country\u2019s twin antitrust agencies: Federal Trade Commission member Charles H. March, a vehement antimonopolist who served as chair of the agency three different times during the Roosevelt Administration, and Thurman Arnold, who became head of the Justice Department\u2019s Antitrust Division\u2014and perhaps the most important antitrust enforcer in U.S. history.<\/p>\n

Both men understood the looming threat of fascism in the United States. Although it\u2019s a story that is sadly too long and winding to detail here, powerful American businesses had spent decades waging war against the antitrust laws and the idea of competition itself. Both March and Arnold saw the viewpoints and actions of American industrialists as a threat to democracy and spiritually closer to the governments of Germany and Italy than the ideals of the United States. In 1939, March wrote that there are two ways to kill business competition: One is when a dictator brings the economy under his command; the other is when businesses convince good liberals that the only solution for economic crisis is to allow them to collude and become monopolies. \u201cThey both lead to fascism,\u201d March wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Arnold\u2019s role in investigating and fighting corporate abuse both at home and abroad went far deeper. American monopolists had been conspiring with their German counterparts to fix prices and limit competition internationally for years. The most powerful companies in America\u2014including Alcoa, Standard Oil of New Jersey (the company that would eventually become Exxon), DuPont, and others\u2014conspired with IG Farben, the industrial giant Krupp, and other German monopolists in the 1920s and \u201930s as a way to protect their dominance in the United States from German competition. In return, the U.S. companies agreed to limit their production of key goods including synthetic rubber and oil byproducts, handing over those markets to German firms. When Arnold took office in 1938, he kickstarted investigations into the transatlantic cartel rings. The Justice Department sued Alcoa, both for monopolizing aluminum and for its role in the cartels. In a Senate hearing led by future President Harry Truman, Arnold alleged<\/a> that under Standard Oil\u2019s cartel deal with Farben, Standard shared its patents for synthetic rubber with Farben but refused to share those patents with the U.S. military or American producers, and had pledged to continue that agreement whether or not the United States entered the war.<\/p>\n

After Germany declared war on the United States, Arnold and a group of trustbusters began investigating German industry to better understand both the size and power of German monopolies and the extent of their cartel agreements with U.S. firms. (Cartel agreements are arrangements in which the companies agree to limit production and not compete against one another.) In 1942, a young lawyer on Arnold\u2019s team named Edward Levi, who would go on to serve as attorney general during the Ford Administration, called St. John\u2019s College professor James Stewart Martin and invited him to leave his position at the college and join the Justice Department to study the German economy. Martin would eventually lead a new unit within the postwar military government in Germany: the Decartelization Branch, the lead organization tasked with breaking up German cartels and monopolies.<\/p>\n

Before the end of the war, Martin\u2019s team spent three years producing 3,600 reports that served as snapshots of Germany\u2019s industrial powers, including Farben. The findings of Martin and other government investigators and antitrust officials were clear: Without the money, technology, and industrial support of Germany\u2019s monopolies, Hitler and the Nazi regime would have struggled to take power in 1933, and would have certainly been unable to wage war and commit mass murder at the same scale. And America\u2019s monopolies had conspired and collaborated with Nazi industries right up until the outbreak of war, with some stopping only because Arnold and other investigators forced them to do so.<\/p>\n

Even after Arnold left the Justice Department in 1943, American officials understood that military victory would mean little if monopolies and cross-border cartel deals didn\u2019t fall along with the Nazi regime. After hearing of the department\u2019s findings from those initial studies of German industry, Roosevelt sent a memo to Secretary of State Cordell Hull connecting the Nazi regime to German monopolists. \u201cThe history of the use of the I.G. Farben trust by the Nazis reads like a detective story,\u201d Roosevelt wrote<\/a> to Hull in the now famous 1944 memo. \u201cThe defeat of the Nazi armies will have to be followed by the eradication of these weapons of economic warfare.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two declarations laid out the job before the antimonopoly forces in Germany: a directive issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April 1945, called JCS 1067, and the protocols of the Potsdam Conference between the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union in August that year. \u201cAt the earliest practicable date, the German economy shall be decentralized for the purpose of eliminating the present concentration of economic power as exemplified in particular by cartels, syndicates, trusts and other monopolistic arrangements,\u201d the Potsdam protocols read<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Decartelization Branch was staffed to the hilt with investigators and prosecutors, some from Arnold\u2019s antitrust division. At its peak in 1946, more than 160 lawyers, economists, and staffers worked at the agency, which set about identifying<\/a> which monopolies and combines had to be broken up to ensure they could never again arm and finance fascism. Its first target for research was IG Farben. Farben had already undergone a kind of soft breakup immediately after the war, when U.S. forces seized Farben properties in West Germany, confiscated its funds, and ousted its top executives, who were bound for Nuremberg. General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered Farben\u2019s properties to be split along the lines of American, British, French, and Soviet control, but the core structure of the firm remained intact. Five years later, after extensive and at times frustrating negotiations between the occupying countries, U.S. agencies, and corporate business interests, Farben was fully dissolved into nine smaller firms, including Bayer and BASF.<\/p>\n

Under \u201cLaw 56,\u201d the military code that animated the work of the Decartelization Branch, the military government found and dissolved thousands of cartel agreements, both domestic and international. But besides the breakup of IG Farben and some parts of the German banking industry, the military government did little of substance to break up powerful German corporations, despite the extensive research and advocacy work of the Decartelization Branch. Historians have debated why the government\u2019s deconcentration mission largely failed; the dawn of the Cold War and the specter of communism, which consumed officials\u2019 attention, have been widely blamed. But what\u2019s missing from this story are the real goals of corporate leaders\u2014goals that, under Trump, powerful corporations are far closer to achieving today.<\/p>\n

The Long, Slow Death of Antitrust in America<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The enemies of the antimonopoly program in postwar Germany were numerous, and included, of course, business interests on both sides of the Atlantic. But perhaps the greatest threat to the program, and likely the primary driver of its ultimate downfall, came from within.<\/p>\n

While the military trustbusters were housed within the Decartelization Branch, leadership in the Economics Division, which oversaw the branch, was far different. The Economics Division was charged with overseeing the economy in the American zone of Germany, as well as coordinating Allied policy across the country. Its leadership came largely from the private sector, including investment banks and some of America\u2019s most powerful monopolies. Most prominent among them was the division\u2019s chief, Brigadier General William Draper. Draper had joined the government from Dillon, Read & Co., the New York investment bank that had been the largest American financier of German cartels and the chief underwriter of bond issuances and loans to the German steel trust. Along with Draper, the division was stocked with corporate executives, including R.J. Wysor, the former head of Republic Steel (once the third-largest steelmaker in the country), and Edward Zdunek, an executive at General Motors.<\/p>\n

Draper wanted little to do with the work of the Decartelization Branch and seemed unconcerned by the concentrated state of German industry. \u201cHe was fundamentally opposed to the idea that the cartels and combines required immediate reorganization and was convinced that the \u2018experienced German management\u2019 had to be retained,\u201d Martin wrote of one of his earliest talks with Draper. A year after the war ended, the rhetoric and actions of the Economics Division had sowed doubt among military government leaders about the need for a robust antimonopoly program in Germany. Draper and his team instead pushed for preserving German heavy industry and keeping former Nazi-era industrialists at the helm.<\/p>\n

As early as 1945, lawmakers and government officials back in the United States expressed frustration at the direction of the decartelization effort in Germany, and at the influence some U.S. officials were having on the program. Senator Harley Kilgore, the West Virginia Democrat who led the war mobilization subcommittee of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, said that December <\/a>that some State Department actions in Germany ran counter to the goals of industrial deconcentration, and that those actions were \u201cjeopardizing our national security and world peace for the sake of short-term cartel profits to a few corporations whose views prevailed in the councils of our military government.\u201d The charges were so serious that a special committee of the Senate sent investigators to Germany to review the work of the military government, including the Economics Division. They returned with concerns about the corporate interests of those charged with breaking up German monopolies. \u201cIt is perfectly obvious that individuals with Wall Street connections and philosophy would not naturally be inclined to advocate forcibly and effectively a program of decartelizations,\u201d the committee\u2019s confidential report found. Martin quit in 1947, and he and others turned to the press and to lawmakers in Washington to complain of American monopolists undermining the work of the Decartelization Branch. But efforts by lawmakers, disgruntled branch staff, and reporters did little to change the direction of the Wall Street-affiliated leaders in the U.S. military government. By 1949, the Decartelization Branch was left with just 25 employees, including clerks, and the deconcentration program was wound down.<\/p>\n

The lessons of IG Farben and the role monopolies played in the Nazis\u2019 war program lived on at home.<\/div>\n

But despite the collapse of the Decartelization Branch, the lessons of IG Farben and the role monopolies played in the Nazis\u2019 war program lived on at home. Antitrust activity had been largely suspended during the war, and dominant corporations ran rampant. Post-war, lawmakers returned to the problem of mergers, which had greatly contributed to corporate concentration and were overseen by the wholly inadequate Clayton Act. Now, with the threat of monopoly-enabled fascism on lawmakers\u2019 minds, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and Representative Emanuel Celler of New York, both Democrats, introduced a bill intended to stop bad mergers and, with them, the rise of the kind of power that could threaten democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am not an alarmist,\u201d Kefauver said in support of the bill, \u201cbut the history of what has taken place in other nations where mergers and concentrations have placed economic control in the hands of a very few people is too clear to pass over easily. A point is eventually reached, and we are rapidly reaching that point in this country, where the public steps in to take over when concentration and monopoly gain too much power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kefauver, Celler, and other lawmakers\u2019 statements suggest they understood that liberty was under threat not only from monopoly, but from corporate concentration writ large. \u201cI don\u2019t want my children or your children to be confronted with signs which read, \u2018verboten\u2019\u2014forbidden, you can\u2019t enter this or that business because there\u2019s an oligopoly of a big three or a big four\u2014an absolute control,\u201d Celler said in comments supporting the antimerger bill.<\/p>\n

The Celler-Kefauver Act passed in 1950, and for the better part of three decades, the antitrust enforcement agencies and the Supreme Court operated in line with lawmakers\u2019 postwar intent of arresting corporate power before it could become political power and threaten the republic. In the Supreme Court\u2019s famous 1962 decision in Brown Shoe Co. v. United States<\/em>, the first merger case the Court heard under the law, it endorsed Congress\u2019s motivation for barring mergers that concentrated industries: a \u201cfear not only of accelerated concentration of economic power on economic grounds, but also of the threat to other values a trend toward concentration was thought to pose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daniel Crane, a University of Michigan professor who has written extensiv<\/a>ely<\/a> about the role that concerns about fascism played in shaping America\u2019s postwar antimonopoly policy, connects the antifascist sentiment of the 1940s and \u201950s with the rise of structuralism\u2014the simple idea that an industry\u2019s structure is the best predictor of its tendency toward dominance and abuse. Structuralism as a new intellectual framework made clear that a company\u2019s size relative to its industry was what mattered in antimonopoly law, rejecting what little support there was at the time for the efficiency and benefits of bigness. An economy dominated by monopolies would lead to fascism, and industries dominated by just a few companies would lead to monopoly, so fighting against corporate concentration was tantamount to fighting fascism. Any discussion of the political goals of antitrust\u2014greater competition, entrepreneurship, economic democracy, and local control of industry\u2014was motivated by the twin specters of fascism on one hand and Soviet-style communism on the other.<\/p>\n

By the late 1960s, the structuralist project to shield the United States from corporate control began to target not only monopoly in the traditional sense of a single dominant company, but also industries where two, three, or four companies shared power. Such concentration continued to stoke fear that corporate power could threaten democracy and economic liberty. In 1968, the government crafted<\/a> new rules governing when and why it would challenge corporate mergers, focused almost entirely on whether a merger would alter the structure of an industry and tilt it toward consolidation.<\/p>\n

The same year, a group of lawyers, economists, and scholars led by University of Chicago law school dean Phil Neal delivered<\/a> a report to President Lyndon Johnson suggesting that Congress should pass a law to deconcentrate industries and ban major conglomerate mergers. Four years later, Michigan Democratic Senator Philip Hart introduced the Industrial Reorganization Act, a bill that would deconcentrate any market where just a few firms shared monopoly power. Hart implored the Senate that, while the bill may have seemed radical, the problem of industrial concentration was real and must be addressed. \u201cI see it as a question not only of economic\u2014but human\u2014freedom,\u201d Hart said. (The bill never advanced out of committee.)<\/p>\n

In the 1970s, American lawmakers and regulators came closer to enacting the vision of the German deconcentration project at home than at any point in U.S. history. Two other proposed bills attempted to take on oligopolies much as Hart\u2019s had. The Federal Trade Commission prosecuted two major lawsuits<\/a> in the 1970s\u2014one against Exxon and seven other oil companies<\/a>, and another against cereal companies including General Foods and Kellogg\u2014to test whether it could successfully sue multiple companies in the same industry for illegal monopolization. (Both suits later faltered before the agency\u2019s administrative judge and were dropped by the Reagan Administration.) The Justice Department, meanwhile, accused phone monopoly AT&T and International Business Machines, or IBM, of illegally monopolizing their industries. The goal of both lawsuits was breakup. The antimonopoly movement was in full bloom.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, corporate profits were flat or declining. As scholars Darren Bush and Mark Glick point out<\/a>, the extension of New Deal policies into the 1970s, along with strong unionization, high inflation, progressive taxes, and other policies, had restrained high incomes and extreme wealth, which had both sharply declined through that decade. As with the onset of World War I and the Great Depression, corporate America needed a crisis they could use to cast doubt over antimonopoly policies and reclaim power. A stagnant economy and runaway inflation in the late 1970s exposed the New Deal programs to attack. Corporate power did not miss its shot.<\/p>\n

The forces that had fought for repeal of the antitrust laws and advocated for a kind of American fascism never went away after World War II. For much of the 1950s and \u201960s, organized capital lurked in the shadows of the New Deal, recruiting influential scholars and pushing their ideas into the fields of economics and industrial organization. The pro-monopoly \u201claw and economics\u201d movement found its footing in the wake of the war, and the University of Chicago, once a home for antimonopolists, was flooded with funding from the ultraconservative Volker Fund to hire such architects of neoliberalism as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. The school would become<\/a> the home of the movement to overturn the antitrust laws.<\/p>\n

The forces that had fought for repeal of the antitrust laws and advocated for a kind of American fascism never went away after World War II.<\/div>\n

In speeches and writing, others who would eventually take power pushed pro-monopoly ideas into the mainstream. Alan Greenspan, who served as director of Alcoa, JPMorgan Chase, and other powerful companies before becoming a central banker, lobbied for the elimination of the antitrust laws in 1961. \u201cThe Sherman Act may be understandable when viewed as a projection of the nineteenth century’s fear and economic ignorance,\u201d Greenspan wrote. \u201cBut it is utter nonsense in the context of today’s economic knowledge.\u201d Robert Bork, a far-right Chicago School disciple, wrote The Antitrust Paradox<\/em> in 1978, and the book became a bible of sorts for those unconcerned about monopoly power dominating the economy. Bork argued that antitrust should seek only to promote consumer welfare and economic efficiency\u2014the so-called \u201cconsumer welfare standard.\u201d If large businesses could do those two things, it didn’t matter if they were monopolies or what market power they possessed. Policymakers, lawyers, and others who sought to overturn the prevailing structuralist approach to antitrust clung to Bork’s economic arguments as evidence that structuralism and antimonopoly policies were misguided.<\/p>\n

President Ronald Reagan won office in 1980, in the wake of hyperinflation and anger at government. In December after the election, Chicago School scholars Richard Posner and George Stigler wrote to a Reagan adviser<\/a> pushing the Administration to enact policies once in office that would virtually end antitrust enforcement against monopolies. While there has been debate around the memo\u2019s importance, Reagan did everything it suggested, including ending the pursuit of monopoly prosecutions, rewriting the rules for how the government would analyze mergers, and appointing a consumer welfare standard adherent to lead the Justice Department\u2019s antitrust division. By the end of his first term in office, Reagan had fully reversed antitrust\u2019s emphasis on the dangers of corporate concentration.<\/p>\n

The turn away from antitrust enforcement was part of a much broader pro-capital program in the 1980s that saw labor unions drastically weakened, regulations undone, taxes reduced, and industry released from most restraints on its ability to do as it wished across the economy. Reagan made Greenspan chair of the Federal Reserve in 1987, and appointed Bork, the solicitor general under Nixon, to the influential Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and later unsuccessfully nominated him for the Supreme Court. Monopolies and their advocates had reclaimed power.<\/p>\n

The Chamber of Commerce and powerful corporations no longer clamored publicly for the elimination of the antitrust laws\u2014because they didn\u2019t need to. The Reagan Administration\u2019s quiet coup, carried out at the behest of the corporate class, in effect repealed the laws without the messy democratic process of convincing Congress to strike them from the books. The neoliberal economic and political system remained in power for decades, across both Republican and Democratic administrations, including, to some degree, the first Trump Administration. Yes, there were moments when policymakers challenged corporate power. The Clinton Administration sued Microsoft for illegal monopolization; President Obama challenged a handful of major mergers (while permitting many others); under the first Trump Administration, officials investigated and sued some Big Tech monopolies. But for the most part, mergers went unchallenged, and obvious monopoly abuses were shrugged off. By some accounts, wealth concentration reached levels unseen since the Gilded Age, while communities across the country suffered from deserted main streets, stagnant wages, and deepening economic distress.<\/p>\n

The neoliberal stranglehold on policy broke in 2020 with the election of President Joe Biden. Biden staffed his Administration with some of the most ardent and visionary trustbusters in American history, including FTC Chair Lina Khan and Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter. Together, the agencies challenged mergers, sued monopolists, and passed rules intended to restore competition to the economy. When Trump announced he was again running for office in 2024, the corporations that had once shunned Trump and his nascent nationalism lined up behind him. The authoritarian promise of Trump was apparently more appealing to corporate power than Biden\u2019s antimonopoly resurgence.<\/p>\n

In Trump, monopolies have found a pathway back to power, and their support for the regime suggests they don\u2019t intend to leave. Trump today relies on corporations to operationalize his deportation agenda, and in return he has largely ceded control of the country to them. When anyone has stood in the way of monopoly power\u2014including those within his government, like former Justice Department antitrust head Gail Slater, who was actually a credible appointee but was then ousted for seeking the most cursory of antitrust actions\u2014corporate lobbyists have convinced the Administration to cast them aside. Our ability to control our own political and economic fate today is under grave threat. If we\u2019re going to reclaim democracy from the grip of corporate control, we must learn the lessons that led us to this moment\u2014and that might light the way out.<\/p>\n

Antimonopoly and Freedom<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The increasing cooperation between monopolies and an authoritarian government demands that the left end its capitulation to corporate power. If we work very hard, citizens and policymakers today have the power to break the grip monopoly holds over our economy and our democracy\u2014not in some feeble way, with reforms that wealth and power can brush aside, but in ways so complete and decisive that corporate power can never again threaten our freedoms. This is not a radical declaration. It is a rational response to this moment in the American story.<\/p>\n

Policymakers must return to our long-held understanding that monopolies enable authoritarianism and cannot be allowed to exist. Regulations, watchdog oversight, union organizing\u2014all of these tools are crucial to democracy. But as we\u2019ve seen so clearly over the past two years, a strongman bent on undermining democracy can and will undo those democratic institutions if they threaten his power. A tyrant cannot magically manifest a monopoly to conspire with if no monopoly exists in the first place.<\/p>\n

If pro-democracy forces hope to be a countervailing power against fascism, they must find answers to the monopoly question. Maybe the proposals of the 1970s return, and policymakers across government pass laws and take other actions that deconcentrate industry. Maybe today\u2019s citizen-led movements to fight data centers, organize workers, and champion small businesses can be the catalyst for an even stronger, locally based antimonopoly movement in communities nationwide.<\/p>\n

Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said<\/a> in June that Big Tech firms should be broken up because of their \u201ctotally unchecked power\u201d and their desire to act as governments by creating and enforcing the rules of how industries function. That is a crucial understanding of the dynamics of corporate power. It must be the prevailing sentiment among those who intend to do all they can to save American democracy. There can be no acquiescence to \u201cabundance\u201d or any other corporate-backed policy or worldview.<\/p>\n

Writing in 1942, at the height of Hitler\u2019s monopoly-enabled atrocities, sociologist Robert S. Lynd understood that fascism was not the product of the Nazis or any other government, but of \u201cthe organized economic power backing the Hitlers in nation after nation over the industrial world.\u201d Either we fight against that system, with antimonopoly action or something else, or we perish. \u201cWe live in a heroic time,\u201d Lynd wrote. \u201cAnd democracy will either throw off its lethargy and rise insistently to the stature of the times\u2014or it will cease to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A generation of Americans learned from Nazi Germany that monopolies fuel fascism. It’s time we relearned that lesson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":16590,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1920],"tags":[1803,1681,1418,1017,1042],"class_list":["post-16581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1920","tag-antimonopoly","tag-antitrust","tag-fascism","tag-features","tag-history"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16581"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16690,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16581\/revisions\/16690"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":16567,"date":"2026-09-17T18:16:39","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T18:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/?p=16567"},"modified":"2026-09-17T18:16:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T18:16:39","slug":"how-to-fix-the-civil-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/82\/how-to-fix-the-civil-service\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Fix the Civil Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

The second Trump Administration has decimated the civil service and with it many government functions Americans want and need. Around 14 percent of the federal workforce\u2014more than 335,000 people<\/a>\u2014were fired, resigned, or retired in 2025. Those big numbers, though, do not illuminate the real consequences of these cuts for specific agencies. Fully one-quarter of the Centers for Disease Control is gone at a time when measles is spreading. One-fifth of the Securities and Exchange Commission has departed even as crypto scams multiply. And the Social Security Administration has lost 14 percent<\/a> of its staff, meaning that every employee is now expected to serve around 1,500 beneficiaries.<\/p>\n

Any future administration that hopes to succeed at anything will need to invest in personnel. However, the processes and procedures governing the federal civil service are outdated, brittle, and broken. Presidents and Congress have failed to invest in these systems for many years. Hiring is an arduous and ineffective nightmare. Decades-old job descriptions are still standard. The Office of Personnel Management is an underfunded bottleneck of policy, decisions, and agency support. Presidents have nominally undertaken personnel reform efforts over the last 50 years, but the initiatives have largely denigrated the workforce to consolidate power in the presidency\u2014without improving governance.<\/p>\n

Working within the existing system will not be an option. Large, structural reform is necessary and unavoidable. To build a government that works for the American people, the United States needs a personnel system designed to the mission rather than one that forces the mission to fit around a rigid, centralized, and increasingly politicized structure. A decentralized personnel system that makes agency flexibility and mission focus the default position would let agencies work better, decrease bottlenecks, and move us toward a healthier balance in congressional oversight.<\/p>\n

A Brief History of Civil Service Reform<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The story of civil service reform broadly charts the rise of a neutral bureaucracy from roughly the 1880s to the 1970s and the subsequent attacks by presidents seeking to centralize executive control over the federal government. While discussion of this history is often confined to specific personnel policies, the arc of the civil service should instead be understood as a, if not the<\/em>, battleground of the interbranch power struggle.<\/p>\n

For the first roughly 100 years of U.S. history, there was no neutral, apolitical federal workforce as we understand it today. At the founding of the country, class and connections largely determined who served. Later, President Andrew Jackson took a more populist view of the government and expanded what became known as the spoils system, turning government jobs into political chits and enhancing the power of the President and party leaders to staff the government with partisan supporters.<\/p>\n

Then, in 1881, a disgruntled office seeker named Charles Guiteau shot and killed President James Garfield. The assassination led Congress and President Chester A. Arthur\u2014himself a central figure in the machine patronage political system\u2014to enact sweeping civil service reforms that had been percolating since the 1860s. Passed in 1883, the Pendleton Act established the Civil Service Commission, which administered and oversaw the merit system, and instituted competitive exams for a small percentage of federal government jobs.<\/p>\n

Working within the existing system will not be an option. Large, structural reform is necessary and unavoidable.<\/div>\n

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, the percentage of civil servants hired through the competitive process grew. Simultaneously, the structures governing the civil service matured, with the introduction of expanded protections for employees and a detailed classification system. The Classification Act of 1923, which formalized the concept of standardized compensation for standardized positions and tied pay to jobs rather than individuals, was passed as part of a wave of scientific management theory that dominated business and eventually government starting at the turn of the century. This system was updated in 1949 with subsequent classification legislation and the creation of the General Schedule payment system, which simplified the pay schedule system by creating 15 grades (and three additional, short-lived super grades) to standardize pay across the government. This is largely the same structure that remains today.<\/p>\n

While the civil service grew in size and competence, another dynamic emerged: tension between the imperative of an independent, neutral workforce and presidents\u2019 desires to advance their own agendas. Recognizing the political benefits of a competent workforce directed at executive priorities, presidents took steps to bring the federal workforce under executive purview.<\/p>\n

With the crisis of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt drew on exceptions the Hoover Administration had gotten from Congress and had New Deal agencies exempted from hiring requirements. This allowed his Administration to hire people who aligned with Roosevelt\u2019s bold vision and programs even as his instinct to centralize control was a harbinger of future trends. In 1921, the competitive civil service accounted for almost 80 percent of the government; by 1936, that number had dropped to 60 percent. As the New Deal programs turned from temporary crisis-response efforts into permanent fixtures, they came into the fold of the civil service. By 1952, the merit-based portion of the workforce had regrown to almost 90 percent. The next year, President Eisenhower arrived in office interested in increasing managerial control of the civil service in the White House and wary, not completely without justification, that his predecessors had filled the government with Democratic loyalists. He created a new category of service, known as Schedule C, that fell outside of the standard process and protections for government jobs directly related to policy or politically sensitive topics. This expanded the number of people the President could appoint directly, outside of the hiring requirements and protections of the merit-based system, and extended political influence further into executive agencies.<\/p>\n

The next shift came in the 1970s. While previous presidents had recognized the benefits of shaping personnel policy to better enable their priorities but still publicly supported the civil service, President Richard Nixon used attacks on the bureaucracy as cover while he shaped the executive branch to consolidate power in the presidency. \u201cAmericans are fed up with wasteful, muscle\u2010bound government in Washington and are anxious for a change that works,\u201d Nixon proclaimed in 1973. He reorganized the executive branch to better enable agency coordination by the White House, starting a period of neo-managerial proclamations and a presidency-centered government. In doing so, he created a playbook that many of his successors would follow: scapegoat the bureaucracy as responsible for any and every failing, announce a need for managerial reform, and consolidate control of institutions to advance presidential priorities.<\/p>\n

President Jimmy Carter was the first to borrow the framework. Carter put civil service reform at the center of his presidential platform, capitalizing on the solidified perception that the Watergate scandal had somehow been a failure of the state, and pledged to \u201cbring the horrible bureaucratic mess under control.\u201d In office, he sent a reorganization plan to Congress to reshape the structures governing the civil service, which was submitted and enacted under the authority granted by the Reorganization Act of 1977; he then also signed into law the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978. Combined, these two documents dissolved the Civil Service Commission and created the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) in its place. The OPM director, unlike the three bipartisan chairs of the old commission, would be a political appointee reporting directly to the President and would assume the defunct body\u2019s authority to determine and audit personnel policy. Further, under the auspices of improving managers\u2019 responsiveness to political direction, the CSRA created the Senior Executive Service, converting the most senior General Schedule positions into a management class with fewer protections and more political appointees.<\/p>\n

Though President Carter was interested in improving governance, his efforts fell considerably short of comprehensive reform, sidestepping issues around entrance processes, classification, and compensation. Instead, power was further concentrated in the presidency, creating a unique opportunity for future leaders less inclined to support the government. One scholar quipped in 1988 that the CSRA \u201cenabled Reagan to be a successful Richard Nixon.\u201d<\/p>\n

President Ronald Reagan came into office at a moment of profound change in the civil service. In addition to the structural changes wrought by the CSRA, President Carter had also, to improve equity in government service and address legitimate concerns over adverse impacts on minority applicants, signed a consent decree as he left office that did away with the Professional and Administrative Career Examination, the primary form of access into entry-level positions for college graduates. While the consent decree was designed to enable a phased transition to a new test or more equitable evaluation tool, the Reagan Administration invested little time in structural improvements and instead largely turned to so-called excepted service appointments\u2014those positions that, for various reasons, fall outside both the requirements and protections of the classified civil service. By seizing the opportunity presented by changes to the law and hiring process, the Reagan Administration was able to diminish and undermine the competitive civil service. Simultaneously, the new OPM director, Donald Devine, recognized the potential of his office to serve as a political weapon on behalf of the presidency. Devine reduced the office\u2019s footprint, increased its percentage of political appointees, limited engagement with agencies, and implemented hiring freezes and reductions in force across the government. In the midst of throttled agency capacity, Reagan\u2019s OPM pushed more responsibilities onto agencies, which\u2014without dedicated and appropriate resources\u2014developed ad hoc approaches to modernizing personnel processes in the new structure.<\/p>\n

Like the Reagan Administration, the Clinton team had a preference for deregulation and decentralized implementation. They also saw the bureaucracy as ripe for downsizing and privatization, starting with, yet again, OPM. From 1993 to 1997, due to a slimming of its mission, the privatization of management training, and the delegation of all hiring to agencies, OPM lost half its staff. But like so many before them, the Clinton Administration overstated the reach of its efforts and claimed victory prematurely. Dramatically using a wheelbarrow to make his point, OPM Director James B. King \u201cthrew out\u201d<\/a> the Federal Personnel Manual, a 10,000-page document considered to be \u201cthe Bible\u201d of federal hiring by human resources professionals. But he failed to change any of the underlying laws, meaning that the byzantine hiring processes recreated themselves in each agency. Despite pushing more duties onto agencies, the Administration also downsized across the government. HR departments were hit especially hard<\/a>, losing 18 percent of their staff from 1992 to 1996. For agencies, the result was hiring units that had more responsibility, less guidance, less money, fewer people, and the same outdated statutory constraints. Meanwhile, they had to pay their governing body for help: OPM demanded compensation for its expert support, deepening the existing divide between the haves and the have-nots across agencies. Needless to say, the effect was not a government that \u201cworks better\u201d and \u201ccosts less,\u201d but was instead a system that stopped working in many ways while costs became opaque.<\/p>\n

While today\u2019s system is profoundly broken, it is not that many have tried and failed. Rather, very little has really been tried.<\/div>\n

Using the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as an opportunity, the George W. Bush Administration tried and ultimately failed to implement agency-specific personnel policies. It is worth noting that the size of the federal workforce did bounce back, just in a different form: Though there were nearly 420,000 fewer civil servants in 2002 than 1990, the contractor workforce grew by more than 700,000 between 1999 and 2002<\/a>. The Obama Administration tried to improve things around the edges with some policy changes and insourcing efforts. But some changes backfired, like the removal of narrative statements from applications, which made applying for positions easier but removed a key application filter and evaluation tool, overwhelmed an already shorthanded system, and encouraged HR shops to use unreliable self-evaluations. The first Trump Administration then began a process of radical change for the civil service, including creating a new excepted service known as Schedule F to reclassify thousands of civil servants into unprotected positions. The Biden Administration attempted to claw these changes back and reinforce protections by, for example, eliminating Schedule F and attempting to add additional protections through rulemaking. But now, nearly two years into the second Trump Administration, it is clear that the levees have given way.<\/p>\n

A Diagnosis of the Current Structure<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Today, the civil service faces three core problems. First, its governance mechanisms are outdated and do not meet the needs of the modern workforce or the challenges presented by a rapidly shifting economy, tech-forward government services, and public needs that require government intervention. Second, like other institutions, civil service governance has been increasingly consolidated in the presidency. Finally, the current system grants needed flexibility to agencies in an inconsistent, ad hoc manner.<\/p>\n

Outdated and Brittle<\/h6>\n

Today, the U.S. federal civil service is governed by policies partially set by the Pendleton Act of 1883 within a structure most recently updated by the Classification Act of 1949. Though many presidents have trumpeted efforts to improve management of the workforce, these efforts, as discussed, aimed primarily to increase presidential authority. One scholar noted that the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, the most recent large piece of legislation nominally aimed at updating the structure, only touched \u201cthe fringes of the system.\u201d It did not tackle the prosaic details of hiring policy, assessment paths, classification, or compensation structures. So while today\u2019s system is profoundly broken, it is not that many have tried and failed. Rather, very little has really been tried. The reason for this inaction is twofold. First, elected leaders lack political incentive to focus on governance. Good governance is rarely rewarded: It is a topic that is not well known or understood by the electorate, and solutions are specific, nuanced, and boring. Second, presidents do<\/em> have a political incentive to expand their own power by limiting the neutrality of the civil service and increasing its responsiveness to their own priorities.<\/p>\n

Presidential and Centralized<\/h6>\n

The Pendleton Act took power over the federal bureaucracy away from the presidency and Congress to establish a neutral workforce. The story of the civil service since has been one of struggle by both branches to reassert their authority and the marked success of the presidency in doing so. Since the New Deal era, presidents have asserted the principles of managerial responsibility to increase their influence. Those who study the civil service have long understood this trend. Scholar Patricia Ingraham wrote of the reform initiatives of Presidents Nixon, Carter, and Reagan: \u201cAll of these efforts have been couched in terms of improved management and efficiency; without any doubt, their intent and effect has been to strengthen the Executive Office of the President at the expense of other key actors in the policy system.\u201d Further, historian Lorenzo Castellani notes, President Reagan shifted the concept of bureaucratic competency from one of neutrality to one centered on responsiveness to the President specifically.<\/p>\n

As presidents reshaped the bureaucracy in their image, Congress retreated. One illustrative example of this institutional capitulation: In 1995, during House committee reorganization and consolidation, oversight of the entire federal workforce was unceremoniously lumped into the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The Senate had included civil service oversight as part of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs in 1977, but then expanded the committee\u2019s jurisdiction further to include homeland security in 2005 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. These sprawling committees, whose staff was also dramatically reduced<\/a> in the 1990s, are a far cry from the narrower ones that preceded them, let alone the even more laser-focused Senate Select Committee to Examine the Several Branches in the Civil Service, which existed from 1875 to 1921.<\/p>\n

This imbalance, though born in the name of better managerial control, is in fact bad for management. As scholar David Lewis has discussed<\/a>, presidents, motivated by legacy and elections, tend to use personnel management as a tool for control rather than performance. Further, this centralization and short-termism lead to greater politicization, difficulty meeting public needs, and decreased public trust.<\/p>\n

Ad Hoc Flexibility<\/h6>\n

The civil service mechanisms are outdated and increasingly tools of the presidency. Because of these compounding features, the civil service has evolved in a deeply ad hoc manner, with flexibility emerging like tree roots pushing through a sidewalk where cracks give way.<\/p>\n

In the absence of comprehensive reform, agencies have been left to advocate on their own behalf to Congress and OPM for the policies they need. In 1989, the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act gave financial regulatory agencies pay structure autonomy. The Federal Aviation Administration, Postal Service, and intelligence agencies were later granted authority to develop their own personnel systems as well. Congress and OPM have added increased flexibility to certain job series, and agencies have creatively defined positions into existing classifications to take advantage of flexibilities where they exist. Hiring managers also turn to excepted service designations or use the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA). Schedule B, for example, allows for direct hiring where it is not practicable to hold a competitive examination, like for specialized technical roles, and through Schedule D, excepted service has been expanded to include pathways for recent graduates. Meanwhile, the IPA allows government managers to bring in people temporarily from academia or elsewhere whose nongovernment role is relevant to the position they would assume. In short, as renowned civil service expert Donald Kettl and his co-authors wrote in 1996, \u201c[T]he federal government\u2019s uniform merit system today is neither uniform, merit-based, nor a system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brave New World <\/strong><\/h5>\n

At 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 2025, the U.S. civil service was in desperate need of comprehensive reform. But the extent of the damage wrought to the system since then makes this need unignorable. The second Trump Administration has intentionally degraded the capacity of most of the federal workforce. As noted earlier, the Administration has hollowed out countless offices and agencies that provide important and necessary services to the American public. But it has done something else as well: Building on a long tradition of using managerial language to centralize control, the Administration has taken unprecedented steps to increase the responsiveness of the workforce to the President directly and specifically.<\/p>\n

The Trump Administration has successfully challenged the existence of independent commissions and agencies, bringing them into the fold of the executive branch. But the President has also attacked lower levels of bureaucratic independence and lawful neutrality. For example, following an executive order<\/a> issued on January 20, 2025, titled \u201cRestoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives,\u201d OPM changed the first principle of Senior Executive Service evaluation from “Commitment to the Rule of Law and the Principles of the American Founding\u201d to \u201cFaithful Administration of the Law and the President\u2019s Policies.\u201d The OPM implementation memo<\/a> notes that \u201cSenior executives must demonstrate specific results that align with and advance the President\u2019s specific policy agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the Trump Administration has upended federal worker union contracts, and it has reinstated one excepted service category and created another that together could convert 50,000 current employees<\/a> from protected to at-will status. Under this rule, civil servants deemed to be in \u201cpolicy-influencing positions\u201d will lack the worker protections and appeal rights of their colleagues. On the occasion of the final rulemaking for the conversion, Trump\u2019s OPM director, Scott Kupor, published a piece on Substack<\/a> offering insight into the Administration\u2019s reasoning for the change. The problem, Kupor explained, is that the civil service is too professional and too independent, and that what is needed for better governance\u2014or at least better responsiveness to White House intent\u2014is more \u201caccountability.\u201d As scholars like David Lewis have shown, Trump\u2019s actions are unprecedented in their scale but not unique in their reasoning.<\/p>\n

A Civil Service for the Mission<\/strong><\/h5>\n

One vision of the future is clear: a return to a smaller, more political, and less capable workforce undertaken in the name of accountability but with the not-so-hidden goal of elevating the presidency. A civil service defined by the unitary executive theory. What, then, is the alternative? As we cannot revert to the status quo ante, this moment of profound change demands a bold alternative: a civil service built for the mission.<\/p>\n

The National Park Service, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and National Institutes of Health have different missions, different workforce needs, and different relationships to the private economy. Uncontroversially, each of those agencies has different requirements for hiring, paying, classifying, and managing personnel. They need the ability to focus intently on what they are specifically being asked to do and to use all the tools at their disposal to do so, including personnel policy. Civil service reform advocates have struggled to build a single set of rules that accounts for an evolving government, world, and workforce and enables hundreds of teams\u2014of all sizes\u2014to accomplish challenging, changing, and deeply varied tasks. Instead, those who know their work the best should be able to build personnel systems that account for their needs, as is already the case in many parts of the government.<\/p>\n

This moment of profound change demands a bold alternative: a civil service built for the mission.<\/div>\n

In this system, a central commission would provide expertise related to policy development and personnel management and processes, guiding agencies as they develop assessment techniques that meet their mission and unique workforce. This commission would replace the Office of Personnel Management and the Merit Systems Protection Board, assuming some of their responsibilities while the majority would be pushed to the agency level. Agencies would have the authority to determine position qualifications, a pay structure fit to purpose, and personnel policies and regulations that fit their mission. They would be bound by the merit principles as laid out in Title V, Section 2301 of the U.S. Code, which provide a values framework for ensuring a professional, competent, apolitical workforce free from discrimination or partisan loyalty tests. And for those agencies that for whatever reason aren\u2019t up to the task of developing their own personnel system, the commission would develop and maintain a default personnel policy package that they could opt into, as desired or needed.<\/p>\n

This change would have three important effects. First, as discussed, it would give power to the parts of the government that have immediate need and grant them the ability to set conditions for building and managing their workforce in the ways most needed to meet their mission. A one-size-fits-all set of regulations attempts to optimize for equity and portability across agencies, but it shortchanges flexibility, making hiring harder and policies too broad and constraining. To rebuild capacity and enable a process that brings more people into government, we must focus on ease of hiring and specificity of purpose, deliberately embracing differences rather than addressing them as edge cases. The Forest Service shouldn\u2019t need to go to Congress<\/a> to classify firefighters appropriately (rather than labeling them with the more generic title of \u201cforestry technician\u201d), nor should the Internal Revenue Service have to continually re-win the authority to create a pathway<\/a> for hiring term-limited information technology workers into critical roles.<\/p>\n

Second, this decentralized system would serve as a step in rebalancing the administrative state away from presidential primacy. The ascendance of the presidency as the first among equal branches is the tale of the last almost 100 years and is a story that can be told through the lens of civil service reform. The explicit intent of shifting responsibility for administration of the civil service from the Civil Service Commission to the Office of Personnel Management was to enable closer oversight by the President. To be sure, the Civil Service Commission was not without its institutional issues, but it is important to recognize the origin of the transition in order to evaluate potential reforms. History has shown that reform initiatives wrapped in the language of management improvement and accountability result in a more political and consolidated structure, rather than in improved results.<\/p>\n

Finally, this restructuring would shift how Congress engages with the governance of the civil service. Currently, the House and the Senate each have one committee that is nominally charged with the administration of the civil service. Each of these committees is large and responsible for other important topics, meaning that members have little time or opportunity to learn the ins and outs of Title V, the part of the U.S. Code that governs the civil service, and its failings and effects. However, all the other committees that have jurisdiction over various agencies continue, as is to be expected (and encouraged), to provide their agencies with carve-outs, flexibilities, and unique authorities to enable their success without considering government-wide effects. Under a system in which agencies set their own personnel policies (governed by common merit values), committees of jurisdiction would no longer hesitantly engage with personnel policy as an ancillary concern, but rather would see personnel matters as core to the oversight of the agencies, as they should be.<\/p>\n

Public trust in government has been declining<\/a> for almost 70 years. While the men and women who have served and continue to serve proudly in the U.S. civil service bear no responsibility for this erosion, they will be at the heart of any successful effort to reverse it. People want a government that meets their needs, and many people also want to serve in pursuit of that aim. A decentralized, mission-centric civil service would better enable both.<\/p>\n

In his inaugural State of the Union address, President John F. Kennedy said: \u201cLet the public service be a proud and lively career. And let every man and woman who works in any area of our national government, in any branch, at any level, be able to say with pride and with honor in future years: \u2018I served the United States Government in that hour of our nation’s need.\u2019\u201d We are again in such an hour. Meeting this moment requires a new vision and the deliberate construction of a civil service capable of fulfilling the missions with which the public entrusts it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was broken long before Donald Trump. Here\u2019s what went wrong\u2014and how we can repair it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":16592,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1920],"tags":[1919,1017,1420],"class_list":["post-16567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1920","tag-civil-service","tag-features","tag-federal-government"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16567"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16660,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16567\/revisions\/16660"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":16572,"date":"2026-09-17T18:16:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T18:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/?p=16572"},"modified":"2026-09-22T14:45:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T14:45:22","slug":"fighting-wall-streets-monopolies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/82\/fighting-wall-streets-monopolies\/","title":{"rendered":"Fighting Wall Street\u2019s Monopolies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wall Street has always faced pressure for change after its misdeeds bring the financial system and the broader economy to the precipice\u2014or over it. But our success in securing durable change has varied wildly. Now is the time to improve the odds by ensuring that the spirit of a revived antimonopoly movement and its emphasis on structuring competitive markets animate our response to the next financial collapse.<\/p>\n

The last 100 years have brought us the Great Depression that began with the 1929 stock market crash and the 2008 global financial crisis, which kicked into high gear when Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. Two attempts to meet the challenge of these self-inflicted crises of capitalism followed: the New Deal and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.<\/p>\n

One of those frameworks, built around the idea of structuring incentives to promote competition, contributed to an unprecedented, decades-long, broad-based prosperity. One of them neutralized finance in a political sense\u2014Wall Street no longer held the whip hand on policy\u2014and in an economic sense, as banking became a boring profession that served industry and consumers, not the other way around. One of them diffused power within the financial sector, resting on the conviction that only overhauling and downsizing finance would force the industry to supply the real economy with credit on reasonable terms. In short, one of those projects was a resounding success.<\/p>\n

The other was Dodd-Frank.<\/p>\n

Despite facing a similarly grave financial crisis as in the 1930s\u2014one also accompanied by massive increases in wealth and income inequality\u2014the United States passed Dodd-Frank and called it a day. The law has not proved an inflection point in history in the way we think of the New Deal. It made no lasting impact on the trajectory or influence of finance, nor did it catalyze a series of reforms. Dodd-Frank\u2019s passage proved to be, in the notorious words<\/a> of an artlessly honest bank lobbyist, \u201chalftime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wall Street, with the open assistance of the Obama Administration and many Democrats, defeated moves in Congress toward root-and-branch restructuring of the financial system. The industry then settled in for a 15-year campaign to slow, stall, or water down the law\u2019s incremental reforms, culminating in the second Trump Administration\u2019s scorched-earth approach.<\/p>\n

Dodd-Frank failed to bend the curve away from our steady march toward financialization: The financial sector<\/a> makes up about 8 percent of our $32 trillion GDP, or about triple the average of the years immediately after World War II. We have an economy that responds to the imperatives of Wall Street\u2014the group of firms that dominate different sectors of finance\u2014rather than people\u2019s desire to lead dignified lives with reasonable material comfort in a meaningfully democratic society. Finance has overwhelmed the rest of the economy to the point where it\u2019s the water in which we swim, seldom noticed because it is so ubiquitous.<\/p>\n

We have an economy that responds to the imperatives of Wall Street rather than people\u2019s desire to lead dignified lives.<\/div>\n

Unfortunately, the abundant \u201cProject 2029s\u201d for the next Democratic administration show signs of weakness. One \u201cbold economic program\u201d on offer rehashes ideas<\/a> from Dodd-Frank built around supervision and regulation. But these approaches have already demonstrably failed<\/em>\u2014often in a policy sense and almost always in a political one. We must avoid misguided thinking about reviving Dodd-Frank and instead grapple directly with the Obama Administration\u2019s shortcomings, which carried over into the Biden years.<\/p>\n

When the next crisis comes\u2014and it always does\u2014we must embrace the antimonopoly spirit that has animated American debates about finance for more than 250 years, one that emphasizes the importance of decentralized financial power in fortifying democracy and creating competitive markets. Dodd-Frank, by abjuring structural change, stands out as a glaring exception in a country that has, in every period of reform, put finance at the center of antimonopoly thinking and vice versa. The idea that we should all have to compete, and that sheer size and power should not determine success, remains etched into the national psyche. Americans also harbor a particular disdain for Wall Street, or what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called<\/a> \u201cfinancial monopoly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bipartisanship on monopoly issues and public distaste for Wall Street can drive the tougher reform we will need. The Trump Administration\u2019s openly corrupt abandonment of antitrust enforcement should not obscure the bipartisan support for tackling market concentration. There are already proposals in Congress in different spheres, including finance, that register support from both parties. Wall Street polls<\/a> badly<\/a> across partisan lines. If you fancy yourself a realist and scoff at the successes of the antimonopoly movement so far, try facing reality: It might not be bearing a ton of fruit right now, but this tree is growing<\/a> and nurturing future champions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Failures of Dodd-Frank<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Passed in 2010, Dodd-Frank\u2019s sprawl defies easy summation. It created a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). It mandated new regulations on housing finance, the core issue in the 2008 crisis. It included the Volcker Rule, which prohibited deposit-taking banks from trading for their own profit. It directed regulators to create tests to measure the resilience of banks and procedures for winding them down in a crisis. It mapped out higher capital rules for banks to improve their ability to handle unexpected losses. It sought to bring parts of the complex derivatives market onto public exchanges. The bill\u2019s authors envisioned that, together, these provisions would make the financial system more stable, less focused on casino-like activities on Wall Street, and fairer for consumers.<\/p>\n

As a package, Dodd-Frank looked imposing enough, but its breadth obscured a fatal weakness. In taking what was, at its core, a technocratic approach, the law fortified the bureaucratic discretion to regulate rather than creating an industry obligation to restructure, which immediately tilted the playing field in Wall Street\u2019s favor. The regulatory process created opportunities for lobbying on virtually every issue\u2014a second bite at the apple. Time worked in the industry\u2019s favor. And Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware saw it coming. \u201cChastened regulators may try in the coming years to be harder on the megabanks,\u201d he said<\/a> in a meticulously argued cri de coeur<\/em> on the Senate floor before Dodd-Frank passed. \u201cBut even if they do, history has shown us that the tango will reach the end of the dance floor, and the big banks will execute the turn and lead again.\u201d<\/p>\n

The moment Wall Street won the key fight in Dodd-Frank, in May 2010, was an anticlimax<\/a>. Twenty-seven Democrats, backed by the Obama Administration, joined almost every Republican in voting to preserve Wall Street\u2019s prerogative to grow without limits by defeating an effort by Kaufman and fellow Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown to add a provision limiting the size of banks.<\/p>\n

After passage, the regulation-writing phase of Dodd-Frank commenced, and the bank lobby went to work. Jamie Dimon, the longtime CEO of JPMorgan Chase, speaks of government relations as the bank\u2019s \u201cseventh line of business,\u201d<\/a> and it showed. The industry mounted a multilayered defense, sometimes fighting the regulatory pressure with a blizzard of complicated arguments from well-paid lawyers, other times taking agencies directly to court to stop regulations, even when congressional intent was crystal clear<\/a>. At the same time, the banking industry bankrolled lawmakers who kept regulators, especially at the CFPB, under political siege for the duration of the Obama Administration. Chumminess with regulators, the revolving door, and Wall Street money in politics did the rest.<\/p>\n

And, because the Brown-Kaufman provision didn\u2019t make it into the final bill, banks have since exploded in size. JPMorgan Chase grew to have a market value the size of the next three banks<\/a> on the size chart combined. The ten largest banks comprise<\/a> over half of all banking assets, and the number of smaller banks has continued its decline, from about 7,500 in 2010 to roughly 4,000 last year. Bank consolidation has accelerated rural distress<\/a> by limiting access to credit, siphoning off local capital, and curtailing household access to financial services. And fewer banks generally means fewer financial services<\/a> for Black and brown neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

Large banks now benefit from the well-known subsidy<\/a> that accrues to institutions the government will inevitably bail out (the \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d problem), giving them an advantage over smaller banks. And they are bad for consumers. The larger the bank, the less interest they pay on deposits<\/a>, and the more interest customers must pay them<\/a> on credit cards.<\/p>\n

Bailouts have continued. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) spent down $16.3 billion<\/a> of the deposit insurance fund to handle a banking crisis in 2023, one that would have spread absent federal guarantees. Various Fed refinancing programs provided hundreds of billions<\/a> in subsidies to Wall Street during the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the nonbank sector (private equity, hedge funds, asset managers) has exploded in size since Dodd-Frank, with assets of $85.7 trillion in 2023<\/a>, nearly three times the total assets of traditional banks. The Dodd-Frank response to nonbanks, also known as \u201cshadow banks,\u201d obscured the lack of concrete results with bureaucratic churn: a multiagency oversight council<\/a> led by the Treasury Department. The asset manager BlackRock went to war early<\/a> to stop that council from targeting its size and importance and then provided several appointees to the Biden Administration. As Treasury secretary under President Biden, Janet Yellen openly abandoned<\/a> the effort to police individual firms, the council\u2019s main instrument of oversight.<\/p>\n

Trump appointees at the Fed are simply ignoring the law in gutting capital rules designed to make megabanks more resilient in a crisis.<\/div>\n

Under Dodd-Frank, the largest banks had to write \u201cliving wills\u201d that mapped out how their businesses could be wound down without endangering the broader banking system. During her tenure as Fed chair, Janet Yellen never forced the divestitures required by law even though she tacitly admitted<\/a> the megabank plans looked unrealistic. The Fed never compelled Wells Fargo to downsize, despite a scandal-ridden decade that defined \u201ctoo big to manage,\u201d<\/a> the idea that no CEO can plausibly administer a megabank effectively over the long term without violating the law or the bank collapsing. The bank lobby won a decade-long effort to grind down stress tests<\/a>, an approach to the \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d dilemma that Timothy Geithner, Treasury secretary in Barack Obama\u2019s first term, later conceded was a failure. Jerome Powell, as Fed chair, simply refused<\/a> to write a Dodd-Frank regulation limiting executive pay. The Volcker Rule, designed to curb casino-like speculation by banks that also hold depositor money, was<\/a> eviscerat<\/a>ed<\/a> by the first Trump Administration. And now, Trump appointees at the Fed are simply ignoring the law<\/a> in gutting capital rules designed to make megabanks more resilient in a crisis.<\/p>\n

The New Deal\u2019s Antimonopoly Ethos<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The New Dealers, by contrast, adopted a strategy that stood the test of time precisely because it embraced the antimonopoly spirit.<\/p>\n

In 1933, the legislation known as Glass-Steagall famously imposed a separation between commercial and investment banking, which forced major banks like J.P. Morgan to downsize themselves via division. Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, a conservative southern Democrat, co-authored the law that helped break Wall Street\u2019s grip on credit allocation. It says something about the law\u2019s efficacy that its name is a marketable brand, a metaphor for structural change in sectors far afield of finance. Proposals for \u201ca Glass-Steagall\u201d have been put forth in sectors including health care, artificial intelligence<\/a>, and tech platforms<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Beyond that change, the creation of FDIC deposit insurance<\/a>\u2014passed in the same legislative package as Glass-Steagall\u2014represented a fundamental shift. Big city banks, which had repeatedly triggered crises that immiserated the entire country, had to make disproportionately large payments into a collective system that benefited smaller, mostly rural banks. Previously, a patchwork of state systems developed over the course of a century had tried to bend the few big banks to the will of the many small ones; with the New Deal, that system went national.<\/p>\n

If Glass-Steagall and deposit insurance addressed abuses in the traditional banking system, the new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reformed markets in stocks, bonds, and other financial assets\u2014the capital markets. Companies whose shares traded privately had to join public exchanges once they reached a certain size. Approved by Congress in 1934, the new agency then mandated that publicly traded companies provide greater transparency around their financial condition to give investors large and small the same information. This change forced market discipline on Wall Street giants who had long made a lucrative industry out of defrauding less-informed clients.<\/p>\n

The New Dealers and their postwar successors also grappled with a problem that had vexed the country since its founding: Finance, when consolidated into large entities, tended to assert increasingly direct and malign control over the rest of the economy.<\/p>\n

At a commercial level, the crushing influence of finance had fostered industrial consolidation on a massive scale in the early 1900s. J. Pierpont Morgan had welded together the first billion-dollar corporation, U.S. Steel. (His process for consolidating and cementing control of companies became known, creepily, as Morganization<\/a>.) Later, Andrew Mellon, Treasury secretary for most of the 1920s, would assemble an industrial empire around his family\u2019s core financial business. Progressive reformers, notably the lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, understood that bank ownership of non-financial companies created value-destroying temptations like saddling a business with debt or draining off profits without reinvesting for the future. But concrete action was a generation away.<\/p>\n

By the time of World War II and shortly after, with Germany\u2019s destructive, bank-enabled industrial monopolies having powered its war machine, Americans saw in financialized commerce not only ill economic effects but a menace to democracy and peace. Nazi-adjacent titans had thrown democracy under the bus in the name of preserving their ability to do business freely. In 1946, the Federal Reserve Board even called<\/a> the burgeoning mixture of businesses run by A.P. Giannini, founder of Bank of America, a potential \u201cfascist economic empire.\u201d The Fed!<\/p>\n

The answer to banker domination and Giannini\u2019s threat to commerce and democracy arrived, after a long debate, with the Bank Holding Company Act<\/a> (BHCA) of 1956, which deserves recognition alongside the Sherman and Clayton Acts as a pillar of the American antimonopoly tradition. The law largely barred sprawling holding companies from owning banks in multiple states, a measure designed to fortify the New Deal\u2019s emphasis on small, local banks. It also prevented banks from entering businesses not related to banking.<\/p>\n

Though it unleashed a decades-long regulatory cat-and-mouse game over exactly what is related to banking, the BHCA foreclosed the possibility of Giannini or anyone else becoming a new Morgan via ownership of a deposit-taking commercial bank. In 1963, the Supreme Court upheld the overall logic of this policy in its decision in United States v. Philadelphia National Bank<\/em>, which confirmed that the Clayton Act could be used to break up banks. \u201c[C]oncentration in banking,\u201d the majority concluded, \u201caccelerates concentration generally.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New Dealers\u2019 reform of finance took place mostly outside the legal terrain defined by the foundational Sherman and Clayton Acts. But Felix Frankfurter, not yet a Supreme Court justice, sure sounded like an antimonopolist when he wrote<\/a> in a letter to Roosevelt in 1934: \u201cNothing less is involved than to keep Wall Street in its place, to furnish a counterpoise against its aggrandizement of power, by which the Street all along the line resists efforts by the government for the common interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be sure, regulation loomed large in the New Deal mind and in postwar efforts to tame finance. But that generation of reformers appreciated the imperative of structural change. They saw that the financial collapse that had led to the Great Depression did not stem from the actions of a few bad apples but rather from systemically perverse incentives. Regulating a failed apparatus could hardly lead to better outcomes.<\/p>\n

A Hot Monopolized Financial Mess<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Fast forward in time, to when the Obama Administration looked askance at the bold spirit of the New Deal settlement in finance. Indeed, the most tenacious critic of structural change at the time was Geithner, Obama\u2019s Treasury secretary, who is now a private equity mogul.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, the problem of financial concentration now looks far uglier than it did before Dodd-Frank. Under Trump 2.0, bank consolidation is proceeding at the fastest pace in over three decades. But Joe Biden\u2014a financial reformer without convictions\u2014didn\u2019t cover himself in glory either. Biden appointees at Treasury (Yellen) and the Federal Reserve (Jerome Powell) refused to revise outdated merger guidelines as the Department of Justice had done for the nonfinancial sector. Yellen even toyed with the idea<\/a> of creating more too-big-to-fail megabanks. Every single Biden appointee at the Federal Reserve voted in April 2025<\/a> to approve the awful Capital One-Discover merger<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As for capital markets, the Obama Administration played ball with Republicans to weaken New Deal reforms, fueling the growth of relatively opaque private markets to the point where one former SEC commissioner has spoken of a system that is \u201cgoing dark.\u201d<\/a> The 2012 JOBS Act<\/a> that Obama signed continued a long-term trend of letting private companies lure in more retail investors without the strictures of transparency and disclosure that underpinned the New Deal system. \u201cUnicorns\u201d\u2014non-public companies with valuations over $1 billion\u2014used to be a rarity. Now we have hundreds of them, many worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. Some of these firms, like Uber, WeWork, and Theranos, have generated<\/a> poor governance, allegations of investor fraud, and endless litigation.<\/p>\n

Much of the world can move money cheaply and quickly, a vital function of any financial system. The American payment system, on the other hand, is a hot monopolized mess in which efficiency is mythical and choice illusory. The Visa and Mastercard duopoly of payment card networks extracts monopoly rents from merchants (nearly $200 billion in 2025<\/a>) while enjoying net profit margins of around 50 percent<\/a>, and an oligopoly of big banks<\/a> issues those cards. Because all customers pay the same price when they buy something, but only more well-to-do cardholders enjoy the rewards attached to payment cards, this system redistributes wealth upwards<\/a> to wealthier white consumers, to the detriment of Black and brown ones.<\/p>\n

The American payment system is a hot monopolized mess in which efficiency is mythical and choice illusory.<\/div>\n

The Fed in 2011 illegally sabotaged<\/a> a Dodd-Frank provision, known as the Durbin Amendment, that was intended to slash swipe fees for debit cards. In 2023, the Fed launched FedNow for instant payments, which could provide a technological backbone for less costly solutions, but refused to require that banks use it; the other real-time system is operated by the largest banks. Those same banks operate the Automated Clearing House (ACH), a slow, clunky system<\/a> that lets banks extract the time value of your money before a transaction clears.<\/p>\n

Payment applications like Venmo, Wise, PayPal, and Cash App have developed attractive user interfaces to move money. But they obscure how dismal the back end of the payment system looks. These upstarts depend on the infrastructure operated by banks and must now increasingly pay for the data<\/a>\u2014your data, that is\u2014to operate their business. Promises that cryptocurrencies would provide new ways to move funds have come to naught.<\/p>\n

Over in the nonbank sector, the last 15 years have witnessed the rise of BlackRock as the largest asset manager in the world, with an astonishing $15 trillion under management<\/a>. Together with Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street, it dominates the field. There is growing evidence that asset manager consolidation reduces the amount of money<\/a> raised by going public, in effect subverting the basic function of stock offerings for the next generation of growth companies.<\/p>\n

The infrastructure of finance now has single points of failure\u2014functions dominated by just a few companies. The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation in 2017 took full control<\/a> of the tri-party repo system, a means by which financial institutions manage massive short-term loans. BlackRock\u2019s proprietary Aladdin system<\/a> is an essential utility<\/a> for many financial companies, including its competitors in asset management, and a source of influence over nonfinancial companies. Three firms dominate<\/a> the business of software platforms that allow small banks to function.<\/p>\n

The United States has a persistent \u201c7 percent problem\u201d<\/a> when it comes to the cost of an initial public offering in public markets: a Wall Street-imposed tax on new companies that flows into the coffers of four investment banks. (It took an IPO the size of SpaceX<\/a> to force those fees downward.) Consolidation has also created a tight circle<\/a> of municipal bond underwriters and dealers that costs localities dearly. Three companies\u2014the Intercontinental Exchange (parent of the New York Stock Exchange), Nasdaq, and Cboe Global Markets\u2014own<\/a> the majority of the 16 public securities exchanges in the United States. Three credit bureaus (TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax) dominate the consumer space, while credit rating agencies Moody\u2019s, S&P Global, and Fitch have a lock on corporate business.<\/p>\n

Cryptocurrency, which fancies itself a novel competitor to traditional finance but is really a throwback to antebellum-era banknotes, has simply aped Wall Street in seeking scale. In 2025, Congress put in place a legal framework for stablecoins, the digital tokens that are supposed to maintain a constant value; the stablecoin industry currently has just two players, Circle and Tether. A new consortium<\/a> of Big Tech and Wall Street firms has announced a standard stablecoin. Google, Meta, and Amazon may turn themselves into de facto banks by issuing their own stablecoins. Congress, meanwhile, is debating<\/a> whether to ban a Fed-backed stablecoin, lest the U.S. government exercise its sovereign function to issue money. Prohibition would probably lead to oligopoly control of this new form of money.<\/p>\n

Financial Control of Industry<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Today, we must also contend with the vast scope of private financial markets, which took shape over the last 30 years outside the regulated exchanges. This sector encompasses, most notably, private equity, but also private credit, hedge funds, and other legal constructs. They control or heavily influence vast swaths of the American economy, a problem that would be familiar to reformers of yore. With their colossal pots of money, private equity and hedge fund managers engage in the kinds of activities from which a traditional bank is barred. With a zeal for speculation that sets them apart from traditional bankers, these firms\u2019 billionaire founders are pirates without swords who seize or raid productive enterprises.<\/p>\n

Private equity, which collects money from institutional investors like pension funds, endowments, insurance firms, and very wealthy people, exercises an extractive, anticompetitive power in many sectors of the economy. Private equity has acquired and operated\u2014and, often, looted into bankruptcy\u2014companies in diverse areas such as retail<\/a>, health<\/a> and elder care<\/a>, emergency equipment<\/a>, pet supplies and grooming, autism therapy centers<\/a>, enterprise software<\/a>, veterinary services<\/a>, youth sports<\/a>, and fast food<\/a>. Many of these private equity-owned companies are roll-ups of prior competitors into a single, dominant firm with pricing power over customers, be they consumers or businesses.<\/p>\n

Private credit, in which money raised in a similar fashion is loaned to companies, represents a newer avenue of influence. It has been instrumental in shoveling money into the incipient bubble in artificial intelligence and data centers. Hedge funds, another investment vehicle, tend to take partial stakes in companies and then force them to disgorge cash, cut costs, or turn over management. (They fancy themselves liberators of badly run companies.) Regardless of the outcomes, they are, undeniably, a powerful influence on commerce.<\/p>\n

In the years since Dodd-Frank, shadow banks have become what yesterday\u2019s reformers feared: financial titans whose commercial power bleeds into politics. With their winnings, they have flooded the American political system with cash<\/a>, eventually in support of Donald Trump<\/a>. It isn\u2019t hard to guess what the Fed officials who lambasted Giannini\u2019s nascent \u201cfascist economic empire\u201d 80 years ago would think today. But don\u2019t expect the present-day Fed to share their outlook. Former Fed chair and current board member Jerome Powell got rich in private equity<\/a>. Current Fed chair Kevin Warsh spent a decade at a family hedge fund<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Breaking the Power of Finance<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Through an antimonopoly prism, the most generous interpretation of Dodd-Frank is that the neo-Brandeisian movement in competition policy\u2014of which antimonopoly thinkers Barry C. Lynn and Tim Wu and Biden officials Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter are leading lights\u2014had not yet emerged in 2010. Now, we need new ideas for how to break the power of finance in the American economy. Happily, we are not starting at zero:<\/p>\n