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’s South Florida Mar-a-Lago estate to offer the incoming President an olive branch.
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’s newspaper,
The Washington Post
, frequently criticized Trump and published dogged coverage of his Administration. Trump’s response was predictable: He lashed out at Bezos, instructed the government to cancel
Post
subscriptions, and used his platform to accuse Amazon of not paying enough in taxes.
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’s electoral victory, both with words and cash: Bezos called Trump’s win “an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.” A month later, Amazon
donated
$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. “In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” he
told reporters
during his first post-election press conference. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”
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’s most powerful corporations and their ultrawealthy executives have woven their businesses into the fabric of Trump’s increasingly authoritarian government—and in return, the Administration has cemented their stranglehold on the economy by permitting their dangerous mergers and wrongdoing.
Cartels and monopolies—companies powerful enough to dominate industry and, in some cases, act as private governments in the economy—have operated in lockstep with authoritarian governments throughout history. In Francisco Franco’s Spain, for example, cement and sugar cartels worked at the behest of the regime throughout World War II and beyond. In
fascist Italy
, 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
was carried out by Augusto Pinochet’s neo-fascist government in Chile (at the urging of pro-monopoly U.S. academics).
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’s 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. “Trump has lots of good ideas, and he has done a lot,” Bezos
told CNBC
in May. “He’s been right about a lot of things, and you have to give him credit where credit is due.” Amazon has since donated to Trump’s $400 million ballroom project, and the company’s in-house movie studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, paid $75 million to produce and market a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, which promptly
bombed
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 gilded White House screening of
Melania
, to kiss the ring, as it were.
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’s tech and infrastructure contracts to fuel his Administration’s deportation machine. Amazon Web Services and its related programs act as the backbone for numerous ICE operations and much of the agency’s infrastructure, including the “ICE Cloud,” which allows it to
store information and share it
with local police and law enforcement. ICE’s fascist immigration crackdown would struggle to function with the same level of efficiency but for the tacit and explicit cooperation of the Amazon monopoly.
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
by watchdog group Public Citizen. Then, in June, the company
secured
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.
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—or, more accurately, buried by a corporate-led coup to undo our democratic control of the economy. As the Trump Administration and America’s corporate titans consolidate their power, these are lessons we must quickly relearn.
Remembering the antimonopoly lessons of the past is just the start. Americans—the Democratic Party in particular—must take decisive action if we’re 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.
The Third Reich’s Monopoly Machine
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
, or Palace of Justice, in Nuremberg, Germany, to defend himself one last time.
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—at 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’s “Wehrmacht Liaison Office,” which facilitated Farben’s 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 Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe (the German air force) and the Nazis’ 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.
At Nuremberg, the Farben executives pleaded what many Nazi officials and collaborators had: that they were merely following the regime’s orders, and that if they had refused, they feared the regime would turn on them. Krauch
asked the tribunal
to “return to me my honor, which was taken away from me by the prosecution.” But his plea meant little. The judges
convicted Krauch
and a dozen of his Farben colleagues of war crimes. He received a six-year sentence, one of the longest for a Farben executive.
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’s horrors. And no combine was more paramount to German fascism than the German mega-monopoly IG Farben.
The first incarnation of Farben began in 1904, a year after Carl Duisberg, the head of chemical firm and drugmaker Bayer and Farben’s 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’s major chemical firms embrace the country’s 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—BASF, Bayer, and Agfa—to form the first version of IG Farben. By 1916, the major players in the industry were
locked
into a cartel tie-up.
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.
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.
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’s synthetic fuel project, which Bosch had fought hard to maintain during the Depression. Hitler was just as enthusiastic as Bosch about the project. Germany’s 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, “The man is more sensible than I thought.”
Even as chancellor, Hitler’s consolidation of power was incomplete. A new round of Reichstag elections in March 1933 represented the party’s 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, “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy.” Farben pledged 400,000 reichsmarks to the campaign, by far the most of any firm.
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—in violation of the Treaty of Versailles—using a newly discovered light metal manufacturing process to build military planes. Farben executive Krauch had become the company’s 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’s finances to that of the Nazi regime. As British journalist and historian Diarmuid Jeffreys writes in his history of the Farben monopoly, “The 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.”
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, “The Four Year Plan was, in fact, an I.G. plan.” 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.
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—a cyanide-based pesticide called Zyklon-B—but 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
and other victims of the Nazi death machine.
As Hitler relied on Farben to produce the poison gas needed to run the death camps, so Farben relied on the Nazis’ 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.
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’s intensely monopolized economy made the march of fascism not only possible, but straightforward for Hitler and the Nazis.
Why De-Nazification Also Meant Decartelization
As Hitler consolidated power and rearmed Germany, American leaders began connecting the rising fascist regime there with the country’s long history of industrial monopolies and cartels. The United States had antitrust laws on the books—notably 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’ 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’s attention, and concern, on corporate power at home.
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’s ban against cartels: “We know that the cartels of Europe afforded Mussolini and Hitler the ready means, the equipment, the implements, with which to seize…industry.” 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
detailing the extent of monopolization in the economy. William Borah, a progressive Republican from Idaho, read the opinion aloud, then
barked to his colleagues
, “There is only one remedy for monopoly, and that is to destroy it.”
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’s 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. “Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people,” Roosevelt told lawmakers. “The 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—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
To implement his antimonopoly program, Roosevelt put in place two trustbusters to operate the country’s 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’s Antitrust Division—and perhaps the most important antitrust enforcer in U.S. history.
Both men understood the looming threat of fascism in the United States. Although it’s 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. “They both lead to fascism,” March
wrote
.
Arnold’s 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—including Alcoa, Standard Oil of New Jersey (the company that would eventually become Exxon), DuPont, and others—conspired with IG Farben, the industrial giant Krupp, and other German monopolists in the 1920s and ’30s 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
that under Standard Oil’s 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.
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’s team named Edward Levi, who would go on to serve as attorney general during the Ford Administration, called St. John’s 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.
Before the end of the war, Martin’s team spent three years producing 3,600 reports that served as snapshots of Germany’s 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’s 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’s 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.
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’t fall along with the Nazi regime. After hearing of the department’s 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. “The history of the use of the I.G. Farben trust by the Nazis reads like a detective story,” Roosevelt
wrote
to Hull in the now famous 1944 memo. “The defeat of the Nazi armies will have to be followed by the eradication of these weapons of economic warfare.”
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. “At 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,” the Potsdam protocols
read
.
The Decartelization Branch was staffed to the hilt with investigators and prosecutors, some from Arnold’s antitrust division. At its peak in 1946, more than 160 lawyers, economists, and staffers worked at the agency, which
set about identifying
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’s 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.
Under “Law 56,” 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’s deconcentration mission largely failed; the dawn of the Cold War and the specter of communism, which consumed officials’ attention, have been widely blamed. But what’s missing from this story are the real goals of corporate leaders—goals that, under Trump, powerful corporations are far closer to achieving today.
The Long, Slow Death of Antitrust in America
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.
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’s most powerful monopolies. Most prominent among them was the division’s 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.
Draper wanted little to do with the work of the Decartelization Branch and seemed unconcerned by the concentrated state of German industry. “He was fundamentally opposed to the idea that the cartels and combines required immediate reorganization and was convinced that the ‘experienced German management’ had to be retained,” 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.
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
that some State Department actions in Germany ran counter to the goals of industrial deconcentration, and that those actions were “jeopardizing 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.” 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. “It 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,” the committee’s 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.
But despite the collapse of the Decartelization Branch, the lessons of IG Farben and the role monopolies played in the Nazis’ 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’ 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.
“I am not an alarmist,” Kefauver said in support of the bill, “but 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.”
Kefauver, Celler, and other lawmakers’ statements suggest they understood that liberty was under threat not only from monopoly, but from corporate concentration writ large. “I don’t want my children or your children to be confronted with signs which read, ‘verboten’—forbidden, you can’t enter this or that business because there’s an oligopoly of a big three or a big four—an absolute control,” Celler said in comments supporting the antimerger bill.
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’ postwar intent of arresting corporate power before it could become political power and threaten the republic. In the Supreme Court’s famous 1962 decision in
Brown Shoe Co. v. United States
, the first merger case the Court heard under the law, it endorsed Congress’s motivation for barring mergers that concentrated industries: a “fear 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.”
Daniel Crane, a University of Michigan professor who has
written extensively
about the role that concerns about fascism played in shaping America’s postwar antimonopoly policy, connects the antifascist sentiment of the 1940s and ’50s with the rise of structuralism—the simple idea that an industry’s structure is the best predictor of its tendency toward dominance and abuse. Structuralism as a new intellectual framework made clear that a company’s 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—greater competition, entrepreneurship, economic democracy, and local control of industry—was motivated by the twin specters of fascism on one hand and Soviet-style communism on the other.
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
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.
The same year, a group of lawyers, economists, and scholars led by University of Chicago law school dean Phil Neal
delivered
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. “I see it as a question not only of economic—but human—freedom,” Hart said. (The bill never advanced out of committee.)
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’s had. The Federal Trade Commission
prosecuted two major lawsuits
in the 1970s—one against
Exxon and seven other oil companies
, and another against cereal companies including General Foods and Kellogg—to test whether it could successfully sue multiple companies in the same industry for illegal monopolization. (Both suits later faltered before the agency’s 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.
Meanwhile, corporate profits were flat or declining. As scholars Darren Bush and Mark Glick
point out
, 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.
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 ’60s, 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 “law and economics” 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
the home of the movement to overturn the antitrust laws.
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. “The Sherman Act may be understandable when viewed as a projection of the nineteenth century’s fear and economic ignorance,” Greenspan wrote. “But it is utter nonsense in the context of today’s economic knowledge.” Robert Bork, a far-right Chicago School disciple, wrote
The Antitrust Paradox
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—the so-called “consumer welfare standard.” 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.
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
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’s 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’s antitrust division. By the end of his first term in office, Reagan had fully reversed antitrust’s emphasis on the dangers of corporate concentration.
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.
The Chamber of Commerce and powerful corporations no longer clamored publicly for the elimination of the antitrust laws—because they didn’t need to. The Reagan Administration’s 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.
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’s antimonopoly resurgence.
In Trump, monopolies have found a pathway back to power, and their support for the regime suggests they don’t 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—including 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—corporate 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’re going to reclaim democracy from the grip of corporate control, we must learn the lessons that led us to this moment—and that might light the way out.
Antimonopoly and Freedom
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—not 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.
Policymakers must return to our long-held understanding that monopolies enable authoritarianism and cannot be allowed to exist. Regulations, watchdog oversight, union organizing—all of these tools are crucial to democracy. But as we’ve 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.
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’s 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.
Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
said
in June that Big Tech firms should be broken up because of their “totally unchecked power” 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 “abundance” or any other corporate-backed policy or worldview.
Writing in 1942, at the height of Hitler’s monopoly-enabled atrocities, sociologist Robert S. Lynd understood that fascism was not the product of the Nazis or any other government, but of “the organized economic power backing the Hitlers in nation after nation over the industrial world.” Either we fight against that system, with antimonopoly action or something else, or we perish. “We live in a heroic time,” Lynd wrote. “And democracy will either throw off its lethargy and rise insistently to the stature of the times—or it will cease to exist.”
Ron Knox
is a senior researcher and policy advocate at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. He writes about monopoly power for
The Nation
,
The American Prospect
,
The Washington Monthly
, and other publications, and is the author of the
“Who Shall Rule”
newsletter.
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