In his new book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, Matt Stoller, one of the most irrepressible members of this new generation of Brandeisians, elevates this argument to something like a theory of history. For Stoller, all of American history—and much of world history—has been defined by a struggle between monopoly and democracy. Where property is concentrated, its owners warp the public institutions that exist around them, allowing them to concentrate property still more. At the extreme ends of this quantitative process, the monopolist captures the state itself, with sovereignty a mere trapping of consolidated market power in the hands of a feudal lord or fascist dictator.
Over the history of the United States, Stoller finds the greatest nemesis of such authoritarian pretensions in America’s anti-monopoly tradition. For him, anti-monopoly is fundamental to the fabric of American democracy. It began with the American Revolution (which he describes as a revolt against the monopoly privileges of British merchants), gained a mass following with Jefferson, became radicalized with the Populists in the late 19th century, tasted power with the Progressives, and culminated in the New Deal and the mid-20th-century US economy. Minimizing the centrality of corporatist coordination to that era, Stoller insists that the New Deal was fundamentally an antitrust program. Its vigorous regulators broke the power that the robber barons accumulated in the 19th century and drove the moneychangers from the temple of democracy, thereby ushering in a golden age of competition and freedom—until this agenda was undermined by scurrilous and arrogant schemers in both parties, who opened the way for a massive reassertion of corporate power beginning in the 1970s.
What’s so telling about this narrative is not only the fact that the golden age of competition that Stoller wishes to restore is the very same period in which great, vertically integrated oligopolies ruled the economy in coordination with one another, labor unions, and the state; it is also that his expansive view of economic power still can’t find a place for class conflict—which, although invisible to Stoller, was often the engine of downward redistribution in the midcentury boom. Because he does not grasp how the fundamental antagonism between labor and capital underlies other forms of economic rivalry, Stoller misunderstands the nature of the New Deal and the legacy it leaves us. As a result, his book offers us a useful guide to some of the ills of concentrated market power today but does not ultimately come to terms with their real origin or present any viable political response.