A few years ago you might recall there was a three year news cycle about how the modern Trump GOP was somehow “serious about antitrust reform this time.” The party, which has never met a consolidated monopoly it didn’t adore (see: airlines, telecom, pharma, health, energy), was suddenly getting credited in the press for being a serious player in reining in the worst impulses of corporate power.
In reality, the GOP was seeking leverage against a handful of tech companies to bully them away from moderating right wing political propaganda on social media. Most of the disjointed efforts to actually crack down on corporate power or monopolization were badly crafted and went absolutely nowhere, though tech giants did ultimately scale back disinfo moderation efforts ahead of a pivotal election.
Funny, that.
I feel like we’re at risk of entering another, similar cycle with the selection of J.D. Vance as the Republican nomination for Vice President. Stories are already starting to flow discussing Vance’s bonafides as a very serious antitrust reformer, and somebody very serious about reining in corporate power. Here’s how Reuters frames it, for example:
“Vance is one of several Republican lawmakers, including U.S. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Florida U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz, called “Khanservatives” for their agreement with the FTC chair that U.S. antitrust law has a broader purpose than keeping prices down for consumers.”
If you recall, Josh Hawley was plastered around the media as the poster child of a new era of right wing interest in antitrust reform, buoyed at times in post-leftist circles by folks like Matt Stoller. But Hawley’s interest in antitrust reform proved entirely hollow, because authoritarians and the oligarchs that coddle them only really care about one thing: power and unchecked wealth accumulation.
Democrats and more traditional Republicans also have this fixation, but authoritarianism is a truly next-level affair that holds zero interest in democracy, the rule of law, or the public interest, and holds even less reservation about the indiscriminate use of violence. Bullying corporations to support bigotry-fueled fascism should never be conflated with good faith efforts to rein in corporate power or police monopoly.
This superficial support for antitrust reform is a pseudo-populist effort to win over low information voters that may not be fully versed with the full brutal impact of real-world authoritarianism.
It’s also intended to obscure the real goal: forcing social media giants to take the knee to the interests of authoritarians, for whom a major cornerstone of power is online propaganda and disinformation. Authoritarians that also very much dream of a future where there are no repercussions for widespread criminality, cruelty, and fraud. It’s hard not to miss the impact of those efforts so far.
The U.S. press is often complicit with this con. See here, for example, where Reuters frames Trump, despite everything we know about his corruption, as somebody actually interested in “antitrust reform” (as opposed to a petty tyrant waging a weird and unproductive grievance campaign against largely amoral self-serving corporate giants he has, falsely, misinterpreted as predominantly left wing because they very briefly tried to stop a few racists from being assholes on the internet):
“Scrutiny of Big Tech would not be a departure for Trump. The FTC and Department of Justice under Trump initiated investigations into Meta, Amazon, Apple, Google over alleged antitrust violations. All four companies were eventually sued, and have denied wrongdoing.”
These weren’t investigations as so much as they were performance art designed to bully. And if you hadn’t noticed, they were very ineffective at actually policing consolidated corporate power, but very effective in chasing big companies away from everything from moderating election lies to embracing bare-bones inclusivity initiatives.
Vance will occasionally veer from party orthodoxy to score brownie points with rural constituents (see recent opposition to successful GOP efforts to kill a low income broadband subsidy program). But he’s not going to, say, suddenly support giving the FCC the funding and authority to take aim at Comcast’s clearly harmful telecom monopoly, or start body checking pharmaceutical empires.
When you scratch below the surface on a lot of this stuff you’ll routinely find it’s simply performance.
The primary interests of the Federalist Society and the tech titan VCs payrolling Vance and friends isn’t truly cracking down on monopoly power, or limiting the power of corporations. The primary goal is the almost total lobotomization of what’s left of regulatory power (see: recent Supreme Court rulings), and the dismantling of government efforts to rein in corporate fraud.
Even if Vance isn’t just a stuffed suit authoritarian opportunist speaking out of both sides of his mouth to earn brownie points with rural voters (and I most assuredly think that, like Hawley, that’s the case,) he’s not going to be operating in any sort of political environment that allows him to pursue those interests.
A Trump Presidency means an immediate and abrupt end to the Lina Khan antitrust reform outlets like The Verge and Reuters insist Vance is a big fan of. And make no mistake: backed by a suite of disastrous and corruption-fueled Supreme Court rulings, a second Trump administration is going to absolutely crush what’s left of U.S. corporate accountability and oversight, wreaking complete havoc across consumer protection, public safety, internet policy, and labor and environmental reform.
If you think any of that actually ends well for actual American employees, consumers, and small businesses without seven-figure lobbying budgets and a trust fund, good luck.
