Washington Monthly - How Biden Can Transform America
Barry Lynn, executive director of Open Markets Institute, writes in The Washington Monthly about how the president-elect doesn’t need Congress to break up monopoly power.
Joe Biden’s grand plan sure sounded right for the final weeks of the campaign. In this time of pandemic and economic upheaval, learn from the hard lessons of the Great Recession and spend big to “build back better.” Focus on jobs, clean energy, infrastructure, and expanding the Affordable Care Act. It was to be nothing less than a new New Deal. Or, as Vox put it in August, Biden is “self-styling as the next FDR.”
Well, Joe Biden did win big. But Democrats did not carry the Senate—and even if they are successful in the Georgia runoffs, their hold on that body will be too tenuous to deliver the trillions of dollars in spending Biden promised. The emerging consensus, as described by The New York Times, is that Biden cannot drive a series of expensive programs forward but must be content to “nibble at the edge of tax policies” and other micro measures while bracing for a sluggish recovery.
And that’s the optimistic take. From day one Biden will also have to parry the populist-tipped thrusts of Republican Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton and other Trump-inspired contenders for 2024, and perhaps of Trump himself if he seeks to reclaim his crown. Biden might also find himself under assault from the left wing of his own party, sometimes wielding the same arguments as anti-corporate Republicans.
The prospect gets ugly fast. Former FCC Commissioner Reed Hundt and others have charged Barack Obama with “wasting” the financial collapse of 2008 by not pursuing deep structural fixes. Faced with an even graver set of challenges, Biden might never get a chance to prove that he’s capable of true reform. Instead, he faces two years as a hostage of the Senate, followed by two years of panic as the MAGA troops muster outside the White House gates.
But what if Biden instead chose to follow through with his promise to transform the nation, only using different tools than he envisioned in the campaign? The fact that he will enter the White House knowing that a Keynesian stimulus is off the table could prove key to his ultimate success if it inspired his team to find smarter ways to achieve its goals.
One set of tools offers the promise of true transformation, without the need for large sums of money or strong congressional support. This is the use of America’s vast suite of anti-monopoly laws already on the books to address the extreme and growing concentration of private power that has harmed the economic and political well-being of almost every American. An anti-monopoly agenda would enable Biden to frame, direct, and drive deep structural reforms tailored to deliver everything from better health care to better jobs to real solutions to the climate crisis, and to create opportunity and stimulate investment and innovation across the entire economy. Such an agenda would even offer ways to steer political debate in a more constructive and civil direction.
Rather than button himself into a beige cardigan next to the White House fire, President Biden can stride forth as a second Harry Truman, taking the fight to the thieves and bullies and demagogues while telling a story of America that explains who broke our nation, how they did it, and how we can fix it.
Fully understood and embraced, anti-monopolism offers Biden the opportunity to establish the foundations for a 21st-century political economy that is fair, just, safe, prosperous, and sustainable, and to do so on the cheap. Even better, anti-monopolism offers him the chance to establish a liberal political regime in America able to protect his achievements for decades to come.
The idea that monopolists pose some sort of threat to the public weal is now widely accepted. In the case of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, for instance, three of every four American voters favor some sort of breakup of the corporations.
Reaction against extreme concentration of wealth and power has in fact played a large and growing role in the nation’s politics for more than a decade. In 2008, Obama’s promise to fight farm monopolies proved key to his win in the Iowa caucus. When he then failed to deliver, and instead bailed out the biggest of banks, populist anger powered the rise of the Tea Party in 2010 and of Occupy Wall Street in 2011. That same anger was a key to Bernie Sanders’s shocking rise in 2016, and to Donald Trump’s even more shocking victory that November. And it played a big role in the Republicans’ strong showing in 2020, as Trump, aided by supporters like the Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, continued to paint Democrats as supercilious servants of financiers and data barons.
Read the full article in The Washington Monthly here.