Matt Stoller delivers a startling historical revelation: the modern corporate dominance we accept as natural was not an accident of market forces, but a deliberate, decades-long intellectual coup orchestrated by Robert Bork and his allies. This piece is not merely a roundup of antitrust news; it is a forensic look at how a small group of thinkers successfully rewrote the American legal code to favor concentrated capital, and how a new generation is now attempting the reverse.
The Bolsheviks of Business
Stoller's most arresting claim is that Robert Bork, the architect of the Chicago School of antitrust theory, explicitly compared his post-1964 strategy to the Bolsheviks after their failed 1905 revolution. "I think our general attitude should be that of the Bolsheviks after 1905," Bork wrote to a friend, signaling a commitment to long-term intellectual warfare rather than immediate political victory. This comparison is jarring because it strips away the veneer of "neutral economics" that Bork's followers later claimed for their work. Stoller argues that Bork hated the mid-20th-century American order and sought to overthrow it not through violence, but through "intellectual work, historical excavation, and organization."
The author traces how this movement built a parallel infrastructure of think tanks and law centers while the public was distracted by the Vietnam War and economic stagnation. "When Reagan came into office, he empowered Bork's law and economics movement, and radically upended how we organize our society." Stoller contends that the resulting deregulation was not a natural evolution but a "lawlessness" where judges and enforcers simply ignored statutes they disliked. This framing is powerful because it reframes the last forty years of economic policy not as a series of market corrections, but as a sustained campaign to dismantle the New Deal's regulatory state.
Critics might argue that the Chicago School's focus on efficiency and consumer prices did yield genuine benefits in terms of lower costs and innovation in certain sectors, and that Stoller's characterization of their work as purely "lawless" ignores the genuine legal debates of the era. However, Stoller's evidence regarding the systematic erasure of antitrust enforcement suggests that the balance of power shifted so drastically that the playing field was no longer level.
The period of the mid-1960s and into the 1970s was a time of institution building, with allies constructing a host of organizations, from the Heritage Foundation to the Law and Economics Center to the Olin Foundation.
The Return of the Rule of Law
The narrative shifts to the present, highlighting the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter to the Antitrust Division as a pivotal moment of reversal. Stoller notes that these enforcers "brought back the rule of law itself" by ignoring theoretical economic models in favor of "statutory text, Congressional intent, and precedent." This is a crucial distinction: the new administration is not trying to invent new laws, but to enforce old ones that had been left dormant for decades.
Stoller points out that Khan resurrected specific prohibitions in the Clayton Act against exclusive deals and tying, while Kanter restored criminal monopolization laws. "They even said it in secret campaign material," referring to the old guard's admission that they were imposing a vision of corporate-friendly lawlessness. The author suggests that the current movement is replicating the long-term institution-building of the Bork era, but with a different goal: "The movement to tame anti-democratic forces in America is growing, under the radar, in powerful ways."
This observation is bolstered by the formation of the new Center for Law and Economy at Columbia University, co-founded by Khan. Stoller writes, "The center will focus on the way 'law and legal institutions structure the economy.'" This institutionalization is significant because it moves the anti-monopoly movement from the fringes of activism to the heart of academic and policy discourse.
Instead of using guidance from theoretical economic models involving price theory, they focused on statutory text, Congressional intent, and precedent.
A Broader Political Economy
The commentary expands beyond antitrust to suggest a fundamental shift in how Americans view the relationship between corporations and democracy. Stoller observes that "Corporate America is financially successful, but operationally decrepit, as the pursuit of monopolization has wholly replaced any attempt to produce useful products and services." This critique resonates with a growing public sentiment that the current economic model is unsustainable and immoral.
The author highlights a diverse coalition of new thinkers and politicians, from Zohran Mamdani in New York to Graham Platner in Maine, who are "jettisoning the old guard." Stoller notes that even some conservative entities, like American Compass, are adopting these ideas, though with a different ideological valence. "What unites this new set of thinkers is a shared view that the U.S. model of high finance-driven growth is immoral and unsustainable."
However, Stoller admits a significant vulnerability in this emerging movement: it has yet to make similar inroads in foreign policy and trade. "The strongest reason for skepticism is that while the anti-monopoly movement has accomplished a lot in terms of changing minds on how to think about political economy, there is nothing similar happening in terms of trade or foreign policy." The author warns that the "old guard still runs there on autopilot," leaving the U.S. vulnerable to global supply chain disruptions and geopolitical miscalculations.
The old guard still runs there on autopilot, without much of a challenge. The war in Iran has prompted no serious attempt on the part of establishment thinkers to understand the U.S. place in the world.
Bottom Line
Stoller's most compelling contribution is the historical parallel he draws between the Bork-led counter-revolution and the current anti-monopoly resurgence, proving that economic policy is won through long-term intellectual institution-building rather than short-term political wins. While the movement's failure to yet challenge the status quo in foreign policy remains a critical blind spot, the shift in legal and academic discourse suggests that the era of unchecked corporate power may finally be ending.