Policy Merits

One of the weird things about the last few years is that, if you read all of the hype about the vigorous antitrust enforcement of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), you’d think that there was a massive uptick in the number of mergers being blocked by these agencies. But there wasn’t.

In the first three years of the Biden administration, there were 149 merger investigations that resulted in a second request initially blocking the merger. In the three years prior to that, under Donald Trump, the same number was 154.

Over this period, there was also a huge spike in transactions that came before these agencies. So the percentage of transactions being blocked actually declined.

You’d think that this would be a disappointment to antitrust advocates, something for them to point to and say that their ideas weren’t actually implemented. But such advocates are more inclined toward narrative than quantification and spent years claiming that all they really needed was to get their people in at the FTC and the DOJ. Acknowledging that installing Lina Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter at the DOJ actually did not have a huge antitrust impact, neither overall nor relative to replacement-level alternatives, would indicate that their underlying claims about how to enact major change in the US economy were incorrect.

Because such advocates prefer narratives and examples over aggregate statistics, much of the discussion over the past few years has been of specific cases. When you analyze things this way, you can definitely write some fun and interesting stories about this or that merger being blocked or litigated against. But you could write about many failures as well, including UnitedHealth’s acquisition of Change Healthcare, Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, and Meta’s acquisition of Within.

Perhaps due to the lackluster reality of attempting to do aggressive antitrust enforcement, this particular political grouping has more recently tended to tout a variety of random regulatory tweaks, generally in the realm of consumer protection, as indicators of the success of their vision. The US Copyright Office made it so that McDonald’s can repair its own ice cream machines, the FTC recently passed a rule that prevents companies from making it hard to cancel subscriptions, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau lowered credit card late fees from $32 to $8, and the Department of Transportation standardized electric vehicle chargers and forced airlines to automatically refund customers for certain things.

This is all fine as far as things go, good even. But were this magnitude of change coming out of a different ideological grouping, rather than the grouping that has dominated the left-of-left-of-center for the last few years, I don’t think anybody would struggle to identify it as small bore tweaks around the edges. It is not, as it is often sold, a kind of radical and far-reaching economic populism agenda. If this is what is meant by Jentleson dismissing this stuff as “niche,” he is right.

Directly-Felt Policy Impact

Policy merits and electoral advantage are not always the same thing. Very good policies can be hard to sell or hard to detect while very bad policies can have a gut-level appeal, especially before they are implemented.

The most basic way to think about the potential electoral impact of implemented policies is to consider how people directly feel it. This is distinct from how they may be influenced about it in the media. The degree to which people directly apprehend that a policy is helping them is a function of the magnitude of the program’s effects and the ability of people to detect that the effects are caused by the program (i.e., its salience).

As noted already above, antitrust and this broader array of “populist” consumer protection tweaks that are lumped in with antitrust do not have a very large magnitude in the context of a $27 trillion economy with 330 million people in it. But they also suffer from a lack of salience. If McDonald’s ice cream machines have more uptime going forward, very few people will consciously notice the change and even those who do will have no reason to think it was because of a move the Copyright Office made. The same is true for almost all of the other tweaks as well: if they are noticed at all, they will just appear to most as changes various companies decided to make, not government policy.

Rhetorical Advantage

Although antitrust and “populism” lacks in directly felt policy impact, they excel tremendously in the kind of messaging that they give rise to. Left-inflected rhetorical appeals about inequality and the common man and the greedy parasites at the top of the society are quite potent, especially when expressed at that level of abstraction. But many of the concrete ideas aimed at turning that rhetoric into policy involve taxation, welfare programs, and pro-union legislation that can prove to be quite controversial.

The genius of antitrust and “populism” is that it is able to access every bit of the left-wing rhetoric without having to touch any of the controversial policy items. It promises to fix inequality and defeat the greedy corporations without levying a single cent and without enabling a single mooch. It takes the fight directly to the corporations through regulation and by cutting them down to size.

From what I have seen this election and before, I think it’s pretty clear that, contrary to what Jentleson argues, this kind of stuff actually provides an electoral advantage, not because it can deliver the kind of sweeping overhaul its proponents claim, but because of the rhetoric it unlocks.

As noted already above, this policy area is also very narrative-inflected. There are individuals and companies and good guys and bad guys and all of that. It’s essentially white collar true crime and courtroom drama with a policy gloss wrapped around it. This appeals to a certain kind of policy person — especially journalists, former journalists, and communications professionals — but also makes for good appeals to the public.