A Tale of Two Populisms: Deconstructing the Neo-Brandeisian and National Conservative Models of Antitrust Law and Political Economy
On the left, neo-Brandeisians, such as former FTC Chair Lina Khan, repeat the Chicago school’s mistake of divorcing competition policy from moral or natural order and relying on formalist legal theory—all in service of their politicized “big is bad” antitrust approach. On the right, national conservatives, led by figures like Sohrab Ahmari, do not treat big as bad and seek to link antitrust law with a theory of natural order, but fall into their own traps—including misapplying the Catholic social thought tradition they claim to uphold.
As Joseph V. Coniglio writes in an article for the American Institute for Economic Research, the prevailing left and right populisms—neo-Brandeisian and national conservatism—do not present desirable models for grounding the next generation of U.S. antitrust law and share important key flaws.
With the neo-Brandeisians now out of power, leaving behind weakened antitrust institutions like the FTC, the incoming Trump administration must avoid repeating their mistakes under the guise of national conservatism. Antitrust should remain apolitical, not a tool for democratic engineering or anti-tech crusades, especially when leading U.S. firms are vital to driving the national innovation and growth needed to maintain America’s leadership in an increasingly dire techno-economic rivalry with China.
