At the New York Times, Adam Jentleson wrote a piece about what Democrats need to do to win elections. In the aftermath of election losses, these kinds of finger-pointing pieces are standard fare. I didn’t find Jentleson’s piece all that interesting overall, but it contains the following tossed-off line that started its own little discourse:

By wishing away these complexities, a coalition-first mind-set produces many candidates who are the inverse of what voters want — people with the cultural sensibilities of Yale Law School graduates who cosplay as populists by over-relying on niche issues like Federal Trade Commission antitrust actions.

In the context of the piece, Jentleson seems to be arguing that this particular issue area is an electoral liability, or at least attracts certain kinds of pointy-headed politicians that are an electoral liability. But it also seems like a line that has been shoehorned in because Jentleson finds the entities and individuals involved in this area of advocacy — Open Markets Institute, American Economic Liberties Project, More Perfect Union, Institute for Local Self Reliance, the American Prospect, Elizabeth Warren, etc. — to be annoying, both interpersonally and because they overstate the significance of the policies they promote.

In assessing Jentleson’s argument and the antitrust movement more generally, I think it’s useful to distinguish between three things that are often muddled together: (1) the policy merits, (2) the directly-felt impact of policy, and (3) the political appeal of the rhetoric accompanying the policies.

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 FTC and the 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 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 towards 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 Copyright Office made it so that McDonalds can repair its own ice cream machines, the FTC recently passed a rule that prevents companies from making it hard to cancel subscriptions, the CFPB lowered credit card late fees from $32 to $8, and the DOT 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 McDonalds 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.