In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," published in Perspectives on Politics:
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting
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Keir Starmer is the UK’s Bob Forehead.
Dude.
"When pigs fly" as a metaphor for "something that is very improbable" is not deeply offensive to *anyone*.
The paper's authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern's Benjamin Page, a professor of Decision Making. Gilens and Page studied a representative sample of 1,779 policy issues, analyzing the effect that the preferences of different groups of people had on the outcome. They wanted to find out what drove policy: money, or popularity?
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It's money. It's totally, utterly money. When billionaires want something, it literally doesn't matter how much the rest of us hate it, they're gonna get their way. When billionaires hate something, it doesn't matter how popular it is with the rest of us, we're not gonna get it.
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As Gilens and Page put it:
> economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
I know the cynics out there are hollering "no duh" at their computers right now, but bear with me here. Gilens and Page's research shows that you and I have no voice in policy outcomes.
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Based on these findings, the only way we can change society is to try and woo oligarchs so they champion our cause. This reduces democracy to a competition to see who can pour the most honey into a plutocrat's ear. Mass mobilizations - millions of people in the streets - only matter to the extent that they bring a tear to a billionaire's eye.
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This just shattered me. I've been haunted by it ever since. I've tried some tactical gambits based on this data, but honestly, I don't want to improve the world by swaying the ultra-rich. Mostly, I've spent the decade since I read the Gilens/Page paper working on mass mobilizations and mass opionion-influencing.
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I reasoned (or maybe rationalized) that while oligarchs were running the nation now, that was subject to change, and that was a change that I was sure wouldn't come from America's plutocrats committing mass class-suicide.
Then, something incredible happened. All this decade, a tide of antitrust vigor has swept the planet.
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The EU has passed big, muscular tech competition laws like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and has by God enforced them, and have patched the enforcement weaknesses in the GDPR. EU member-states - France, Germany, Spain - have passed their own big, ambitious national laws that go further than DSA/DMA.
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Even Ireland - a country that deliberately prostrated itself to US Big Tech - is getting in on the act, with the country's Social Media Czar railing against the "enshittification" of tech:
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Not just the EU, of course. Australia and Canada have taken some big swings at Big Tech, and Canada is pressing ahead with its digital services tax of 3% for onshore earnings of tech companies with more than CAD20m in annual turnover, despite the fact that Trump has promised to end all trade talks with Canada in retaliation:
https://financialpost.com/technology/canadas-digital-services-tax-g7
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Antitrust fever has swept both of the world's superpowers. Under Trump I, the DOJ and FTC brought key cases against Facebook and Google, and then Biden's antitrust enforcers went to town on all forms of monopoly, carrying on the Trump cases and reviving some of the law's most elegant weapons from a more civilized age, like the Robinson-Patman Act:
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Admittedly, Trump's FTC and DOJ have carried on some of Biden's work, even as they've killed some of the Biden era's most important cases, and made a general Trumpian mockery of the idea that antitrust law is a tool for economic justice:
https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/weekly-rewind-62725
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Trump killing antitrust law is normal. That's what politics have been like for this whole century, and it's what politics are like in every other domain: billionaires get their way on climate, on labor, on whatever bullshit they get into their fool fucking heads:
But it's a mistake to think that Trump killed antitrust enforcement in the USA out of a special conservative deference to millionaires and enthusiasm for corrosive and predatory monopolies.
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In the UK, four consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers presided over the best competition law enforcement in British history - and it was Labour's Keir Starmer who fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-head of Amazon UK:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter
It is completely normal for both "progressive" and "conservative" parties to wield the entire apparatus of state to the benefit of powerful monopolists.
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The antitrust enforcement - in the US, the UK, the EU, Australia, Germany, France and Spain - are totally aberrant. And it's not just in these countries where political science's law of gravity reversed itself: there've been giant, brutal antitrust cases in Japan and South Korea.
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