At an Open Markets Institute conference, economic populism was on the agenda.
Democratic Senators Chris Murphy and Chris Van Hollen leave a briefing at the Capitol in Washington, DC, June 2025.
(Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg) The Open Markets Institute, a clearinghouse of information on antitrust policy and Washington’s legal strategy, was not lacking in ambition in crafting its convening this year of political leaders, regulators and writers attacking the powers of economic concentration. The rally, held in an event space across the street from the Capitol, was titled “The Next American Revolution: Shattering the Oligarchy and Creating a New American Democracy.”
As Institute Director Barry Lynn welcomed the crowd to a daylong series of panels on the challenges of antitrust enforcement and its place in our political discourse, it quickly became clear that the call for revolution was another invocation of the country’s 250th anniversary; Lynn, like many other speakers at the event, reminded the crowd that anti-monopoly sentiment was at the center of the colonial rebellion against the British crown.
Yet events outside the room gave new currency to the rhetoric. The evening before, a list of three democratic socialist candidates driven into victories facing establishment-backed opponents in New York’s primary elections, sparking speculation among pundits about the rise of a “Democratic Tea Party.” And as the conference progressed, President Donald Trump canceled his planned ceremony to sign Congress’ new housing affordability measure, which aimed to prevent private equity funds from acquiring rental investment properties and driving up the cost of housing. The housing bill was outgoing Republican lawmakers’ last hope to claim during the upcoming midterm cycle that they were trying to measurably improve the cost of living for an inflation-stricken electorate. In a heated meeting with Republican senators, Trump insisted that he would not sign the measure until Congress also approved his pet bill to combat the nonexistent scourge of voter fraud, the SAVE Act — an already doomed law that signals to disenchanted voters that Republican leaders care more about blocking access to voting than destroying an unwieldy political economy. Placed alongside Trump’s announcement that he’s “not really thinking about Americans’ financial situation” in his blind negotiations over the Iran war, the housing bill debacle belies the creaky tale that MAGA rule will restore economic sovereignty to forgotten American workers. It is no wonder that Lynn concluded his introduction by declaring that “the American people are in a revolutionary mood.”
Many of the panels that followed also began with speculation about the results in New York and their broader meaning for an electorate increasingly weary of the Trump oligarchy and procedurally-minded Democratic rhetoric that neglects the material conditions behind America’s bitter political mood. Indeed, the challenges of aligning Democratic political strategy with the crusade against monopoly power in the economy are so pressing that the conference devoted two separate sessions to this issue. And strikingly, prominent Democrats speaking before the conference emphasized the same urgent need to reclaim the party’s identity as the party of disenfranchised workers. “It’s not enough to oppose everything Donald Trump does,” said Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who, along with fellow conference keynote speaker Chris Murphy from Connecticut, is now being touted as a potential 2028 presidential candidate. The New York results vindicated “those candidates who believe we need to move beyond Trump and recognize that the pre-Trump status quo was already broken,” he continued. “We have much deeper problems to solve, including the concentration of wealth, economic power and political power… We can’t just tinker at the margins. We need fundamental change.” Van Hollen went on to support Medicare for All, sweeping campaign finance reform, an end to the filibuster, and an overhaul of the tax code to support struggling workers and fund climate change mitigation.
Murphy, for his part, offered a sober diagnosis of the country’s growing anomie, drawn from his just-released book, Crisis of the common goodand emphasizing the “inextricable link with the structure of our economy and the way people feel about the way they interact with the economy and our democratic crisis.” Both lawmakers appeared to be testing arguments for the 2028 cycle, and it is undeniable progress that such disparate issue appeals are firmly anchored in the principles of left-wing economic populism.
Yet the Democratic strategy sessions made clear how far Democrats are from reconstituting the party as a compelling and credible force for populist economic justice. Even though Kamala Harris inherited a strong antitrust record from the Biden White House, her 2024 campaign struggled, and ultimately failed, in its efforts to convey a simple populist message. “During the 2024 cycle, we were shouting from the rooftops” about the centrality of economic equity to the campaign, recalls consultant Evan Roth Smith of Slingshot Strategies. “And Harris would react in context in an extraordinarily stupid way.” Smith went on to explain that such failures directly feed into the widespread public perception that Democratic candidates are simply not serious or trustworthy carriers of core populist appeals. A recent series of broad-format polls conducted by his firm using “natural language, low question counts, and open-ended questions” targeting independent, swing, and disenchanted GOP voters asked what was stopping them from voting for a Democrat. “The number one word was ‘spineless,’” Smith said. “People sounded the same all over the country.”
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It’s less a problem of fine-tuning the message, he continued, and more of a deeply rooted ideology. “The Democratic Party has made peace with capital over the last 20 or 30 years. If you’re a center-left party, you’re supposed to be opposed, even openly hostile, to capital.” For Democrats to actually gain ground in this political climate, the prescription is simple, he said: “Just declare war on capital. That, I think, will restore the confidence that we’ve seen eroded in the studies we’ve done of partisan Democrats – not just undecided voters and independents. … And it doesn’t really matter if you win these fights. The fights have to be better chosen and louder; they have to violate more of the standards and attract more attention.” A key proof of concept, he suggested, is the upcoming Michigan Senate primary, where Abdul El-Sayed breaks away from a group of establishment rivals with a straightforward Mamdani-style pitch for sweeping affordability reforms, chief among them Medicare for All.
Another Democratic disconnect was reflected on stage: Despite the conference’s salutary emphasis on the need to reclaim worker power as the party’s organizing mission, the event’s roster included no union representatives. The closest he came was former union leader Dan Osborn, an independent candidate for Senate in Nebraska, who explained how his experience in union organizing informed his political ambitions. Unions played a key role in the results of the New York primary, and El-Sayed benefited from the endorsement and popular support of the United Auto Workers. Yet most speakers assessing the New York results highlighted the (effective) organizing work of democratic socialists and the campaign’s outsized personal charisma. Texas Rep. Greg Casar, head of the House Progressive Caucus, recalled Franklin Roosevelt’s rousing 1936 inaugural address to the Democratic National Convention, with its outspoken criticism of “economic royalists” and FDR’s declaration that he “congratulated himself.”[d] their hatred. Yet this performance – and the broad New Deal coalition that supported it – was also a demonstration of union power, in the wake of the historic collective bargaining provisions of the Wagner Act of 1934. During a day of bracing discussions about the democratic distortions caused by a manager-dominated political economy, it was striking that the chief messengers were elected officials, former federal regulators, academics, consultants, pollsters, policy pundits and journalists. For the next American Revolution to take root as something more than a conference name, it seems a key starting point would have to be for workers to take more of the lead.
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Chris Leh mann Chris Lehmann is the DC bureau chief for The nation and a contributing editor to The deflector. He was previously editor-in-chief of THE Deflector And The New Republicand is the author, more recently, of The Cult of Money: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Destruction of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).
