SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
us chamber of commerce
Electile Dysfunction—Why Can’t the Dems Get Their Polls Up?
The Democratic Party cannot afford to attend to the material needs of its traditional popular base because it is terrified of offending its donor class.
May 27, 2026
“The Republicans go for the jugular; the Democrats go for the capillaries,”—Kevin Phillips
With the recent release of the long-withheld, but little anticipated Democratic National Committee “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential electoral loss, we’re back to the perennial questions of which issues should receive priority; how should messaging and narrative around those issues be crafted; which wing(s) of the party should be amputated before their rot infects the entire organism, suburban soccer moms or inner city youth; and on and on. All good questions, but ultimately, in present circumstances, unanswerable except in the most platitudinous, hand-waving ways. The most fundamental dilemma resides in the Faustian bargain the party entered beginning in the 1970s, and the result of that bargain is neatly captured in Sheldon Wolin’s 2010 coinage “the inauthentic opposition”:
While the transformed Republican Party reveals what a “party of government” might look like under inverted totalitarianism, the Democrats reveal the fate of opposition politics under inverted totalitarianism. The Democrats’ politics might be described as inauthentic opposition in the era of Superpower [i.e., the US after the fall of the Soviet Union]. Having fended off its reformist elements and disclaimed the label of liberal, it is trapped by new rules of the game which dictate that a party exists to win elections rather than to promote a vision of the good society… Accordingly, the party competes for an apolitical segment of the electorate, “the undecided,” and puzzles how best to woo religious zealots. Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society. [This point is exquisitely exemplified by the first couple of years of the Obama administration, when they held the federal trifecta and still managed to privilege the kleptocratic banksters of the housing crisis and the war criminal gangsters of the W. Bush regime.] The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf.
The origins of this current malaise date back to the mid 1970s, and followed the actions taken by business class elites responding to the exhortations contained in the now-famous Powell Memorandum. This was a secret 1971 memo from then-corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to the Secretary of the US Chamber of Commerce. The memo wasn’t revealed to the public until well after Powell had been appointed to the Supreme Court, where he continued to wage his ideological battle in defense of capitalism and corporate power (including, of course, free speech rights articulated in cash). In the memo Powell argued that:
The US Chamber of Commerce should lead an assault upon the major institutions, universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts, in order to change how individuals think about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual.
US businesses, Powell suggested, did not lack the resources for such an effort, particularly if they were pooled. That is, if people started to think together as a class rather than as individual firms and corporations. The US Chamber of Commerce took up this challenge in a very dramatic way. It expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to about a quarter of a million just a decade later. Other elite organizational forms also began to coalesce around this core following the advice of the memo. These included think tanks (e.g., the Heritage Foundation, established 1973 by Adolph Coors), as well as corporate money pumps to operationalize the memo’s chief objectives.
One of the most prominent of these organizations was the Business Roundtable, founded in 1972, and comprising CEOs whose corporations at the time accounted for about half of the US gross national product. During this period, through political action committees, the Roundtable was spending about $900 million annually on political matters, a very significant sum at the time. These newly emerging entities provided a mechanism for corporations to contribute substantial funds to political campaigns and candidates, authorized in large measure through a number of Supreme Court rulings, several written by Powell himself.
These PACs, which were just beginning to have a political presence (there were 89 PACs in 1974, and around 1,500 by 1982) gave to both parties largely in equal measure in the 70s, but began leaning heavily toward the Republicans, who had little difficulty aligning their platforms with capital corporate interests. This was also the moment that the traditional political base of the Republican Party began to merge with the Christian Right and with white working classes, who were persuaded that they had been left behind by affirmative action and other “illegitimate” policies (now, of course, cloaked as DEI and “wokeness”).
The problem for anyone struggling to get by, as this alliance portrayed it, was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of the society and economy. The real problem was liberals, who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups. The prevalent narrative, more pertinent now than ever, was the idea of unworthy “others” cutting in line ahead of worthy citizens: “You've worked hard. You've played by the rules. You're not getting ahead. Well, it's not that the system is stacked against you. It's that these people, who are undeserving, are getting more advantages than you get.” The Republican political base (and now most particularly MAGAnites) could be energized through positive mobilizations of things like religion and cultural nationalism, but it could also be turned out through very negative, though coded, though I would say increasingly less coded if not blatant, racism (e.g., President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”), xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-feminism.
Democrats, seemingly, were more conflicted, at least at that time, between support for their base and the need to pursue big money. That ambivalence, at least within the ranks of the Democratic Party establishment in its current manifestation, has now all but disappeared and constitutes the irreconcilable contradiction that plagues the party now. To return for a moment to Wolin:
By ignoring dissent and by assuming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.
According to critical geographer David Harvey, the structure that emerged out of this political realignment was as simple as it was predictable and durable. The Republican Party could, and still can, marshal massive financial resources and mobilize its popular base to vote against its own material interests on cultural or religious grounds, while simultaneously advancing the capital accumulation policies (ongoing war and arms sales, lowered taxation, massive deregulation, privatization of public goods and services) of their elite masters.
The Democratic Party, conversely, could not, and still cannot, afford to attend to the material needs (e.g., a national healthcare system, affordable housing, environmental and consumer protection, financial and anti-trust regulation, a peace dividend) of its traditional popular base because it was and is terrified of offending its donor class. Given the asymmetry, the political hegemony of the Republican Party became more sure over this period, and has relegated the Democrats, even when in power, to their current position of inauthenticity. If and until this most fundamental contradiction can be resolved, the policies and messaging will remain flaccid, impotent, and unsatisfying. Under these circumstances we can aptly paraphrase Phillips, to wit: So now the Democrats also go for the jugular. Unfortunately, it’s too often their own.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Big Business Rejoices as Trump Scraps Biden Order Combating 'Excessive Concentration of Industry'
One critic called the president's move a "signal to monopolists that they have a clear path."
Aug 15, 2025
US President Donald Trump continued taking a hatchet to his predecessor's antitrust legacy this week by rolling back an executive order that affirmed the federal government's responsibility to "enforce the antitrust laws to combat the excessive concentration of industry, the abuses of market power, and the harmful effects of monopoly and monopsony."
Trump's revocation of former President Joe Biden's 2021 order drew enthusiastic applause from the largest corporate lobbying organization in the United States.
Sean Heather, the US Chamber of Commerce's senior vice president for antitrust, declared that by repealing the Biden order—which was titled "Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy"—Trump "has rightfully chosen vigorous competition that entrusts American consumers to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, not more government bureaucracy."
One anti-monopoly advocate, Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project, mockingly congratulated Trump for "securing the approval of the US Chamber of Commerce in repealing Biden's executive order saying competition is good."
The American Prospect's David Dayen called the president's move a "signal to monopolists that they have a clear path."
The president's decision was also welcomed by officials within the Trump administration who are tasked with enforcing the nation's antitrust laws, including Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Andrew Ferguson and the head of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, Gail Slater.
Ferguson claimed in a statement Thursday that the Biden order reflected the previous administration's "undue hostility toward mergers and acquisitions"—an assertion that Open Markets Institute legal director Sandeep Vaheesan refuted in a social media post, citing recent trends in merger enforcement actions.
Andrew Ferguson's claims re Biden admin are disconnected from the truth
- "Top-down competition regulations" were agencies reviving dormant statutory powers granted by Congress
- "Undue hostility toward M&A" is just not reflected in numbers on mergers and enforcement activity https://t.co/eHFyBm9tVk pic.twitter.com/PvCcsmvV8q
— Sandeep Vaheesan (@sandeepvaheesan) August 14, 2025
Biden administration antitrust officials—principally former FTC Chair Lina Khan and former DOJ Antitrust Division head Jonathan Kanter—drew praise across the political spectrum for combating corporate abuses and unlawful consolidation.
But during the first six months of his second term, Trump and his handpicked agency heads have settled or dropped key merger challenges brought by the Biden administration, ceding repeatedly to well-connected corporate lobbyists and allowing giant companies such as UnitedHealth to continue absorbing their competitors.
According to a newly updated tally by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, Trump administration agencies have thus far dropped enforcement actions against at least 165 companies.
"Pro-monopoly and pro-concentration of corporate power and control. Those are the policies the Trump admin has espoused in firing fair competition enforcers and revoking an executive order to revitalize fair competition across markets," the Open Markets Institute said Thursday. "And prices are still sky high. No surprise."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump FTC Lets Corporate Lobbyists Kill 'Massively Popular' Click-to-Cancel Rule in Court
Republicans on the Federal Trade Commission have "ensured that hardworking people will keep getting stuck with subscriptions they don't want or can't afford," said one consumer advocate.
Jul 09, 2025
Consumer advocates said Tuesday that the Trump administration is to blame for an appeals court decision that effectively killed the Federal Trade Commission's click-to-cancel rule, a Biden-era effort to stop companies from trapping consumers in subscriptions with onerous cancellation terms.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit vacated the rule entirely on procedural grounds on Tuesday, siding with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other corporate interests that claimed the FTC's process in crafting and finalizing the rule did not give industry sufficient "opportunity to assess" the agency's "cost-benefit analysis of alternatives."
After the rule was finalized last October, the FTC—then led by Lina Khan—said it had received more than 16,000 public comments on the proposal, which would have required companies to make it just as easy for consumers to cancel subscriptions as it was to enroll. The agency said the number of subscription-related public complaints rose to nearly 70 per day in 2024, indicating growing anger at companies' predatory tactics.
Khan wrote on social media Tuesday that public comments on the rule were "overwhelmingly" supportive and criticized the Trump FTC for giving industry groups time to block the effort. The rule was originally set to take effect on May 14, but the Trump FTC—now led by Republican Andrew Ferguson and two GOP commissioners—voted on May 9 to delay implementation, citing industry concerns that "it would take a substantial amount of time to come into compliance."
"The rule was set to go into effect in May but this FTC slow-walked it—and now a court has tossed it out, claiming industry didn't get enough of a say," Khan lamented.
Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, said Tuesday that "the byzantine rulemaking process provides courts with infinite discretion to torpedo rules in service of deep-pocketed corporations and in spite of overwhelming public support."
"The commission received 16,000 public comments on its rule, yet the 8th Circuit has the temerity to suggest the commission failed to provide enough process to the Chamber of Commerce," Hepner added. "Congress gave the FTC the power to stop unfair and deceptive practices."
"If the FTC is serious about affordability for everyday Americans, it must reissue the rule immediately."
Mark Meador, one of just three commissioners left at the FTC following President Donald Trump's firing of the agency's two Democratic members earlier this year, declared following the appeals court decision that the click-to-cancel rule "isn't going into effect for one reason: The Biden FTC cut corners and didn't follow the law."
The American Prospect's David Dayen wrote in response that Meador, a commissioner "who has the ability to reissue the rule," is "more interested in cheering on judicial obstruction than simply saying he will reissue the rule."
Given that Ferguson and Republican FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak voted against finalizing the click-to-cancel rule last year, it is unlikely that they will support reviving the rule in the wake of the appeals court decision. Meador was not an FTC commissioner when the rule was finalized.
Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, slammed the Trump FTC for delaying the rule's enforcement "long enough for big corporate lobbyists to win in court."
"It's bad enough that the Trump FTC has done nothing to bring down costs for the American people," Hegde said in a statement Tuesday. "Now, by slow-walking a simple, massively popular protection, they've ensured that hardworking people will keep getting stuck with subscriptions they don't want or can't afford from cable companies, gyms, and online services. If the FTC is serious about affordability for everyday Americans, it must reissue the rule immediately."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular