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Are Democrats Finding Their Spines?

At an Open Markets Institute conference, economic populism was on the agenda.

Democratic Senators Chris Murphy and Chris Van Hollen depart a briefing at the Capitol in Washington, DC, in June 2025.

The Open Markets Institute, a DC clearinghouse of antitrust policy and legal strategy, didn’t lack for ambition in drawing up its convocation this year of political leaders, regulators, and writers attacking the powers of economic concentration. The gathering, hosted at an event space across from the grounds of the Capitol, was called “The Next American Revolution: Breaking Oligarchy and Making 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 soon became clear that the call for revolution was another invocation of the country’s 250th anniversary; Lynn, like many of the later speakers at the event, reminded the crowd that anti-monopoly sentiment was front and center in the colonial rebellion against the British crown.

Still, events outside the room lent a fresh currency to the rhetoric. The night before, a slate of three democratic socialist candidates swept into victories over establishment-backed opponents in New York’s primary balloting, spurring pundit speculation over the rise of a “Democratic tea party.” And as the conference proceeded, President Donald Trump revoked his scheduled ceremony to sign Congress’s new housing affordability measure, which sought to rein in equity funds from acquiring rental investment properties and driving up the cost of shelter. The housing bill had been the last hope for incumbent Republican lawmakers to claim during the upcoming midterm cycle that they were trying to measurably improve living costs for an electorate battered by inflation. In a heated meeting with GOP senators, Trump insisted that he wouldn’t sign the measure until Congress also approved his pet bill to address the nonexistent scourge of election fraud, the SAVE act—an already doomed piece of legislation that signals to disenchanted voters that Republican leaders care more about blocking ballot access than unrigging a top heavy political economy. Placed alongside Trump’s announcement that he “doesn’t really think about Americans’ financial situations” in his purblind negotiations over the Iran War, the housing bill debacle gives the lie to the creaky fable that the MAGA regime will restore economic sovereignty to forgotten American workers. Small wonder that Lynn wound up his introduction by declaring that “the American people are in a revolutionary mood.”

Many of the ensuing panels likewise kicked off with speculations over the results in New York, and their broader meaning for an electorate increasingly fed up with both the Trump........

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