Democracy

Eleanor Fox argues that the leading law firms should have immediately and collectively resisted President Donald Trump’s attacks. Strong, timely collective resistance may have helped staunch democratic backsliding and prevented normalization of repeated, speech-chilling demands. Doing so, however, the firms would have faced the risk of violating the antitrust laws. This article assesses antitrust’s treatment of political action and argues that the space for protected political action needs to be enlarged.

Assistant Director Matt Lucky, Ph.D., reviews Joan Williams’ new book, Outclassed, which reflects on the Democratic Party’s loss of what she calls “middle-status” voters. Williams discusses her book with Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales on this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, which you can listen to here.

The following is an excerpt from Joan Williams' new book, “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back,” now out at St. Martin's Press.

The following is an excerpt from Natasha Piano's new book, Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science, now out at Harvard University...

Populist leaders like United States President Donald Trump are zealously challenging the authority of independent technocrats and judges. This backlash follows decades of steadily increasing delegation of policymaking authority to unelected experts, bureaucratic agencies, and the judiciary. In new research, Gabriele Gratton and Jacob Edenhofer argue that such backlash is a predictable development in political environments where majorities are unstable and new political coalitions frequently favor policies at odds with those crafted by social welfare-maximizing technocrats.

Wendy Li writes that business leaders must rediscover past unity and put pressure on politicians to defend against President Donald Trump’s attacks on businesses and civil society and prevent democratic backsliding.

Aaron Edlin and Carl Shapiro respond to Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson’s keynote speech at the 2025 Stigler Center antitrust and competition conference, in which he lays out his approach to regulating the content moderation policies of the major social media platforms. They explain why Ferguson’s approach threatens the exercise of free speech, is inconsistent with antitrust law, and politicizes the agency.

The new Trump administration has thrust antitrust’s role in protecting free speech into the spotlight. Jan Polański discusses how this development should inform the European Union’s own debates about antitrust and free speech.

Luigi Zingales invites guest contributors to the Washington Post’s op-ed pages to boycott the opinion section in response to the recent decision by the...

Sarah Haan writes that to understand American authoritarianism, it’s less useful to analyze the strategies of elected dictators around the globe than to look at how corporate leaders in the United States have rigged corporate democracy.