Meet the New Trustbusters.

• Author: Cortellessa, Eric

THESE 2020 DEMOCRATIC CONTENDERS WANT TO TAKE ON MODERN MONOPOLIES. WLLL VOTERS GET BEHIND THEM?

This much can be said for Democrats heading into 2020: if their candidate manages to defeat Donald Trump, the new president will enter the White House having promised the boldest domestic policy agenda in more than a generation. At least six presidential hopefuls are all in on single-payer; an overlapping set of six cosponsored the Green New Deal legislation; and three have even said they support reparations for slavery.

But while these proposals may help curry favor with the left, they don't squarely address what was arguably Hillary Clinton's biggest substantive weakness in 2016: the inability to offer a compelling alternative to Trump's hateful and mendacious argument about the origins of American middle-class decline. The party is still haunted by the memory of a candidate who didn't have a way to explain the broad sense that economic opportunity for average people has been shrinking for decades, nor a realistic plan for what to do about it. In that vacuum, Trump's crude xenophobia spread easily.

That's not to say, however, that the present Democratic field is bereft of such an idea. It turns out that three of the leading presidential hopefuls--Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar--already have their arms around a concept that both makes sense of voters' economic frustrations and provides a blueprint for a future administration to start reversing the rising tide of inequality: fighting corporate monopoly.

It's a concept that might sound (other than to faithful readers of this magazine) like a relic from a bygone era; in 1912, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt competed over who would most aggressively confront the oligarchs of the era. But what's old is new again. We are living in a moment in which ownership of the American economy, along with the global economy, is more highly concentrated than at any time since the original Gilded Age. Four airlines control our skies, one of three national chains probably owns your corner pharmacy, and one tech giant accounts for half of all e-commerce and a third of all cloud storage. This is more or less the direct result of the abandonment of antitrust enforcement beginning in the 1970s and the resulting four decades of ever-increasing mergers and acquisitions.

It stands to reason that the concentration of corporate power would go hand in hand with the concentration of wealth. And indeed, economists have recently connected the dots between the rise of new monopolies and the staggering rise in inequality over the same time period. With less competition, monopoly firms can charge higher prices and funnel the money back to their own shareholders and executives, rather than giving workers a raise or investing in...