Washington’s Angriest Progressive Is Winning Over Conservatives – and Baffling Old Allies

“BOOM!!!!,” tweeted Stoller. That made Buttigieg, in American Economic Liberties Project parlance, a Democrat with “the courage to learn.”

Needling Democrats, though, is perhaps less of a challenge for Stoller with the left than his biggest project at the moment: helping the anti-monopoly cause get traction on the right, too.

That some elements on the right are going through a rethinking of the party’s relationship vis-à-vis corporate America — part of what figures like GOP Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and J.D. Vance (Ohio) have taken to calling “The Realignment” — has created an opportunity for Stoller. One thread of that thinking: That conservatism has to figure out how to embrace a kind of post-Trump populism that uses political power to build a capitalism that, as Rubio puts it, “promotes the common good, as opposed to one that prioritizes Wall Street and Beijing.”

Stoller is particularly interested in the Ohio senator. “You saw J.D. Vance with that rail safety bill?” he says. The Hillbilly Elegy author has argued that as a “bicoastal elite” has looked the other way, a withering of antitrust enforcement has contributed to the sort of tragedies like February’s train derailment in the community of East Palestine and has co-sponsored a bill with home-state Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown to impose new rules on railroad operations.

Stoller, who tends to see the world in terms of markets, is something of a natural emissary to the right side of the aisle. “He speaks Republican fluently,” says one senior Biden administration official admiringly. The official asked to be anonymous because they did not want to be seen discussing internal administration thinking.

For his part, Stoller has been actively building bridges with an up-and-coming generation of Republicans. He writes for the American Compass, an organization launched in 2020 by Oren Cass, a former Mitt Romney campaign official who says of Stoller, “We both look at the Chicago School” — a branch of antitrust thinking which, broadly speaking, argues that companies should be left to grow as big as they like as long as they keep prices low — “and say, ‘That is just a totally insane way to try to understand capitalism.’”

And on a weekday evening in mid-March, Stoller co-hosted with a counterpart from the Federalist Society a happy hour at the Capitol Hill pub Kelly’s Irish Times — picked for its populist bona fides — pitching it in the invitation to contacts on the left as a chance to meet other people “who are interested in populist approaches to competition policy.” Wrote Stoller, “Come, you’ll have fun and have a very different kind of conversation.” Some 30 to 40 people did turn out, drinking beers, eating chicken tenders, and if all goes well for Stoller, laying the groundwork for the next generation of anti-concentration believers on both the right and left.

“Republicans believe different things than we do. That’s just the reality,” Stoller says. “And you can try to do politics and work on where you overlap, or you can choose to say, ‘I’m going to not try to get cancer patients the drugs they need for a reasonable price.’”

But building an anti-monopoly movement on the right will likely be a decades-long project, if it’s possible at all. The massive difficulty of the task helps explain why Stoller has worked hard to hang on to an alliance of sorts with one powerful Republican already among, as a policy lead with a mid-sized technology company put it to me enthusiastically, Washington’s “antitrust-pilled.”

Stoller first took notice of Hawley in 2017, when the then-37-year-old Missouri attorney general became the first AG in the United States to bring an antitrust case against Google.

Stoller then picked up a copy of Preacher of Righteousness, a biography of the trust-busting Republican Teddy Roosevelt that Hawley had begun writing as an undergrad history student at Stanford. “I thought, this book shows he really understands the formation of corporate America,” Stoller says now.

When Hawley ran for Senate and won the following year, he didn’t shy away from his belief in the necessity of breaking up the country’s biggest companies, situating his support for the cause, at times, in the idea that “religious conservatives” like himself have struck a bum deal in hitching themselves to a free-market philosophy. Stoller and Hawley’s shop began talking.