How Monopolies Threaten Democracy

“When economic power concentrates in the hands of a few, political power follows."

“Monopoly power threatens democracy itself,” New York State Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado told the audience at Fordham Law School last week, during a conference on oligarchy. “When economic power concentrates in the hands of a few, political power follows, and that’s a direct threat to our democratic ideals.”

I attended the conference because as I’ve been interviewing people across the country, I’ve heard Democratic and progressive advocates say over and over again that accelerating wealth concentration is the root cause of our many unfolding political crises. That’s a claim with plenty of support: Since the late ‘80s, the wealthiest 10% has owned a greater and greater share of the nation’s wealth. In just one sign of the wealth gap: According to Federal Reserve data, the richest 1 percent own 50% of U.S. stock and mutual funds. Meanwhile, according to a recent U.S. News survey, 42% of Americans—and nearly half of women—wouldn’t be able to cover a $1,000 cost with cash or savings should an emergency arise.

Behind the growing wealth gap is corporate consolidation. “A handful of corporations dominate the economy, control vital industries and shape the daily lives of millions of people,” Delgado told the audience at Fordham. “This isn’t just an economic problem, it is a democratic one, and if we want to renew both our prosperity and our sense of shared self-government, our collective belief in democracy, it begins with confronting concentrated corporate power head on.”

Delgado took us through a brief history of anti-trust actions in the United States, starting when this was still a British colony. The famous Boston Tea Party was not really focused on unfair taxes, as the story usually goes, but instead was in opposition to the British Parliament granting the Dutch East India Company monopoly status, Delgado said. During the Progressive Era, and then after World War II, Congress passed waves of anti-trust legislation. In the 1970s, there was another surge of anti-trust action. In earlier eras, “supporters of anti-trust laws understood that democracy and concentrated economic power cannot coexist,” Delgado said. But then came the 1980s, when the Reaganite Chicago School began dismantling previous regulations and redefining anti-trust regulation only to apply to short-term pricing effects. Since then, more mergers have been allowed, and industries have consolidated mostly unchecked.

Today, corporate consolidation across tech, healthcare, meatpacking, airlines, and many other industries means that a relatively small number of companies are amassing wealth and power in ways that mirror the monopolies of the Gilded Age. With outsized market share, those corporations can make life worse for workers and consumers in big and small ways.

In our post-Citizens United world, it’s not just that those corporations can wield outsize political power to increase their market share and profits– they can also hand staggering amounts of power to their billionaire owners. What’s different between Standard Oil and today’s corporate giants? Many of today’s giants are tech companies, and that adds a whole new dimension to how their influence perpetuates itself in ways that threaten the entire premise of democracy– the idea that we are all equal, one person, one vote.

Look at the Forbes’ index of billionaires. As of this publication, among the men ranked in the top ten wealthiest billionaires, eight of them—Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer, and Michael Dell—run or own (directly or as controlling shareholders) tech or media companies that shape how the public creates and consumes information. That has enormous consequences for our politics.

“The tech monopolies of the 21st Century are unlike any we have faced before,” Delgado said last week. “The oil steel and railroad barons of the 20th century controlled production and distribution, but today’s tech giants, Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta, and others control information, communication, and digital infrastructure itself. They govern the flow of news, commerce and social interaction, but they operate without public oversight.”

As I listened, I mentally catalogued a few prominent examples of tech and media barons with seismic influence over public life: As Wired described, “The Ellison family is cornering the market on attention and data the same way the Vanderbilts did railroads and the Rockefellers did oil.” Elon Musk, who donated over $291 million to elect Republicans in 2024, infamously owns X. As Democracy News covered last week, Zuckerberg’s Meta, whose platforms have a record of helping Trump win elections, is launching multiple PACs to select lawmakers who will readily pave the way for its expansion into AI. Bezos’s Amazon busts unions, kills competition, and has duped customers and contracted with firms that in turn provide cloud infrastructure to ICE. Bezos’s Washington Post will no longer run op-eds opposed to “personal liberties and free markets” after the paper declined to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential campaign.

It didn’t take long to convince me: Taking on monopolies is a necessary precondition to minimizing the corrosive effects of big money on our politics, which in itself is an urgent step to saving our democracy.

“The question isn’t: How do we fight to save our democracy from a tyrant?” Delgado said toward the end of his remarks. “The question is: How do we fight to prove to the people that democracy itself actually works for them, that democracy truly does ensure upward mobility, economic freedom, and equal opportunity?”