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

In 2020, when the U.S. presidential election was merely toxic but not yet completely stained by Jan. 6, first-term Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley was already coming to be reviled on the left for what was seen as his populist posturing and nationalist policy ideas. He was a “reactionar[y],” in the words of Jamelle Bouie, a left-leaning New York Times columnist. He was getting “a lot of mileage out of this ‘tribune of the forgotten’ shtick,” Alex Yablon, a progressive writer and policy analyst, agreed.

There was, though, one Democrat who was kind of liking Hawley: Matt Stoller, a unique blend of historian, analyst, organizer and carnival barker for the progressive antitrust revivalism that has of late taken hold in Washington.

“It's fascinating how Josh Hawley keeps rolling out pro-worker platforms, like payroll support, as well as anti-monopoly policy ideas,” Stoller tweeted in May 2020. “And yet liberals and leftists use calling Hawley a fraud or a fascist as an in-group social signal to each other.”

For many who knew Stoller or were familiar with his work, his boosting of Hawley was perhaps not surprising. Stoller is known for his dogmatic belief that taking on corporate power by breaking up companies that have gotten too big is the goal — so central and so urgent that nearly any other cause or political relationship should be sacrificed in service of it. His defense of Hawley, who had just a few years earlier become the first state attorney general to sue Google on antitrust grounds, was just the latest example.

Then, in late December of 2020, Hawley became the first senator to say that he’d object to the Electoral College’s certification of President Joe Biden’s presidential win over concern about supposed voting irregularities. Shortly afterward, he was photographed raising a seeming fist of solidarity to protestors outside the Capitol Building on Jan. 6. Hawley later condemned the violence of that day, but by then even some Republicans backed away from him.

For some of Stoller’s critics, the episode put in sharp relief the folly of his attempt to celebrate Hawley’s antitrust work. About ten days after the Capitol riot, a software engineer with his own interest in antitrust built a website — “Why Did Matt Stoller Shut Up About Josh Hawley Dot Com” — complete with a countdown clock noting that Stoller had tweeted about Hawley just before midnight on the 5th but not since.

About two months after Jan. 6, though, Stoller picked up tweeting about Hawley again.

“I mean, January 6th was awful,” says Stoller now. “You can’t legitimize an attempt to overthrow the presidential election.” He is dressed in maroon Allbirds and a matching polka-dot tie for the first of three interviews that together lasted nearly seven hours on Zoom and in the Washington, D.C. offices of the American Economic Liberties Project, an advocacy group dedicated to countering concentrated corporate power, for which he serves as director of research.

At the same time, “fundamentally, my view is that authoritarianism is coming from the private sector,” not from those who’d attempt to seize control of democratic institutions by force.

It’s exactly what erstwhile and would-be allies on the left find so frustrating about Stoller: Is there really nothing that is more important than the anti-monopoly cause?

The extremely online Stoller has arguably done more than anyone else in the country to breathe new life into the idea that government should be breaking up monopolies wherever they lurk. For years, he’s been known for his gladiatorial presence on Twitter, where he parses obscure agency filings, debates case law and case studies and engages in daily battle with just about anyone who’ll join in. Fanning anger online is part of his project: “I want people to be as offended at monopolization as they are about any sort of social problem,” says Stoller. “I want people to be like, ‘That is just wrong,’ on a visceral level.”

Stoller also holds remarkable sway in Biden’s Washington. Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor who until recently served as Biden’s point person on competition in the White House, says Stoller — who, per Wu, maintains a “direct line to the White House” — helps Biden avoid something that has plagued past Democrat presidents: Crafting good policies no one understands.

But Stoller isn’t content to keep converting Democrats to the cause. The Hawley gambit is part of a broader effort to build a bipartisan consensus around the idea that government should use its might to challenge the power of big business. And amid what some on the right are calling the “Realignment,” which has some conservatives and Republicans reevaluating their orientation toward corporate power, he has a fresh opportunity to do just that.

As Stoller sees it, the ideal political setup is to have political opponents try to out-anti-monopoly each other — it’s the only way the antitrust vision can be realized. “If your democratic institutions cannot touch the economy,” he says, “then people are not going to value those political institutions.”

And if burning nominal allies is what it takes to bring about that future, then — to Stoller, at least — making everyone mad is worth it.

Stoller was born in London, grew up in Miami and attended New Hampshire’s Episcopalian St. Paul’s School and then Harvard. He gets that he has a somewhat odd origin story for a populist rabble-rouser. “I’m a frustrated elite. That’s how I think of myself,” he says.

Like many around his age — 45 — Stoller found his way to Washington via blogging, which he discovered while working at a software startup in Massachusetts. He was writing mostly about politics in the run-up to the Iraq War, and to his regret now, he listened to Washington’s experts and ended up siding with his party’s liberal hawks. When it turned out that the war was based on false premises for which no one would pay for promoting, he says, he grew depressed, feeling he’d tricked himself into having “endorsed mass murder.”

One bright spot is that he came away, though, with the feeling that the online world was a safe space for debating tough ideas like war and political power, and eventually took up the cause of “net neutrality,” the principle that all internet traffic should be treated equally and the country’s behemoth telecommunication companies like AT&T and Verizon should be prohibited by government from blocking or giving preference to any content.

After the 2008 financial crisis hit, he saw President Barack Obama fall into a now familiar trap — “he believed the top bankers knew what they were doing,” Stoller says — and as a result continued the bailout of the big financial institutions started under President George W. Bush while allowing homeowners to go into foreclosure. That crisis helped crystallize his belief that economics is core to politics. But particularly upsetting, he says, is that the Democratic left, when confronted with what he saw as Obama’s failure to leverage the powers of the presidency to protect American homeowners, “would first deny it, then they would get sad. But they wouldn’t get angry.”

Stoller wanted to better understand how government functioned, exactly. That year he went to work on the Capitol Hill staff of Orlando-area Democrat Rep. Alan Grayson, pulling policy ideas from the blogs he was still reading. Grayson lost his reelection. Eventually Stoller headed to Los Angeles. He’d met the British comedian Russell Brand on the set of the film “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” — his brother is the director Nicholas Stoller — and reconnected with him in New York City’s Zuccotti Park during 2011’s Occupy Wall Street. Stoller served as, per the L.A. Times, Brand’s “geeky sidekick” for a season on an FX-aired attempt at a radical “The Daily Show.” (In one segment, a bushier-haired Stoller endeavors to explain how a small Alaskan town’s decision to make a cat mayor was actually a statement on limited government.) “Terrible show,” says Stoller. He headed back east, returning to work for a reelected Grayson. He soon hopped to the Senate Budget Committee under Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent.

It was around then, in the spring of 2016, that I met with Stoller, who I knew from Washington circles, in a Senate cafeteria for coffee. I asked what he was up to, and his response was, as I recall it, I’m going to make monopolies a thing again. It struck me as odd, and stuck with me for years because it was so thoroughly out of step with the era’s vibe: Silicon Valley’s multibillion-dollar tech companies were 21st-century America’s proudest success stories, and Google representatives were at the time reportedly attending White House meetings about once a week. Yeah, good luck with that, I remember thinking.

By then, Stoller had picked up one lesson in governing: Policy gets made by people who know each others’ names. And so he pulled together a group of congressional staffers and other Democrats still rattled by the 2008 economic crisis, for pizza and beers on Wednesdays in a Capitol Hill conference room of the advocacy group Public Citizen, to discuss how, as they saw it, Washington had come to so completely allow big business’ demands to drown out the needs of average Americans. A decade later, some of those attendees would go on to be hugely influential. Lina Khan is now the powerful chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Zephyr Teachout is a prominent antitrust thinker and professor at Fordham Law School. Andy Green heads up competition policy at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees a trillion-dollar-plus slice of the economy.

But in the summer of 2016, economic concentration was still an obscure topic — that is, until it got a major boost when Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts rumored to be on Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential short list, gave a speech on Capitol Hill declaring that “competition is dying,” naming and shaming Google, Apple and Amazon. Monopoly talk was suddenly hot. Stoller went to work for the group that hosted Warren’s speech. Called Open Markets, it was embedded in a larger left-of-center think tank, New America, that happened to receive backing from Google. In 2017, Open Markets posted a statement celebrating European regulators’ €4 billion fine on Google over its shopping platform and needling U.S. regulators to draw inspiration from it. New America asked the group to leave its think-tank home. (New America’s CEO has held that the split was over long-standing complaints about collegiality and cooperation.)

The Open Markets fight caught attention in Washington and beyond: Is this the sort of political muscle Google now wields? And is the cost for getting crosswise to it getting cast out into the wilderness?

As the years passed, Washington continued to sour on Silicon Valley. And in the winter of 2020, Stoller and fellow Open Markets veterans spun out their own group, the American Economic Liberties Project. The group’s name is a riff on the American Civil Liberties Union, a nod to the belief that economic freedoms are as central to American life as free speech, and at least as vital to democracy. (AELP is nonpartisan, and while it does not disclose its funding says it takes no money from corporations.) The group’s work is aimed at educating regulators, staffers and more on their approach to economic power when it comes to “Big Tech” and beyond. “We want Democrats and Republicans to learn how to govern,” says Stoller, knocking on the table for emphasis.

Along the way, Stoller was working on Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. Delving into the past century of monopolies in the United States, the 608-page book, says Stoller, was meant as something of a guide to a 25-year-old him — an aspiring policymaker attempting to understand how the country got to where it was at the time now and looking for a different path forward. Published in the fall of 2019, almost overnight it become the foundational historical text for a movement coming to be known as the New Brandeisian School, named after Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice who in the 1930s railed against what he called “the curse of bigness.”

To gin up interest in the book, Stoller, an early adopter of blogging, jumped on the Substack bandwagon taking off in American journalism at the time. His newsletter, called “Big,” has become a key gear in the Brandeisian machine. It is densely written, often intensely wonky — expect charts and discussion of the Commodities Exchange Act — and has amassed around 85,000 subscribers. “Matt is a brilliant thinker and writer,” says Sen. Warren by email. “And through his newsletter, he continues to shed light on the dangers monopolies pose to our democracy and economy.”

In his twice-weekly-or-so “Big” missives, Stoller dissects what he calls “weird monopolies.” They range from the consolidation of independent bike stores to how bullet producers’ efforts to keep prices high led to “The Great Ammunition Shortages of 2021,” from competitive cheerleading industry to cattle ranching, often drawing on firsthand interviews with those in the trenches of the industries effected; “I don’t know how to raise cows,” says Stoller.

Wu is the Columbia professor who until recently was Biden’s special assistant for technology and competition policy. Is it actually useful to have someone like Stoller on the outside? “One thousand percent,” Wu says.

Stoller, Wu says, serves to draw attention to obscure issues that even White House staffers can use help understanding. One story, on the role that pharmaceutical benefits managers have in driving up drug prices, was told through a “Game of Thrones”-inspired post called “The Red Wedding for Rural Pharmacies.”

“He convinced us that it just mattered,” Wu says. (The Biden administration and Congress have since put pressure on so-called PBMs over, in particular, insulin pricing, and this winter manufacturers announced price cuts.) In November of 2021, Stoller wrote about how the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 1924 helped explain why a mammoth vessel had gotten stuck in the Panama Canal (“Too Big to Sail.”) Months later, Biden signed a bipartisan reform bill imposing more oversight on international shipping companies. Wu says Stoller’s work gives Democrats an opening with constituencies Biden might struggle to reach, “like the average tomato shipper in Illinois.”

“Sometimes I think of Matt Stoller as the reincarnation of ‘Fighting Bob’ LaFollette,” says Wu. That’s the aggressive, progressive Wisconsin governor and senator who in the early 1900s grew a national profile by, among other things, fighting for tougher regulation of the railroads — and fighting with just about everybody.

William Kovacic, a former Republican chair of the Federal Trade Commission, says Stoller reminds him of a more modern battler from a different arena. “Do you follow ice hockey?” he asks.

Kovacic, over coffee near the campus of the George Washington University where he directs the school’s Competition Law Center, says of Stoller’s role in the New Brandeis movement, “as a source of the intellectual arguments that they have been making, he’s second to none.” But, Kovacic adds, Stoller to him evokes Marty McSorley. McSorley was a much-loved and skillful NHL enforcer who protected the graceful, all-time great Wayne Gretzky — until McSorley was run out of the league in 2000 after bashing an opponent on the side of the head with a hockey stick.

Stoller’s weapon of choice is Twitter. “What’s with the religious zeal to canonize Jimmy Carter?” went one tweet thread from Stoller this winter. “He was a bad President and not in a ‘meant well’ kind of way. Genuinely awful.” The 98-year-old had entered end-of-life care the day before. The political thinker Anand Giridharadas has summed it up by saying that in a typical day on Twitter, “I agree with Matt, disagree with him, wish I had thought of something he said, regret something he said on his behalf, [and] retweet something he wrote.”

But as Stoller sees it, among Carter’s sins is his undercutting the American labor movement and deregulating the airline industry in ways that contributed to some of its current failings. Stoller says he’s more comfortable being argumentative than most and tries to only punch up. In some cases, he’s defending the progress the New Brandeisians are attempting to make; in February of 2023, Stoller unleashed a 20-tweet thread lambasting a Republican FTC commissioner who resigned while lodging complaints about Khan’s leadership.

But Stoller says he really sees himself as the defender of those Americans hurt by the sort of bad economic policy he sees pushed by Carter or Republican commissioners — the kinds of people who aren’t spending their days on Twitter. “You can’t be totally uncivil. But at some level, you have to remember that there are real stakes here,” says Stoller. “And the person who’s not in the conversation is the person without power. That’s what I’m thinking about.”

Among Stoller’s tweets that have gotten critics roiled and would-be allies sighing was one in November of 2022, just as the crypto exchange FTX was collapsing: “Crypto scams are what happens when you defund the police.” It hit some observers as a glib demonstration of Stoller’s problematic insistence on seeing see every social challenge through a competition lens. Alex Vitale, a Brooklyn College professor and author of The End of Policing tweeted back, “This is beyond ridiculous.” It seemed to others as dismissive of complaints about over-policing, particularly in Black communities. Stoller doesn’t see it. White-collar crime is crime, and other people seem to get away with similar framing — no one blinks, he argues, when U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler talks about being a “cop on the beat.”

And when it comes to accusations he was waving away questions of race, he says, American history has proven racism is often worsened by, if not the product of, the exact sort of economic concentration and misdeeds he’s thrown himself into encouraging more robust policing of. He points to the challenges of Black entrepreneurs and creators getting into a cable industry “loosely controlled by four Goliaths.”

Stoller, too, rejects another charge sometimes tossed his way: That he’s far tougher on members of his own party than on Republicans. He’s happy to praise Democrats, he says, when they behave well. Take Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary and fellow Harvard grad Stoller regularly needles. (Stoller graduated the spring before Buttigieg arrived on campus.) Buttigieg’s two-and-a-half-year stint as a McKinsey & Company consultant makes him, to Stoller, one of “The Bobs,” as in the sort of middleman from the 1999 cult film “Office Space” who works on behalf of some faceless, far-off owner while exploiting the engineers so eager to just do their jobs they take their anger out on a malfunctioning printer. But more than that, Stoller sees Buttigieg as talking a good game while failing to use the actual powers available to him as the head of a massive, 55,000-employee Cabinet agency to really force the airline industry to change.

At least until March, when Buttigieg announced the DOT would move to block JetBlue’s nearly $4 billion bid to buy the budget airline Spirit. Buttigieg noted his nearly 60-year-old agency “generally has not gotten involved in these merger cases.”

“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.

Some on the left complain that Stoller’s outreach to some factions on the right make it harder to keep and build progressive allies. “Matt’s embrace of Republicans like Hawley makes it uncomfortable for some and downright impossible for others to be in coalition with him,” says one left-of-center figure in the antitrust space, on background because of the necessity of keeping good relations with Stoller.

If to some on the left Stoller’s embrace of Hawley is a deal-breaker or a burden when it comes to building in-roads with the vast majority of officials and staffers on the left who are still, at most, merely antitrust-curious, Stoller is undeterred.

Asked about working with Stoller, Hawley says via text message that the country’s corporations have grown too big and too powerful because “for decades, both parties abandoned antitrust and failed to make American workers the priority.”

There’s some evidence that Stoller’s Hawley connection and attempts at building bridges between those on the right and left eager to reduce the power of corporations over American life are already paying off.

In the late fall of 2020, both Hawley and Sanders were sniffing around the idea of adding to Covid-relief proposals a second round of checks sent out to Americans. Kyle Plotkin was Hawley’s chief of staff at the time, and recalls Stoller saying, “I think there might be an interesting coalition you can build for direct payments.” Stoller connected the two offices, and a top Sanders aide, Faiz Shakir, recalls Stoller’s quasi-seal-of-approval of the discussions as reassuring at a time when he wasn’t quite sure what to make of Hawley’s true interest. Hawley called on President Trump to back the checks, and two rounds of payments totaling $2,000 eventually went to out millions of Americans.

But there’s a sense of deep umbrage among many on the online left that Stoller’s gone too far in acting as a validator of Hawley — out of want of an ally, too willing to overlook what they see as the Missourian’s intensely problematic politics.

“You want to talk about who validated Josh Hawley, it’s the people of Missouri,” Stoller says. And that will soon be put to the test. Hawley’s first six-year term is up in 2025. Vying for a chance to replace him is Lucas Kunce, a Democrat, 13-year Marine veteran, and until January of 2022, AELP’s director of national security policy.

Kunce and Stoller met when the former was a Big-reading official inside the Pentagon, and the two later paired up to write a piece for the magazine American Conservative on how four decades of economic consolidation has led to the withering of the United States’ ability to produce the stuff of modern warfare, from 5G equipment to aircraft parts. Together, during the Trump years, Stoller and Kunce convened a national-security discussion group called “The New Realists,” focused on, as Stoller puts it, “guns and money.”

“I’m a huge fan of Lucas, and he’d be an awesome senator. I would vote for him,” says Stoller.

But ultimately, the Kunce-Hawley matchup is evidence that the anti-monopoly cause doesn’t belong to one party anymore. “I want the Republican Party to say, we’re more for the little guy than they are, and I want the Democrats to say, ‘No, we are,’” Stoller says.

In that sense, Stoller doesn’t really need to pick a side in the Kunce-Hawley race. He’s already winning.