Are you a citizen? Or a consumer? A person who uses reason to judge fact? Or a parroter of rumors, lies, and hate? Are you the master of your own fate? Or another dog’s body?
In America today, we talk all the time of how we are defined by others. We understand that when others name us, they aim to manipulate us, to exploit us, to discard us.
And so we rebel, and we create new labels for ourselves. And in the process, sometimes new liberties and rights. We are good at it. We should be proud.
Yet in America today, we have largely lost this ability to define our own selves within the political economy. We have largely lost the ability even to see how others shape us and the world around us.
For two centuries in America we fought—as individuals, as communities, as a people—to win and keep power. Our aim was not simply a voter’s share of some distant national sovereignty. Our aim was the liberty to make our own selves and our own society. The liberty to make our own worlds and our own world.
To that end we developed a language to illuminate the power in the corporation and the power in concentrations of capital, and we designed systems to master that power. We used this language also to define ourselves absolutely as wielders of power, as creators, growers, makers, thinkers, citizens.
But a generation ago, we let others develop a bastard version of this language to label and categorize us in ways designed to take all such power, and all such liberties, away. They did so by defining us as simple buyers, eaters, button pushers, voyeurs.
And with mouths agape, and eyes vacant, we have stared and watched them, passive spectators of our own debauchment.
At what point—exactly—do you lose ownership of your self?
The ideas in your head? At what point do they become another’s tool to exploit and manipulate you?
The liberty you seek? Do you even know what exactly that is anymore?
This ignorance—of who you are and how others shape you—is license to use your own secrets to farm you, to harrow you.
This ignorance—of who you are and how others shape you—is license to use your own appetites to degrade you.
This ignorance—of who you are and how others shape you—is license to strip you of your skills, your intellectual tools, your confidence as a thinker and creator.
This ignorance—of who you are and how others shape you—is license to use your fears to lure the fiend up within you. And thereby enthrall you not only to their structures of power but to their ability to manipulate the grossest of your passions.
This ignorance—of who you are and how others shape you—is why we now face the gravest threat to liberty and democracy in America, and to equality and individual dignity, since the days of the slave power.
Our grandparents and great-grandparents, in building America, made it so that all society would be public society, except for what took place in our homes and in our minds.
They built America so that important decisions would be common decisions and structured the political economy so our minds could wander freely anywhere, so we could deliberate fully together everywhere.
Nowhere was such freedom more important than in the realms of technology and industry. The goal was to keep all such intellectual and commercial systems open and common. So we could work with one another to think up and to make whatever we needed to survive and thrive. So we could participate freely, plug in freely, within these “technological commons.”1
It took millions of Americans, working together, thinking together, to make our railroads and electrical and telephone networks and automobile and airplane and computer networks, so we could more easily connect with one another, and communicate with one another, and build a better world with one another. On our farms, millions of Americans adapted their seeds and animals to the particularities of land and moment so we could better clothe and feed one another.
But today vast reaches of our world have been cut off from us. As we walk the streets and drive the highways and till the land, as we go online to do business with one another and communicate with one another, we pass along walls and fences that enclose entire realms of life and mind that used to be largely or entirely open to us.
Today, our energy systems, transportation systems, health systems, education systems, communications systems, news systems, agricultural systems, entertainment systems, and security systems were not made by us to serve our needs. All these systems were made by others to serve their needs. These systems are not open to our ideas. They are designed to impose the ideas—and will—of others on us.
This affects us as individuals. It’s one reason we find ourselves standing even outside our own jobs and families, our own businesses and farms, gazing numbly through little windows smeared with thumbprints, watching others run our lives.
It also affects all of us together. Climate change is the greatest challenge humans have ever faced, together, as a species. To survive and keep our dignity, we must figure out all over again how to feed and house ourselves, how to warm and transport ourselves, and how to protect ourselves against disease and despair in a world going through extreme and unpredictable change.
We have every power of mind, every moral capacity necessary to succeed, and to succeed in ways that result in a far more just distribution of well-being and opportunity among all people.
What we don’t have today are the keys to any of the technological commons that have been enclosed by the monopolists. Which means we no longer have an ability to study and see what is needed or to share and refine better ideas with one another.
And so with mouths agape, and eyes vacant, we look on silently as others loot and break the systems that we built, and that our parents and grandparents built, and the lives and communities and worlds that depend on them.
We are free to wander in the shadows of other people’s walls, along other people’s fences, down other people’s corridors. While the world that was ours—now unowned, untended, unconsidered—falls to ruin.
Our world is dying because we can no longer put our hands to it, can no longer put our thoughts to it, can no longer dream better ways to make and mend it. Because in every direction we look, a monopolist stands in our way.
You and 100 million others stand, fretful, alarmed, agitated. And you have loitered so for more than a decade, since the days of the Tea Party and Occupy. You and 100 million others have been waiting, calling, for a leader, a savior.
But thus far all our saviors have failed. And all our rebellions have guttered, their molten energies carefully redirected away from the powerful, perhaps into some harmless and sterile amusement, increasingly into hatred of some other because of their race, or where they were born, or simply because of their political party.
I remember when we first stood up after the financial crash of 2008, suddenly impoverished, terrified, outraged. I wrote my last book, Cornered, in part to help us understand who had broken our lives and what we must demand from those who would lead us.
But no one ever really answered us.
First came President Obama, with his promises of pragmatism and his coterie of meritocratically selected technocrats. But he failed. In part, President Obama failed because he never mastered the political machine that had elected him, never established clear lines between the people’s government and the Wall Street financier and Silicon Valley mogul.2
But President Obama’s failure was also one of philosophy, of vision. He failed because he and most of his meritocrats did not really understand political economic power. And their inability to see that power made them unable to project power, hence to protect America’s citizens from those “who store up violence and robbery in their palaces.”3
Even though President Obama and his team imagined themselves to be “realists,” able to direct the interests of Goldman Sachs and Google toward the common good, their view of how the world works was in many respects strikingly naïve, based as it was on a belief in “rational” man and “rational” markets and other mythical beasts.
Next came President Trump, with his nationalism and tribalism and spluttering fury, his one big idea to build a wall and bolt the doors to keep out the Mexican worker and the Chinese corporation and the “Wuhan virus.” (Unless, of course, the Chinese corporation were to pay him, in the form of some personal political favor, for a license to enter.)
From the point of view of the American people, the Trump presidency has been an almost flawless catastrophe. Not only has President Trump failed to deal with the vast array of threats China poses to America’s national security and sovereignty, he has also worked hard to further empower the oligarchs and autocrats, handing out grand favors to big ag, big oil, big pharma, big hospital, and especially big tech, and taking particular delight in sabotaging efforts to fight climate change.
In response to these failures, growing numbers of Americans today are working to create a people’s movement able to force our leaders to make truly radical changes to our political economy, right now. This movement is to a great degree a product of the American people awakening to the dangers posed by extreme concentrations of economic power.
In but a few years, the movement has won many victories. This includes building real power within the Democratic Party and developing analyses and language that have intruded deep into the thinking of many Republicans and Independents. Thanks to the power of this movement, both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders published new visions for the enforcement of American antimonopoly law, based on principles and rules derived directly from the American System of Liberty.
Yet despite these striking advances, it is a movement that—if viewed through the eyes of Louis Brandeis or any of the millions of other Americans who built our original System of Liberty—still looks deeply flawed.
One problem is that the main energies of the movement are directed almost entirely toward the federal government. And a prime focus has been on massive plans, like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, that would require the centralization of direction and control over vast swaths of the American economy and American life. It is a movement, in other words, that ignores the actual political structures in our country, which direct citizens to exercise power within each and every state, and each and every town. It’s a movement that ignores the need to construct a story and a language that speaks to the people of every corner in America, no matter their color or party.
A second flaw is that the movement drifts every day further toward a sentimental and romantic vision of revolution. The American System of Liberty has proven methods for structuring markets and corporations and property rights, and for wielding the lure of profit to make a more just society and to radically speed up and redirect technological innovation. But growing numbers of people prefer instead to dream of utopia and content themselves with intellectually indolent calls for the “overthrow” of “capitalism,” the walling off of “market forces,” and the extirpation of the “profit motive”—and, apparently, all human selfishness—from our lives.
A third flaw is that the movement is still focused ultimately on finding and elevating some savior, who once in power is to somehow, miraculously, multiply loaves, fishes, and windmills and turn hydrocarbons into chardonnay.
The overall result is a vision profoundly disempowering of individual citizens, who rather than being encouraged to fight for themselves, in their own communities, in their own lives, in their own ways, are encouraged to gaze rapturously and passively at some glorious redeemer. It is vision also, not paradoxically, profoundly disempowering of the leaders themselves, whom we saddle with expectations impossible for any human to achieve.
It is a vision, even if its believers were to capture power, designed to fail.
Here again, the ultimate flaw lies in us. In our failure to understand that the foundation stone of the American System of Liberty is the citizen, is each of us individually.
Leaders are ultimately made by the people. Until we know who we truly are, we will never be able to make the leaders we need. Leaders who do not promise to do everything for us but who will help us win sufficient liberty to do all we must, for ourselves and one another, right at home.
In America, the line separating the prophetic visions of the Hebrew Bible and political debate has always been thin. Lincoln, Douglass, Anthony, Brandeis, Du Bois, Roosevelt, and King all invoked the prophets and often wielded their words and imagery. It came to them naturally, an inheritance from the Puritans and Baptists, and the King James Bible, a way of thinking and acting built directly into American language and literature, hence into the American soul.4
In America there is also a clear apocalyptic tradition even among those not wont to quote Scripture. Jefferson in his fight against Hamilton’s plan to enthrone the financier, Jackson in his “war” on the national bank, Kennedy in his warning of a missile gap with the Soviets, Gore in his alarms about climate change: all spoke the language of Armageddon.
There is even what we might call a faux-apocalyptic tradition in America, in which leaders depict relatively minor problems, or even imagined problems, in extreme terms so as to direct fear and anger toward particular ends or at particular people. Examples include McCarthy and communism, Wallace and integration, Reagan and welfare, Trump and immigrants.
We often call such apocalyptic prophecies jeremiads, after the prophet Jeremiah. I bring up the political jeremiad for three reasons.
First, it works. The jeremiad has been an essential part of American political culture, a proven way of standing people up to make change, from long before the Revolution, no matter their actual religion, no matter whether they believe in any god at all.5 As Martin Luther King Jr. explained in 1968, “The Hebrew prophets are needed … because decent people must be imbued with the courage to speak the truth, to realize that silence may temporarily preserve status or security but to live with a lie is a gross affront to God.”6
Second, the nature of the jeremiad teaches us that something more than simple material interest has repeatedly shaped the actions of large numbers of Americans time and again in our history. That love of justice and love of one’s neighbor can at times actually lead us into the streets to fight for revolutionary ends. This in turn helps us to see how today, as we set about our next radical reconstruction of the American political economy, it is vital to admit that our ultimate goals are also intellectual and moral and spiritual in nature.
Third, the jeremiad helps us understand our own role, our own importance, as individuals. The essential role not only of our hands in the fight but of our individual thoughts and individual dreams, both to make the political change we seek and to build the world we must.
American revolutionaries over the centuries have used the jeremiad to target many evils, including slavery, racism, poverty, and the degradation of the earth. But the particular polemic that may best fit our needs today was published in 1644 by John Milton. In Areopagitica, the poet railed against the choking off, by a system of official censorship, of the mind of the individual in society.
The true danger to society, Milton wrote, comes not from the outrageous word or wild notion but from those who would monopolize control over information and knowledge. It was they, he wrote, who threatened “to bring a famin upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing but what is measur’d to us by their bushel.” Instead, Milton wrote, it is the people, all the people, who “should be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, ev’n to a rarity, and admiration, things not before discourst or writt’n of.”7
Not that Milton himself claimed credit for this vision of a democracy of thought. To make clear who had inspired his writings, Milton referred to a story in the Book of Numbers about a time when Moses learned that two men in his camp had begun to prophesy.8
According to that story, Joshua Son of Nun then pleaded with Moses to “forbid” the two men from prophesying. Moses responded not with any selfish effort to protect his precedence or profession but by delivering perhaps the most essentially democratic of laments in human history.
“[W]ould God that All the LORD’S people were prophets, and that the LORD would put His Spirit upon them!”
What these prophets mean to tell us, it would seem, is that the prophet must be each and every one of us. And that our fight today is not merely to restore our ability to govern ourselves and our world. Our fight is also, and perhaps mainly, to re-create a true democracy of thought and to bring all our ideas, all our capacities, together, so we can begin the work of repairing the world, together.
A decade ago, after the publication of my book Cornered, Phil Longman, Lina Khan, and I launched the Open Markets Institute at New America, a think tank in Washington. The goal of both Cornered and our work at Open Markets was simple. To use journalism, history, and commonsense arguments to help people see the Godzilla of monopoly and his fire. And to understand we have what with to slay him.
For five years, we made steady but slow progress. Then in 2016, we saw an explosion of interest in monopoly and of a courageous will to restore democracy. Today, with presidential candidates railing against monopoly on the campaign trail, with the attorneys general of our states and the Antitrust Subcommittee of Congress investigating Google and Facebook, and with a true movement rising to fight monopoly, we can honestly say this original mission has been accomplished.
Millions of Americans, and millions of people around the world, do see the threat posed by monopoly, and do see we have weapons.
I wrote Liberty from All Masters to help us move from awakening to victory. To the restoration of true liberty and true democracy in America through the destruction of all unregulated private power, most immediately the threat posed by Google, Amazon, and Facebook. And to the tearing down of all the walls and fences that exclude us from our technological commons and from true liberty to think and create with one another.
This book is fundamentally a work of history, an uncovering of the original principles of the American System of Liberty, and a recounting of the lessons of our nearly 250 years fighting for liberty, sometimes as individuals, often as a community, within these borders. My aim here has not been to detail what exactly to do in the years ahead. For that, you can turn to the website of our Open Markets Institute, where you will find a vast body of work on these issues.
And importantly, the Open Markets team is no longer the only keeper of this philosophy. Which means you can now turn also to the writings and actions of a fast-growing legion of allies and others who have rediscovered the rich array of laws, and the particular ways of seeing, of America’s antimonopoly tradition.
In the early years of the nation, in the early days of the American System of Liberty, James Madison translated the prophetic voices of Moses and Milton into the more finely reasoned and drier language we associate with the Enlightenment. In doing so, he provided perhaps the single most concise expression in the American tradition of the intersection of power, democracy, and the mind of the individual.
“Although all men are born free, and all nations might be so, yet too true it is, that slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant—they have been cheated; asleep—they have been surprized; divided—the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson? That because the people may betray themselves, they ought to give themselves up, blindfold, to those who have an interest in betraying them? Rather conclude that the people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government they should watch over it, as well as obey it.”
More than two centuries on, our challenge today is the same. Yes, the world today is—technologically, socially, culturally—profoundly different than that of the founding era. But the principles and language of those days remain as pertinent and potent and can be adapted perfectly to this moment. This, indeed, is precisely what the American people have done repeatedly over the years, every time some new technology or some new form of political thought and organization has threatened our lives, our democracy, our world.
For us today this means, at the most basic level, that our challenge is to resurrect the concept of the citizen for our twenty-first century and to define what it means to be a creator, grower, maker, thinker, and dreamer in the digital age. And it means using this concept of the citizen to rebuild our American System of Liberty to ensure it protects every one of our capacities as citizens, and every one of our human properties, as Madison would have understood the term, no matter the technologies of today or tomorrow.
It means banishing false economic sciences from our governing and judicial councils—and from our own thinking. And embracing again simple commonsense politics and simple bright-line rules of competition and justice.
It means structuring and regulating open markets designed to ensure an absolute liberty to share ideas and goods with one another, to protect our democracy through the careful distribution of power and opportunity, and to create public understanding and public power by pushing commercial information into the public realm through functioning systems for the pricing of all goods and services on which the public depends.
It means re-creating an open technological commons, designed to allow everyone to bring their ideas together, to bring new techniques and technologies to fruition, to empower us to better our lives, and to save our world.
It means using the state to ensure equality not just of opportunity but also of some real property in the American tradition of 160 acres per citizen.
It means using the state to make up, somehow, for our grotesque failure—even in the heart of the twentieth century—to provide African Americans with the same access to real properties as other Americans, or even to protect what properties African Americans were able to hammer into being.
Of most immediate importance in the age of Google and Amazon, it means taking from all powerful middlemen all license to discriminate in the delivery of their services, which is the only way to restore rule of law in our commercial and intellectual realms and ensure the protection of all personal property necessary for true liberty and democracy and for all true scientific advance.
Rarely in human history have we stood at such a fork. Down the road we now travel lies a future of degradation, depravity, and slow death. Yet we also see another path, one that leads to a world of technological and social wonders.
Which brings me to the fourth and last reason I brought up the subject of the jeremiad. Which is that all such prophecies always end with a vision of restoration. The purpose of the jeremiad, in the words of one scholar of the form, is to “direct an imperiled people … toward the fulfillment of their destiny, to guide them individually toward salvation, and collectively toward the American city of God.”9
In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr., mere months before his death, in the midst of a war of mechanized murder in Vietnam, with the prospect of nuclear annihilation looming, in the early years of awareness of our environmental crisis, in the early days of his campaign against poverty, focused on the need to escape webs of ideological and institutional control over our physical and spiritual lives.
To survive, as individuals and as a society, King wrote, we must make ourselves master of all “that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms and instrumentalities by means of which we live.”10
American history, indeed, teaches that when the financiers are the masters of the technologies on which we depend, they will wield these technologies in ways designed to concentrate control over us, hence in ways that end up destroying our selves, our society, our world.
What American history also teaches is that the people, when we are truly masters of our own selves and our own communities, will create and wield technologies in ways that empower us—as a people—to achieve moral ends and to build a moral society.
And so we shall again, today.
Perhaps, one day soon, you will behold your own hands shining before you. Perhaps, one day soon, it will be your own eyes, sparking with inspiration, that you see in the mirror. Perhaps, one day, it will be an absolute love for all humankind that you feel glowing in your own soul.
But what about right now, today? Will you dare today to recognize, even without such signs, the glory within you?
Will you dare, today, to recognize that you already have the power to destroy and to create? The power to break what must be broken and to heal what has been torn?
Will you dare, today, to recognize how this spirit links you to all people everywhere? Who dream as you do? Fear as you do? Strive to understand as you do? Strive to hope as you do? Who live, in the words of King, in the same World House with you?
Are you ready yet to stand against the few men armed with immense machines designed to crush your life? And the lives of your children? And the life of your world?
Are you ready yet to stand against those few men, who in their actions if not their words mock the sacrifices of your grandparents and great-grandparents? Who mock the blood spilled by generation upon generation to get us here? Who mock your will and mock your mind and mock your dreams?
Are you ready yet to stand against those who have exiled you from your own capacity to gather facts and to reason? Who have exiled you from your own God-given existence as a complete human being, a thinker and creator?
Are you ready to “rebuild the ancient ruins” and to “raise up the age-old foundations”?
No one else will fix this for you. American democracy is not a gift of big men on thrones of power. American democracy is not something handed to us by Jefferson or Douglass or Lincoln or Anthony or Brandeis or Du Bois or Roosevelt. American democracy is made by the people imposing their will—and their own systems of control—on “big” men.
It’s time to accept what we have lost. Our lives will never go back to normal. We have nowhere to retreat. Radical change, radical threat, are upon us.
Do nothing and our world ends. Do nothing and the songs of the temple shall all be howlings. Do nothing and our children and our children’s children shall perish in fire.
We have but one way forward. Only the American System of Liberty provides us with the intellectual, institutional, psychological, technological, and spiritual tools that will enable us to break the powers that bind us and to build a world fit for our children and their children.
Only the American System of Liberty provides us with the tools to reestablish liberty in America for the next 100 years. To refit our world for the centuries. To remake a true World House of hope and trust and justice and love.
The sword is in your hand. See it. Know it. Use it.