The Revolution Devours Its Children: Inside the New Battle Against Google
17th September 2017
One of the biggest, most embarrassing divorces in the normally quiet world of Washington think tanks blew into the open earlier this month, when writer Barry Lynn and nine others defected from New America. Lynn said they were pushed out of the influential Democratic think tank after he wrote a post this summer criticizing Google, one of its key funders. Anne-Marie Slaughter, who heads the foundation, called the story reporting the news “false”—then wrote a long Medium post walking her charge back.
One thing the Crust does not do is bite the hands that fund it.
Whatever the final trigger for the split, its roots lay far deeper than this summer’s scuffle. The Google controversy marked the most public emergence of an intellectually combative group jostling for a role as the new economic brain of the Democratic Party.
Raising the bar from ‘moron’ to ‘dimwit’. If the Democrat Party has an ‘economic brain’ other than Karl Marx, I have yet to see evidence of it.
Lynn’s group, called Open Markets, has spent six years arguing that the Democrats have become too comfortable with corporate money and power, and need to rally around a new principle: breaking up monopolies. As the party remains locked in a struggle to reboot itself, unable to craft a unifying vision in the Trump era, Lynn and his group are trying to push it into a new fight against global corporate titans, targeting big companies like Google by name, and arguing that it’s time to use federal antitrust law to chip away at their influence. They see the fight as both a boon to democracy and a political framework that could excite voters in a new, more energized populist moment.
But the Democrat Party is all about corporate money and power. These people must not be paying attention.