Thread by @matthewstoller

1. I'll explain what I mean here. I'm a Biden voter. But it is fundamentally dangerous that Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai are making policy over how we deliberate over political matters. This policy has to be done through the government. But the problem is even deeper.

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1325466152819175429

2. Voting machines are now consolidated and owned by private equity firms, who make policy over electoral infrastructure itself. Media conglomerates organize the political parties. Contractors structure government spending and Blackrock structures Federal Reserve policy.

3. The essence of democracy is twofold, civic and commercial. We need competitive markets and a democratic system of industrial control. Otherwise monopolists will and do make public policy that we the people would otherwise be making.

4. For decades, we have delegated the commercial sphere to economists and experts, while focusing entirely on civic questions. But commerce is where a lot of policy happens. Facebook, Google, and Amazon present this in an extraordinarily stark manner.

5. America, unlike European countries, split its financial center (NYC) from its political center (DC). That was a way to ward off concentrations of power. But now the richest man in America owns the newspaper in the nation's capital, and will have 50,000 employees here.

6. Today there are a lot of debates over the nature of American history. Was it founded in 1619 or 1776 or 1787 or 1865? What is the root of our modern social problems?

There's a third strand of our historical narrative, which is the traditional democratic commercial system.

7. And this one is quite jarring, and breaks most comfortable narratives. Because the mass de-industrialization of America, which took place in the 1980s to 2000s, is the main story here. There are no precedents for it. It is new. The villains are Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

8. It is about the transfer of public power to private oligarchs, but it is also about explicitly getting rid of productive capacity and placing ourselves as the mercy of foreigners. This has never happened before. Ever. It is truly reckless.

9. When Trump talked about Make America Great Again, he was mocked, and rightly so. But he was also understood, because America used to be a place where we made things. Biden gets this, though his political operation may or may not.

10. The political crisis in commercial America is that policy isn't made by public institutions, but private monopolists and financiers either in gilded cities here or in Beijing or London. Democracy in the civic sphere is tenuous, but we are living in a commercial autocracy.

11. Google, Facebook, and Amazon are pace setters, both far more powerful than traditional monopolists and dominant in regulating the critical lifeblood of democracy - information. We have never, and I mean never, allowed the consolidation of control over information like this.

12. The political crisis of corporate concentration is driving most other nasty trends we're seeing. We simply cannot make public policy if monopolists are making private policy to subvert it. And the converse is true. Breaking monopolies frees us to make policy again.