Biden’s Trustbuster Draws Unlikely Fans: ‘Khanservative’ Republicans
Growing skepticism toward big business on the right has won the FTC’s Lina Khan new allies...
PUBLIUS SPECIAL GUEST: Robert H. Bork Jr. is the President of the Antitrust Education Project, and recently reissued his father's book, The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself.
When you’re trying to restructure the entire American economy, you take your allies wherever you can find them. And so Lina Khan, the liberal chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, welcomes her growing group of Republican fans.
“Antitrust and antimonopoly has historically been deeply bipartisan,” Khan said in a recent interview in her spacious Washington office lined with 1920s political cartoons. “Conceptually, conservatives view concentration of power skeptically, and there has been a recognition that concentration of corporate power can in some instances be deeply antithetical to liberty.”
Since being appointed by President Biden three years ago, the 35-year-old Khan has turned the obscure federal agency into a high-profile battleship aimed at the big corporations she says have distorted markets and harmed consumers. Her aggressive actions against Big Tech and other industries have inflamed the business community, and not all have been successful. But in an anomaly in this partisan age, a group of conservatives has cheered her efforts, seeing her as a fellow traveler in the populist cause.
The “Khanservatives,” as they call themselves, tend to be younger and Trumpier, part of the growing ranks of Republicans who question unfettered markets and see big corporations as an adversary to their constituents.
“As the Republican Party becomes more working class, we’re less captive to the neolibertarian view that everything big business does to people is OK,” said Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who has interviewed Khan on his Newsmax show. His party, he said, “can’t be whores for big business and be the voice of the working class at the same time.”
Most Republicans, to be sure, aren’t embracing Khan. House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan hauled her before the committee for a four-hour grilling in July, where he and other GOP representatives accused her of abusing power and bullying companies. “She has pushed investigations to burden parties with vague and costly demands without any substantive follow-through, or, frankly, logic, for the requests themselves,” Jordan said.
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PLUG BOOK: The Antitrust Paradox By Judge Robert H. Bork
BIO: Robert H. Bork Jr. is the President of the Antitrust Education Project, and recently reissued his father's book, The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself.
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Robert H. Bork Jr. is the President of the Antitrust Education Project, and recently reissued his father's book, The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself.