JG NEG

Adv Cp
 Worker Welfare CP
The United States federal government should rule that antitrust law should regulate at least
employers that have monopsony power.

Replacing consumer welfare with worker considerations lets labor win---alternatives legalize
exploitation and ban collective bargaining.
Firat Cengiz 20. School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool. "The conflict between market
competition and worker solidarity: moving from consumer to a citizen welfare standard in competition law".
Cambridge Core. 10-8-2020. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/legal-studies/article/conflict-between-
market-competition-and-worker-solidarity-moving-from-consumer-to-a-citizen-welfare-standard-in-competition-
law/6E783D1FC4BAB5605DFABCD17FBE3F35
Introduction
This paper offers a critical investigation of the law and economics of competition law enforcement in conflicts between workers and employers
in the European Union (hereinafter EU) and the US. In such cases competition law comes into direct conflict with the
principle of worker solidarity: according to the principle of market competition individuals are expected to take independent economic
decisions and actions, whereas workers need to take collective economic actions and decisions to protect their interests. This conflict is
particularly obvious in the context of the so-called gig economy,1 in which employers keep casualised workers at
legal arms’ length to reduce labour and regulatory costs.2 If gig workers take collective action against their
working conditions, they might face attack from competition law, because legally they might be considered
independent service providers, rather than workers.3
The legal conundrum facing gig workers has become an increasingly popular subject in the law and economics literature.4 Nevertheless, the
more fundamental question of how the enforcement of competition rules affects the overall position of workers
beyond the limited case of the gig economy remains largely unexplored. This paper aims to investigate this broader and more fundamental
question. In order to provide a sufficiently global answer, the paper focuses on the legal positions of the EU and US, as the leading competition
law jurisdictions and primary competition policy exporters.5 The EU–US comparison shows that despite the slightly different legal tests applied
in these polities, competition rules constitute nearly equally disciplining mechanisms against collective worker
action on either side of the Atlantic.
This paper also makes an original contribution to the emerging debate on whether and how competition law can contribute to wealth
equality between citizens in the post-2008 crisis economy. The existing debate on the competition law–equality
relationship takes the ‘consumer welfare’ standard as its main reference point: it focuses exclusively on
the distribution of wealth between consumers and producers; as a result, it overlooks the production process that takes
place before consumers meet products and services, and the position of workers within it.6 This is a natural result of
competition law's reliance on a limited area of neoclassical economics called ‘equilibrium economics’ that understands efficiency
exclusively as a market mechanism in which the price manifests itself where supply meets demand.7 Departing from the mainstream competition law and
economics methodology, this paper builds its investigation on a holistic theoretical foundation, looking beyond equilibrium economics at labour exploitation theory
as established in neoclassical as well as Marxian models. This analysis shows that despite standing at opposing ends of the political spectrum and whilst having some
fundamental differences, Marxistand neoclassical models agree that collective worker action is economically
beneficial and socially necessary. As a result, a critical analysis of the current legal situation on both sides of the Atlantic in light of this holistic
framework illustrates how competition law's hostility towards collective worker action is not only unjust but also
economically unsound.
This paper demonstrates that the key problem in competition law's treatment of labour stems from the application
of the consumer welfare standard in cases involving the competition–solidarity conflict without paying any attention to
the idiosyncratic qualities of labour that render it naturally open to exploitation. Similarly, the consumer
welfare standard overlooks the fact that consumers and workers are essentially the same group of people
and one's welfare cannot be increased or decreased without affecting the other's.8 Even if worker
exploitation could result in reduced labour costs and decreased prices, this cannot be deemed
efficient as it reduces the workers’ welfare and results in broader negative socio-economic effects.
Similarly, collective worker action resulting in higher labour costs and potentially higher prices cannot
automatically be deemed inefficient, because although this might increase the prices consumers pay,
they benefit from higher wages and better working conditions in their position as workers. As a result of this critical analysis, the
paper proposes an original and more inclusive ‘citizen welfare’ standard that takes into account the economic
effects of anti-competitive behaviour on workers as well as consumers. The citizen welfare standard could also potentially be applied in
other contexts to solve long-standing conflicts between competition and other policy objectives, such as industrial, environmental and social
policy objectives,9 although this paper primarily focuses on the application of citizen welfare to the competition–solidarity conflict.
The structure of the paper is as follows: the next section provides an opening discussion of competition law, consumer welfare and equality.
This is followed by a discussion of the economic theory of labour exploitation. Then, the paper investigates how competition law approaches
the competition–solidarity conflict in the EU and the US. The fourth section critically discusses the EU and US legal positions in light of economic
theory. This section also develops the citizen welfare approach as an alternative to consumer welfare for the
resolution of the competition–solidarity conflict. This is finally followed with conclusions. Regarding terminology, this paper uses the
term ‘worker’ (rather than employee) as a non-legal, generic term encompassing all individuals who make a
living by providing labour power as a production factor in the production process of goods and services. Similarly, the term ‘labour’
is used to refer to the contribution of the workers to the production process as an abstract human factor. However, if the courts or authorities
in question use a different term (such as employee) in a specific case, the paper uses the same term in the discussion of that specific case.
 ---AT: alt causes
Monopsonies are key---inequality hollows out economics resilience---shocks are inevitable, only
worker stability makes recovery possible.
Kate Bahn 21. Washington Center for Equitable Growth Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, "Kate
Bahn testimony before the Joint Economic Committee on monopsony, workers, and corporate power". Equitable
Growth. 7-14-2021. https://equitablegrowth.org/kate-bahn-testimony-before-the-joint-economic-committee-on-
monopsony-workers-and-corporate-power/
Thank you Chair Beyer, Ranking Member Lee, and members of the Joint Economic Committee for inviting me to
testify today. My name is Kate Bahn and I am the Director of Labor Market Policy and the interim Chief Economist
at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. We seek to advance evidence-backed ideas and policies that
promote strong, stable and broad-based growth. Core to this mission is understanding the ways in which
inequality has distorted, subverted and obstructed economic growth in recent decades.
Mounting evidence, which I will review today, demonstrates how the rising concentration of corporate power
has increased economic inequality and made the U.S. economy less efficient. Reversing the trends that
have led to a “second gilded age” is critical to encouraging a resilient economic recovery following the
pandemic-induced economic crisis of 2020 and encouraging a healthy, competitive economy for the future.
Introduction
The United States boasts one of the wealthiest economies in the world, but decades of increasing income
inequality, job polarization, and stagnant wages for most Americans has plagued our labor market and
demonstrated that a rising tide does not lift all boats. Furthermore, economic evidence demonstrates how
inequality results in an inefficient allocation of talent and resources while increasing corporate
concentration that enriches the few while holding back the entire economy from its potential.
Understanding the causes and consequences of the concentration of corporate power will guide policymaking
in order to ensure that the economic recovery in the next phase of the pandemic will be broadly shared
and ensure a more resilient economy.
“Monopsony” is a key economic concept to understand in this discussion. Monopsony is the labor market
equivalent of the better-known phenomenon of “monopoly,” but instead of having only one producer of a good or
service, there is effectively only one buyer of a good or service, such as only one employer hiring people’s labor in
a company town. Like in monopoly, this phenomenon is not limited to when a firm is strictly the only buyer of
labor. Today I will explain the circumstances and effects of employers having significant monopsony power over
the market and over workers.
When employers have outsized power in employment relationships, they are able to set wages for their
workers, rather than wages being determined by competitive market forces. Given this monopsony power,
employers undercut workers. This means paying them less than the value they contribute to production.
One recent survey of all the economic research on monopsony finds that, on average across studies, employers
have the power to keep wages over one-third less than they would be in a perfectly competitive market. Put
another way, in a theoretical competitive market, if an employer cut wages then all workers would quit. But in
reality, these estimates are the equivalent of a firm cutting wages by 5 percent yet only losing 10 percent
to 20 percent of their workers, thus growing their profits without significantly impacting their business .
It is not only important for workers to earn a fair share so they can support themselves and their families, but also
critical to ensure that our economy rebuilds to be stronger and more resilient. Prior to the current public
health crisis and resulting recession, earnings inequality had been growing since at least the 1980s while the
labor share of national income has been declining in same period. This is cause for concern as recent evidence
suggests that the labor share of income has a positive impact on GDP growth in the long-run .
The unprecedented economic shock caused by the coronavirus pandemic revealed how economic inequality
leads to a fragile economy, where those with the least are hit the hardest, amplifying recessions since
lower-income workers typically spend more of their income in the economy. But the crisis also
demonstrated how economic policy targeted toward workers and families can provide a foundation for
growth. This is because workers are the economy, and pushing back against the concentration corporate
power by providing resources to workers is the foundation for strong, stable and broadly shared
growth.
The Causes of Monopsony
The concept of monopsony was initially developed by the early 20th century economist Joan Robinson, who
examined how lack of competition led to unfair and inefficient economic outcomes . The prototypical
example of monopsony is a company town, where there is one very dominant employer and workers have no
choice but to accept low wages since they have no outside options. This is the most extreme case, but it is
important to note that firms have monopsony power in any circumstance where workers aren’t moving
between jobs seamlessly in search of the highest wages they can get.
Firms can use monopsony power to lower workers’ wages any time workers:
 Have few potential employers
 Face job mobility constraints
 Can only gather imperfect information about employers and jobs
 Have divergent preferences for job attributes
 Lack the ability to bargain over those offers
I will go through each of these factors in turn and demonstrate how labor markets are unique compared to other
markets in dealing with competitive forces.
While concentrated labor markets are not the norm, they are pervasive across the United States, especially
within certain sectors or locations. When markets are very concentrated, employers can give workers
smaller yearly raises or make working conditions worse, knowing that their workers have nowhere to
go to find a better job with better pay. (See Figure 1.)
A study published in the journal Labour Economics by economists Jose Azar, Ioana Marinescu, and Marshall
Steinbaum finds that 60 percent of U.S. local labor markets are highly concentrated as defined by U.S.
antitrust authorities’ 2010 horizontal merger guidelines. This accounts for 20 percent of employment in the
United States. Research by economists Gregor Schubert, Anna Stansbury, and Bledi Tsaka goes further by
estimating workers’ outside options, or the likelihood a worker is able to change into a different occupation or
industry. This study finds that even with a more expansive definition of job opportunities more than 10
percent of the U.S. workforce is in local labor markets where pay is being suppressed by employer
concentration by at least 2 percent, and a significant proportion of these workers facing few outside options
are facing pay suppression of 5 percent or more. As study co-author Anna Stansbury noted, “for a typical full-time
workers making $50,000 a year, a 2 percent pay reduction is equivalent to losing $1,000 per year and a 5 percent
pay reduction is equivalent to losing $2,500 per year.”
Certain sectors are now very concentrated, such as the healthcare industry. In a paper by the economists
Elena Prager and Matt Schmitt, they find that hospital mergers led to negative wage growth among skilled workers
such as nurses or pharmacy workers. Consolidation and outsized employer power, alongside other
phenomenon such as the fissuring of the workplace, may have broader impacts on the structure of the U.S.
labor market when it affects the overall structure of the labor market, including the hollowing out of
middle class jobs that have historically been a pathway for upward mobility.
 2NC---Solvency
Worker welfare is key.
Suresh Naidu et al 18. *Suresh Naidu is an Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs and Economics,
Columbia University. **Eric Posner is a Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of
Chicago Law School. ***E. Glen Weyl is a Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research New England and Visiting Senior
Research Scholar, Yale University Department of Economics and Law School “Antitrust Remedies for Labor Market
Power” University of Chicago Law School. 2018. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=13776&context=journal_articles
Most of the principles naturally carry over, in suitably modified form, to the analysis of merger effects on labor
markets, though a few subtle issues arise. Many of the same factors that could act as efficiencies on the product side are also efficiencies on the labor side. By
analogy to the “consumer welfare” standard, we believe that mergers that trigger scrutiny by reducing labor
market competition should be subject to a “worker welfare” standard.213 The fact that the merger might raise
firm profits more than it harms workers should not be sufficient to excuse the merger. Instead, the merger would be
permitted if the merger sufficiently increases worker productivity (workers’ marginal revenue product) in a way
that will not fully be absorbed by lower prices or increased employer profits. Thus, harms from reduced
competition are more than fully offset, and therefore workers’ wages, benefits, or conditions will improve
because of the merger. This is not to say that mergers that harm workers should never be approved. The losses to workers could be offset by gains
elsewhere in the economy. Indeed, the merger of two firms that operate in a frictionless labor market should not greatly
harm workers even if it does result in significant layoffs, because in a competitive labor market the laid-off
workers can easily find equally good jobs.214 In contrast, a merger that does create competitive concern should not
be excused simply on the basis that it allows the firm to cut costs by destroying jobs. In such cases, antitrust doctrine does not
allow efficiency gains in other markets to offset losses in one market.215 Thus, typically, the worker-surplus implications of a merger will
indicate its competitive effects, just as in product markets consumer surplus is a strong but not perfect proxy for
competitive effects. In some cases, a merger may prove overall competitively harmful in labor markets (thus
reducing worker welfare) and beneficial in product markets (thus increasing consumer welfare). Such cases should be
treated roughly like ones where competitive harm occurs in one product market but there are competitive benefits in another product market. To the extent
possible, antitrust authorities should try to find remedies that address the competitive harms while preserving the
benefits, such as requiring the spinning off of critical units that would allow an increase in market power. However,
the frequency of such cases should not be exaggerated; mergers that increase labor market power and thus raise effective costs will not
usually bring lower prices to consumers, and mergers increasing product market power and thus reducing sales will not typically create great jobs. As we noted in
section I.A.3, enforcers
should not believe the canard that the monopsonist’s lower labor costs are passed on to
consumers as lower prices.216 Monopsony power raises the effective marginal cost a firm faces and thus should almost always lead to increased prices.
Similar analysis applies to the merger-specificity of the efficiency gains: productivity gains that could be achieved absent the anticompetitive effects of the merger
should not play a role in merger analysis.

The counterplan solves inequality, worker power, and wages

Eric Posner 21. Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. “You Deserve a Bigger Paycheck. Here’s How
You Might Get It.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/23/opinion/antitrust-workers-employers.html
The spectacle of the antitrust challenge to Big Tech has been riveting. But a far more consequential
transformation in antitrust law has largely escaped notice — the movement to use antitrust law to
address wage suppression and inequality caused by the power of employers in labor markets.
Economic theory says that when a pool of workers has only one potential employer, or a small number of
potential employers, those workers will be paid below-market wages. Without the credible threat to
quit and work for a competitor, workers lack leverage that could allow them to secure a raise and better
conditions. This situation is sometimes called monopsony, and it is similar to monopoly in the market for goods.
When buyers have no choice among sellers, a monopolist can charge high prices; when workers have little
choice among employers, the employer can “charge” low wages.
Monopolies result in sluggish economic growth as well as high prices because in order to raise prices, monopolists
make fewer goods or provide less in services. Companies that use their market power to suppress wages do
something similar: They hire fewer workers, and this leads to unemployment and low growth as well. And
because employers push down wages by reducing employment, they supply fewer goods, causing
higher prices to consumers even though labor costs are reduced. A business might have monopoly power
(over goods it sells), monopsony power (over workers), both or neither. If a small town has one newspaper, the
newspaper has both a monopoly over local news and a monopsony over journalists. If the town has a single
automobile manufacturing plant, that business will have a monopsony over the relevant skilled workers but not a
monopoly over cars, which are sold into a national market where there are competitors.
Economists have understood these things since Adam Smith, who famously called wage-fixing by employers
“the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of.” But economists did not take this risk very seriously
until recently, instead usually assuming that employers compete vigorously for workers. As a result, though the
logic for using antitrust law to address market power is the same for monopsony as it is for monopoly, the legal
community did not embrace the possibility that antitrust law should be brought to bear against employers, except
in unusual cases.
But in recent years, thanks to the remarkable work of a diverse group of mostly young economists, this
conventional wisdom was shattered. Exploiting vast data sets of employment and wages that had become
available, they discovered that concentrated labor markets — that is, with one or few employers — are
ubiquitous. In one paper, José Azar, Ioana Marinescu, Marshall Steinbaum and Bledi Taska found that more
than 60 percent of labor markets exceeded levels of concentration that are regarded as presumptive
antitrust problems by the Department of Justice. Numerous papers have made similar findings.
In highly concentrated labor markets, wages fall — as economic theory would predict. For example, Elena
Prager and Matt Schmitt examined hospital mergers and found that when hospitals expand through mergers and
gain significant market power, the wage growth of employees declines. Notably, this decline affected skilled health
care professionals like nurses — but not administrators and unskilled staff members like cafeteria workers, who
could easily find jobs outside hospitals.
The work on labor market concentration has been supplemented by growing evidence that employers
collude with one another and engage in other anticompetitive practices. Evan Starr and his co-authors have
found that agreements not to compete — where employers block workers from moving to competitors — are
extremely common (as many as nearly 40 percent of workers have been subject to one) and are associated
with lower wages. Alan B. Krueger and Orley Ashenfelter found that nearly 60 percent of major brand-name
franchises — companies like McDonald’s and Jiffy Lube — subjected franchise employees to no-poaching
agreements, which prevented them, even within the same franchise system, from quitting one employer to join
another.
As a result, many workers, especially in rural areas and small towns — areas subject to high unemployment and
economic stagnation — are squeezed by employers and underpaid. For example, when farm equipment
manufacturers merge, they close dealerships, and so a mechanic who used to be able to get a good job as several
dealers competed for his work must accept a less-appealing job from the single place in the area or drop out of the
labor market.
Antitrust law applies to “restraint of trade,” and courts agree that when employers enter cartels to suppress
wages, they violate the law. Yet until a few years ago, there were hardly any antitrust cases against employers. The
major exception was a 2010 case against Big Tech after Google, Apple and other companies agreed not to solicit
one another’s software engineers. This was potentially criminal behavior, but the Justice Department slapped
them on the wrist. (A subsequent lawsuit secured more than $400 million in damages for the workers.)
But it was the academic research, not the tech case, that finally woke the antitrust community from its torpor. In
the past year, the Justice Department has brought several criminal indictments against employers for antitrust
violations (the first ever). The Federal Trade Commission is pondering a rule to restrict noncompetes. State
attorneys general brought cases against franchises and other employers that used no-poaching agreements and
noncompetes. Congress is holding hearings next week on antitrust and the American worker. Private
litigators have joined in as discoveries of abusive wage practices have piled up. For example, “Big Chicken”
companies face lawsuits not only for fixing the prices of chicken but also for fixing the wages of their workers.
If the academic research on labor markets is correct, then millions of Americans are paid thousands or
even tens of thousands of dollars less than they should be paid. Labor monopsony affects people at all
income levels, but it is a particular problem for lower-income workers and people living in stagnant rural and
semirural parts of the country. In his recent executive order on antitrust, President Biden became the first
president to commit government resources to ensure that the antitrust laws are used to help workers.
Let’s hope he follows through.

The counterplan solves but the aff doesn’t---antitrust is the key remedy
Lauren Sillman 20. Antitrust Associate, Clifford Chance LLP; J.D., Georgetown University Law Center; B.A.,
University of Iowa. “ANTITRUST FOR CONSUMERS AND WORKERS: A FRAMEWORK FOR LABOR MARKET ANALYSIS
IN MERGER REVIEW.” https://lawjournal.ku.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/4_Sillman_Antitrust_V30_I1.pdf
A détente is especially desirable today in light of the severe stagnation in American wages. In the past thirty-
five years, U.S. gross domestic product has all in all grown but the purchasing power of the average
worker has barely changed.3 Labor’s share of national income declined precipitously in the 2000s, and
in the five years after the Great Recession it was lower than at any point since World War II .4 Because
most people get most of their income from labor, and because those who get most of their income from capital
tend to be wealthy, this income shift has dramatic consequences for inequality .
Economists and policymakers have advanced numerous explanations for this troubling trend ranging from
the decline of unions, to tighter monetary policy, to increased trade liberalization, and more.5 One explanation
that has received attention in recent years is an apparent epidemic of market concentration and flagging
competition.6 A growing body of evidence suggests that over time fewer and fewer firms have come to
dominate sectors across the economy.7 One study found that from 1982 to 2012, the share of sales by
the sectors’ top four firms increased in manufacturing, finance, services, utilities, retail trade, and
wholesale trade.8 Average markups above cost—a manifestation of market power—rose from eighteen
percent in 1980 to sixty-seven percent in 2014.9 This increase in concentration is due, in part, to a
growing wave of mergers. By one count over 325,000 mergers have been announced since 1985.10 That year,
around 2,000 mergers with a value of a little over $300 billion were announced.11 In 2018, 15,000 mergers
occurred—valued at just under two trillion dollars.12
The ability of firms to charge prices for their products or services that exceed the competitive level
harms workers in their role as consumers, and the reverberating inefficiencies have consequences for
wages as well.13 Workers are harmed more directly, though by firms with buyer power in labor markets.
Instead of enabling firms to charge high prices for the goods or services they sell, buyer power—also known as
monopsony power—allows firms to push wages below the level workers would receive in competitive
labor markets.
A recent study applied the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), which is used to measure market concentration. The
Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) (“the agencies”) used HHI in merger review,
and found that at least forty percent of job markets fell into the “highly concentrated” category, making
them especially susceptible to anticompetitive behavior by employers.14 The hiring markets for the
twenty-five percent most concentrated occupations in almost every commuting zone in the country have
concentration levels nearly tripled the “highly concentrated” threshold .15 In commuting zones across
middle America, the hiring market for nearly every occupation is highly concentrated.16 As discussed below, a
concentrated labor market generally increases the buyer power of participants in that market. Recent research on
labor supply elasticity, which is an indicator of vulnerability to employers’ market power, further challenges
traditional assumptions of competitiveness in labor markets.17
Historically, antitrust enforcers have given far less attention to firms’ power as buyers than as sellers and
have been particularly hesitant to check their power as buyers of labor. However, the tide may be beginning to
change. Federal and state enforcers have begun to challenge anticompetitive labor contracts,18 and there
is a small but growing body of precedent addressing increased buyer power in mergers .19 In 2016, the
Obama Administration’s Council of Economic Advisors issued a report describing the problem of labor market
power and encouraging greater attention to the issue by the antitrust enforcement agencies.20 Separately, then-
Acting Assistant Attorney General Renata Hesse stated that antitrust enforcement efforts should not only be
concerned with the welfare of consumers, but should “also benefit workers, whose wages won’t be driven
down by dominant employers with the power to dictate terms of employment .”21 Nevertheless, to date,
the agencies have never blocked a merger on the basis of harm to workers.
There are many reasons that may account for the dearth of enforcement, including misunderstandings of the
relationship between labor and antitrust laws, the momentum of precedent focused on seller-side harms, and the
resistance of some to increased antitrust enforcement as a general matter.22 In addition to these practical and
ideological impediments, mistaken intuitions about the economics of buyer power create obstacles for
enforcement. At first glance it would seem that if firms use their buyer power to lower their costs, downstream
customers are ultimately benefitted. Therefore, the consumer welfare standard, which underpins modern antitrust
enforcement, would seem to counsel against intervention contrary to buyer power. In most cases, though, this
intuition is simply wrong.23 More competitive labor markets are not just good for workers; they are good for
consumers too.
Clarifying the relevant interests at stake is crucial as policy reforms begin in earnest, and there is reason to believe
that such reforms are on the horizon. Several politicians have recently advocated for greater antitrust scrutiny of
labor markets. For example, in 2017 Senator Amy Klobuchar introduced a bill that would require the enforcement
agencies to pay greater attention to buyer power in merger review.24 Senator Elizabeth Warren—who seeks more
interventionist antitrust policy on many fronts25—and Senator Cory Booker—who in 2017 sent a letter to the DOJ
and FTC citing concern with the failure of the agencies to address labor market power—have also taken up the
cause.26
Labor market issues are also garnering increased attention from antitrust scholars.27 In an article
published in 2018, C. Scott Hemphill and Nancy Rose argued for more interventionist merger policy directed at
various forms of buyer market power.28 The same year, Suresh Naidu, Eric Posner and Glen Weyl published
Antitrust Remedies for Labor Market Power, a sweeping analysis of the myriad options available to enforcers to
promote more competitive labor markets.29 This legal analysis has been spurred by a growing body of
empirical work on buyer power in labor markets.30 An array of scholars concluded that labor market power
is a problem and one that antitrust institutions should do more to address.
This paper similarly argues that buyer power—and specifically buyer power in labor markets—deserves
greater antitrust scrutiny and, to that end, develops a framework for systematically evaluating labor
market power in merger analysis. The enthusiasm of some progressive politicians for more interventionist
antitrust policy has drawn skepticism from many antitrust practitioners and scholars who worry that reforms will
unmoor antitrust policy from its foundational principles and turn antitrust enforcement over to political whims.31
At least with respect to labor market power, however, economic theory and empirical evidence support
increased enforcement without any reform of the basic legal framework and without deviating from substantial
consensus about the proper role for antitrust in the economy.

Antitrust is key---permissive guidelines enabled the rise in monopsonies, expanding a worker welfare
standard to labor markets is key to wage equality.
Joseph E. Stiglitz 21. Joseph E. Stiglitz is an economist and professor at Columbia University. He is the co-chair of
the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and
the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. He has served as chief economist of the World Bank and chairman
of the Council of Economic Advisers. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001“Fostering More-
Competitive Labor Markets” Inequality and the Labor Market: The Case for Greater Competition. Brookings
Institution Press. (2021) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctv13vdhvm.6
Of course, this is not the world in which we live. Even the corner grocery store knows it can raise its prices a little
bit without losing all of its customers, which is what the standard competitive theory suggests. More and more,
firms have demonstrated high and increasing levels of market power (Philippon 2019; Stiglitz 2019). At the
same time, the bargaining power of workers has weakened.
It was never an equal match. An employer typically can find an alternative worker far more easily than a
worker can find an alternative employer. This is especially so during slack periods in the labor market, or
in places where there has been persistent unemployment. Leaving or losing a job is often greatly disruptive to
workers and their families. There are mortgages to pay, children to feed, bills coming due. From the
perspective of workers, jobs are not easily substitutable.
As the chapters in this volume make abundantly clear, this imbalance of market power has consequences. It
enables firms to raise prices for goods and services—lowering the real incomes of workers. It enables
firms to suppress wages of workers below what they would be in a competitive marketplace—contributing to
the inequality crisis facing the country. This economic inequality gets translated into political
inequality, especially in our money-driven politics, resulting in rules that evermore favor big
corporations at the expense of workers. The growing political inequality, in turn, hampers economic
performance, and ensures that most of the benefits of our anemic economic growth go to those at the
very top (Stiglitz 2012).
In the middle of the 20th century, John K. Galbraith (1952) described an economy based on countervailing power—
where labor institutions and government checked the power of large corporations and financial institutions. But
policy choices over the past half century have upset this balance in ways that have weakened not only the
workers, but also the economy and the country. This volume explores what has happened by concentrating on
one understudied part of the problem: the labor market.
Explaining the Weakening of Workers’ Bargaining Power
Multiple factors have contributed to the weakening of workers’ bargaining position . This volume focuses
specifically on the ways that employers have increased their market power over workers.
Employer Concentration
Permissive antitrust enforcement has promoted concentration across industries, reducing the number
of employers—particularly those in rural areas (Stiglitz 2016).1 With few alternatives, workers must accept
the low wages that large local employers offer. More precisely, limited competition by buyers—in this case,
employers who buy labor services—gives rise to monopsony power.2 Any firm with monopsony power
knows that if it hires more workers, it will drive up the wage. The marginal cost of hiring an additional worker
is thus greater than the wage. The result is lower employment and lower wages than if there were a
competitive labor market. The chapter by Marinescu in this volume forcefully documents the degree of
monopsony in labor markets across the United States, especially in rural areas—areas where, not surprisingly,
wages lag behind the rest of the country.
Collusion
Typically there is some, but limited, competition in the labor market, but it is competition that is insufficient to
achieve anything approximating what would emerge in a truly competitive marketplace. But employers often do
not like even this limited competition, because even some competition means that wages are higher than they
would be with no competition. Thus, firms sometimes collude to not compete; and that collusion drives
down wages. The incentives for firms to do this—if they can get away with it—are obvious: collusion has
been a feature of capitalism from the start. As Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations, “Masters are
always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour
above their actual rate. . . . Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour
even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy” (Smith 1776, book 1, chap.
8).
Even then, Smith had observed an asymmetry not only in bargaining power, but also in capitalists’ response to
workers’ attempts to redress the balance. When workers combine their forces, “the masters . . . never cease to call
aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted
with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen” (Smith 1776, book 1, chap.
8). This stance, of course, was markedly different from capitalists’ own behavior—not only in labor markets, but
elsewhere, too. As Smith put it in one of his most famous statements, “People of the same trade seldom meet
together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in
some contrivance to raise prices” (book 1, chap. 10). This issue is central: to redress the natural imbalance of
bargaining power, workers have to band together and engage in collective bargaining. Unions are critical. But it is
precisely because unions have been somewhat successful in redressing the imbalance that employers have worked
so hard to suppress them, as I comment later in this introduction.
Contracts
In multiple contexts, business enterprises have not been satisfied with the increased profits brought by
greater market concentration and occasional collusion. Businesses have figured out how to sustain and
amplify those profits by the clever design of contracts that are conceived to inhibit competition in the labor
market. This is another method that enables them to drive down wages still further.3 The chapters by Evan
Starr and Terri Gerstein (this volume) provide ample evidence of the harmful impact of the misuse of labor
contracts, noting in particular that often-used ruses distort the true impact on workers. Noncompete
agreements, by definition, reduce competition. There might be some justification for not allowing
employees with knowledge of trade secrets to go to work for competitors, but that hardly applies to
employees of fast-food chains.
Employers have also put into contracts provisions that weaken workers’ rights—and power—if a dispute
arises. Inserting arbitration clauses into most contracts has moved dispute resolution out of the public
domain— where it can be protected in the public interest, through transparency and basic standards—into
private hands. This not only weakens workers’ position after a dispute arises, but also subtly changes the
balance of power— making it easier for firms to take advantage of workers, knowing that their ability to get
redress is so circumscribed. Making matters worse is a broader set of changes in legal frameworks that has hurt
workers and consumers at the expense of corporations. For instance, the ability to bring class-action lawsuits,
particularly in arbitration, has been greatly limited.
Asymmetric Information
The standard competitive theory assumes perfect information. Research over the past 50 years has
explained how even a little information asymmetry can have a large impact. Employers have recognized
this—they have figured out that such asymmetry can weaken workers’ position and lead to lower wages.
They have responded by doing what they can to increase these asymmetries, sharing data with each other
but insisting that workers keep their own compensation data confidential, and punishing employees
who violate such confidentiality. The chapter by Harris in this volume describes the adverse effects of
informational asymmetries, how firms have tried to increase these asymmetries, and what governments have
done and can still do to promote transparency—and thus competition—in the labor market.
 No Impact---1NC/2AC
No impact to the liberal order.
Graham Allison 18. Professor of Government at Harvard. “The Myth of the Liberal Order.” Foreign Affairs 97.4:
124-133
Among the debates that have swept the U.S. foreign policy community since the beginning of the Trump
administration, alarm about the fate of the liberal international rules-based order has emerged as one of the
few fixed points. From the international relations scholar G. John Ikenberry's claim that "for seven decades the
world has been dominated by a western liberal order" to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's call in the final days of the
Obama administration to "act urgently to defend the liberal international order," this banner waves atop most
discussions of the United States' role in the world. About this order, the reigning consensus makes three core
claims. First, that the liberal order has been the principal cause of the so-called long peace among great
powers for the past seven decades. Second, that constructing this order has been the main driver of U.S.
engagement in the world over that period. And third, that U.S. President Donald Trump is the primary threat to
the liberal order-and thus to world peace. The political scientist Joseph Nye, for example, has written, "The
demonstrable success of the order in helping secure and stabilize the world over the past seven decades has led to a
strong consensus that defending, deepening, and extending this system has been and continues to be the central task
of U.S. foreign policy." Nye has gone so far as to assert: "I am not worried by the rise of China. I am more worried
by the rise of Trump." Although all these propositions contain some truth, each is more wrong than right. The
"long peace" was the not the result of a liberal order but the byproduct of the dangerous balance of
power between the Soviet Union and the United States during the four and a half decades of the Cold War and
then of a brief period of U.S. dominance. U.S. engagement in the world has been driven not by the desire to
advance liberalism abroad or to build an international order but by the need to do what was necessary to
preserve liberal democracy at home. And although Trump is undermining key elements of the current order, he
is far from the biggest threat to global stability. These misconceptions about the liberal order's causes
and consequences lead its advocates to call for the United States to strengthen the order by clinging to
pillars from the past and rolling back authoritarianism around the globe. Yet rather than seek to return to
an imagined past in which the United States molded the world in its image, Washington should limit its efforts to
ensuring sufficient order abroad to allow it to concentrate on reconstructing a viable liberal democracy at home.
CONCEPTUAL JELL-O The ambiguity of each of the terms in the phrase "liberal international rules-based
order" creates a slipperiness that allows the concept to be applied to almost any situation. When, in 2017,
members of the World Economic Forum in Davos crowned Chinese President Xi Jinping the leader of the liberal
economic order-even though he heads the most protectionist, mercantilist, and predatory major economy in the
world-they revealed that, at least in this context, the word "liberal" has come unhinged.
 No Impact---2NC/1AR
No impact to its collapse, countless other factors and incentives both explain and
solve better
--AND, it’s a BAD FRAME to use
Glaser 19 – professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the Department of Political
Science at George Washington University
Charles Glaser, “A Flawed Framework: Why the Liberal International Order Concept Is Misguided,”
International Security, Vol 43, Spring 2019, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00343
In this article, I show that the
LIO concept suffers from theoretical weaknesses that render it
unable to explain much about the interaction of the United States with its adversaries or
its allies. Worse yet, framing U.S. policy in terms of the LIO is potentially dangerous; by
exaggerating the threat posed by small changes to the political status quo and
implicitly rejecting adaptation to the new balance of power in East Asia, the LIO lens could
encourage the United States to adopt overly competitive policies.
The LIO concept suffers from two main problems. First, and most basic, the LIO concept is inward
looking; it focuses on interactions between states that are members of the liberal international
order, not on interactions between states that belong to the LIO and those that do not. This is a
serious limitation, because the LIO is a partial order; it does not (and did not) include key major powers.
During the Cold War, for example, the LIO did not include the Soviet Union; today, neither China nor Russia is fully included.
Consequently, the LIO concept can shed little light on the most important issues in
international politics—specifically, the prospects for peace and cooperation between the United
States and its allies, on the one hand, and its adversaries and competitors, on the other.
Second, key strands of the LIO concept suffer serious theoretical weaknesses. For example, one strand
argues that a powerful state can bind itself to institutions, thereby reassuring weaker partners that it will meet its alliance
commitments, neither abandoning its allies nor using force coercively against them; such reassurance was essential to NATO’s
success during the Cold War. A powerful state, however, cannot effectively constrain its ability to
use its power/military force when the stakes are sufficiently high. Another strand of the LIO concept
holds that hierarchy built on legitimate authority, granted by subordinate (i.e., weaker) states to the dominant (i.e., stronger) state,
is essential to explaining cooperation under anarchy. According to this argument, hierarchy plays a central role in explaining
cooperation among NATO’s member states. I show, however, that this has not been the case and that established
theories of alliance cooperation explain cooperation within NATO quite well. Given these theoretical
weaknesses, the LIO concept cannot support claims that the LIO’s institutions have been
more effective or better able to weather shocks from the international system than they would
have been otherwise.
I argue that other well-established theories—in particular, defensive realism/rationalist
structural theories, which are based on a combination of power, interest, and information-
based arguments—are able to explain the major historical events that scholars and
commentators have credited to the LIO. Thus, the LIO concept’s inward focus and
theoretical weakness do not leave scholars with a significant explanatory gap. For example,
balance of threat theory does an excellent job of explaining the basics of NATO’s Cold War cohesion and effectiveness. Explaining
more nuanced features of NATO requires other theories, including bargaining theory and neo-institutional theories. Similarly, a
variety of structural arguments can explain the Cold War peace, including the defense advantage created by nuclear weapons,
NATO’s effective deterrent capabilities, and the relative simplicity of balancing in bipolarity.
Despite these problems with the LIO concept, the LIO might prove valuable if its components produce more jointly than they would
individually—that is, if the whole of the LIO were greater than the sum of its parts. For example, a variety of theories have identified
positive interactions between U.S. alliances and the open economic system. Available research indicates, however, that the size of
these interactions is hard to estimate—experts disagree on their magnitude, with some finding that the benefits are insignificant.
Thus, the possibility of interactive benefits fails to provide a strong case for envisioning the LIO as an integrated entity. More central
to my critique, the mechanisms that drive these interactions are not included in the LIO concept and
therefore lie largely outside the LIO lens.
In light of all of these shortcomings, I conclude that scholars, policy analysts, and practitioners should stop
framing their analyses of U.S. international policy in terms of the LIO. In addition to
lacking analytic value, framing discussions of U.S. international policy in terms of the LIO
tends to build in a status quo bias: the vast majority of such discussions start from the premise
that preserving the LIO deserves top priority. With China’s rise generating a dramatic shift in the global
balance of power, however, the United States needs to engage in a more fundamental evaluation of
its interests and the best means for achieving them. I argue, therefore, that the United States should analyze the
broad outlines of its international policy from the perspective of grand strategy. By adopting a
grand-strategic framework, analysts can correct the LIO’s status quo bias, make theoretical debates more
explicit, and ensure that a wider array of foreign policy options receive due consideration.

Empirically denied – e.g. Soviet Union, China, Iraq, North Korea, trade decline
and ON and ON
Glaser 19 – professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the Department of Political
Science at George Washington University
Charles Glaser, “A Flawed Framework: Why the Liberal International Order Concept Is Misguided,”
International Security, Vol 43, Spring 2019, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00343
Proponents of the LIO have made ambitious claims about its positive impact on U.S.
security, maintaining that it was responsible for the Cold War peace, U.S. success in winning the
Cold War, the specialization of capabilities within U.S. alliances,40 and the lack of balancing against predominant
U.S. power following the Cold War. In addition, they ascribe the peace and cooperation that characterized the first two decades of
the post–Cold War era largely to the LIO.
The LIO can take little or no credit for these outcomes, however, because it is a partial
order and because the LIO concept is primarily inward looking. By partial, I mean that the order
does not include all of the major powers;41 by in- ward looking, I mean that the LIO concept primarily
addresses interactions between states that are members of the order, not interactions between
its members and states that lay outside the LIO. In other words, links between the LIO concept
and the behavior of potential U.S. adversaries are largely missing.
My argument does not dispute that individual elements of the LIO significantly influence interactions between the United States
(and its allies) and nonmember states. There are well-established theories that explain these inter- actions. Given its inward
focus, however, the LIO concept fails to identify additional interactions, outcomes, or
benefits.
Consider, first, the Cold War. The Soviet Union and its allies were not members of the LIO. They were not democracies, so
democratic peace arguments do not apply. Nor were they members of the most important and most consequential LIO institutions,
including NATO. Thus, the institutional binding argument says little about how institutional
arrangements influenced political relations between the United States and Soviet Union . Nor
does the hierarchy argument apply globally, because the Cold War was bipolar. To the extent that the United States
enjoyed power advantages within this bipolarity, it could not use them to gain legitimate authority through a consensual bargain
with the Soviet Union. Finally, the Soviet Union was largely excluded from the West’s open markets and
its financial system; thus, economic interdependence arguments do not apply. In short, the LIO
concept does not address interactions between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The post–Cold War era is less clear cut. Nevertheless, the LIO concept continues to suffer many of the
problems associated with its inward focus. China is not a democracy, and it is not a member of the United
States’ security alliances in Asia; indeed, China is now the target of these alliances. The binding and hierarchy
arguments, therefore, do not apply to China. China was, how- ever, increasingly integrated into the international
economy, including the WTO, during this period; economic interdependence between the United States and China grew
dramatically, as did China’s wealth. Thus, the economic interdependence and convergence arguments do apply. The LIO
concept says little about the expected results when only some of its mechanisms apply. In
any event, the results predicted by the LIO’s interdependence and convergence mechanisms have
been disappointing: growing international trade has been accompanied by escalating tensions
between the United States and China, not by reduced tensions; and China’s dramatic economic success
has been accompanied recently by increasingly centralized authoritarian rule, not democracy and
liberalization more generally. China’s failure to move toward democracy has been possibly the greatest
disappointment for proponents of the LIO.
LIO is not a thing, but if anything net-worse for all their impacts, especially global
stability
Staniland 18
PhD from MIT (Paul Staniland is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Committee on
International Relations at the University of Chicago, “Misreading the “Liberal Order”: Why We Need New
Thinking in American Foreign Policy,” July 29, https://www.lawfareblog.com/misreading-liberal-order-
why-we-need-new-thinking-american-foreign-policy

Pushing back against Trump’s foreign policy is an important goal. But moving forward requires a more serious analysis than
claiming that the “liberal international order” was the centerpiece of past U.S. foreign-policy successes, and thus should
be again. Both claims are flawed. We need to understand the limits of the liberal international order, where it previously failed to
deliver benefits, and why it offers little guidance for many contemporary questions. First, advocates of the order
tend to skim past the policies pursued under the liberal order that have not worked. These mistakes need to be
directly confronted to do better in the future. Proponents of the order, however, often present a narrow and
highly selective reading of history that ignores much of the coercion, violence, and instability that
accompanied post-war history. Problematic outcomes are treated as either aberrant exceptions or as
not truly characterizing the order. One recent defense of the liberal order by prominent liberal institutionalists Daniel
Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, for instance, does not mention Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, or Libya.
Professors Stephen Chaudoin, Helen Milner, and Dustin Tingley herald the order’s “support for freedom, democracy, human rights,
a free press.” Kori Schake writes that Western democracies’ wars are “about enlarging the perimeter of security and prosperity,
expanding and consolidating the liberal order.” Historian Hal Brands argues that the order has advocated “political liberalism in the
form of representative government and human rights; and other liberal concepts, such as nonaggression, self-determination, and the
peaceful settlement of disputes.” Other analysts have persuasively argued that these accounts create an “imagined” picture of post-
World War II history. Patrick Porter outlines in detail how coercive, violent, and hypocritical U.S. foreign
policy has often been. To the extent an international liberal order ever actually existed beyond a small cluster of countries,
writes Nick Danforth, it was recent and short-lived. Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim further argue that “ critics
exaggerate Mr. Trump’s abnormality,” situating him within a long history of the pursuit of American self-interest.
Graham Allison—no bomb-throwing radical—has recently written that the order was a “myth” and that credit for the lack of great
power war should instead go to nuclear deterrence. Coercion and disregard for both allies and political
liberalism have been entirely compatible with the “liberal” order. The last two decades have been
a bumpy ride for U.S. foreign policy. Since 9/11, we have seen the disintegration of Syria, Yemen,
and Libya, a war without end in Afghanistan, the collapse of the Arab Spring, the rise and
resurgence of the Islamic State, and the distinctly mixed success of strategies aimed at managing China’s
rise. At home, the growth of a national-security state has placed remarkable power in the hands of
Donald Trump. Simply returning to the old order is no guarantee of good results . Grappling
openly with failure and self-inflicted wounds—while also acknowledging clear benefits of the order—is essential for moving beyond
self-congratulatory platitudes. Second, the liberal order in its idealized form had very limited reach into what are
now pivotal areas of U.S. security policy: Asia, the Middle East, and the “developing world” more
broadly. The core of the liberal order remains transatlantic, but Asia is now growing dramatically in wealth and military power.
What is the record of the order in the region? There was certainly some democracy promotion when authoritarian regimes began to
totter, but there was also deep, sustained cooperation with dictators like Suharto and Ferdinand
Marcos; while there are some regional institutions (such as ASEAN), they are comparatively weak; while there are
some rules, they have been deeply contested. Close U.S. allies like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea (the latter two
experiencing long bouts of U.S.-allied autocracy) were not integrated into a broad alliance pact like NATO .
India and Pakistan were never part of the core order, and China was only very partially integrated (primarily into the economic pillar
of the order, and through ad hoc security cooperation from the 1970s). Southeast Asia has been a site of warfare and
authoritarianism for much of its post-1945 history. The United States has long considered the Middle East vital to its security,
but the extent to which the United States should invest its own blood and treasure in protecting the area was always up for debate. It
was only in the 1970s that the United States decided it was prepared to use force to defend the region; “dual containment” in the
1990s was always controversial, while the invasion of Iraq and its chaotic aftermath revealed deep fissures over how much presence
was enough. Meanwhile, liberalism, democracy, human rights, and international institutions have not
made much of a mark in the region. Jake Sullivan, in a rather odd defense of the order, suggests that “Middle Eastern
instability has been a feature, not a bug, of the system.” This is not reassuring about the order’s ability to structure politics in the
area. The same can be said about the order’s history in Africa, with deep Western involvement in
civil wars, support for authoritarian regimes, and often-counterproductive demands for
economic liberalization contributing to ongoing instability . The legacy of the “liberal order” is both far more
complex and shallower outside of the north Atlantic core than within it. Invocations of the order are seen with
greater cynicism and suspicion in these areas than in Washington or Berlin. Yet they are precisely the
regions that are increasingly the focus of U.S. security policy. Finally, and as the preceding already suggests,
the idea of “liberal order” is itself frequently too vague a concept, and was too incomplete a phenomenon,
to offer guidance on a number of key contemporary questions. Allison goes so far as to call it “conceptual
Jell-o.” The extremely abstract principles that experts use to define the order are confronted with a reality of extreme historical
variation. This amorphousness undermines its usefulness as an actual guide to future foreign
policy. U.S. alliances in Western Europe since World War II looked dramatically different than those in
East Asia. Both have achieved their basic goals, so which should be the model for the future? The United States often
applied pressure to coerce its allies into adopting economic and security policies conducive to U.S. interests—going so far
as to threaten abandonment of close European allies—even as it simultaneously built key elements of the liberal order.
The core of the liberal order was a more tenuous and contested political space than we often remember. This inconsistency applies to
involvement in the domestic politics of other states. The United States has regularly embraced authoritarian leaders (and distanced
itself from democratic regimes), while at other times it has helped to push these leaders out in the face of domestic mobilization.
Advocates of the order tend to stress the latter and dismiss the former as aberrant, but both strategies contributed to the ultimate
victory of the liberal order over the Soviet bloc. The order’s history offers support for aggressively promoting democracy, accepting
democratization when it emerges, and strongly supporting friendly dictators. This makes it unhelpful for grappling with the question
of whether and how to promote democracy. The same is true of military interventions and covert operations abroad. U.S. leaders
invested heavily in Cold War proxy wars and the overthrow of foreign regimes, while at other times and places they avoided such
interventions. This history carries important implications for addressing today’s policy challenges. Simply appealing to the
order does not, for instance, tell us much about how to deal with a rising China: Since the liberal order included
highly institutionalized alliances, loose “hub-and-spoke” arrangements, and coalitions of the willing, and was characterized by both
preventive wars and containment, it is extremely unclear what the order suggests for America’s China strategy. While “rules-
based” order is a term in vogue, it doesn’t tell us what the rules should actually be, or
how they should be decided. Nor does appealing to the liberal order help us understand whether the United States
needs to be deeply involved or largely absent from the Middle East, or somewhere in between. Under the order, democracy
promotion and assertive liberal intervention sometimes occurred, but so too did restraint and an acceptance of autocracy. There
are no answers in the liberal international order for navigating the enormously difficult terrain of the
contemporary Middle East.
 LIO Resilient---1NC/2AC
The liberal order is resilient --- Trump can’t collapse it, and the US still possesses
the credibility to mobilize cooperation
Sullivan 18 Jake Sullivan, JAKE SULLIVAN is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. He served in the Obama administration as Director of Policy Planning at the U.S.
Department of State and as National Security Adviser to the Vice President. “The World After Trump.”
Foreign Affairs. March/April 2018 Issue. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-03-05/world-
after-trump

But the existing order is more resilient than this assessment suggests. There is
no doubt that Trump represents a meaningful threat to the health of both American democracy
and the international system. And there is a nonnegligible risk that he could drag the country into a
constitutional crisis, or the world into a crippling trade war or even an all-out nuclear war. Yet despite
these risks, rumors of the international order’s demise have been greatly
exaggerated. The system is built to last through significant shifts in global politics and
economics and strong enough to survive a term of President Trump.
This more optimistic view is offered not as comfort but as a call to action. The present moment demands resolve and affirmative
thinking from the foreign policy community about how to sustain and reinforce the international order, not just lamentations about
Trump’s destructiveness or resignation about the order’s fate. No one knows for certain how things will turn out. But fatalism will
become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The order can endure only if its defenders step up. It may be durable, but it also needs an update to account for new realities and
new challenges. Between fatalism and complacency lies urgency. Champions of the order must start working now to protect its key
elements, to build a new consensus at home and abroad about needed adjustments, and to set the stage for a better approach, before
it’s too late.
A RESILIENT ORDER
In a world where the major trends seem to spell chaos, it is fair to place the burden of proof on those who
claim that the current order can continue. Yet well before Trump, it had already demonstrated its
capacity to adapt to changes in the nature and distribution of power. Three basic factors account
for such resilience—and demonstrate why the emphasis now should be on protecting and improving the
order rather than planning for the aftermath of its demise.
First, most of the world remains invested in major aspects of the order and still
counts on the United States to operate at its center. The passing of U.S. dominance need
not mean the end of U.S. leadership. That is, the United States may not be able to direct
outcomes from a position of preeminent economic, political, and military influence, but it can
still mobilize cooperation on shared challenges and shape consensus on key rules .
In the years ahead, although Washington will not be the only destination for countries seeking capital,
resources, or influence, it will remain the most important agenda-setter.
Some context is important. The U.S.-led order was built at a unique moment, at the end of World
War II. Europe’s and Asia’s erstwhile great powers were reduced to rubble, and a combination of
dominance abroad and shared economic prosperity at home allowed the United States to serve as the
architect and guarantor of a new order fashioned in its own image. It had not just the material power
to shape rules and drive outcomes but also a model many other countries wanted to emulate. It
used the opportunity to build an order that benefited itself as well as others, with clear advantages
for populations at home and abroad. As the international relations scholar G. John Ikenberry has put it in
this magazine, the resulting system was “hard to overturn and easy to join .” The end of
the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union served to reinforce and extend American
preeminence.
This precise state of affairs was never going to last forever. Other powers would eventually rise, and the
basic bargain would one day need to be revisited. That day has arrived, and the question now is, do other
countries want a fundamentally different bargain or simply some adjustments? A comprehensive
2016 rand analysis found that few powers display an appetite for dismantling the
international order or transforming it into something unrecognizable . And while
Trump’s election has forced countries to contemplate a world without a central role for the United States,
many still view the president as an aberration and not a new American normal,
especially given that the United States has bounced back before.
Even China has concluded that it largely benefits from the order’s continued operation. Around
the time of Trump’s inauguration, breathless reports interpreted Chinese President Xi
Jinping’s comments on an open international economy and climate change as indicators that China
planned to somehow take over for the United States. But what Xi was really signaling was that China
does not want near-term radical change in the global system, even as it seeks to gain more influence
by taking advantage of the vacuum left by Trump. And to the extent that Beijing has set out to construct
its own parallel institutions, particularly when it comes to trade and investment, thus far these
institutions largely supplement the existing order rather than threatening to supplant it.
Other emerging powers chafe at certain features of the order, and some seek a more prominent place in
institutions such as the UN Security Council. Yet rhetorical flourishes aside, they, like China, talk
in terms of reform rather than replacement—and their continued participation sends
a similar message. For example, leaders of the major emerging powers eagerly accepted U.S.
President Barack Obama’s invitation to join the first Nuclear Security Summit, in 2010; less
eagerly but still willingly, they joined the global sanctions regime against Iran’s nuclear
program. Richard Fontaine and Daniel Kliman of the Center for a New American Security quote a
Brazilian official who captured a broader sentiment among emerging powers: “Brazil wants to
expand its room in the house, not tear the house down.” And indeed, Brazil has taken on a
leading role in defending important aspects of the order, such as the multistakeholder system for Internet
governance. Emerging powers’ quest for a greater voice in regional and global institutions is not a
repudiation of the order but evidence that they see increasing their participation as preferable to
going a different way.
Modeling
 Not Modeled---1NC/2AC
Nobody models the US—stats
Mila Versteeg 13, Associate Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Model, Resource, or
Outlier? What Effect Has the U.S. Constitution Had on the Recently Adopted Constitutions of Other
Nations?, 29 May 2013, www.heritage.org/research/lecture/2013/05/model-resource-or-outlier-what-
effect-has-the-us-constitution-had-on-the-recently-adopted-constitutions-of-other-nations
Unsurprisingly, attempting to gauge one constitution’s “influence” on another involves various conceptual and methodological
challenges. To illustrate, a highly generic constitution may be generic because others have followed its lead, because it has modeled
others, or simply by coincidence. That said, if two constitutions are becoming increasingly dissimilar, by
definition, one cannot be following the other. That is, neither is exerting influence on the other
(at least not in a positive way).¶ This is the phenomenon we observed in comparing the U.S. Constitution to the rest of the world;
based on the rights index, the U.S. has become less similar to the world since 1946 and, with a current index of
0.30, is less similar now than at any point during the studied period. This phenomenon has occurred even
among current American allies; among countries in regions with close cultural and historic ties to the U.S.
(namely, Latin America and Western Europe); and among democracies. Only among common law countries is
constitutional similarity higher than it was after World War II, but even that similarity has decreased since the 1960s. ¶ Rights
provisions are not the only constitutional elements that have lost favor with the rest of the
world; structural provisions pioneered by American constitutionalism—such as federalism,
presidentialism, and judicial review—have also been losing their global appeal.¶ For instance,
in the early 20th century, 22 percent of constitutions provided for federalistic systems, while
today, just 12 percent do.¶ A similar trend has occurred for presidentialism, another American innovation. Since the end of
World War II, the percentage of countries employing purely presidential systems has declined, mainly
in favor of mixed systems, which were a favorite of former Soviet bloc countries.¶ Finally, though judicial review is not
mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, it has proved the most popular American structural innovation. But though the
popularity of judicial review in general has exploded over the past six decades, most countries have
opted for the European style of review (which designates a single, constitutional court
which alone has the power to nullify laws inconsistent with the constitution) over the
American model (in which all courts are empowered to strike unconstitutional laws). In 1946,
over 80 percent of countries exercised American-style constitutional review; today, fewer than half
do.¶ Reasons for the Decline¶ It appears that several factors are driving the U.S. Constitution’s increasing
atypicality. First, while in 2006 the average national constitutions contained 34 rights (of the 60 we identify), the U.S.
Constitution contains relatively few—just 21—and the rights it does contain are often themselves atypical. ¶ Just one-third of
constitutions provide for church and state separation, as does the U.S. Establishment Clause, and only 2 percent of constitutions
(including, e.g., Mexico and Guatemala) contain a “right to bear arms.” Conversely, the U.S. Constitution omits some of
the most globally popular rights, such as women’s rights, the right to social security, the right to
food, and the right to health care.¶ These peculiarities, together with the fact that the U.S.
Constitution is both old and particularly hard to amend, have led some to characterize the
Constitution as simply antiquated or obsolete.

AND, it’s NOT an internal link – imitation’s the result of a stable foreign
preference – independent of the success or failure of any particular U.S. policy –
which obviously thumps
Negretto 13 (Gabriel L. Negretto, associate professor of political studies at the Centro de Investigación
y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City, Ph.D. political science, M.A. international affairs with specialization
in Latin American studies, Columbia University, B.A. law, University of Buenos Aires, Making
Constitutions: Presidents, Parties, and Institutional Choice in Latin America, Cambridge University Press,
2013, p.48-
Once political leaders from the main parties perceive that keeping the constitution or some of its
provisions is no longer viable or desirable, there is usually a more or less extended period of
informal deliberation and negotiation on the general purpose of the revision, the different
reform proposals, and the organization of the process. The formal initiation of constitution making entails the decision,
usually made by the incumbent party alone or in coordination with other parties, to convene a constituent assembly or propose constitutional
amendments. The final stage is that of deliberation, negotiation, and voting on the proposals. A political theory of constitutional
choice seeks to explain why the individuals and groups involved in the design of constitutions
select one particular set of institutions when any of several alternatives could be adopted. The
identity of the actors participating in constitution making, the goals they pursue, and their
ability to realize them should be at the center of such a theory. This is not, however, the
perspective adopted by classical explanations of constitutional design, which focus on
factors external to the process of constitutional change as the driving force of institutional
selection. The leading classical explanation is based on the idea of diffusion, contagion, or imitation of
constitutional models between countries. The central idea is that constitution makers select a constitutional model based
on how many countries within a particular area of geographic, cultural, or political influence have already adopted it. In other words, the
driving force for imitation is external to the environment where a particular institution is
adopted. Empirical evidence in support of this theory is that certain forms of constitutional design tend to be common to countries related by
geographic, cultural, and historical ties. For instance, Latin American countries have overwhelmingly opted for presidential-PR systems, parliamentary-
plurality systems are concentrated in the United Kingdom and many former British colonies, and parliamentary-PR systems have spread in continental
Europe (Lijphart 1991). The
spatial or temporal clustering of institutions, however, is the outcome of a
process that needs to be explained. A group of countries may copy one another in certain areas
of institutional design because of the discovery of a new institution that may solve a common set
of problems, because of the desire to conform to a particular cultural pattern, or simply because
of the unacknowledged effect of a common domestic variable. In other words, it is necessary
to know the reasons for imitation beyond the simple fact that a constitutional model might
become fashionable among a group of countries at a certain point in time .10 Moreover, even
when the diffusion mechanism is specified, it cannot account for why certain models are
adopted instead of others also available at the time when institutional change takes place, or
why constitution makers almost always make a selective use of foreign designs, copying some
but not all the components of a given model (see Horowitz 2002, 16–17).11 A better
understanding of the process by which constitution makers select institutions is provided by
actor-centered theories that attribute the origins of constitutional designs to the instrumental
preferences of the framers. In this view, politicians select institutions based on the
outcomes they expect to obtain once these institutions are in place. There is no agreement, however,
about the nature of these outcomes. In some theories, constitutional designers are presumed to pursue cooperative outcomes; other theories postulate
that constitutional designers are mainly concerned with the distributional effects produced by institutions.
Populism
 No Populism---1NC/2AC
Populist leaders have been decreasing steadily – COVID and opposition cooaltions
weaken their hold on the U.S.
Meyer 22 – research fellow at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
Brett Meyer, January 6 2022, “A Playbook Against Populism? Populist Leadership in Decline in 2021,”
Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, https://institute.global/policy/playbook-against-populism-
populist-leadership-decline-2021
In our annual update to our Populists in Power database, we find that the number of populist leaders
in power at the beginning of 2022 is down from 17 at the beginning of 2021 to 13 – the
lowest since 2004. Three of the four populist leaders who lost power were less ideological anti-
establishment populists, meaning that the remaining populists are almost all culturally
right wing.
Two common factors appear to have contributed to this significant fall in the number of populist
leaders. First, the pandemic may have reminded the public of the importance of
seriousness and expertise in policymaking. Countries with populist leaders around the
world had higher Covid-19 case and death rates than those without populist leaders, and populist
leaders in Europe have seen a sustained dip in their polling popularity relative to more
conventional parties throughout the pandemic.
Second, unusually broad opposition coalitions have emerged to depose populist incumbents.
Historically divided opposition parties adopted a narrow focus in their election
campaigns to remove the populist leader. This happened in three out of four populist
losses in 2021. We also see evidence of opposition parties following this “playbook” in countries
where populist leaders are facing elections in 2022.
The danger posed by populism lies in the damage leaders can do to the norms and institutions of liberal
democracy. However, we find that, in most of the cases where populist leaders lost power last year,
there is limited evidence that key norms such as a free press, an independent
judiciary and the peaceful transfer of power have been obviously weakened . That
said, elections in the coming years in countries where populist governments have invoked more radical
reform to entrench their positions give less cause for optimism.
 No Populism---2NC/1AR
Populism is decreasing now – the state of the pandemic has fractured
them and allowed for center-left parties to reassert their control
Fisher 21 – Max Fisher is an international reporter and columnist for The New York Times. He has
reported from five continents on conflict, diplomacy, social change and other topics.
Max Fisher, September 20 2021, “As Populists Decline, the Center-Left Sees Hints of a Comeback,” The
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/americas/canada-election-liberals-
trudeau.html
A style of politics long considered in decline is experiencing something of a reprieve, even
seeing glimmers of a possible return.
The gray-suited technocrats of the center-left are once more a serious force, at the expense of both the
establishment conservatism that prevailed among Western democracies for much of the 21st century, and
the right-wing populism that arose in backlash to the status quo.
This month alone, center-left parties have taken power in Norway and appear on the verge of doing the
same in Germany. They hold the White House, share power in Italy and lead a newly credible opposition
movement in authoritarian-leaning Hungary.
Calling it a comeback would be premature, analysts warn. Center-left gains are uneven and fragile. And
they may be due less to any groundswell of enthusiasm than to short-term political tailwinds, largely a
result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Canada, where the center-left has faced a battle to hold onto power in Monday’s election, may best
encapsulate the trend. The forces boosting center-lefts globally have nudged the Liberals’ poll numbers
there from poor to middling — a fitting metaphor for the movement’s prospects.
Still, even modest gains among Western democracies could give a long-struggling political wing the
chance to redeem itself with voters.
And it would counteract a dominant trend of the past decade: the rise in ethno-
nationalism and strongman politics of the new populist right.
“People have been writing for several years now about how the Social Democrats are going to die out for
good, and now here they are, they’re the leading party,” said Brett Meyer, who researches political trends
at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, referring to the center-left’s sudden rise in Germany.
“That’s been an enormous surprise,” he added.
A Test of Covid Politics
If Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, keeps his job, it may be due in large part to political changes
brought about by the pandemic.
Mr. Trudeau’s decision to call an election just two years after the last vote proved unpopular, initially
sinking his party’s poll numbers into second place.
But a few factors hinting at wider trends have since tightened the race.
Mr. Trudeau was expected to lose support to the left-wing New Democratic Party. But that party, after
years of growth amid global polarization to the left- and right-wing margins, has stalled in its rise. This
fits with voters worldwide tilting toward establishment parties in response to the uncertainty of the
pandemic.
Two political scientists, James Bisbee and Dan Honig, identified this change by analyzing dozens of
primaries and races. The pandemic, they found, boosted mainstream candidates, at the expense of
political outsiders, by a sometimes-decisive 2 to 15 percentage points. They call this effect a “flight to
safety.”
Other research suggests that the nature of a pandemic leads voters to crave strong institutions,
forceful government actions and social unity in response.
Those preferences naturally privilege the agendas of left-wing parties. That may be why, even as
Canadians express weariness with Mr. Trudeau and disapproval of some of his choices, they remain
drawn to the policies that his party represents.
But Mr. Trudeau’s luckiest stroke may be how the pandemic is dividing the political right.
In the 2010s, right-wing coalitions broadly unified over identity issues like immigration. But pandemic-
related questions — whether to mandate vaccines, when to impose lockdowns, how forcefully to intervene
in the economy — have split moderates from the activist base.
Canada’s Conservative Party, led by Erin O’Toole, has tacked left on climate and social issues. But Mr.
O’Toole’s ambiguity on pandemic issues might have allowed the anti-vaccine-mandate People’s Party
to siphon off votes. And it has opened him to attack from the left, with Mr. Trudeau challenging him to
disavow anti-lockdown activists.
Polls worldwide also show lopsided support for vaccine mandates, greater welfare spending
and other pandemic policies that fit better with the agendas of the left than the right — and
that left-wing parties can more safely embrace without risking backlash from their base .
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plus a handpicked selection of our recent Canada-related coverage. Get it sent to your inbox.
Canada is representative in another way, experts say. It shows that, while the pandemic might give the
center-left an assist, it is not always enough to ensure victory. Though this year’s Dutch elections saw
centrist and left-wing gains, the center-right remains firmly in power in the Netherlands. And polls in
France suggest that next year’s elections will split between the centrist incumbent and the far-right
Marine Le Pen. The center-left, all but obliterated in 2017, is considered unlikely to soon recover.
“Can you say that the period over the last 18 months is one of social democratic revival?” Pippa Norris, a
Harvard University scholar of party politics, said. “Well, it depends on the election you’re looking at.”
While such a trend might become clear in retrospect, she added, for now, “What we’ve got is realignment
and volatility.”
The Populist Stall-Out
That realignment is taking at least one clear form. The once-formidable right-wing populist wave
has, for the moment, stalled — and may even be slightly reversing.
The movement’s rise has been slowing since late 2018, when its leaders faced a series of setbacks in
Europe and the Americas. Its challenges have since deepened.
Half of Europe’s right-wing populist parties saw their support decline under the pandemic, though often
by small amounts, according to a study by Cas Mudde and Jakub Wondreys at the University of Georgia.
Only one in six gained support.
“It is possible that Covid-19 may have exposed the soft underbelly of populist politics,” Vittorio Bufacchi, a
scholar at the University College Cork, wrote last year.
The populists who indulged anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine sentiments suffered the most in polls, such as
Donald J. Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Most populists initially defied their anti-institution, anti-expert brands, pushing for forceful government
interventions and deference to scientists, Dr. Meyer found. It was another sign of circumstances favoring
left-leaning politics.
But many have since reverted to form. Populists typically rely on distrust of institutions and social
division to rule, making those habits hard to break.
Right-wing populist governments in Poland, Hungary and Slovenia face sliding poll
numbers and rising opposition movements, often led by the center-left.
Populists are faring little better in opposition . Ms. Le Pen’s far-right party faced setbacks in
French regional elections this summer. Alternative for Germany, once seen as the vanguard of the
new far-right, has been stuck or backsliding in polls. After championing anti-lockdown sentiment, it
suffered losses even in its homeland, Saxony.
This presents a challenge for center-right parties , too. For much of the 2010s, they found success
by co-opting nationalist sentiment. But this was easier when identity issues dominated politics. It has
become a political albatross, at least for now.

Courts check any residiual concerns of populism – liberal democracy ill preserve
Kamarck 21 – Founding Director, Center for Effective Public Management and Senior Fellow,
Governance Studies, Brookings Institution.
Elaine Kamarck, March 15 2021, “Is Democracy in Decline?” Council on Foreign Relations,
https://www.cfr.org/event/democracy-decline
KAMARCK: Thank you, Mara, and thank you for the Council and having us all here. I do miss doing these
things in the beautiful building in New York, but one of these days perhaps soon. I think that the
institutions of democracy passed the stress test quite well. But that doesn't mean that they'll pass the
second stress test and let me go through some of these just very quickly, to set the context. Start
with the courts, okay. First of all, I think it's important to realize that conservative judges, people
you disagree with on policy, doesn't necessarily mean anti-democratic judges. In
fact, if you look at the Trump efforts to overturn the results of the election, Trump and his
campaign filed sixty-two lawsuits. Only one did they win. The rest, including ones filed in the
Supreme Court, they lost. If you look at the four years of his attempts to roll back
regulations, 90 percent of his deregulatory actions have been stopped in the cour ts
for a whole wide variety of reasons. In other words, Donald Trump not only did not control the
courts, he was actually stopped and checked by the courts.
Look at Congress, right. Congress, we always talk about how oh, those Republicans were the lap dogs of
the administration. Well, on domestic politics the big win was the tax bill. Now, I'm sorry, I've known
Republicans, I'm a political scientist, I followed this for years and years. Republicans love to cut taxes.
They didn't need Donald Trump to cut taxes. There's nothing anti-democratic about cutting
taxes. And then if you look at foreign policy, from Syria to Yemen to Russia, Republican
senators have actually stood up to Donald Trump. And of course, the Democratic House
impeached him twice, but the Republican Senate did go ahead and hold a trial, they did not try to
do anything that was extra-constitutional.
Look at our federalist system protected by the Tenth Amendment , where governors and
states have a lot of authority independent of the president. Here when it came to several areas, but
most particularly the handling of COVID and the election, the governors and the states stood up to Trump
quite well. At one point when Trump was trying to convince the governors to open up, he
threatened to withhold medical aid, medical aid for medical devices from the states. It never
happened, it was quickly pointed out that that was illegal to do so . He backed off of
that, as he did from so many things. And of course, when it came to the election itself, we had these
heroes like Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, like Mike Shirkey in Michigan, who basically said to, who
were Republicans who voted for Trump, who said to him, no, we can't do this, that
is outside the law.
Look at the bureaucracy, alright. There's a wonderful, untold story about the Food and Drug
Administration from just several months ago, just from last year, where the White House tried
to stop them from issuing a process, or promoting a process that would have led to the delayed
emergency use authorization for the vaccines, which we now have. FDA scientists went
bananas over this. And they proceeded to essentially issue these regulations themselves in open
defiance of the White House, and the White House really couldn't do anything about it.
They bowed to the scientists at the FDA.
And finally, of course, there's the press. As far as I know, there have been no new libel laws even
introduced into Congress, let alone passed. The press, as far as I can tell, seems more than happy to
insult Donald Trump or criticize Donald Trump, but his threats didn't seem to hurt them. We do have a
more polarized press. But a polarized press is not the same as a press that has been constraine d.
So I actually think that we passed the stress test fairly well. The issue, which I think we'll talk
about more, and my colleagues will, has been the denigration of norms, particularly norms of presidential
behavior. And there, you know, the frightening thing is, what if we had a competent demagogue? What if
we had a competent demagogue who in fact used his power and use the bully pulpit to actually start to
undermine some of these laws and some of these guardrails as, and I'm sure Yascha will talk about and
John, as demagogues and dictators have in other countries. That I think is something that we Americans
saw for the very first time. And that I think is the challenge before us.
 No US Civil War---1NC/2AC
Zero chance of a civil war---only a tiny fraction are willing to fight.
Damon Linker 18. Senior correspondent; consulting editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press. “If
you think another civil war is imminent, get off Twitter.” The Week. 9/26/2018.
http://theweek.com/articles/798002/think-another-civil-war-imminent-twitter.
If you think another civil war is imminent, get off Twitter Is the United States careening toward a new civil
war? A surprisingly wide array of commentators appear to think so. In the turbulent opening months of the Trump administration,
Foreign Policy magazine asked security experts about the likelihood of the country descending into widespread civil violence over
the next 10-15 years, and the consensus put the odds at about 30 percent. Others, including The New Yorker and The Nation, have
posed the question to historians. Meanwhile, on the right, National Review, The American Conservative, and historian Niall
Ferguson have begun to take the question quite seriously, while most recently, fabled investigative journalist Carl Bernstein leavened
his CNN commentary on the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings by describing the Supreme Court nomination fight as "almost
the Gettysburg and Antietam, the absolutely essential battles" of our "cold civil war." Is it true? Should Americans on
both sides of our ideological divide be stocking up on ammunition and preparing for the
imminent outbreak of hostilities? The answer is no. It's true that politically engaged Democrats
and Republicans, progressives and conservatives, left-wing and right-wing activists and opinion
journalists increasingly despise each other and express that loathing with verbal viciousness
online. But of course a digital conflagration is quite a bit different than a real one, and
there is precious little evidence — actually, almost none — that our online warfare is
translating into real-world violence. We also have no reason, thus far, to think this will change. This
reality can be a challenge to recognize and accept. That's because the emotions triggered by antagonists on social
media are intense, and spending one's time immersed in digital battles can give the impression
that the world itself is becoming a mosh pit of hatred and rage. But it isn't. Just as one could be
forgiven for concluding from his tweets that President Trump is an actual tyrant (when in fact he's a remarkably impotent
president), so online mêlées feel like evidence of real-world civil unrest and looming violence . But
they're not. They're the expression of the passions of a small number of highly polarized,
intensely committed partisans whipping themselves into ever-greater paroxysms of rage while
most of the rest of the country goes about its business largely unaware of the tumult. If you
doubt it, compare the real world of the past couple of years with any comparable span of time
during the late 1960s or early 1970s. Political assassinations; widespread, large, and sometimes
violent protests; race riots and burning cities; regular terrorist bombings — all of this was
commonplace during those years, and all of it looks far more like the early stages of a civil war
than anything happening now. Yet of course there was no civil war in America 50 years ago.
Still less is one about to break out in the present. Instead, we have a reality-show civil war played out online, on
talk radio, and on prime time cable news, like a video game in which participants (some of them anonymous) succumb to furious
outrage and delight in provoking it in others. The virtual reality can be so convincing and all-consuming that
those immersed in it find it difficult to separate their own partially performative fury from
what's really going on around them in the wider world. Don't believe me? Consider the numbers: During prime
time, somewhere between two and three million people watch right-slanted Fox News, with Rachel Maddow's left-leaning program
on MSNBC in the same range. That's about six million viewers — or roughly 2 percent of the country — highly
engaged with highly partisan spins on the news. Twitter, which more than anything else is what feeds the
impression of a world spinning out of control, is similarly marginal. Yes, President Trump's
perpetually news-making and polarizing account has over 54 million (worldwide) followers. But his most popular tweets
typically garner around 100,000 likes, with many receiving far fewer than that. That's a
miniscule portion of the 138 million people who voted in the 2016 presidential election. Now,
as I've written about on numerous occasions, the American electorate (along with elected officeholders) is ideologically polarized
and becoming more so over time. That isn't an illusion. Democrats and Republicans increasingly view the world in profoundly
different ways. That's real, and it's bad for the country. But a civil war isn't just a function of disagreement. It's far
more a function of intensity of conviction. It costs close to nothing for a liberal to fire off an
insulting tweet about a right-wing statement on Twitter — or for a conservative to yell at the TV
screen during Tucker Carlson's latest rant about America-hating professors. But is either partisan anywhere
close to picking up a weapon, firing it in anger, and facing the prospect of being beaten or
shot in response? I'll believe it when I see it. And those are the people who care enough about political
disputes to spend time surfing partisan websites or watching ideological talk shows. What about the countless
millions of Americans who don't pay much attention to politics? Who have vaguely defined views on
everything ranging from the Supreme Court to ObamaCare's individual mandate to Ted Cruz? Who are focused on work
and love and family and find the political spectacle both extremely confusing and immensely
degrading? None of them are remotely close to reaching for a rifle, to killing and risking being
killed for some political cause. Now add in the not-inconsiderable number of Americans who
are addicted to alcohol or pain killers, or who have dropped out of the workforce and sunk into a personal
oblivion of video games, pornography, and drugs. These people may be the least likely of all to commit
themselves to an ideological fight. Put it all together and we're left with a portrait of a country in
which the vast majority is politically apathetic, disconnected, turned inward toward
their private lives, more disgusted by politics than likely roused by it to acts of war — with a tiny,
engaged minority seemingly on the edge of political violence, but only so long as it remains a largely spectator sport. That's not a
country on the verge of civil war. It's a country rapidly losing the capacity to distinguish between
a seductive digital fantasy of heroic battles waged against sinister enemies and the unedifying
reality of national dysfunction and decline.