Barry Lynn had spent years trying to convince American politicians to worry about corporate concentration. It was, in his words, like pushing a boulder up the hill throughout much of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. That began to change with a fortuitous phone call he received in February 2016.

The staff of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) invited Lynn, executive director of an antitrust think tank thats now called the Open Markets Institute, to a policy discussion over dinner. He could bring any other experts he wanted.

Warren, a markets enthusiast and former Republican who had become one of the countrys foremost experts on financial regulation, had an inkling that the consolidation problem plaguing Wall Street might be affecting other sectors of the economy, and she wanted to learn more.

Lynn brought along Teddy Downey, editor of a financial policy-focused Capitol Hill newsletter , and two committed anti-monopolists: Lina Khan, then a Yale law student, and Jonathan Kanter, a corporate lawyer who had been a Federal Trade Commission staffer.

Five years later, President Joe Biden named Khan to lead the Federal Trade Commission. Kanter is Bidens nominee to lead the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. One of Warrens protgs, now a top staffer at Bidens National Economic Council, played a leading role in drafting a July 9 executive order declaring a whole-of-government approach to combating corporate consolidation and unfair competition in the U.S. economy.

That executive order was the most important statement about regulating economic power since the New Deal, said Lynn, a former business journalist convinced by the disruptive effects of a Taiwanese earthquake in 1999 that federal antitrust enforcement should return to its more aggressive Rooseveltian roots.

In Lynns eyes, the march toward Bidens early and wholehearted embrace of the anti-monopoly movement and the first possibility of real government action against decades of corporate concentration began with Warren peppering the quartet with questions over a light buffet in her office.

Inspired by what she heard, Warren would go on to deliver a speech in June 2016 about reigniting competition in the American economy at Open Markets.

The country needs more competition and more competitors to accelerate economic growth, more competition to promote innovation and more competition to reduce the ability of giant corporations to use their money and power to bend government policy and regulation to benefit themselves, she declared.

If the 2008 financial crisis, in which the government bailed out too big to fail Wall Street banks, had shown the country the dangers of corporate consolidation, Warren, in conjunction with figures like Lynn, was beginning to prescribe solutions proportionate to the scale of the problem.

People were waking up every day with bruises all over their bodies, Lynn said. We helped them see the fist.

Warrens speech was the first of several inflection points, fostered by a feisty cadre of public intellectuals and political insiders, that propelled aggressive antitrust enforcement to the heights of power in Washington, culminating in Bidens embrace.

Im a proud capitalist. I spent most of my career representing the corporate state of Delaware. I know America cant succeed unless American business succeeds, Biden said when unveiling the executive order earlier this month. But let me be very clear: Capitalism without competition isnt capitalism; its exploitation.

Other pivotal moments included Donald Trumps election and the role that Big Tech played in his success, the New America Foundations expulsion of Lynns think tank at the behest of Google, the prominence of antitrust policy in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and the successful persuasion of Biden and his inner circle of advisers that curbing monopoly power was both essential policy and smart politics.

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