My uncle, the prophet

 My uncle Henry Kaiser was born in 1911 and died in the late 1980s after a long career as a labor attorney.  He was the third of his 9 siblings to be born in the United States, not Ukraine, and the second, I believe, to attend college.  After graduating from Brooklyn College he attended the University of Wisconsin Law School--joining my father in Madison during his undergraduate degrees--even though their family, by that time, had fallen on hard economic times. He began his legal career before the war, working as a counsel for the American Federation of Labor, and was eventually drafted, becoming a civil affairs officer in France after D-Day.  In 1946 he argued the biggest case of his career before the Supreme Court: the contempt case against John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers, who had refused to return to work during a strike after a court issued an injunction that it had no legal right to issue.  During my college years I spent parts of two summers living in his house in Chevy Chase along with his wife and my two cousins.  We had a wonderful relationship and got to know each other very well.  He was, like me, something of a contrarian who reached his own opinions about everything.  Some of them differed significantly from the standard New Deal/Great Society views of my father and most of the people in his orbit.  I frequently argued with him, but I learned a lot.

To put it bluntly, Uncle Henry was never convinced that the vast expansion of the federal government's power over the economy had done more good than harm.  He was a brilliant negotiator and felt that the unions he represented, including the musicians and bakers' unions, could perfectly well work out their problems with management on their own.  He once volunteered that he did not think that the labor movement in the long run had benefited from the 1935 Wagner Act, which established a legal right to organize and set up the NLRB and the whole mechanism for securing government-recognized union recognition.  That was partly, he later elaborated, because in 1946 the Wagner Act had been amended in a very anti-union manner by the Taft Hartley Law, but also because he did not trust government interference.  He had seen the development of the whole network of Washington law firms and lobbyists who made so much money out of trying to bend government regulation to the interests of their clients.  And in the last decades of his life he became very concerned with changes in the legal profession more broadly, and by the growing tendency of institutions, including the government, to sue one another over almost everything.  The increasing corruption of administrative processes, he once said, might eventually tempt the American people to turn to a strongman.

I still do not think that my uncle was entirely right, because I think the New Deal did lasting good for the American people, and because I see no alternative to substantial bureaucratic authority in modern society.  Now however that most of the New Deal legacy is utterly dead--including its attempts to secure the rights of labor--I often find myself thinking that he had a point.  Such a moment occurred this morning when I opened this Wall Street Journal article about the fate of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.  It revolves around 48-year old Mike Davis, a lawyer from Iowa with huge corporate clients who has the ear of the White House and some of the leading figures in the Justice Department.   Like Pete Hegseth, Davis apparently won Trump's heart by repeatedly defending him on cable news shows, in Davis's case after Trump was indicted for refusing to return classified documents he had taken to Mara Lago after 2021.He has been threatening the leaders of the Antitrust Division with ruin if they do not approve certain antitrust settlements, and has evidently driven the head of the division, Gail Slater, and two of her deputies, out of their jobs.  Davis denies this, but one of the deputies has sworn to it under oath. Davis has now filed suit to get that deputy, one Roger Alford, disbarred.  He has also used contacts with Trump and Attorney General Bondi to get a settlement for Live Nation, one of the nation's leading ticket brokers, that is much more favorable to them than what the antitrust division had proposed.

To put it another way, while the antitrust division was originally designed to stop monopolistic practices that cost consumers money and strangle competition, now its existence allows lawyers like Davis to make millions of dollars by using political influence to get its decisions overturned to favor their clients.  They couldn't have earned that money if we had no antitrust laws or antitrust enforcement.  That was exactly the kind of development that drove my uncle crazy.  Now, more than 35 years after his death, we see how much worse it could get.

I still find the impulse to create impartial bureaucracies to secure more economic justice for our citizens was a noble one, but Uncle Henry rightly recognized how easily it could be corrupted and turned into a new income stream for lawyers.  Like nearly everything else that President Trump is doing, this isn't an entirely new development by any means, but he and his team have pushed it to an entirely new level. There is no vaccine for this disease and there never will be, and the cure takes generations to find.  In the long run now law or constitution is stronger than human nature, and history remains a struggle between different parts of our brains.