Lina Khan: Woke and anti-woke serve Big Business: Biden's FTC chair speaks out

Sohrab Ahmari
August 30, 2025

Not long ago, Lina Khan embodied an emerging bipartisan consensus on the future of the US economy. Out was Bush-Obama-style deference to Big Business. In its place, populists of the Left and Right promoted industrial policy, state capacity, and curbs on the market power that allows the asset-rich to lord it over workers and consumers. They called this new consensus “post-neoliberalism” (not exactly a snappy coinage, but it did the job).

Well, so much for that.

“If you’re passing legislation that is effectively giving huge tax cuts to the rich and stripping away Medicaid, that speaks for itself,” Khan tells me in an interview Thursday, referring to President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. “It’s difficult to paint that in any type of populist brush…. It’s very much a continuation of the kind of Reagan-Bush-type philosophy: ‘Let’s concentrate wealth upwards, and maybe it’ll trickle down.’”

SNIP
What does Khan make of Abundance? “I haven’t seen any credible analysis that suggested why Democrats lost was we didn’t have enough donors on our side,” she says. “I just haven’t seen that presented in a convincing way.” Indeed, Harris had the backing of one tech heavyweight, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who called for Khan’s head as the price of ongoing support. “There’s some prominent tech donors who are opposed to the antitrust and competition work that we were doing.” Some of those donors are now throwing their weight behind Abundance.

https://unherd.com/2025/08/lina-khan-woke-and-anti-woke-are-tools-of-big-business/