I recently taped an interview with Bruce Collins, a nationally-aired radio host, on antitrust issues. We discuss the state of antitrust, the drift toward what I call “conservative socialism,” and why my father's warnings about the erosion of neutral principles feel more urgent than ever. I argue that both the Biden and Trump administrations, in different ways, have moved antitrust enforcement away from objective standards and toward political discretion. And once that once that discipline goes, it's very hard to get back!
Enjoy!
Your father, Robert Bork, Sr, was such a significant figure in American legal history—looking back now, what do you think he understood about the direction of the country that feels especially relevant today?
My father understood something that I think we are only now fully rediscovering—that the greatest threat to a free society doesn’t usually come in the form of open confrontation with the Constitution, but in its gradual reinterpretation to serve political ends.
He saw very clearly that when judges, regulators, or political actors begin to substitute their own values for neutral principles, whether in constitutional law or in economic policy, you don’t just get bad decisions, you get a breakdown of the rule of law itself. The system stops being predictable, and it starts becoming discretionary. And discretionary power is where liberty goes to die.
What feels especially relevant today is his warning that this wouldn’t stay confined to the courts. Once the idea takes hold that outcomes matter more than principles, it spreads—to administrative agencies, to antitrust enforcement, to corporate governance. You begin to see law used as a tool to engineer social or political outcomes rather than to protect a neutral framework for competition and freedom.
In antitrust, for example, he was very clear: if you abandon the consumer welfare standard in favor of vague political goals, whether that’s fairness, industrial policy, or social objectives—you open the door to arbitrary enforcement. And once enforcement becomes arbitrary, it becomes political.
I think he would look at the current moment and say: this is exactly the trajectory I warned about—not because any one policy is catastrophic, but because the underlying discipline of neutral principles is eroding.
And once that discipline goes, it’s very hard to get it back.
Your new book, The New Paradox, addresses conservative socialism. What is conservative socialism?
Conservative socialism is the idea that you can use the tools of government—regulation, antitrust enforcement, industrial policy—not just to protect markets, but to direct them toward preferred social or political outcomes, while still calling that “pro-market” or “pro-American.”
It’s a paradox because it comes from the right. Traditionally, conservatives argued for neutral rules, limited government, and letting competition determine outcomes. But what we’re seeing now is a shift—some on the right are becoming comfortable using state power to shape markets: picking winners and losers, punishing disfavored companies, or steering capital in the name of national strength, cultural goals, or fairness.
At that point, you’re no longer defending capitalism, you’re managing it.
And the danger, which my father warned about in a different context, is that once you abandon neutral principles—like the consumer welfare standard in antitrust—you don’t get better outcomes, you get more discretion. And more discretion means more politics.
So “conservative socialism” isn’t just a label—it’s a warning. It’s what happens when the right adopts the means of the left, even if it believes it’s pursuing different ends.
Having had a front-row seat to your father’s life and career, is there anything about him that the public didn’t fully understand—but you think they should have?
I think what the public often missed was how deeply principled—and actually how restrained—he was.
He was portrayed as a kind of ideological figure, someone eager to impose his views. But the reality was almost the opposite. What drove him was a belief that judges and policymakers should not impose their personal preferences. He believed in discipline — in sticking to neutral principles even when they led to outcomes you might not personally like.
That’s a harder position than it sounds. It requires a kind of intellectual humility that’s rare in public life.
The other thing people didn’t fully appreciate was his sense of humor and his warmth. He could be very funny, very human, and very aware of the absurdities of the moment—even at the height of the confirmation battle. That part of him didn’t really come through in the public narrative.
And finally, I think people underestimated how forward-looking he was. Many of the debates we’re having today—about the role of courts, the politicization of law, the use of economic regulation to achieve social goals—he saw coming decades ago.
So, if there’s one thing I wish people understood better, it’s this: he wasn’t trying to shape the country in his image. He was trying to preserve a system where no one gets to do that.
You are the President of the Antitrust Education Project; can you tell us more about this?
The Antitrust Education Project is a nonprofit dedicated to promoting sound, economics-based antitrust policy—what I would call the consumer welfare approach.
Our core mission is educational. We work to explain why antitrust law should focus on protecting competition and consumers—not be repurposed as a tool for broader political or social objectives. That includes engaging with policymakers, supporting research, filing amicus briefs where appropriate, and helping elevate serious scholarships in this space.
Right now, there’s a real risk that antitrust is being pulled away from objective standards and toward more discretionary, politically driven enforcement. We think that’s a mistake—not just economically, but legally—because it undermines predictability and ultimately harms consumers.
So, what we’re trying to do is bring clarity and discipline back into the conversation. Not ideology—discipline. The idea that antitrust should be grounded in evidence, economics, and the rule of law.
Where do you see signs of conservative socialism within the Trump administration?
I think you see elements of what I call “conservative socialism” in the willingness to use state power to shape market outcomes—often in ways that depart from traditional, rules-based conservatism.
Take trade policy under Donald Trump. The use of tariffs wasn’t just about addressing discrete unfair practices; it became a broader tool to steer industrial outcomes—effectively deciding which sectors should be protected and which should bear the cost. That’s a form of government-directed market shaping.
You also see it in antitrust rhetoric. There were moments where enforcement—or at least the threat of it—appeared tied to concerns about the speech or political posture of large technology firms. Once antitrust becomes a lever to discipline companies for non-economic reasons, you’ve moved away from neutral principles and toward discretionary power.
Another area is industrial policy—efforts to favor domestic production or particular industries not just for national security, but as a general economic strategy. Again, the question isn’t whether any one policy is justified, but whether you’re normalizing the idea that government should be actively directing private economic outcomes.
And that’s really the thread: when you move from setting the rules of the game to influencing the results of the game, you’re no longer just defending markets—you’re managing them.
That’s what I mean by conservative socialism.
What is the job of antitrust regulators?
At its core, the job of antitrust regulators is to protect competition—not competitors, and not political outcomes, but the competitive process itself.
That means preventing conduct that harms consumers: things like price-fixing, collusion, exclusionary practices that block rivals unfairly, or mergers that would likely reduce competition and lead to higher prices, lower quality, or less innovation.
The key point—and this is where my father was very clear—is that antitrust is supposed to be grounded in objective, economically coherent standards. In the United States, which has traditionally meant the consumer welfare standard: are consumers better or worse off as a result of a given practice?
Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division are not supposed to be referees of fairness in some broad social sense, and they’re certainly not supposed to be tools for advancing political agendas. Their role is narrower—but also more important: to enforce clear rules that keep markets competitive and predictable.
When they do that well, you get lower prices, better products, and more innovation. When they move beyond that—when they start trying to engineer outcomes—you risk turning antitrust into something arbitrary and political.
And once that happens, you don’t just lose economic efficiency, you lose the rule of law in this area.
What was the Biden administration’s approach to antitrust and is this approach different under President Trump?
The Biden administration took what I would describe as a structural and ideological shift in antitrust. Under leaders like Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter at the Antitrust Division, there was a move away from the traditional consumer welfare standard toward a broader set of goals about market structure, concentration, labor effects, and even political power.
That translated into more aggressive merger challenges, skepticism of large firms as such, and a willingness to bring cases that might not have succeeded under the prior, more economic-driven framework. You also saw a greater openness to using antitrust as part of a larger effort to reshape markets, not just police them.
Now, under Donald Trump—at least in his earlier term—you saw something different in tone but not always in direction. On paper, there was more rhetorical support for traditional antitrust principles. But in practice, there were moments when enforcement risked becoming politicized in a different way, particularly in how large technology firms were discussed.
So, the contrast isn’t as simple as “one was aggressive and the other was restrained.” The Biden approach was more openly transformative—explicitly rethinking the goals of antitrust. The Trump-era approach was less ideologically systematic, but at times showed a willingness to use antitrust or regulatory pressure in a more ad hoc, politically inflected way.
And that’s really the point I make in The New Paradox: both approaches, in different ways, risk moving away from neutral, rules-based enforcement. One does it in the name of restructuring markets; the other can do it in the name of reacting to perceived political or cultural concerns.
The common danger is the same—greater discretion, less predictability, and ultimately a more politicized antitrust regime.
Can you talk about President Trump’s antitrust regulators and the plight of CBS News and Skydance media, as chronicled in your book, The New Paradox?
What I argue in The New Paradox is that the Trump-era approach to antitrust, while not ideologically coherent in the way the Biden approach is, still revealed something important—and concerning—about the direction of policy.
If you look at leadership at the Antitrust Division under Makan Delrahim, there was, in many respects, a return to more traditional, economics-based analysis. Delrahim, for example, emphasized vertical merger guidelines and tried to ground enforcement in established doctrine.
But at the same time, there was a broader political environment under Donald Trump in which large media and technology companies—particularly those perceived as hostile—were openly criticized and, at times, implicitly threatened with regulatory scrutiny.
The CBS–Skydance situation, as I describe it in the book, becomes illustrative of that tension. When transactions involving major media entities like CBS News and Skydance Media are viewed through a political lens—whether fairly or not—you introduce uncertainty into what should be a legal and economic analysis.
And that’s the key point: antitrust enforcement depends on credibility. It has to be seen as neutral, predictable, and grounded in law and economics. Once market participants begin to believe that outcomes may turn on political considerations—who you are, what you say, or how you’re perceived, you’ve already weakened the system.
So, the lesson I draw isn’t that Trump’s regulators abandoned economics across the board—they didn’t. It’s that even a partially politicized environment can undermine confidence in the neutrality of enforcement.
And once that confidence erodes, you don’t just get different outcomes, you get a different kind of system.
We know that the IRS was weaponized in the past for its’ treatment of conservative groups as well as social media censorship. Is censorship a problem from the right side of the aisle also?
I think the honest answer is yes—censorship, or pressure on speech, is a risk from any direction once you accept the premise that power should be used to shape outcomes rather than protect neutral principles.
We’ve seen well-documented concerns on the left—whether involving government pressure on platforms, or the treatment of certain groups by agencies like the IRS. Those episodes raised serious rule-of-law issues.
But the right is not immune to the same temptation. You’re now seeing calls from some conservatives to use government power—whether through regulation, antitrust, or platform mandates—to discipline or control the behavior of large technology companies based on their perceived bias or speech policies.
At that point, the justification changes, but the mechanism is the same: government pressure influencing private speech.
And that’s really the line that matters. A free society depends on the idea that the government doesn’t get to decide which viewpoints are favored or disfavored—directly or indirectly. Once you open that door, it rarely stays confined to one side.
So, my view is consistent with the broader theme of The New Paradox: the danger isn’t just what one side is doing, it’s the erosion of neutral principles that restrain everyone.
Because once those restraints weaken, the tools of censorship become available to whoever holds power next.
Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future?
I’m cautiously optimistic—but only if we’re honest about the risks.
The United States has an extraordinary capacity for self-correction. We’ve gone through periods before when institutions were strained, where legal principles were bent, and we’ve found our way back. That resilience is real.
But what gives me pause is that many of the pressures we’re seeing now—whether it’s the politicization of law, the erosion of neutral principles, or the growing comfort with using government power to shape outcomes—are coming from multiple directions at once. That’s new. And it makes course correction harder.
So, my optimism isn’t automatic. It depends on whether we’re willing to recommit to first principles: the rule of law, limits on government power, and the idea that the system should be neutral, not outcome driven.
If we do that, I think the country’s future is very strong.
If we don’t, then the risk isn’t some dramatic collapse, it’s a slow drift into a more discretionary, more politicized system.
And history suggests that once you drift far enough in that direction, it’s very difficult to turn back.