Through the end of 2028, US structural antitrust enforcement against the dominant digital platforms (Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple) will persist as one of the few enforcement domains that survives an administration change intact — the Trump DOJ Antitrust Division and FTC will maintain, and in at least one case escalate, the major monopolization actions inherited from the prior administration rather than abandoning them. BUT the shared enforcement target will mask two non-fungible and increasingly polarized theories of harm: the anti-monopoly left will continue to denominate the harm in economic-concentration terms (a neo-Brandeisian revival of the Progressive/New Deal 'curse of bigness' — market power, labor and supplier squeeze, the successor to the consumer-welfare standard), while the ascendant right will denominate the SAME structural target in viewpoint/informational terms (platform 'censorship,' content-moderation as a monopoly abuse, the 'woke monopoly'). The concrete, near-term falsifier: at least one major remedy or enforcement action against a dominant platform will be pursued or publicly justified by the Trump-era enforcers primarily through a content-moderation / viewpoint-discrimination frame rather than a price/output/concentration frame. Antitrust thus functions as a convergent VETO on concentrated private power that both polarized camps want to wield — for opposite reasons — reframed from a discretionary 'may' (Chicago-School consumer-welfare enforcement) into a deontic 'must' (a democratic imperative against domination) whose necessity each side grounds in an incompatible account of what domination is.

ANTITRUST connects to POLARIZATION through an inversion of the naive expectation. The surface intuition is that polarization fragments everything: a domain touched by partisan sorting should split into two enforcement postures, one party enforcing and the other dismantling. The prediction asserts the opposite structural shape — antitrust against platforms becomes a rare CONVERGENT target precisely because concentrated platform power is a domination-object legible to both anti-monopoly traditions at once, but polarization does not disappear; it migrates from the TARGET to the RATIONALE. This is the pastiche-convergence of note 119 transposed to enforcement: agreement on the form (the shared veto) without agreement on the content (the theory of harm), bound by in-group-bias that lets each camp read its own antitrust as principled and the other’s as weaponized. ANACHRONISM is the enabling condition: antitrust is a reactivated Progressive/New Deal instrument whose original theory — that economic concentration is a threat to self-government, not merely to prices (Brandeis’s ‘curse of bigness’) — was buried for four decades under the Chicago-School consumer-welfare standard and is now exhumed. Its very anachronism is functional: a tool built for railroads and Standard Oil carries a theory broad enough (‘concentration → domination’) to be re-denominated by the right as ‘informational concentration → viewpoint domination’ and by the left as ‘market concentration → economic domination.’ The dead form is picked up by two hands reaching for different things. VETO names what both hands want: antitrust as a structural veto point on private concentrated power — the one instrument that can compel divestiture, block acquisition, and discipline a gatekeeper. Both polarized camps covet the veto because both experience platform power as a domination they cannot otherwise reach (the left through markets and labor, the right through the public sphere and speech). MUST closes the chain as the deontic transformation: antitrust shifts modality from the discretionary ‘may’ of consumer-welfare efficiency-optimization (enforce only where prices demonstrably rise) to an anti-domination ‘must’ (concentration is intolerable as such). The neo-Brandeisians articulate a ‘must’ grounded in republican political economy; the populist right independently articulates a ‘must’ grounded in the corruption of the public sphere. The shared deontic register is what makes the convergence robust against ordinary administration-change de-prioritization — a ‘must’ is not dropped the way a ‘may’ is — while the incompatible groundings of the two ‘musts’ are what keep the rationale polarized. The whole chain is one mechanism at five magnifications: antitrust is the veto; the veto is coveted convergently; polarization relocates to the rationale; the anachronistic breadth of the tool is what permits two rationales to share one instrument; and the deontic ‘must’ is what stabilizes the convergence against the fragmenting pull of the very polarization that colors its justifications.