In recent weeks, Sohrab Ahmari, known as a leading intellectual exponent of belligerent Trumpian conservatism, has been doing the rounds to explain why he is giving up on right-wing populism.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration; his new book, “Tyranny, Inc.,” about the atrocities of corporate power in America, features writings by leading populist Republicans like Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. But he describes these figures as “exceptions on the right,” whose willingness to consider interventionist economic policies contrasts with the broader trend in which populism “change into a niche/trashy online media product”, with no policy content beyond resentment of the elites.
No doubt Ahmari’s liberal readers would answer: that’s how it’s always been! But part of the reason the “Tyranny, Inc.” The author and his entourage received so much attention in the Trump era is that the era of populism has actually distorted the economic orthodoxies on the right.
The Trump administration often failed, as Ahmari laments, to warm up to Reaganite policymaking. But Trump’s victorious campaign has effectively negated, at least for a while, the Tea Party-era emphasis on entitlement reform and hard money. And Trump has continued elements of his economic nationalism — while the Biden administration has embraced similar ideas about trade and infrastructure, to the point where it’s fair to say that both sides have been reshaped by Trump’s ’16 campaign.
Meanwhile, a populist intellectual ecosystem exists on the right, through think tanks like American Compass and magazines like American Affairs and Ahmari’s own Compact, where there was little more than a proliferation of gadflies before the Trump era. The Hawley-Rubio-JD Vance faction in the Senate is small, but more influential than any past equivalent. And Trump himself, the Republican leader, is still making promises: new cities! new rates! flying cars! – which resemble industrial policy more than supply-side economics.
So why does Ahmari despair about his case? In part, he’s factoring in forces he’s probably underestimated before: the popular libertarianism of the Republican Party’s donor base and the cynicism of the celebrity-industrial complex.
But then Ahmari is also disillusioned because, while remaining socially conservative, he has personally moved further to the left than some of his fellow populists.
With its powerful anecdotes of corporate crime and its (slightly exaggerated) account of the brutality of American economic life, “Tyranny, Inc.” is a book more in the pessimistic vein of Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” than—well, to take a personal example, than “Grand New Party,” the book I co-authored with Reihan Salam fifteen years ago. wrote, arguing for a more populist conservatism. Ahmari sometimes describes his vision of American capitalism as closely paralleling that of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and there is simply no way to bring the full Sanders vision into the current Republican coalition; in that sense, he is right to consider himself politically homeless.
Finally, however, Ahmari does not always fully consider how recent material and cultural changes complicate his argument that cultural renewal depends on economic transformation—that “attempts to change culture without reforming the economy are futile at best.”
If so, how about the fact that the US economy was arguably worse ten or twenty years ago, yet the culture was healthier than it is now?
When Barack Obama ran for president, inequality had increased since the 1980s and the health care safety net had a significant gap. When Trump ran for president, household income had stagnated since 2000 and economic policymakers had allowed the unemployment rate to remain unnecessarily high.
But today inequality may even be declining, wages have generally risen and are rising faster for the working class, unemployment is extremely low, and we are closer to universal health care than we were 20 years ago. Meanwhile, the big Biden-era problem for wage earners has been a spike in inflation, which Bernie Sanders’ agenda seems ill-equipped to address.
But despite these economic improvements, the cultural fabric looks more frayed than ever, with liberals and conservatives alike worried about the slow fading of church and family, crime and homelessness returning to America’s cities, while a haze of marijuana settles over twenty, with a mental desperation that overshadows every social rank.
You can blame Covid for deepening this era of bad feelings. You could argue that our social malaise only shows that the economic improvements have not gone far enough. And you can blame certain social trends – teen internet addiction, for example – on bad actors in big business.
But in terms of priority and urgency, I wonder if the harder socially conservative side of Ahmari – the anti-pot, anti-porn, anti-crime aspects of his politics, shall we say – is actually more relevant to our situation than the New-Deal liberal side which brings him new interest from the left.
Cultural conservatism absolutely needs economic policies, and corporate power absolutely shapes culture. But our own social crisis feels a little less economically determined in 2023, a little more culturally real than at any other point in my adult life.
