Tyrants of Industry

To win a second term, former U.S. President Donald Trump will need to continue to attract the working-class voters who helped give him his first victory in 2016 and almost handed him a second in 2020. People from this category constitute a majority of eligible voters across the nation and make up an even higher percentage of the electorate in the crucial swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The drift of less educated and less affluent Americans away from the Democratic Party did not begin with Trump. Indeed, Trump’s success with these groups is best understood as the culmination of a long process that commentators have described as the “class inversion of American politics,” with most professionals now supporting Democrats and more working-class people backing Republicans.

Trump’s ability to take advantage of this trend has often been attributed to his exploitation of social and cultural grievances, but voters also viewed him as less economically conservative and more sympathetic to working-class interests than previous Republican leaders. As in other areas, Trump’s policies did not exactly bear out the rhetoric. Although he shifted Republican positions on some economic issues—notably trade—he did not pursue economic policies that disproportionately benefited working-class Americans.

Given the political importance of these voters, it is not surprising that some on the right have called for a further shift away from the GOP’s traditionally conservative economic platform. Perhaps the most interesting and unexpected of these calls comes from the writer and pundit Sohrab Ahmari in Tyranny, Inc. His book is neither a policy brief for Trump nor a partisan attack on the Biden administration. Instead, it takes aim at contemporary capitalism and what Ahmari sees as the failures of both parties to rein in a private sector whose power has become a threat not only to the country’s economic well-being but to Americans’ freedom and liberty, as well. By getting readers to recognize this threat, Ahmari aims to build support for a new relationship between government and capitalism that would enable the former to control the pernicious economic and political consequences of the latter.

CORPORATE TAKEOVER

In many ways, Ahmari may seem a surprising figure to be making a case against contemporary U.S. capitalism. He began his career as an editor and commentator for conservative publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and The New York Post. In the 2010s, he converted to Catholicism and evolved into a right-wing culture warrior, expressing sympathy for Donald Trump and Hungary’s autocratic leader Viktor Orban and penning jeremiads against identity politics. In 2019, he gained notoriety for his attack on David French, at the time a National Review writer and fellow conservative Christian who had argued that the culture wars could be fought civilly. Christians, Ahmari responded, needed to understand that they were involved in a real war and should fight accordingly, leaving unclear what that meant.

Ahmari’s evolution took another turn in 2022, when he co-founded the magazine Compact with two other heterodox thinkers, one a fellow religious conservative, the other a dissident Marxist. Reflecting the diverse backgrounds of its founders, Compact describes its mission as promoting “a strong social-democratic state that defends community—local and national, familial and religious—against a libertine left and a libertarian right.” Now, in Tyranny, Inc., Ahmari has moved even further from his earlier work, setting aside cultural concerns and redirecting his anger toward American capitalism and its corrosive effects on democracy.

Although many books have criticized the economic harms of contemporary capitalism—rising inequality, financial insecurity, and so on—Tyranny, Inc. also highlights capitalism’s destructive political consequences. The current version of American capitalism, he argues, has generated vast inequalities in power that have allowed companies to coerce their workers, undermined choice and freedom, and turned politics into a game in which “one side lacks the power to play while the other side is structurally set up to win.”

Take employment and workplace law. Rather than merely providing clear expectations about the terms and conditions of employment, many employment contracts now give employers sweeping control over workers, even beyond the workplace. Corporations may surveil employees’ web browsing and email and punish them for taking bathroom breaks deemed too long. They can even compel workers to listen to political speech. Ahmari cites news reports showing that, in 2019, workers at a Royal Dutch Shell plant in Pennsylvania were told that they would not receive overtime pay if they refused to attend a speech by Trump. Employers can also prevent employees from speaking out about abusive workplace conditions, even enforcing gag orders on former employees who file wrongful termination lawsuits.

Alternatively, companies may require employees to use special arbitration courts to resolve disputes. This is an onerous process that can be prohibitively expensive for the employee, and its rules and procedures have been designed by the company for its own benefit, in contrast to the legal system in a democracy, in which all citizens are theoretically equal before the law. In one U.S. worker’s contract, Ahmari writes, Uber Eats required that “any dispute be resolved using individual, private mediation” and that arbitration proceedings would be held at the International Chamber of Commerce in Amsterdam. “In practice,” Ahmari writes, it meant that a worker “would have had to pay an up-front fee of $14,500 just to begin the process”—obviously daunting costs for an Uber driver earning approximately $2,000 a month.

Perhaps corporations’ greatest damage to democracy has been their long campaign to undermine labor unions. By enabling workers to confront employers collectively rather than individually, unions help workers bargain more effectively over wages, benefits, and workplace conditions, as well as pursue labor’s shared interests in the political arena. As Ahmari notes, one of the major achievements of the New Deal in the 1930s was the National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the right to organize and soon led to a federal minimum wage, guaranteed overtime pay, and other regulations and policies that contributed to diminishing inequality and rising living standards after the Great Depression. By the 1950s, more than 30 percent of the U.S. labor force was unionized. But union membership had shrunk to just 10 percent by 2022, largely thanks to a concerted anti-union strategy by much of the corporate sector, aided and abetted by a conservative, pro-business legal movement and the Republican Party.

Tyranny, Inc. describes the myriad tools U.S. companies use to discredit unions and prevent workers from building or joining them, including by firing employees they consider troublesome, threatening to shut down workplaces if workers vote for unions, and spying on employees’ efforts to organize. These labor-busting tactics may be deployed despite the progressive political leanings of the owners. Ahmari tells the story of a podcast that REI, the outdoor-gear chain, prepared for its workers. The podcast began with the company’s chief diversity officer declaring, “I use she/her pronouns and am speaking to you today from the traditional lands of the Ohlone people,” before moving on to her main purpose of warning workers not to join a union.

American capitalism has undermined choice and freedom.

Contemporary American capitalism has not only diminished the power of some groups while enhancing that of others, making a mockery of the political equality that is the foundation of any real democracy. It has also led to a rollback of a broad array of government regulations and services, which has reduced the quality of life of many citizens and contributed to a fraying of the country’s social fabric. For example, emergency services such as firefighting and ambulances have long been considered public goods. Now, as Ahmari observes, they are being outsourced, especially in underserved rural areas, to profit-seeking private companies, with the result that residents often pay exorbitant prices for deficient services. Since citizens often cannot choose between public and private emergency services, they risk incurring thousands of dollars of debt with a call to 911—presenting a wrenching dilemma, particularly for the poor. How are Americans, Ahmari wonders, supposed to see themselves as part of a common national community if membership in that community means less and less?

Ahmari argues that such abuses persist and have even increased partly because of another consequence of unrestrained capitalism—the emergence of “news deserts” in many parts of the country, principally in regions with poorer, less educated people where public accountability is especially needed. This phenomenon is not simply the outcome of vanishing advertising revenue and the rise of the Internet. As Ahmari observes, it has also been caused by cost-cutting Wall Street investors, who have gobbled up local newspapers and television stations with little interest in the longterm survival of local news. Nor do these investors seem to care that without these outlets, local abuses of power are much more likely to go unreported on and therefore unpunished.

Ahmari repeatedly stresses that these effects are not inevitable. Rather, they are the product of political choices made over many decades. For example, both parties have embraced neoliberal economic ideas and policies that have undercut the power of working Americans, enhanced the power of wealthy corporate elites, and weakened the ability of government to counter this tilt. Different political choices, accordingly, could reverse these problems. As Ahmari sees it, the goal must be to move away from a vision of capitalism in which markets have continually expanded at the expense of government oversight. Instead, he argues, the United States should aim to create a new economic order, in which a strong “social democratic” state keeps “markets in their proper place.” But what would that look like in practice?

CHRISTIANS INTO DEMOCRATS

Although less familiar in the United States, the term “social democracy” has long been a part of the political lexicon elsewhere, especially in Europe, where parties bearing this name have been important political actors. More generally, social democracy refers to a distinct understanding of the relationship between capitalism and government, one that is based on the “primacy of politics”—that is, the idea that political power could and should be used to control the downsides of capitalism.

In contrast to their communist and Marxist counterparts, social democrats have historically accepted that capitalism was the best engine of economic growth and innovation. But unlike classical liberals, social democrats also feared the downsides of an unfettered market economy. In Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, this led them to build strong social safety nets, empower unions, and regulate the operation of markets in other ways. But social democrats also differed from the type of reformists and progressive liberals that have typically dominated the Democratic Party in the United States, except during the New Deal era, in which a more social democratic understanding of the economy emerged. Progressive U.S. liberals acknowledge that capitalism can produce such negative effects as economic inequality and insecurity, and that government needs policies to ameliorate them. But in general, these reformers have not been much concerned with addressing capitalism’s destructive political consequences, as well. Social democrats, on the other hand, explicitly assert that all economics is political—that the rules governing the economy shape political as well as economic outcomes, most notably the relative power of various socioeconomic groups.

In recent decades in the United States, however, it is not the left but neoliberal conservatives who have grasped that reshaping the economic rules inevitably means reshaping power relationships in society. They have, as Ahmari puts it, engaged in “a generational effort” to weaken the political power of workers and obscure the reality that “private actors can imperil freedom just as much as overweening governments.” Yet social democracy involves more than a state capable of constraining capitalism’s negative economic and political consequences. In addition to the primacy of politics, social democrats have traditionally shown a strong commitment to liberal democracy.

Social democrats viewed the democratic state both as the best tool for constraining capitalism and as the only political system consistent with the liberal values they held. The most important of those values is the ability of individuals to make their own life choices, free from political, social, or economic coercion. Such a commitment to individual freedom, liberty, and the pluralism that follows from it conflicts, however, with Ahmari’s previous positions. In the past, he has railed against those who prize “autonomy above all” and aim “to secure for the individual will the widest possible berth to define what is true and good and beautiful, against the authority of tradition.” It is the task of government, Ahmari has argued, to protect and promote the “common good” rather than maximizing private autonomy or liberty. If one assumes that Ahmari remains committed to some version of his earlier positions, then social democracy is the wrong solution for him. What other political traditions, then, might be compatible with his calls for a new economic order?

Perhaps the most obvious is right-wing populism. In populist efforts to remake the economy, Europe may be ahead of the United States. Many European rightwing populist parties abandoned neoliberal and conservative economic policies a couple of decades ago, instead attacking globalization and free trade, advocating for a strong national state, promising to protect social welfare policies, and more generally claiming to champion the “left-behinds.” This reorientation has helped France’s National Rally, the Austrian Freedom Party, the Sweden Democrats, and other European rightwing populist parties become the largest or close to the largest working-class parties in their countries. These parties have not, however, paired their leftward economic shift with a commitment to political liberalism. And how committed they are to democracy remains unclear.

This is certainly true of the Trumpist version of the Republican Party, which has made clear its disdain not merely for pluralism and individual rights but also for democracy itself. In his culture-warrior days, Ahmari certainly expressed something resembling rightwing populist views. But if his rejection of tyranny is principled, then embracing the Trumpist GOP, even if it shifts away from an embrace of neoliberal, free-market capitalism, is not an option since it would simply create a different form of tyranny.

European Christian democrats have accepted multiparty democracy.

There is, however, another political tradition consistent with the kind of constraints on capitalism Ahmari advocates: post-1945 Christian democracy. Unlike right-wing populism, Christian democracy coheres with at least some of the traditional or religious values Ahmari championed earlier in his career while also maintaining a strong commitment to democratic institutions. Like social democracy, Christian democracy has not played an important role in the United States, but it has deep roots in Europe.

Christian democracy began in the late nineteenth century, when Catholic parties sprang up to protect the role of the church and religion in modernizing societies. They tended to be wary of capitalism, which they saw as threatening traditional values. Until World War II, many of these parties were also skeptical about liberal democracy since elections and majority rule might produce policies that would weaken the role of the church and religion in society.

After World War II, however, the attitude of European Catholic parties changed. Having experienced the horrors produced by actual tyrannies, Catholic parties such as Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and Italy’s Christian Democrats committed themselves to democracy, even though this would entail making compromises and accepting the legitimacy of political actors with opposing views on the role of church and religion in society. Postwar Christian democratic parties also embraced welfare states and other restrictions on markets: in addition to being concerned about capitalism’s corrosive effect on traditional values, they now recognized the democratic benefits of market restraints. By providing many European countries with something they lacked before the war—namely, mass parties on the right that fully accepted multiparty democracy—the modern Christian democratic movement contributed immensely to Europe’s postwar stability.

In the contemporary United States, Christian movements on the right have until now been closer to the pre–World War II European Catholic parties than their postwar offshoots. Thus, echoes of the earlier position can be found in the Christian Nationalism and Catholic integralism movements, which are profoundly illiberal and prioritize the protection and promotion of Christian values above all else. To establish the more salutary approach of Europe’s Christian democrats, Ahmari would need to persuade religious conservatives that a better way to protect their interests is to work through, rather than against, the country’s democratic institutions.

AMERICA’S PARTY PROBLEM

Tyranny, Inc. is a powerful and convincing account of the dangers that capitalism poses to the country’s political foundations. But saving American democracy requires more than taking on the private sector; it also requires addressing the threat posed by political parties not fully committed to democratic principles.

Ahmari is correct to point out that the left’s turning away from earlier efforts to rein in corporate America and protect workers has contributed to the rise of neoliberal capitalism and hence to the dismal state of American democracy today. Nonetheless, the primary responsibility for the unhealthy state of the U.S. economy and democracy lies with the Republican Party. Not only have successive Republican administrations fought more consistently to deregulate markets, undermine the power of workers, and eviscerate a protective, regulatory state; they have also, especially since Trump, supported unprecedented attacks on democratic norms and institutions.

Ahmari is unlikely to persuade many voters on the right to become social democrats, but he may be able to convince at least some of them that their economic and political future does not lie in a right-populist or Christian nationalist or integralist direction—with all the illiberalism and further evisceration of democracy those tendencies entail. And if he can direct them instead toward the profile that made Christian democratic parties so successful in Europe during the postwar decades—a defense of Christian values, a recognition that unconstrained capitalism is dangerous, and a principled commitment to democracy—he will be doing the American people a great service. Without such a reorientation of Trump’s GOP, however, Ahmari’s call for more government may simply exchange one form of tyranny for another.