Tyranny, Inc. (Sohrab Ahmari, 2023)
Sohrab Ahmari’s August 2023 book; focused on working-class economics, unionization, and corporate power; avoided culture war; well-received on the left; marked Ahmari’s definitive break from New Right culture-warring; dedicated to “Adrian, Chad, Gladden, and Patrick” but defended freedom in liberal terms on the first page
Context
By the summer of 2023, Ahmari had grown increasingly estranged from the culture-war wing of the New Right. In August 2023, he published both a Newsweek op-ed and this book. The op-ed declared: “I was wrong. The GOP will never be the party of the working class.”
He acknowledged his role in peddling GOP populism and hoping Trump could deliver, helping working people “attain lives of security and dignity.” Then: “Now I’m faced with the realization that I couldn’t — no one could, because the Republican Party remains, incorrigibly, a vehicle for the wealthy.”
He was increasingly drawn to the economic policies of the left — to figures like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who stood out against “the vast majority of leaders in American politics, and especially those on the right” unwilling to tackle “corporate hegemony and Wall Street domination” that makes daily life “all but unlivable” for the working class. He added: “Indeed, I increasingly despair of the whole Right, now almost completely lost to a mindless politics that reduces every problem to ‘wokeness.’”
Field: Ahmari’s anticorporate arguments were “much smarter than the anti-ESG and ‘woke capitalism’ lines coming from Claremont and the NatCons.”
Argument
Tyranny, Inc. stayed tethered to real working-class issues: support for unionization, achievements of the progressive past like the New Deal, critique of corporate power and the “private tyranny” of employers over workers. It avoided the culture wars almost entirely.
The book was dedicated to “Adrian, Chad, Gladden, and Patrick” — Vermeule, Pecknold, Pappin, Deneen. But on the first page, Ahmari spoke of freedom in affirming, liberal terms: he declared that freedom “is suffering a global funk” and called this a tragedy with multiple and varying causes — from the “seductive allure of populist demagogues” to “the perceived failure of liberal democracy to solve ordinary people’s problems” and “the advent of social media as a tool for spreading misinformation.”
He noted that “vast multitudes now labor under the yoke of coercion, in some cases having willingly thrown in their lots with elected despots, from Poland to the Philippines, Hungary to Turkey. This is an agonizing development for Americans especially.” He quoted a Freedom House report: “the yearning for a noncoercive society ‘is the question at the center of every pivotal moment of American history.’”
By calling Orbán and similar figures “elected despots” and defending freedom as noncoercion, Ahmari broke openly with his integralist colleagues. He published a Spring 2024 essay in Liberties (a liberal literary journal) concluding that “American democracy is itself a most precious common good.”
Ahmari’s Turn Against the Hard Right
Tyranny, Inc. coincided with Ahmari’s becoming the only prominent New Right commentator to publicly attack the Hard Right in writing. In 2023 he dubbed figures like Raw Egg Nationalist, Bronze Age Pervert, and L0m3z the “Unabomber Right” in The New Statesman. He was also a consistent critic of Elon Musk’s antiworker policies and his takeover of Twitter, calling X a “cesspool.”
He wrote that DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign failed because it was “too online, too rigid, and too weird” — DeSantis, he wrote, was “too much the darling of the intellectual right.” He continued attacking the “barbarian right” through 2024. Field: “It was lonely work.”
Field’s Assessment
Perhaps Ahmari’s journalist background and immigrant experience kept him “more bound to the real world.” Field: “Sometimes, not having a PhD can be a boon to clear thinking.” Where Vermeule, Deneen, and Pappin remained absorbed in theological and philosophical abstractions that led them toward admiration of Orbán and Legutko, Ahmari’s proximity to ordinary working-class concerns pulled him back toward liberal democratic commitments.
Cross-References
- Sohrab Ahmari — author
- Postliberalism — the movement Ahmari was partially leaving behind
- Catholic Integralism — the tradition he was breaking with on the question of freedom and coercion
- Viktor Orbán — whom Ahmari named as an “elected despot,” unlike his integralist colleagues
- Patrick Deneen — co-dedicatee; moving in the opposite direction toward Regime Change
- Adrian Vermeule — co-dedicatee; whose integralist colleagues Ahmari was distancing himself from
- Compact — the magazine Ahmari co-founded and continued writing for