The Failure of Quixotic Conservatism

The New Center: A Wednesday Newsletter From Sohrab Ahmari

I’m on a short vacation, visiting Paris to promote the newly published French edition of Tyranny, Inc. So please forgive the somewhat rushed post—which, as it happens, touches on the book and its reception on the American right. A thoughtful but generally negative review in the conservative journal Modern Age is a good occasion to discuss the quixotic brand of conservatism that I fear the review reflects. (Yes, I know it’s generally considered bad form to respond to critical reviews, but I do this so rarely that I feel entitled to occasional indulgence.)

But first, for those who haven’t read Tyranny, Inc. (though you really should), a four-paragraph summary:

People in the West, and the Anglosphere especially, are accustomed to thinking of coercion as only what governments do to us. In fact, we are pervasively governed—and, therefore, coerced—in our lives as workers and consumers. Yet we frequently can’t politically negotiate this coercion, nor challenge it legally, precisely because the prevailing economic ideology designates the market as “private.” A system of pervasive coercion that is immured from political contestation is what I call private tyranny.

The book offers readers a reported tour of this system from the perspective of workers and consumers subjected to its operations: working moms whose lives are thrown into chaos by the “just-in-time” scheduling practices common in the service and retail sectors; employees silenced and surveilled by lopsided at-will employment agreements; others left unable to vindicate their legal rights by corporate-friendly commercial arbitration; still others having their jobs, housing, and health care taken away by hedge-fund and private-equity predators out to squeeze value out of the real economy, but refusing to invest in the firms they gain control of; and on and on.

I then argue that such episodes are symptoms of the power disparities generated by markets under industrial conditions. The central power disparity is that between asset-rich employers and asset-less employees: those who have no other means of sustaining and reproducing themselves but selling their labor power for wages. This is because, in complex industrial economies, numerous workers face off against only a handful of dominant firms in the typical sector. The size and consolidation of power on the employers’ side translates into very little bargaining power for employees—that is, unless the latter are able to band together and mount what economist John Kenneth Galbraith called countervailing power to defend their mutual interests.

Policies aimed at raising up the countervailing power of workers were at the heart of social and Christian democracy in Europe and the New Deal order in the United States. In the three decades following World War II, this model brought about mass working-class prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic and dramatically compressed inequality. Yet New Deal/social-democratic economies were no less dynamic for that. Indeed, as Tony Annett has pointed out in Compact, from 1948 to 1979, US productivity climbed 118 percent; under the neoliberal model that succeeded the New Deal order, by contrast, productivity rose by only 65 percent (between 1980 and 2021). I champion the principles behind the New Deal order as the best means for combating today’s private tyranny, which has rendered the term “working class” synonymous with opioid addiction, out-of-wedlock birth, declining life expectancy, and general precarity and insecurity.