Appears in this episode

Andrew Sullivan

Sohrab is a founder and editor of Compact: A Radical American Journal, and he’s a contributing editor at The American Conservative. He spent nearly a decade at News Corp. — as the op-ed editor of the New York Post and as a columnist and editor with the WSJ opinion pages in New York and London. His first appearance on the Dishcast addressed what he sees as “the failures of liberalism.” This time, we debate his new book, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on whether low wages are worth the low prices they create, and how hedge funds destroy companies — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: debating the rhetorical use of “coercion”; how the private sector isn’t truly private; “scheduling precarity” — when bosses restrict shifts; how unpredictable shifts harm kids; byzantine contracts; the Hollywood strike; AI and human likeness data; how workers and bosses aren’t symmetrical; Adam Smith wanted labor protections; Hayek and Friedman supported the welfare state; the dominance of private equity firms; turning newspapers into ghost papers of syndication; Wall Street’s obsession with cash flow over investment; remembering that workers are also consumers; the cost of clothing is nothing compared to the past; the sheer variety of the free market; when workers can’t afford the products they make; why half of fast-food workers rely on welfare; a low-wage job is better than no job; why Sohrab champions the New Deal, the Wagner Act, Tripartism and Sabbath laws; my upbringing in a stagnant, state-run economy in England; Thatcher and Blair as capitalists who spent a ton on public goods; sectoral bargaining in Europe; the miracle drugs of Big Pharma; the Silicon Valley Bank collapse; declining life expectancy in the US; the opioid crisis; Trump’s vacant policy agenda; and Sohrab supporting Hawley/Vance/Rubio but also giving credit to Biden for his economic and trade policies.

Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Freddie deBoer on his new book How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, Vivek Ramaswamy on his vision for America, and Leor Sapir on the evolving treatment of gender dysphoria. Please send any guest recs and pod dissent to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Coincidentally with the convo this week, a listener wants to hear more about post-liberals like Sohrab and their similarities to Marxists:

I wonder if you might consider writing something about the relationship between Marxism and the “post-liberalism” of Deneen, Hazony, et al. In your recent conversation with Lee Fang on the tensions within the left, he made a remark to the effect that there’s a hefty dose of Marxism in Deneen’s work. I’ve heard others make the same argument, and I can certainly see why. Clearly, there’s a lot of anti-market sentiment in Deneen and the post-liberals; like Marx, they believe that the market alienates humanity from our true nature.

But I wonder, is Marxism really the tradition they’re operating in, or is it a different and right-wing tradition? I’m a historian, but I’m not sufficiently well-read in 19th-century intellectual history or political philosophy to feel confident of my ability to situate the post-liberals correctly. But to me, the post-liberals sound at least as much like 19th century Southern plantation owners as they do Marxists. Or, put differently, plantation owners also sounded like Marxists when they railed against Northern “wage slavery,” but they were starting from very different assumptions about human nature than Marx, and they imagined a very different ideal society than Marx. Of course, too, the slaveowners’ critique of “wage slavery” was profoundly self-serving.

I don’t mean to suggest that the post-liberals share slaveowners’ beliefs about race, but they certainly seem to share their paternalism — their desire to reestablish the household, with an independent (male) head representing the dependent members, and thereby roll back the rights revolution that replaced the household with the individual as the locus of political rights and obligations. That is a distinctly anti-modern worldview. I know virtually nothing about Marx’s views on gender, but he certainly wasn’t thinking in terms of the household as his basic unit of political analysis; he was modern, not anti-modern, in terms of class.

I worry that describing the post-liberals as Marxist supplies elision where analytical precision is needed. And I worry that the effect of this elision is to obscure some of what makes the post-liberals so scary to a liberal like me — a female liberal, no less! Marxists and post-liberals threaten liberalism, but they threaten it in different ways. Conflating the nature of the threat reduces the ability to meet it. It also reduces the ability to take what may be of value in their worldview (and I think both worldviews contain some genuinely helpful insights) and use them to improve liberalism.

A point you made in response to Fang is really important here: the “neoliberal” deregulation of the market and the modern rights revolution went hand in hand. There’s a reason why post-liberals oppose both the tyranny of the market and the rights revolution. I’d love to read something by you analyzing the relationship between Marxism and post-liberalism.

If you listen to the conversation above with Sohrab Ahmari, you’ll see I home in on something like this at one point. Ahmari uses words like “tyranny” and “coercion” to describe the dynamics of a free society and economy. It’s eerily similar to the woke understanding of “structural violence.” Both extremes at this moment are aligned against individualism and agency. Some of this is a healthy reaction to rising inequality; some of it is, to my mind, illiberal. One other point: I don’t regard the defense of the family unit as somehow anti-individual. The family makes an adult individual possible. It’s foundational, which is why I’ve always been in favor of pro-family policy, of which marriage equality was very much a part.

Another listener looks to our episode with Josh Barro and his defense of the Biden administration:

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