Over the last few weeks Sohrab Ahmari, well known as a leading intellectual exponent of a combative Trumpian conservatismbingo super star, has been making the rounds explaining why he’s giving up on right-wing populism.
That’s a slight overstatement; his new book, “Tyranny, Inc.,” on the cruelties of corporate power in America, bears blurbs from leading populist Republicans like Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. But he describes these figures as “shining exceptions on the right,” whose willingness to consider interventionist economic policies contrasts with the broader trend in which populism is “turning into a niche/trashy online-media product,” with no policy content beyond resentment of elites.
No doubt Ahmari’s liberal readers would respond, it’s always been that way! But part of the reason that the “Tyranny, Inc.” author and his circle earned so much attention in the Trump era is that the age of populism really did unsettle economic orthodoxies on the right.
The Trump administration often defaulted, as Ahmari laments, to warmed-over Reaganite policymaking. But Trump’s victorious campaign really did kill off, for a time at least, the Tea Party-era emphasis on entitlement reform and hard money. And Trump did follow through on elements of his economic nationalism — while the Biden administration has embraced similar ideas on trade and infrastructure, to the point where it’s fair to say that both parties have been reshaped by Trump’s ’16 campaign.
Meanwhile, a populist intellectual ecosystem exists on the right, through think tanks like American Compass and journals like American Affairs and Ahmari’s own Compact, where before the Trump era there was little more than a scattering of gadflies. The Hawley-Rubio-J.D. Vance faction in the Senate is small, but more influential than any past equivalent. And Trump himself, the Republican front-runner, is still making promises — new cities! new tariffs! flying cars! — that smack more of industrial policy than supply-side economics.
So why is Ahmari despairing of his cause? In part, he’s reckoning with forces he probably underestimated before — the folk libertarianism of the G.O.P.’s donor base and the cynicism of its celebrity-industrial complex.
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