Sohrab Ahmari is a Catholic conservative and founder of the magazine Compact. He previously worked at the NY Post and the Wall Street Journal. He might be best known for a fight with National Review’s David French in which he argued against innovations like drag-time story hour for kids.

Ahmari recently published a book titled “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty–and What to Do About It.” The book has received some favorable attention from people on the left because it seems to be making a fundamentally left-wing argument about capitalism. I first noticed the debate when Michelle Goldberg wrote about it earlier this month:

Summarizing his thesis, Ahmari writes that the “general tendency of Tyranny, Inc., is the domination of working- and middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the asset-rich.” He examines such topics as coercive arbitration agreements that prevent exploited workers from pressing their claims in court, the ruinous privatization of emergency services and the role of hedge funds in destroying local newspapers. He celebrates “the achievements of social democracy,” which “remind us that there once was an alternative — and that there could be one again.”

If you squint, you can still see the conservative influence on “Tyranny, Inc.” Ahmari’s litany of neoliberal sins includes, for example, “the leasing of wombs via commercial surrogacy.” But much of the book’s analysis feels decidedly leftist.

A sure sign that the book has appeal to the left is that Vox invited Ahmari to discuss it in an interview which was published yesterday. Here’s a bit of what he had to say:

Sean Illing

Here’s how I think about this from the left: The problem is that we’ve inherited a conception of freedom from people obsessed with state tyranny, with all the focus on negative rights, and this way of thinking obscures a very real but different type of unfreedom, which is what happens when people don’t have meaningful choices in their life because the things they need to survive and thrive are so precarious and contingent.

It’s great to not live in a totalitarian state, don’t get me wrong, but what’s the point of living in a state where you may not have Big Brother’s boot on your neck but you’re one medical diagnosis removed from bankruptcy? Where your access to health care is tied to tenuous employment? That’s not real freedom. Is it the same as being in a labor camp? Nope. Is it better than living in Stalin’s Russia? No question. But it’s not the kind of freedom we ought to aspire to, and I think the left has always been more alive to this truth than the right, though I suspect you may disagree with that—

Sohrab Ahmari

No, I absolutely agree with that. You can find statements to that effect of what really it takes to have human flourishing and what human liberty is. You can find rich accounts of that in the catechism of the Catholic Church and Catholic social teaching, which jibed with the social democratic and Christian democratic movements, especially in Europe in the mid-century era. But yes, I think hands down the left is far more deeply attuned to this…

Sean Illing

What you argue in the book is that the version of capitalism we have now — neoliberalism — has actually supplanted democracy in a very real way because it relocates the source of our unfreedom in the private sphere, where for that reason exactly, it’s immune to democratic checks and accountability. Is that a fair summation?

Sohrab Ahmari

Precisely.

Ahmari really does seem to be arguing for something like Democratic Socialism, at least in principle. He wants a world where material success is guaranteed regardless of someone’s behavior or effort. He’s defining freedom not in political terms but economic ones, i.e. not just the ability to be free of government coercion but free of “precarity” or really the need to work for your own success.

That strikes me as less of a new insight and more of a very old utopian temptation, one which never works out in practice. Human needs are quasi-infinite, while material blessings are always dependent on the hard work of someone, somewhere and are therefore finite. Once you’ve decoupled the concept of work and market value from earnings and material success, you’re inviting another kind of collectivist tyranny. To rephrase a bit of what Sean Illing said above, what’s the point of living in a state where you’re free from worry that one medical diagnosis will bankrupt you if Big Brother’s boot is on your neck in the form of confiscatory tax rates designed to support everyone’s economic freedom?

This isn’t just a purely theoretical question. We’ve seen the estimates of what it would cost to implement single payer in the US (a program that would alleviate concerns about a medical diagnosis). Bernie Sander’s version of this proposal was estimated to cost around $3 trillion per year. And contrary to what Bernie claims, all of the income of all of the billionaires wouldn’t come close to paying for that. In fact, you could confiscate the total wealth of all of them and it still wouldn’t be enough. If that’s what “freedom” looks like, I’ll pass.

Simply put, socialism doesn’t work because sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. We’ve seen this play out recently in Venezuela where successive socialists governments promised everyone a better life and wound up delivering a nightmare which caused millions of people to flee the country to avoid actual starvation. Honestly, I wonder if Hugo Chavez would have been in basic agreement with Sohrab Ahmari’s thesis. That should worry you.

My first thought when reading all of this is that it sounds a bit like what songwriter Oliver Anthony has been trying to say. Maybe I’m wrong about that but “Rich men north of Richmond” sung by a guy living in an old RV with holes in the roof does sound like a kind of blue collar version of what Ahmari is saying. And the fact that something doesn’t work doesn’t mean it can’t be tremendously popular. It was only two years ago that “defund the police” was all the rage. Democratic Socialism could always be the next big thing if we aren’t careful.

Update: Left vs right arguing over which side Oliver Anthony supports. Leftist Briahna Joy Gray thinks the song was great except for one line.