The trials of Sohrab Ahmari
The trials of Sohrab Ahmari
Compact's founder seems to have noticed some of the rot infecting right neopopulism. But can he quit capitalism?
Sohrab Ahmari, writing for The New Statesman:
Trump managed enough lucidity to praise Musk for… firing workers en masse for trying to mount collective action…According to a certain pseudo-populist narrative on the right, those X employees didn’t count as workers, because they belonged to a “woke” managerial class that wasn’t doing much of anything (besides censorship, that is)…the pseudo-populist right is recapitulating a tired, racialised, and “culturalist” account of labour in defending his actions.
It’s hard to read passages like this and not suspect that Ahmari is beginning to recognize the neopopulist wing of the GOP for the fraud that it is. And he isn’t just grasping the obvious point that Trump’s occasional workerist rhetoric is just a veil over ordinary ruling class politics; he’s even appreciating subtle points, like how the neopopulists have developed a culture-based conception of the working class that has little to do with labor. The passage above is something you might have read in this blog four years ago, when much of my time was spent grappling with the revised theories of class that were threatening to displace ones with some minimal grounding in the economy.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this sort of epiphany from Ahmari. Back in May, he wrote a genuinely cutting piece, America’s dime-store Nietzcheans, on what passes for the intelligentsia of the hard right:
many – indeed, most – belong to the educated, urban professional classes who are profoundly alienated from the American mainstream. This little-understood sociological fact upends the typical understanding that many have of this sort of ideology. According to a conventional account…in the US it is the Trumpian-Jacksonian back country that is seething with racial resentment. [But in fact], it is a subset of disaffected or stressed urban professionals today who are developing a counter-culture centred around the worship of strength and the restoration of “natural hierarchies” among large human groups, as supposedly revealed by IQ bell curves.
Again, this is a point the left has been making for years in our ridicule of the art school trust-funders and failed academic careerists that make up the ridiculous Dimes Square clique. Running these people down as backwoods hillbillies may be the default mode of engagement for a certain genre of sheltered urban liberal, but that kind of regionalism has never been particularly popular on the US left.
There have been other instances too, such as during his belated falling out with genuinely insane Twitter personality Aimee Terese:
Read all of these moments together and it seems clear that Ahmari is at least aware of serious problems on the neopopulist right: its superficiality, its intellectual vacuity, and its, how to put this gently, deranged deep-seated and completely overt racism.
But is this the beginning of a genuine reformation in his politics? Given the number of times they’ve shifted over the years, one gets the impression of a man who is genuinely trying to get it right. Or of a deeply cynical man who, like the Red Scare girls and the Krassenstein brothers, changes political commitments with the shifting winds.
One cause for skepticism, in my view, is that he still is not acknowledging his own role in where the neopopulist right is today. Consider his comments about Aimee Terese; read in a vacuum, one might not realize that Sohrab promoted Terese himself in the past, even appearing as a guest on her show. And this wasn’t before some dastardly heel turn that made her into the villain she is today. Terese was already dealing in the same rhetoric and fraternizing with the same Nazis; and even in his promotion of the show, Ahmari bills her as “anti-woke.” You couldn’t know this about Aimee and not know what she was up to.
Even if one sets Aimee’s racism aside, one still has to contend with the role she and other personalities associated with Ahmari have played in warping out ideas about workers. Michael Lind is one of the more respectable writers for Ahmari’s magainze Compact, and he has written columns for the publication decrying what he calls the right’s “eugenic conservatives, or eugenicons.” But Lind has also propagated a theory of class that lumps teachers, journalists, and the clergy in with CEOs and old money as members of “the overclass.”
Compare this to Sohrab’s critique of the neopopulist right’s theory of class:
A worker, in this telling, is a burly electrician or carpenter who wears flannel shirts and drives a pickup. In reality, the American workforce – people with no means of sustaining and reproducing themselves but for selling their labour power for wages – also includes the likes of university adjuncts, a slew of downwardly mobile professionals, and, yes, tech administrators.
Does Sohrab include his own writer Lind in this critique? It’s impossible to say.
For me at least there is another point of ambiguity: why does Ahmari reserve his most pointed critiques of the neopopulists for The New Statesman rather than putting them in his own publication? Read the former and you get articles like this; read Compact and you get articles like “Josh Hawley’s Labor Revolution” and “Left-Behind America Sticks With Trump.” Given persisting questions about Compact’s launch funding, it’s hard not to wonder if, despite these recurring epiphanies, there is still a message for the publication that Ahmari has to stay on.
Ultimately, it seems clear that whatever message Ahmari stays on, it will not be a socialist one. Severing ties with bigots like Aimee Terese and Nina “i’m a nazi now” Power has been a good start; mysteriously, a number of other Posts Leftists like Malcolm Kyeyune and Adam Lehrer have disappeared from the masthead too. Still, there’s a reason why Ahmari is saying “pseudo-populism”: his politics are still bewitched by the spectacle of some kind of genuine populist alternative to socialism, one that somehow opposes the exploitation of labor and tolerates capitalism. We can cheer on Ahmari for severing ties with sundry fascist and bigots, but walking away from liberalism seems likely to remain, for him and for Compact, a step too far.