The conservative case for labor in America

Conservative politics and labor advocacy don't often go hand in hand, unless you are columnist Sohrab Ahmari.

Ahmari says conservative politicians have the chance to change material conditions for workers — and labor advocates have the chance to forge a new political path.

Today, On Point: The conservative case for labor in America.

Sohrab Ahmari, incoming U.S. editor of Unherd, a UK-based journal of ideas, politics, science and culture. Founder of the online magazine COMPACT.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Sohrab Ahmari has stellar conservative bona fides, or bona fides, I'm sure. One of you out there will email me to let me know which is the right pronouncer. He's founder and editor of COMPACT Magazine, a contributing editor of the American Conservative, a visiting fellow at the Veritas Center for Ethics and Public Life at Franciscan University.

He also spent years as an op-ed editor at the New York Post and a columnist and editor in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. Now that last one, especially, isn't exactly known as a bastion of pro-labor, anti-capitalist conviction. It's pretty much the exact opposite. And yet Ahmari joins us today to make the conservative case for increasing the power of American labor in order to strike a greater balance against the cruel vagaries of pure market forces.

He's also author of Tyranny, Inc., How Private Power Crushed American Liberty and What to Do. Sohrab Ahmari, welcome to On Point.

SOHRAB AHMARI: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: I find that these days, labels in American life and American political life are pretty challenging things, so I'd like to actually start first by setting some common definitions for us to work from.

How would you define conservatism, or perhaps more specifically, your conservatism?

AHMARI: Sure, I would say that it's a commitment to trying to maintain ordered continuity. That's the small 'c' conservative urge or impulse, that the world should not head into sort of chaotic change, as much as possible.

That doesn't mean that change doesn't happen, or change isn't necessary. But generally speaking, it's a disposition toward ordered continuity.

CHAKRABARTI: Ordered continuity. Okay, then how would you define, what's the border between order and disorder?

AHMARI: It's a pretty, pretty abstract question. I feel like I have to go back to my Philosophy 101 course.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

AHMARI: But I think you can think about this in a subjective sense. That as an individual, you would like to have a sense that the steps leading up to the point you are, have a kind of coherence to them. And then therefore, they can guide you into the future as new challenges come up or as new realities come up, in that subjective sense of order. And a total disruption, a kind of year zero sensibility to draw from the history of the French Revolution, that's discomforting. And that's something that human beings don't do well with, and societies that attempt to do that, often end up in catastrophic places.

CHAKRABARTI: The reason why I asked that philosophically based question there, is A, I gather you're the kind of person who isn't afraid of abstraction. But B, also because this word order is, it can be read in different ways, right? Many people might hear that as saying that's simply a defense of the status quo, and the status quo is actually the problem. But ordered continuity, as your broad sensibility of what conservatism is.

Okay. Now similarly, how would you define American labor or the working class, or whatever group it is that you're thinking of in the context of this conversation? I have a pretty standard issue definition of the working class. I define people who belong to the working class as those who have only one means of reproducing themselves, and that is by selling their labor power for wages.

And that's, the labor movement is the movement that arose to represent their interests in the face of a great force for disorder, for disruption, for having everything that's solid melt into air. And having all that is sacred be profane. And of course, I'm alluding to the words of the Communist Manifesto, the kind of description of the rise of market society, of capitalism, as this great disrupter.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. But having only one means of reproducing themselves, a.k.a. their labor power, in the Marxist context, that's one thing. But in modern America, are you, would you be including the professional classes, as well? The college educated Americans, versus non college educated Americans.

AHMARI: So this is a long running debate, including in left circles. Is where do you put the professional or managerial class. It's a sort of in between class. I tend to be in the camp that has a pretty inclusive definition of working class. So that when I look at someone who is an assistant professor or an adjunct lecturer in a very precarious situation, at a college, making sometimes $30,000, $40,000 a year and having to rely on public welfare to make ends meet, as we know, is true of about a quarter of college adjunct teachers.

I tend to put that person economically into the basket of the working class, even though I recognize that they might wield a great deal more cultural capital or cultural power than someone who earns the same amount of money but is a cashier at Walmart.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So this makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate your patience in my slow probing of specifics here. Because again, I have become frustrated in the past several years of the generalities with which much political conversation takes place, so the specifics really matter.

Basically, I'm not going to ask you to give an income dollar value cutoff, right? But you are speaking of a broad swath of Americans who, let's say, are not wildly economically secure.

AHMARI: Yeah, which is actually a lot of Americans. There's that study from the Federal Reserve that found that something, nearly half of Americans would struggle to come up with $400 in cash to pay for an emergency expense.

Then about one in 10 Americans wouldn't be able to come up with it at all.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Yeah. So then, you, what is the, what would you say is capitalism's role here, or let me rephrase that. You have said that capitalism, as practiced currently in the United States, and perhaps even just fundamentally, is profoundly non-conservative or unconservative, and so therefore the implication is true conservatism shouldn't support unfettered capitalism.

So explain.

AHMARI: Yeah, sure. Something I like to do when I, especially when I speak to right of center audiences, is I like to read quotations from, let's say, Pope Leo XIII. I'm a, Convert to Roman Catholicism. And I like to read these quotes about how capitalism or industrial capitalism has immiserated the masses, created eye watering inequalities, while leaving power and wealth in the hands of a very few individuals.

But I don't tell them that the quote comes from Pope Leo. Rather, I tell them that it's a quote from Karl Marx or Rosa Luxemburg or some canonically left-wing figure. Only after I read that quote do I reveal that what you just heard were the words of Pope Leo XIII, or Pope John Paul II, who said, called for giving priority to labor over capital, and that labor should not be treated as just one more commodity among others.

And John Paul II was probably the most liberal economics. When I say liberal here, I mean in the kind of market friendly economics, of all the kind of Roman pontiffs. And even still, he was still hewing to this tradition that sees capitalism as something that sure, generates great productivity, innovation.

It's very good at allocating goods and capital efficiently, and so on and so forth, but that it has this other side, that it generates inequalities in power. It generates inequalities in wealth, that if left unaddressed, can create misery. And so I think that's where those two ends of the conversation beat for me.

CHAKRABARTI: And what responses or what kind of reaction do you get from those right of center audience members?

AHMARI: Typically, uncomfortable chuckles at first, but I would say, that said, the atmosphere is changing on the right from obviously where we were in the kind of peak Reagan, Bush, Romney, Ryan era for a whole host of reasons which we can get into.

Typically, right of center voters have become much more skeptical of unfettered markets, certainly the model of what we call neoliberal globalization or corporate globalization that resulted in the loss of manufacturing jobs, that empowered China relative to the United States, that kind of left this swath of destruction across the old industrial heartland. Where if you do a map, two maps of the United States, one locating where the sort of heaviest concentration of Fentanyl and opioid addiction deaths are, and where we lost manufacturing jobs as a result of the so-called China shock, those maps are like uncannily overlapping.

And so because of that, I find that people are pretty actually receptive to the kinds of ideas I just laid out here.

CHAKRABARTI: So it's really, I was very fascinated by the resonance between some pontiffs thinking about labor versus capital, and the Marxist echoes there. But now we're getting to, basically, I hope I'm not oversimplifying this, but the basis of your critique of capitalism, your conservative critique of capitalism, right?

That if conservatism is valuing ordered continuity in a society, capitalism, by definition, is about disordered progress, right? Boom, bust the creative destruction as it's called, in capitalism. That's supposed to be a feature of a capitalist system, not a cost of it. So therefore, that is why you see it as a non-conservative force.

AHMARI: Yes, and I think a fundamental commitment of small 'c' conservatism going back to its roots in the classical and Christian tradition, in Aristotle, is this idea of social balance. That is, that the various forces in society, the various estates in society, family, church, employer, economy, et cetera, should be in a kind of balance with each other, and all ordered to the common good of the whole.

This is a very kind of old classical ancient Greek idea. And that's definitely not something that a capitalism on its own can bring about. There are modern means for trying to approximate it, and that's what I'm interested in.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Sohrab, if I may, since you've already referenced your Catholicism a couple of times, can you tell us the story of your own spiritual evolution, or journey over time? Because Catholicism is quite far from where you started your life as a young boy.

AHMARI: Sure. So I was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. Immigrated to the United States when I was 13, about to turn 14, and was a kind of fresh off the boat precocious kid. I landed in northern Utah, of all places, this is where we had relatives, so when we immigrated, you go where you have relatives. And very quickly as a teen, very typical in this sense, I became a college Trotskyist.

Which is why I have a kind of facility with the Marxist canon that surprises people for someone who's on the right. And then I gradually, over the course of many years, shifted to the right as a result of a number of life experiences, reading, etc. Certainly, abandoning the kind of utopian horizon offered by Marxism, in part, just by looking at how it worked out, in terms of what used to be called really existing socialism in the East Bloc and its history.

That's my, that's where I began, though, and I have a sort of history with the labor movement, in the sense that when I was a college and high school Marxist, I would go to, I would join picket lines of minors and be this odd kid among these burly minors hawking a Trotskyist newspaper.

But I eventually shifted to the right. And then through it, it's very difficult to summarize quickly. In parallel to my political shift to the right of center, I also, while I was an editorial writer and columnist for the Wall Street Journal based in London. I had been reading Pope Benedict's books, just out of curiosity, and reading the Bible. And occasionally, in quite providential ways, finding myself going to Mass as a secular, as an ostensibly secular person. When I felt like I had reached a kind of crisis point in life, I would go to Mass.

And so that culminated in my being received into the Catholic Church. In December 2016, at a little chapel in central London.

CHAKRABARTI: And so your shift towards the center right that you said, after your Trotskyist period, what propelled that, and what were the years of that happening?

AHMARI: So that would be between 2006 and then I joined the Wall Street Journal editorial page as a staffer in 2012.

That's where, in a kind of slow way, I shifted to the right, in the sense that I rejected the sort of progressivism, not necessarily like the recognition of empirical reality, that class is a reality. But a certain kind of progressivism that was taking hold then, including in its kind of identity politics dimension, which has now been so ferociously reputed by voters. But at the time, it was already nascent.

I did Teach for America right after college. And I remember these kinds of diversity sessions where if you were a person of color, you took a step forward because you lacked privilege. And then if you were disabled, if you were this or that sexuality. And even though I was in some ways in post 9/11 America, as an Iranian born migrant, even though I was in the sweet spot of that diversity matrix, I found it condescending.

And not resonant with my experience as an Iranian American. And so it was a rejection of that sort of thing, which still remains strong in my thinking.

CHAKRABARTI: So I want to spend a second talking about your time at the Wall Street Journal, because as I had a little fun with it, at the top of the show, it's not known to be the place that people go to for arguments in favor of labor in this country, or opposed to unfettered capitalism.

I wonder if, what kinds of conversations did you have with your colleagues there, or did this idea of, at all, of capitalism being a destructive force, not for the common good, ever get serious consideration. Because, of course, as the fundamental argument for free market capitalism is that it is the most efficient way to raise the quality of life or advance a nation's economic interests the fastest.

AHMARI: Yeah, so did I have conversations with my colleagues? Not really, I was ensconced in the Institutional rights, and, you know, you tow the line, right? So what happened was really it was the Trump phenomenon that happened to coincide with when I was received into the church, interestingly. And what I mean by that is lots of people, including at the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, this kind of premier publication of the center right.

And then, but also our analogs on the other side of the aisle. The center left, were puzzled and repelled and horrified by the rise of Donald Trump. For me, especially, I was based in London, preaching the virtue of the free movement of goods, labor services, and here back home, our party is now being led by someone who rejects a lot of these orthodoxies.

Trump said, I'm opposed to these free trade deals. He called the Iraq war a disaster, at a famous debate in South Carolina, and so on and so forth. And the crowds cheered for him, right? The base roared when he said, for example, about health care, I'm not going to let people die on the streets.

Or when he said, I'm gonna protect your entitlements. Broke with that sort of libertarian dogma that you have to quote-unquote reform, meaning cut or privatize social security. So it was jarring, and initially I was repelled by it, I rejected it. But unlike many others who just stayed in that oppositional stance, and I have colleagues who are still there, they just became conservative, never Trumpers, I had this inkling of why is it that lots of my compatriots, lots of my fellow Americans, are so dissatisfied with the system? That I'm here abroad, I'm in the UK articulating its virtues.

I had to ask, and so there was this period, I don't know if you remember, for about two, three months after the 2016 election, when reporters from liberal sort of mainstream outlets fanned across the heartland trying to find Trumpians. And that's when JD Vance's memoir too, Hillbilly Elegy, reached the top of the charts, bestseller charts.

But then most people lost interest. And I think lots of, it's their mistake that they then just took this stance of, Trump was elected illegitimately on the basis of the Russiagate hoax and therefore the goal has to be to try to undo the outcome of 2016, because it was a Russian hatched plot or something like that.

But I didn't. I just kept thinking, and I'm like yeah, the economy has worked well for people like me. That model has, but it has not worked well for lots of people who didn't go to college, but they have just as much of the claim in trying to live a sort of decent, stable life.

As Americans who do go to college, and so an economy that doesn't work for them should be under question. Now as it happens, that's also when I was converting to Catholicism and suddenly, I had this new kind of conceptual framework for trying to understand that. Because the church, much as a certain kind of conservative American Catholic has sought to pigeonhole church teaching into Milton Friedman thought, the church is not for free market capitalism.

It's just blatantly not. And it has this language drawn from the sort of Aristotelian tradition of the common good. Of, as I said, this sense of social balance between the different estates and so on, that it's very useful for trying to both articulate the critique, to try to explain why it is that half of our compatriots are unhappy with the economy, and then potentially laying out a path forward.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, institutions like the church are not long lived if there's constant revolution going on, and revolution is frequently predicated by radical imbalances. Your point's well taken there, but you're hearkening back to, you've appropriately used this phrase, classical conservatism.

You're hearkening back to a kind of conservatism that politically hasn't existed in this country at least for 50 years, right? And so I'm wondering, how do you see your version of a pro-labor, I don't know if you're exclusively anti-capitalist, but more moderated capitalism, going to find inroads in a Republican Party right now, maybe just because Trump smashed that mold, you can. But that has still, at its core, politically conservative in terms of social issues, and economically so, as well, in terms of its view of labor.

Yeah, go ahead.

AHMARI: A couple of points to make. The first is that I am not anti-capitalist. I accept the kind of, the Marxist diagnosis of what happens to social order when market societies arise, right? There's gonna be a division between two classes, one much more numerically large, but weaker, relatively, et cetera, et cetera.

But the difference is that the Catholic tradition pushes toward reconciliation between the classes, right? Class reconciliation is the goal, not the abolition of one class by the other. And so we find that mechanism for trying to bring about class reconciliation, which doesn't happen just by extorting the rich to be good capitalists or morally preaching to them, although that's part of it and that's good. It comes about when you have the countervailing power of other socialist states, most notably the working class, when they can mount countervailing power against the ownership class.

So that's an important point that I'm not anti-capitalist. Because I recognize that markets are necessary and useful. It's just about bringing greater balance to it. Now, do we have a conservative tradition like that? I would argue that the New Deal is conservative in that regard. The New Dealers themselves, many of them came from elite backgrounds.

And they recognize that in order for the American experiment to continue, in order for there not to be cataclysmic disruption, capitalism has to give more to the working class. And then you have a tradition of conservative presidents that I call the Eisenhower-Nixon tradition, who accepted the New Deal.

Having lived through the kind of cataclysmic 1930s, they understood why you have to have labor unions as part of the mix, why a regulatory state is necessary, et cetera, et cetera. And in crucial ways that we can get into, Trump harkens back to this Eisenhower-Nixon tradition.

In his appeal, most notably to the teamsters union and the alliance he's built with the teamsters president Sean O'Brien, that I can go into, in his questioning of unfettered trade and preference for tariffs, which goes back to the Hamiltonian tradition, this country, for most of its history, had a protected economy.

And by protected, I mean protected by tariffs and import substitution measures. In his, obviously, opposition to mass migration of the kind, like mass low wage migration, that's not good for the working class, right? And it, and, by the way, New Dealers were not pro-open borders. Another one of my tricks is I like to read quotes about why open borders don't work for workers.

But I like to say that it was Steve Bannon who said such and such, or it was the firebrand anti-immigration intellectual, Ann Coulter. And then only afterward to progressive audiences do I reveal that, no, that was Arthur Schlesinger, or it was Barbara Jordan, or a civil rights figure, or various union leaders like Cesar Chavez, who, for most of the New Deal consensus, were also opposed to unfettered migration, they saw it as a means to disempower workers on the lower rungs of the labor market.

So something like that formation, I think, is coming back. And it's an opportunity for the labor movement. It's an opportunity for the Republican Party to build a completely different kind of majority. And a potentially very durable one, in the sense that we talk of the age of FDR or the age of Reagan, these kind of defining, realigning presidents, I think we're entering the age of Trump.

And that's an enormous opportunity, I think, for both the Republican Party, but also for the organized working class.

CHAKRABARTI: In a few minutes, Sohrab, I want to talk to you, but I want to hear more from you about the sort of reality when it comes to what those opportunities may be.

But I may be stepping into an area that's far out of my depth here, but I'm going to do it anyway. Cause I'm just so fascinated by the scholarly Catholic background that you bring to this. Because one could make the argument that the kind of classical conservatism that was embraced, or actually most profoundly influenced, that the Catholic Church itself most profoundly influenced, over many centuries, was one that relied on profound inequality.

The partnership between the church and monarchies, for example, needed to have a feudal class, in order for whatever expressions of power that monarchy or the church itself wanted to enact. People just don't necessarily see the institution of the Catholic Church over time, over centuries, as the place to look for when it came to materially uplifting, not spiritually, but materially uplifting the most downtrodden.

AHMARI: First of all, we could go into various church teachings going back a long time. For example, Pope Pius V riding a Papal bull back in the 16th century, exhorting the Spaniards not to enslave or deprive the Native Americans of, and other native peoples that you might encounter, is the way he put it, of their natural right to property.

In other words, enslaved, don't take away their property because these are human beings, and they have they are endowed with reason, and they can receive the message of revelation. And therefore, it's unlawful to do that for you. And so now, obviously, was that upheld? Probably only in the breach.

But I think the concept, the basic concept that human beings all have a enduring dignity, that they are made in the image of God. I think these have been revolutionary ideas, in fact, and quite influential. I think, in bettering our world over time. However, you're right in the sense that the church does not preach absolute egalitarianism, the abolition of all hierarchies.

As I said, when we did attempt that in modernity, it did not result in the loss of hierarchy. It resulted in a kind of nomenklatura that could send people to the gulag. It's about class reconciliation. But that requires accepting that there will be differences between people. I'm not an absolute egalitarian, nor is the church.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I was thinking during the break that there's a major difference between what powerful people say, obviously, versus what they do, and in the context of the Catholic Church, I would say, obviously, the power of the Holy C has not always been considered to be utterly benign.

Otherwise, why would Martin Luther have ever picked up hammer and nail, right? He was directly protesting at least what he saw as profound corruption in the Catholic church, and the church not practicing what it was literally preaching. So with that in mind, I wonder what you think of Republicanism under Donald Trump.

While you're absolutely right, he has spoken directly to many of the concerns of working-class Americans or Americans in this broad definition of labor, as you have it. At the same time, some of the actual practical policies he's championing, you mentioned one of them tariffs, if he applies his across-the-board tariffs as he wants, that is likely to materially impact working Americans negatively by raising prices on them, or seeking tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

That doesn't necessarily have a direct material uplift for the people who voted for him.

AHMARI: Sure. By the way, a fact check myself, it was Pope Pius III, I apologize, who issued the Papal bull, Sublimus Deus on the rights of native peoples encountered by Christians. But let's move forward from the 16th century.

You're right. Look, the Trumpian agenda as it was articulated in 2015-16 did not cash out perfectly during President Trump's first four years, and I said that repeatedly myself. His major legislative accomplishment was a tax cut for the wealthiest individuals and corporations. Engineered by Paul Ryan.

However, I would say that he did do one major thing, which I guess we'll disagree on. That he instituted tariffs on Chinese goods, which then were not repealed by President Biden. In fact, President Biden expanded Trump's tariffs to include electric vehicles and EV components. So I think what I see Trumpism as, this Trumpism ... as being in deep continuity with Bidenism, in some respects. Not on immigration.

That's a whole other bag of issues that we can open if we want, but on these issues of industrial policy, on the idea that the United States should be able to manufacture on its own, that manufacturing itself comes with a certain kind of job that is more higher wage, that has greater dignity. And stability, all of this has now become a kind of new bipartisan consensus.

It used to be, when Trump said it, in 2015, '16, that people like me, like myself and my colleagues at the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and equally on the kind of neoliberal center left, people were like, all horrified, that you would talk about tariffs. And now it's become accepted, right? You even had various figures in the Biden administration openly calling out what used to be called the Washington consensus, this idea that we should just make the world completely flat for all movement of all goods, services, capital and people, that's been rejected.

So he's created this new consensus, and we'll see with Trump, too. Things are looking interesting, right? Just one example, and I won't go further, but just one example among many, is that he picked as the Secretary of Labor, Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who is one of the, not only a supporter, but a sponsor of the PRO Act, which is the labor movement's No. 1 legislative priority, that would seek to undo the sort of hollowing out of the National Labor Relations Act and the entire New Deal architecture.

That has happened ever since, this kind of drift of late American labor law that's happened over several decades. She's a supporter of that, a Republican who supports the PRO Act, as the Secretary of Labor. That's an astonishing thing, notwithstanding other areas where I disagree with the shape that the new administration is taking.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, no, I totally agree with you on that. It's not that long ago that a Republican president naming Secretary of Labor like that, or choosing a person like that would have been unheard of completely. But consensus amongst Democrats and Republicans, or put more broadly, the political elite in this country does not necessarily mean it leads to material good for people.

And darn it. But reality is a pesky thing, isn't it? That those tariffs that were levied first by Trump, and you're absolutely right, continued by Biden against China, produced a trade war that ended up hurting American farmers a great deal. And the only reason why more of them did not completely go under is because 90% of the money of the revenue raised by the tariffs went to subsidize income lost by farmers.

So ultimately, at the end of the day, the consensus didn't actually make things better in the more permanently, or even in the short run.

AHMARI: Here's what I'll say, that the United States that led the world throughout the 20th century was not a product of laissez faire on issues of trade. It was a product of the Hamiltonian system.

So Alexander Hamilton, from the beginning, had this idea that there is a risk that the United States will become a kind of resource pool for Great Britain, the great industrial power of the time and a captive market for its manufactured goods. So he set in place and people like Clay and Lincoln and so on kept up this idea of protecting American manufacturing.

It's why in the 19th century and early 20th centuries, although the Republican Party was quite hostile to labor's cause, organized labor would at times tactically support Republican nominees for president. Because the Republicans were seen as the party of economic protectionism. For the most part, they supported Democrats and including, they supported Democrats because Democrats were seen as the party of closed borders.

But the point is that this idea that we're going to apply price protection to our domestic manufacturers is very old, and the debates over how much of the costs are borne by consumers are really technical and complex. There is, I can cite countervailing opinions on the other side and scholarship that suggests that the costs are borne by the countries that are subject to tariffs.

But what I would agree with you on is merely just having tariffs alone will not bring about the kind of common good economy that we want. We also need workforce development, and the labor movement is very good at doing workforce development.

So part of the new sort of rapprochement between labor and the Trump administration or labor and the GOP could be to invite labor to do more of its wonderful workforce development work that it does. So that if we're going to have industrial jobs, we have the actual workforce that's capable of doing them, rather than having has happened with the CHIPS Act.

Where that Taiwanese company, the TSCM or whatever, had to import its own workers from Taiwan to help work on that plant in Arizona. So we don't want things like that. So there's a lot more to be done. Tariffs aren't the be all, end all. I just would say that there's a kind of emerging opportunity here. You could do lots and lots of things.

If we enact something like a PRO Act light, I don't know if you've heard of this. It's some version of the PRO Act that you could get through a Republican Congress is now on the table. Senator Hawley, his office, it was reported by Bloomberg, is drafting a version of that, in conjunction with the teamsters.

Things are really, things are changing. And two, three years ago, I was pretty quick to join people on the left who were like this Trumpian, pro working-class rhetoric is merely just rhetoric. And this time around, I just can't say that, because first of all, we're at the dawn of an administration, hasn't even come into power.

But also, there's just interesting signals. On the other hand, I don't like the influence of Elon Musk, who's a sort of rabid techno libertarian, but he's been given what looks to me like a kind of blue ribbon commission, to go back to the Vatican. In the Vatican, whenever the pope doesn't want to do something, he's, yes, let's set up a committee.

And that's where things go to die.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

AHMARI: Is that what, right? That change will never be made because the pope sent it to committee. Is that what DOGE, however you pronounce it, is that what DOGE is? Or will it have like real influence? I don't know.

CHAKRABARTI: Just hearing the word DOGE, it just takes my mind in so many different directions.

But you, this rapprochement, as you say, between the Republican Party, or let me put it more specifically, Trumpism, because I still think there are many influential members of the Republican Party who don't necessarily look kindly upon organized labor and unions. Sean O'Brien of the Teamsters, as you mentioned, he spoke at the Republican National Convention and you spoke, you did an interview with him just after his appearance, is that right?

AHMARI: Yes, his first interview post that speech.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me about it.

AHMARI: I was curious about how that came about, and what was most notable is the role played by Senator Hawley. He said that, in other words, what set in motion lots that we're seeing, and O'Brien also endorsed Representative ... Lori Chavez-DeRemer for Secretary of Labor in the pages of COMPACT, a magazine I co-founded, although I'm leaving it soon.

And 24 hours later, she was nominated for the role. But I asked him at the time, right after the RNC, how did this come about? And he said it was just because we noticed certain things that Senator Hawley was saying, or certain signals that he was making.

So we had a meeting, we laid out some of our issues, and he showed up at picket lines and intervened in strikes, on behalf of striking workers. That Hawley was the only Republican to sign a letter in which he called on to uphold this finding of the National Labor Relations Board, that Amazon truck drivers are employees who should be granted the protections that are granted typically to employees, even though Amazon wants to treat them as contractors, because of the degree of control that Amazon exerts over their daily life as workers.

And other steps of the kind, that led to the Teamsters making a modest donation to Senator Hawley. It was really there, although, then in parallel, I think I would just highlight two other senators, now Vice President-elect, then Senator Vance of Ohio, and Senator Rubio, who've been pushing this kind of mode of pro-labor conservatism along in different avenues, in different ways.

But Hawley has played a kind of key underappreciated role, because I think he was the one who really brought Sean O'Brien to where he is today.

CHAKRABARTI: So I wonder if you still see the fundamentally American politics, even in this new milieu as a zero-sum game, right? Because if you're calling for a conservative case to support labor, I've also heard you say in this conversation, it's a way to bring more of those voters into the Republican Party.

So is this, I don't know if, forgive the crass question, but is this also just cynically a way to strengthen the Republican Party, or is it truly a way to better the lives of working Americans?

AHMARI: No, it's obviously, I hope, as I've laid out my case for why I'm concerned about unfettered capitalism, my sincerity is clear.

But yeah, I'm also a partisan, right? However, here's what I'd say, is that as far as the labor movement is concerned, a politics like I'm suggesting would not mean that labor becomes now an adjunct of the Republican Party, the way it's been an adjunct of the Democratic Party. That's not been good for labor, right?

It's become just one of many interest groups that occasionally Democrats had to support. But what I'm laying out is a Republican Party that does this kind of outreach. And a labor movement that is open to such outreach could bring us to a place where we have an independent labor movement that stands apart from both parties and can influence both and can reward and punish both.

That's a completely different equation than what we've had over the past couple of generations. And I always say, look, it is Republicans fault that there's been a rupture. Under Nixon, the party still actively fought for the labor vote. But then since Reagan, labor movement has only gotten the back of the hand from the Republican party.

So it's no wonder they turned to the Democratic Party, but in the process, labor became an adjunct of the Democratic Party, and that's not a, it's not a good place to be for labor. Ultimately what I want is an independent labor movement. And honestly, in a lot of these issues, we need a bipartisan consensus.

The model of unfettered capitalism, neoliberalism, was a bipartisan consensus. Margaret Thatcher was famously asked, what's your greatest achievement? And she said, Tony Blair.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

AHMARI: That kind of Reagan, that kind of Reaganite, Clintonian, Gerhard Schröder. It was social, nominal social Democrats and nominal leftists who also upheld this, that model.

And so what replaces it also has to be a kind of bipartisan model, just like neoliberalism was and just like the New Deal order was. So just to give you an example. There are compromises to be struck that are good for the people and good for both parties. Some Americans families, they want to be able to, for both partners to, spouses to work in the formal labor market and lots of progressives want to offer universal pre-k.

That's a non-starter for lots of Republicans, unless you introduce for other families the ability to be subsidized if one spouse wants to stay home, whether it's the man or the woman, I don't care. So there you have, what I call, it's not quite a win, but it's a win enough. And there's lots of issues like that on family policy, labor, industrial policy, et cetera, where we don't get, actually, we get away from zero sum.

We get to what I, like I said, a win enough. Everyone takes away a little bit. And that's how ordinary, small 'd' Democratic politics should work, right?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. The vision that you're laying out is an inspiring one. And just as an aside, that Thatcher quote makes me crack up. There are, as you know better than I, but there are many people in the UK who think that there's nothing labor about new labor under Blair, as it was.

But we have about 30 seconds left here. And I just want to hear you, whether or not you think that such kind of a consensus like that, like you've been describing, is possible, given the other interests in our politics. Money, the identity politics you were talking about. What do you think?

AHMARI: Look, I talk to a lot, because of the nature of my politics, I talk to lots of progressives and center left people. And my hope is, from these, based on these conversations, that they're going to tone down the identity politics going forward. That's what they tell me, that it just didn't work. So if that is removed from politics, it is really toxic.

It has been really destructive, and it's called forth a ferocious reaction on the other side, which I don't like either. So if the central left tones that down, I think a lot can be done. Bipartisan way.