In the last two years, iPhone customers may have been pleasantly surprised to see a standardized USB-C charger port, allowing them to dispose of Apple’s custom Lightning wires. The world’s 1.5 billion iPhone users can thank Europe for forcing Apple’s change. The tech giant decided to switch all its new iPhones, determining it too costly to produce the USB-C port just for Europe. 

It’s only in recent years that consumers have woken up to Big Tech’s power over our attention, moods, privacy, stock market, economy, and wallets—over us. It’s fortunate then that with our heads buried in our phones scrolling through social media, consumer advocates, regulatory agencies, and litigators have been sounding the alarm on surveillance and monopoly power and delving into the drier nuts-and-bolts details of right-to-repair and interoperability regulations, like the one that led to Apple standardizing its charging port. 

Prolific tech critic Cory Doctorow, whose pronouncements make him akin to a town crier in the digital square, is among those leading the charge. After coining and popularizing the term “enshittification” to mean how tech platforms degrade over time, Doctorow has bestowed his latest book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, with the title.  

His book, derived mainly from his blog Pluralistic, will be eye-opening to consumers and those like me who are already familiar with Big Tech’s bullying methods. (I’m the editorial director of the Open Markets Institute, a think tank that seeks to regulate Big Tech monopolies and curb corporate power.) 

Enshittification is a ride through all the bait-and-switch tactics, financial trickery, and gatekeeping to which Big Tech platforms subject users. A prime example is how Google began degrading its always reliable workhorse of a product, search, in the mid-aughts, once there was no more room for its flagship segment, which had captured a 90 percent global market share, to grow. In a strategy laid bare in internal memos and emails in the Department of Justice exhibits in one of its two monopoly cases against the corporation, Google made users input more queries into the search bar to get the answers, leading to more ads and more revenue for Google. “After all, even if Google couldn’t find more people to search, or more ways to use search, they could certainly find new ways to charge for search,” Doctorow observes. “In other words, once Google stopped growing, it started squeezing.”  

Doctorow takes us through the how and why of enshittification. How tech companies enshittify proceeds in four steps: 1) first, platforms are good to their individual customers, 2) they abuse their individuals to improve things for their business customers, 3) next, they undercut their business customers to keep more profit, and 4) finally, they have turned into a giant pile of shit. 

Both Amazon and Facebook have turned on their once-prized business customers, Facebook, by raising the price of ad targeting and failing to show its users the ads advertisers paid for. News outlets, in particular, were hurt badly when the platform began downranking short excerpts of news articles in favor of longer ones, effectively cannibalizing the news business. Similarly, Amazon started to shaft the merchants who sell on its marketplace by effectively forcing them to pay to be included in Amazon Prime, forbidding them to sell their product at a lower price on any other website, including their own, and, perhaps most galling, ripping off merchants’ ideas to make its own Amazon-branded copycat products. 

According to Doctorow, the enshittifier’s “credo” is, “Your job is to create as much value on that platform as possible. Our job is to harvest all of that value, leaving behind the smaller quantum of utility that will keep the platform from imploding.” 

But it’s not just the well-known platforms. Tech companies, in general, have gotten into the game. In one of the book’s most brazen examples, Unity, a company that offers tools for video game developers, announced a change to its pricing policy: it would start charging game developer customers a fee every time they sold a video game, claiming it wanted “shared success” with its customers, the developers who used their tools.  

Unity’s customer base of video game developers balked. Doctorow likens the scheme to selling hammers to build a lemonade stand and expecting a nickel from each drink sold. “Unity is an avatar of the attitudes that produce enshittification,” he writes. “Enshittification is what happens when the executives calculate that they can force you to go along with their schemes, and when they’re right about it.” In Unity’s case, its plan to fleece its customers didn’t work 

Part of the reason is that the law allows them to get away with things traditional companies never could, owing to underregulation, copyright law, and regulatory capture. Having an app allows tech companies to break the law and then claim they didn’t because the crime was committed with an app, for instance, app-based lending platforms that ignore usury law or cryptocurrency apps that illegally trade in unregistered securities.  

Regulation hasn’t kept pace with technology, as we see most vexingly in the case of AI, which has sent government regulators worldwide scrambling. Add to underregulation the billions of dollars the tech industry has funneled into lobbying, and you have regulatory capture that has helped tech companies weaponize intellectual property laws. For instance, IP laws for apps ban “circumvention,” which means technology companies can destroy rivals that have developed anti-features allowing users to skirt the app’s undesirable features: “In other words, tech companies don’t stop with ‘It’s not a crime if we do it with an app.’ They also say, ‘It’s a crime if you fix our app to defend yourself from our crimes.’” 

Enshittification also describes the waning counterbalancing influence of the tech industry’s white-collar workforce, an aspect of Big Tech’s exceptionalism that gets little attention. Doctorow notes that Google’s way of sorting web pages came from an academic research paper on citation analysis by its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, giving the company its scholarly atmosphere. Technologists were recruited from top universities worldwide, offered generous pay with stock options, and given one day a week to work on side projects. 

For years, Google deferred to its technical staff, who remained a bulwark against enshittification. It believed deeply in Google’s mission statement to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Yet, letting engineers run the show exasperated investors, whose greed won out over workers’ idealism as we saw with the corporation’s strategy to degrade search quality. 

Google wasn’t the only giant to rein in its high-minded workers; it was among the most prominent. The rupture with their workforce, which began when Big Tech corporations ramped up their enshittificatory (yes, Doctorow uses this form of the word, too) ways over the past decade, became a chasm in 2023 when a quarter of a million tech workers were fired—despite the industry’s record profits. In 2025, the unspoken covenant was severed with tech executives’ embracing Donald Trump at his inauguration.  

Big Tech may have outfoxed regulators and its workforce, but Doctorow sees a reckoning coming. Absent U.S. regulation, as the Trump administration protects the tech platforms, we may have to rely on Europe to check the tech industry’s power.  

We saw this dissonance between the U.S. and Europe this autumn when a federal judge imposed a modest penalty on Google for its illegal search market dominance. That stood in sharp contrast to the much larger, albeit affordable for Google, $3.5 billion fine levied by the European Commission for its digital advertising monopoly. 

Enshittification may seem outdated amid the surge of AI, which is barely mentioned. It’s not that Doctorow hasn’t been thinking and talking about AI—he considers it a bubble—it’s that we have to wait for his AI book to be released next year, by which time his predictions might already have come true. 

Sneak preview: He’s not optimistic. In a recent post, Doctorow warns, “I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can’t be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people’s money and lighting it on fire. Eventually, those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don’t get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.”  

Doctorow’s Enshittification is an indispensable guide to understanding how we got here. If Part 1 is a must-read, Part 2 will be epic. 

The post The Cory Doctorow Doctrine  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Not a week goes by that book publishers don’t disgorge a tome on Big Tech, whether it’s a tell-all about C-suite leaders keeping us hooked to their algorithms, a boosterish guide to Artificial Intelligence (AI) by a tech insider, or a dire warning on how the tech platforms are hollowing out our attention spans.  

Add two more volumes to the pile. One is a meditation on technology and AI by Vauhini Vara, a Wall Street Journal alumnus and the first of the paper’s reporters to cover Facebook, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. The second chronicles a key piece of computer code that helped launch the social media age, Like: The Button That Changed the World. The latter’s success and the former’s sprawl suggest that a narrower aperture is a more enlightening way to view our tech world.  

Searches is a chimera of a book: part AI, pastiches of journalism, an exhortation against what she calls technological capitalism, and hints of a postmodern novel couched within a memoir. For example, Vara shares a decade’s worth of queries she has typed into Google—something we all do multiple times a day and can easily relate to: “What is wastewater charge on water bill. What is a cardigan without buttons called. What to spray in ovens to clean. What is turbot fish.” She finds the excavation “unexpectedly moving,” as many of us might. “The material that Google valued for its financial potential was, for me, valuable on its own terms,” she writes.  

Similarly, Vara, who landed her first post-undergraduate covering tech for the Journal in the mid-2000s after attending Stanford, looks back at product reviews she wrote on Amazon and lists the topics X has determined she is interested in based on its algorithm. This record of her, and by extension, our behavior, shows the creepy and long-lived surveillance we subject ourselves to when we engage with any of these platforms. The book’s experimental approach works best in these passages. By showing us evidence of, rather than declaring, how our data is the very product driving the hundreds of billions of dollars generated by the tech giants, we feel the violation.  

When she does resort to telling rather than showing, Vara is prone to familiar assessments that online life resembles but doesn’t replicate or enhance lived experience. “To live like this—endlessly comparing our imperfect fleshy selves with sanitized digital simulacra of selfhood that [sic] appears online and finding ourselves wanting, endlessly finding ourselves trapped in an infinite scroll of algorithmically advantaged outrage and scorn—exerts such a subtle psychic violence that we might not even be aware of it as it’s happening,” she surmises.  

The book’s deconstructive way of critiquing Big Tech falls flat when it becomes something of a gimmick: One in every few chapters is “written” by the latest Chat-GPT model (in this case, Chat-GPT4), which summarizes the previous two chapters in a bloodless facsimile of human writing: “Your portrayal of tech companies, particularly Amazon, captures a complex and multifaceted view that many share about the impact of these corporations on society.” If nothing else, these chapters confirm that AI will never replace the writing and art of actual humans, though it’s unclear whether Vara intends to make us feel this way.  

An aspiring novelist, Vara left her plum gig at the Journal to attend the storied Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She published her first novel in 2022, The Immortal King Rao, which narrates the rise of a visionary tech CEO from humble beginnings in India to presiding over an algorithm-fueled dystopia. In her memoir Searches, Vara appears to deploy some of the techniques picked up in Iowa of interrogating the text and calling authorship into question when she asks Chat-GPT to write about the death of her sister when Vara was still in high school, resulting in a chapter called “Ghosts” that went viral when first published a few years ago in the literary magazine The Believer. While “Ghosts” may have already found its way on syllabi in literary theory seminars, it sits uneasily alongside other chapters like the compilations of our personal data that offer a clearer takedown of Big Tech. After her close observation of Silicon Valley, it’s apparent that Vara has emerged as a critic. She lauds efforts to rein in Big Tech by former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and her mentor, Barry Lynn, executive director of Open Markets Institute, where I work as the editorial director. Despite its high-flown aspirations, Searches is ultimately a magpie’s nest of diffuse thoughts and musings on the digital world but illuminates little about the handful of companies that own it.  

Taking a radically different approach is Like: The Button That Changed the World. This seemingly circumscribed ambit is a far more successful look at the tech industry than Vara’s sprawling meditation. Like is so direct in its scope that at one point, the reader is treated to a history of when we came to use an upwardly directed thumb to indicate a positive sentiment or enthusiasm. TL;DR: It’s not entirely clear, but it may have started with gladiator fights in ancient Rome as a way for the audience to indicate whether a fallen fighter should be spared.  

One of the coauthors, Bob Goodson, is a Silicon Valley insider who helped invent an early iteration of the like button at Yelp in 2005, a few years before Facebook universalized this symbol, among the most important pieces of computer code ever to be written. Yelp’s early version didn’t include a thumbs-up symbol or the word “like,” but it did offer a way to interact with a posted review by clicking one of three buttons—“useful,” “funny,” and “cool.”  

Goodson and his coauthor Martin Reeves of BCG Henderson Institute, a think tank for developing business ideas, describe the impetus behind Yelp’s emotional reaction button as giving a website user the most effortless way of engaging with online content—one-click commenting—all while remaining on the same page and avoiding a change in URL that would trigger a page refresh. Back then, two decades ago, none of this was intuitive. It was akin to inventing the wheel.  

The book quotes former Max Levchin, the former chair of the board of directors of Yelp, on why the company’s emotional reaction buttons gained so much traction then. Noting that only a small percentage of users would write and create web content, he says, “The psychological or psycho-behavioral foundation of the like button is really about breaking out of the ‘only one percent who will say anything online’ assumption.” 

The authors don’t give Yelp all the credit, though. Silicon Valley was humming with web design ideas in the mid-2000s, and other websites, too, developed or borrowed emotive reactions. When Facebook launched the thumbs-up button in 2009, after Mark Zuckerberg had rejected the idea two years earlier, it became today’s familiar icon.  

“After Facebook finally added its like button, the feature proceeded to spread like wildfire, both in its use and through its replication on other sites,” the authors write. “It was a watershed moment.” They estimate that today, like buttons are clicked 160 billion times per day around the internet, tantamount to every human clicking a like button 20 times. 

This deep dive into the invention of the button and the ramifications of this piece of code is insightful. The authors credit the like button with underpinning the entire social media industry. Each like is a data point, after all, and once collected and combined with others, it powers algorithms driving more likes, shares, and reposts. “What seems like an ephemeral action produces a data point with a life of its own—a life that may last forever, working its way into endless other corners of influence and action,” they write. 

The authors recognize the dark side of what they call the like economy, the world of people and brands “amassing thumbs-up and finding ways to be paid for that positive attention.” They cite an internal Facebook report that found that the site’s monitoring of users’ emotional states could enable the delivery of ads when young people feel down and need a confidence boost.  

“We can’t have it both ways: we’ve given the like button a lot of credit for fueling the rise of social media, so it must share some responsibility for the repercussions,” the authors write, acknowledging the threat to society posed by social media, namely its impact on mental health and addiction, especially on young people; the invasiveness that defines surveillance capitalism whereby our data is sold to third-party brokers and used to serve us ads; and the extreme political polarization that has led to the election of a man determined to undermine democracy. 

What started as a clever, low-stakes way to keep a website’s users on the page—the like button—has helped create a threat of epic proportions. While Goodson and Reeves don’t have answers, they contribute to our understanding of how a few corporations have transformed our lives in a decade and a half. 

Correction: The original version of this story misnamed one of the co-authors of Like. He is Bob Goodson, not Bob Goodman. Max Levchin was incorrectly identified as the CEO of Yelp. He is a former chair of the board of directors of Yelp.

The post How the Digital Age Changed Us appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In the days since Donald Trump was reelected president, we’ve been subjected to news of the president-elect’s Cabinet choices, each one a harbinger of some disaster in the making: a defense secretary issuing orders to a military to attack private citizens; an attorney general weaponizing the state to go after political enemies based on grudges; a national intelligence director working in tandem with the world’s most ruthless despots.  

These are just the routine nominations. President Trump is also planning to set up the new Department of Government Efficiency, to be led by his acolytes Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, with the explicit goal of slashing $2 trillion of federal spending. With close to 35 percent of the federal budget allocated to Medicare and Social Security, one would assume that these programs, which support the country’s elderly, would be on Musk and Ramaswamy’s chopping block. Yet Trump has deemed these programs untouchable, telling AARP earlier this fall, “As you know, I was there for four years and never even thought about doing it. I’m going to do nothing to Social Security.” He similarly vowed to protect Medicare, suggesting that increased economic growth under his leadership would be enough to sustain the program. 

Trump’s disavowal that Social Security and Medicare would undergo cuts wasn’t enough to retain voters over 65, who favored him by seven points in 2016 and five points over the Democratic candidate in 2020 but were evenly split between him and Kamala Harris this year. This may be because seniors are far more attuned to the precarious future facing America’s rapidly aging population. Both Social Security and Medicare trust funds are heading toward exhaustion in a decade, and the long-term outlook for these programs is threatened by a precipitous decline in birth rates since contributions from workers fund the programs. 

There’s also a looming cost-of-care crisis as the sizable Baby Boomer generation continues to hit old age. The number of Americans living with Alzheimer’s—just one type of dementia—is projected to double to 13.8 million by 2050, while associated costs are expected to grow to $1.5 trillion, twice the costs for individuals without dementia. Our current system of Medicare covers medications and surgeries for elders afflicted with conditions like cancer and heart disease but does not pay for help with everyday activities like eating and dressing, the type of caregiving those with dementia primarily need.  

At the same time, most Americans lack enough savings to maintain their current level of living, dementia or not. This cloudy outlook for seniors is rarely mentioned by policymakers and the media. Released earlier this month, Golden Years, by the historian James Chappel, seeks to compensate for this lack of attention. Beginning with the invention of retirement in the early 20th century—before which Americans were expected to work until death—Chappel traces the history of how America’s seniors came to have a social safety net at all, before arriving at today’s uncertain future. Throughout the book, both a thorough history and a call to action, Chappel airs his frustration over the country’s failure to do more for our aging population.  

Much like with universal health care, the United States is a laggard among industrialized nations when it comes to providing for its seniors. Yes, Social Security offers a basic monthly stipend, and Medicare does pay for costly acute medical care that might otherwise bankrupt a family on a fixed income, but most wealthy countries in Europe and Asia cover long-term care in the form of assisted living and nursing homes.  

What does America have instead? Women. As Chappell rightly points out, it is middle-aged daughters, many of whom are already buried under their own child care responsibilities, who are called on to take over the onerous task of caring for an elderly parent. Chappel quotes a 67-year-old grandmother named Miriam Dypold, who takes care of her 90-year-old mother and describes feeling “more frazzled and tied down than she did during the years when she was raising five children.” Akin to reserve military personnel, once activated, these women are expected not to grumble but rather to view the job as one of duty and honor.  

I should know—I’m one of them. When my now 86-year-old father was widowed eight years ago, I imagined a time would come when he would be unable to take care of himself; I just didn’t know when. He was able to live by himself for a few years until the pandemic took away the systems he relied on: his gym routine and the cook who came every day to prepare a home-cooked meal and tidy up.  

The monotony and loneliness wrought by the pandemic sent him spiraling into a deep depression and placed my erstwhile mentally sharp father on the path of cognitive decline. (Seventy-five percent of those killed by the pandemic in the United States, or 860,000 people, were over 65, and those seniors who did manage to survive the COVID-19 virus often suffered similar fates to my father.) Irascible and beset with anxiety, he began bouncing between living with me and my family in Brooklyn and in a retirement home 7,000 miles away in New Delhi, India, the country of his birth. 

My father also suffers from diabetes and a heart condition that has led to a couple of heart attacks in the last few years. As I’ve taken on his care, I’ve become intimately familiar with his pill regimen and fluctuating blood sugar and blood pressure levels. My blood pressure, likewise, has skyrocketed, and I’ve developed a frozen shoulder from the stress. As Dypold puts it, “This is just the way it is for women of my generation.” 

I am ill-equipped to be taking care of my father, but paying for long-term care in the U.S. is prohibitively expensive. Unless he is prepared to hand over all of his hard-won life savings—painstakingly accrued over his 50 years as an immigrant in America—to the state and go on Medicaid, my dad is, as they say, shit out of luck.  

Medicaid does pay for long-term care, but only after a person has exhausted his or her savings, with spouses also required to spend down to near-poverty levels. Even then, long-term care through Medicaid may not be attractive when only poor-quality nursing homes accept Medicaid patients. America’s failure to provide universal long-term care doesn’t just impact the elderly. Younger people with disabilities or life-threatening illnesses are also left in the lurch, not to mention female caregivers like me. 

Chappel spotlights the failure of the U.S. government to provide long-term care for its aging population, instead placing an undue burden on their adult sons and daughters, many of whom are raising children of their own. Indeed, he notes, relieving aging parents’ dependence on their grown children was the very impetus behind Social Security when it was conceived and passed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his labor secretary, Frances Perkins, in the mid-1930s. According to a report commissioned by FDR to study the issue of social insurance for the aging, dependency was “enormously expensive not only in the cost of actual assistance” but also in the “loss of self-respect and the constant fear of insecurity.” 

The passage of Social Security followed a ferment of early-20th-century social movements that lobbied the federal government to provide for aging Americans, the most popular of which was led by a physician from Southern California named Francis Townsend. Spurred by socialist ideals, Townsend envisioned a state-supported division of life into three parts. Americans would receive an education in their youth, after which they would begin working and enter what Townsend deemed the “productive years of life.” Finally, no longer able to work, they would arrive at old age, or the “age for leisure.” Under his scheme, every old person would receive a monthly payment of $200—the equivalent of $5,000 today—all of which he or she would be forced to spend every 30 days to fuel a prosperous economy.  

The Townsend Plan, as it was known, gained steam precisely because its champion possessed a vision of old age distinct from the other phases of life at all. “Townsend wasn’t just promising miserly, means-tested pensions to keep older people out of poverty,” Chappel writes. “He was promising a new way of life for older people, and he was offering them a chance to participate in the salvation of the American economy.” Perhaps most importantly, Townsend was offering it to all old people, women, and former slaves among them, not just to the working white men who, until then, had long dominated the conversation on providing for retirement. 

The program FDR and Perkins ultimately implemented was a far cry from the generous Townsend Plan, which ultimately foundered when Townsend was forced to admit before Congress that he had invented the revenues that would be generated to cover the scheme. FDR’s Social Security was not funded by government general revenue but by a new and separate payroll tax through which people would receive a retirement income in proportion to how much they paid in, translating into smaller payments to the less well-off. The program would be less about articulating a new phase of life for the country’s seniors and more about reducing their dependence on their children, who were still contributing to the economy. 

Chappel laments how Social Security reinforced the existing hierarchies of the labor market, contrasting it with how the Townsend Plan would have “used old-age policy to attack and redress some of the most insidious injustices of American society.” 

Despite this critique, Chappel is quick to acknowledge that Social Security and its handmaiden Medicare, passed three decades later and for much the same reason—“to save younger people from being on the hook for their parents’ expenses,” as he puts it—have done much to reduce poverty, particularly among older Black Americans and seniors with disabilities. 

The wave of political energy that spawned these and other federal safety net programs from the 1930s to the ’60s crested in the 1970s and ’80s. Right-wing ideologues like the economist Milton Friedman, the chief architect of the era’s conservative retrenchment, began raising concerns that Social Security would soon run out of money. Other leading conservative figures, magazines, and think tanks jumped on the bandwagon, increasingly calling for market-based solutions and private investment. The drumbeat of negative attention culminated in a lengthy 1974 report in U.S. News & World Report entitled “Social Security: Promising Too Much to Too Many?” 

The criticism was not entirely misplaced. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan struck a bipartisan compromise to address the program’s insolvency, ultimately raising taxes on younger Americans while cutting their future benefits.  

Yet other efforts to improve the lives of the elderly ran aground. A congressman named Claude Pepper sponsored the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, which would have funded long-term care by eliminating the income cap on Medicare taxes. The act, which allowed individuals to pay premiums toward long-term care, was initially passed in 1988 but was repealed the next year. 

The financial world stepped into the breach left by faltering legislative activity. Financiers looking to capture a potential windfall in retirement funds helped usher in the individual-funded 401ks and IRAs that are meant to compose the bulk of our retirement income today. Friedman’s fervent desire to do away with Social Security and Medicare is hardly a moot question and could still come to pass under President Trump despite his protestations. Indeed, the conservative Project 2025 blueprint calls for making Medicare Advantage, which are Medicare-approved plans offered by insurance companies, the “default enrollment option.” This is tantamount to the privatization of Medicare. 

Describing how popular culture from the Reagan era reflected the notion that aging Americans were responsible for their own basic well-being, Chappel dedicates an entire rapturous chapter to the cult classic The Golden Girls. In an episode called “Rose Fights Back,” he writes the character played by Betty White is distraught when she realizes that she will no longer receive a small pension from her late husband’s bankrupt business. As a result, she pulls herself up and gets a job as a journalist’s assistant. “Just as the show propagated a widely shared ideal of health as personal responsibility, it did the same for finances,” the author writes, adding that Golden Girls rarely depicts an older person’s reliance on the government, “almost as though Social Security doesn’t exist.” 

Almost a century after its creation, Social Security has proved remarkably resistant to the slings and arrows. As described earlier, however, its reckoning is fast approaching. Golden Years is a clarion call not just to reform the fragile system that supports old age in America but also to augment it to cover the long-term care the country, including my family, so desperately needs. 

Yet nearly 300 pages later I was none the wiser on what solutions Chappel proposes to get there. His lens is a progressive one, so maybe an increase in taxes would play a role in funding an improved system, but he fails to mention the easiest fix of all—raising the cap on payroll taxes, currently set at $176,100. Does he support increasing the full retirement age for Social Security from the current 67? I can’t imagine he does, but I would have wanted him to compare and contrast the various proposals being considered. What kinds of taxes would be involved in funding long-term care? How would he propose dealing with a potential public outcry over increased taxes to support the elderly, upon whom a third of the federal budget, or $2 trillion, is already spent? 

As much as I believe that fully funded long-term care for my father is the answer to our own family’s crisis, I do wonder how it would be paid for in hyper-individualistic America. In any event, my father cannot wait for that to happen and is returning to India, where, to my relief, he can afford to pay for a nursing home out of pocket. 

Golden Years is unlikely to get a wide reception. Had Chappel ended his encomium to America’s seniors with a set of proposals for addressing the pending Social Security crisis and expanding the framework to include long-term care, this book might have become required reading for policymakers on both sides of the aisle. Nonetheless, it is a welcome primer on the history of American aging for anyone who has a parent or is planning to get old. And yes, that means you. 

The post Gray Expectations appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s been almost three months since The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government, a novelistic nonfiction account of the rapacious lobbying industry’s excesses, appeared with considerable fanfare. The title’s homage to Jordan Belfort’s financial memoir, The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Martin Scorsese film, plus the book’s two esteemed journalist authors being brothers, gave it extra panache. But even with our focus diverted by an octogenarian president abandoning his reelection bid to allow his Gen X heir to go toe-to-toe with a democracy-threatening former president and his gaffe-prone Millennial running mate, this remarkable book deserves our continuing attention.

For instance, after years of abusing its market power to squelch competition and spy on users, Google is finally facing two federal antitrust lawsuits, one for its search monopoly and the other for its dominance over the digital advertising market. To defenders of the Mountain View, California, behemoth, the suits are misguided. Still, to the federal prosecutors, state attorneys general, and private parties pursuing them, they are a noble, albeit late, attempt to contain a tech giant that spent the first two decades of the 21st century snapping up rivals, dominating new markets, and building an illegal monopoly over all corners of the Internet.

Yet, the feds had tried to halt Google well over a decade ago. The Federal Trade Commission considered suing Google for pushing its products over those of competitors as far back as 2011. However, after quietly wrapping up a two-year-long antitrust probe, Barack Obama’s FTC offered the corporation a toothless settlement. What happened to the lawsuit that would have certainly curtailed the power Big Tech enjoys today? Lobbyists did.

The Brothers Mullins show how Google’s luxe lobbyists outwitted the FTC through a secretive campaign dubbed Project Eagle, targeting the panel’s five commissioners—three Democrats and two Republicans. With 50 policy ninjas—former FTC officials, academics, and antitrust lawyers—the lobbyists cranked out white papers, media interviews, and ultimately 75 op-eds, including ones written by former FTC chairman James Miller and none other than the late Robert Bork, the failed Supreme Court nominee and intellectual godfather of the anti-antitrust movement. (Both were Google consultants at the time.)

In the wake of the failed case, the FTC chair stepped down. President Obama replaced him with the holdout Democratic commissioner, who continued to shy away from holding Google accountable.

The Mullins brothers, who chronicle the shenanigans of D.C.’s power players for Politico and The Wall Street Journal, trace the rise of lobbying from its modest beginnings in the late 1960s and early 1970s to its heyday in the 2010s, when corporate America (and foreign governments) sought lobbyists to quash laws protecting consumers and pass friendly legislation in their stead, all while doling out multimillion-dollar paydays to lobbyists and their pseudonymous firms. The book doesn’t end there, though. The last third recounts how corruption, hubris, and exposure led to the lobbying industry’s comeuppance and the somewhat compromised status it holds today.

Lobbying is a prototypically American industry. Gucci-wearing influence peddlers don’t stalk the ornate hallways of London’s Parliament, Berlin’s Bundestag, or Tokyo’s Diet as they do Washington’s Capitol. As the authors describe, lobbying emerged as a reaction to regulatory expansions of the 1960s and early 1970s that spoke to the concerns of unions, environmental groups, and consumer advocates—the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and so on that expanded Progressive Era and New Deal mainstays like the FTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Corporate America, which had spent decades on the back foot after Franklin D. Roosevelt, rose from its complacency to battle its opponents in these movements, “transforming Washington’s once sleepy corporate lobbying community into the most powerful influence-peddling machine in American history,” the authors write. In 1967, there were about 70 registered lobbyists in Washington; this number grew to about 115,000 in 2016.

The Wolves of K Street focuses on three lobbying dynasties, two Democratic and one Republican. Two are notorious: Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, whose prominent 1980s lobbying firm was devoted to advancing Republican candidates, the interests of corporate America, the agendas of murderous dictators and warlords of the Global South, and much later, a guy named Donald Trump.

Starting their respective lobbying empires in the late 20th century, Tommy Boggs, the late son of 70s-era House majority leader Hale Boggs, and Tony Podesta, the brother of John Podesta, the Democratic official who replaced John Kerry as climate ambassador, may have been Democrats, but they soon became aligned with corporate interests, sapping the rights of workers and consumers. For instance, Patton Boggs had been instrumental in passing the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, a 2003 law that forbade the government program from bringing down costs through bulk discounts from the pharmaceutical industry. Boggs’s other lobbying victories included one for Wall Street banks that prevented government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from extending lower-cost mortgages to home buyers.

The Podesta Group also aided corporate America’s ascendancy. Tony Podesta, a liberal activist who helped torpedo Bork’s 1987 Supreme Court nomination, was a favorite lobbyist of Big Pharma and Big Tech. One of the gourmand and art lover’s coups, on behalf of biotech firm Genentech, involved getting the Food and Drug Administration to expedite its approval process for drugs produced by biotech firms. Back in the mid-1990s, Genentech was working on a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. Podesta recognized that the well-educated constituency afflicted with the condition could be enlisted in his cause. He orchestrated a campaign in which groups of HIV/AIDS patients met with members of Congress to fulminate over the FDA’s lengthy drug review process. It worked, and in 1997, President Clinton signed the FDA Modernization Act, slashing the drug review timeline by half. Podesta acknowledged the lobbying profession’s dark wizardry when he said Genentech was able to “convert what could have been seen as a deregulation scheme into a matter of patients’ rights.”

In the early 21st century, Patton Boggs and the Podesta Group routinely topped lists of the most revenue-generating Washington lobbying firms, but both fell apart in dramatically similar ways. Hit badly by the 2008 Great Recession, Tommy Boggs’s firm was looking forward to a $500 million payout to refill its coffers after becoming enmeshed in a byzantine scheme involving Ecuadorian farmers, a New York hedge fund, and Chevron. In a dramatic turnabout, a federal judge ruled that Patton Boggs was a co-conspirator in trying to extort Chevron with false reports of pollution leading to health issues. The firm was now on the hook for $15 million.

Likewise, the Podesta Group suffered a reversal of fortune after the firm entangled itself with Paul Manafort’s murky scheme to prop up Ukraine’s corrupt and Moscow-leaning president, Viktor Yanukovych. Tony Podesta dismissed his employees’ concerns about taking on a client that appeared to be a front for Yanukovych and eagerly signed the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine onto its roster. “Podesta’s willingness to ignore his staff’s concerns underscores the profit-seeking calculus that pervades the foreign lobbying industry,” the Mullins brothers write, noting that the red flags hardly gave Podesta pause that the client might not be working in the interests of American foreign policy. “Rather, they were seen as minor annoyances getting in the way of a big payday,” they write.

The Podesta Group, tarred by the Ukrainian scandal and unable to tout its closeness to the incoming Trump administration, suffered an exodus of clients soon after the 2016 presidential campaign. Both Tommy Boggs and Tony Podesta were approached on several occasions by employees willing to throw them a lifeline in the form of equity in the firm. And both lobbying legends rebuffed the repeated attempts and presided over the demise of their businesses. A diminished Patton Boggs was bought by a law firm in 2014 and lives on as Squire Patton Boggs, while the Podesta Group dissolved in 2017.

In narrating these rollicking tales, the authors give equal weight to the colorful details that lend pathos to the stories of these fabled lobbyists. “Decades of second helpings and stiff drinks had ballooned Boggs’s waistline,” the Mullins brothers write. They similarly describe Podesta’s “meaty torso” and spend pages on his mythic modern art collection, which ultimately led to his divorce from the woman who would take his name, Heather Podesta, and absorb enough of his lobbying acumen to build a storied influence-peddling firm of her own. The authors show equal flair in describing the rise and fall—and rise and fall—of Paul Manafort, the huckster who just peacocked his way through the Republican presidential convention earlier this summer.

However, the authors reserve their most cinematic writing for Boggs’s protégé Evan Morris, who gets swept up in the Washington lifestyle after leaving Patton Boggs to work for Genentech and become one of the Democratic Party’s most energetic campaign fundraisers. By his mid-30s, Morris had acquired a $1.4 million condo in downtown San Francisco, a $3 million waterfront estate on Maryland’s eastern shore, a $300,000 mahogany speedboat, and memberships at several country clubs in the Washington area. As suspected, he did not come by these perks honestly.

Morris’s death by gunshot in 2015, with a $1,500 vintage wine by his side at an exclusive Virginia golf club, was ruled a suicide. The Gothic demise exemplifies the reckoning felt by the Icarian figures profiled in The Wolves of K Street. High-flying lobbyists like Podesta and Boggs helped overturn a 20th-century balance of power that saw victories for consumers and labor and replaced it with a lobbyist-swarmed Capitol where the public interest is largely forgotten. While overweening ambition got the better of them, the world they built has only grown larger, continuing to auction off American democracy bit by bit to the highest bidder. That’s the real story behind The Wolves of K Street, a Spring book that deserves to be read all summer and into this fall’s tumultuous election.

The post As Election Day Approaches, Don’t Forget About the K Street Wolves appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In his latest book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, Fareed Zakaria proffers his own 21st-century spin on storied historian Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal work The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848. Like the famed 20^th-century historian, Zakaria recounts how the French and Industrial Revolutions profoundly shaped the structures, norms, and guiding principles that made our society what it is. The ubiquitous commentator also identifies a few more “revolutions” that aren’t generally considered revolutions, both pre-industrial era and contemporary.

While Zakaria may not be in Hobsbawm’s league, the Mumbai-born son of a political family who was a wunderkind editor of Newsweek International and remains a Washington Post columnist is still going strong at 60. Those who just see the erudite scholar on TV, where he presides over an eponymous CNN program, may not be aware that he earned a Harvard political science PhD under Harvard mainstays like Samuel Huntington of Clash of Civilizations fame and Joseph Nye.

Much of what Zakaria writes is familiar, but that doesn’t make it unappealing. Anyone assigned to read the classic tome, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by the famed German sociologist Max Weber won’t be shocked to find that Zakaria locates the seeds of Western democracy in late 16th-century Holland, where northern Protestant provinces broke away from the Catholic Hapsburg empire. The Netherlands bestowed great agency to local authorities—much like America’s founders did two centuries later. In another precursor to Constitutional principles, early Holland enshrined the freedom of religion.

With the foundation for democracy laid, enter stage right: capitalism. In the 1500s, the Netherlands was a thriving maritime nation rather than an agricultural one. Fewer than a quarter of its workers were in agriculture—unusual for this period—with more than half in trade and manufacturing. Merchants, not aristocrats, held cachetand influence in this milieu. The world’s first stock exchange can be traced back to the Dutch East India Company’s issue of shares to the public to raise funds. At the same time, the Bank of Amsterdam served as a quasi-central bank, another historical first that Adam Smith described in detail in The Wealth of Nations. “It was telling that the Netherlands gained fame not for its castles or cannons but for its banks and merchants,” Zakaria writes.

This Dutch revolution took root in England during the Glorious Revolution, a not-quite-revolutionary sequence of events in the late 1600s. Following the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles I in 1649, parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell seized power, presiding over the short-lived republic of Britain—which it became for the first and only time in its history, a mere decade before the monarchy was restored under Charles II. Upon his death, his brother James ascended to the throne. However, his heavy-handed Catholicism did not go over well with Parliament, which invited his Protestant daughter, Mary Stuart, and her husband, William of Orange, to invade. William, of course, was the quasi-leader of the Dutch republic. Why quasi? As we learned earlier from Zakaria, the prescient early Holland didn’t have a monarchy.

The bloodless ascension of Mary and William as joint monarchs to the British throne in 1688 constituted the Glorious Revolution. But why does Zakaria include this un-revolutionary moment among his pantheon of revolutions? “For the first time in British history, the new royals were endowed with power by an Act of Parliament, making them limited, constitutional monarchs,” he writes. “This marked the turning point of England’s political modernization.” Stability flowed from the new arrangement, making the country ripe for Dutch ideas, such as religious tolerance and freedom of thought as embodied by Isaac Newton and John Locke (who was allowed to return from exile in the Netherlands), and, of course, capitalism. Now that the Dutch had passed the liberal baton to England, Zakaria chronicles how England led the charge toward modernity. These two accounts of lesser-known European history, early Holland and the Glorious Revolution, are illuminating and convincing.

Zakaria rounds out the first half of his book, “Revolutions Past,” with chapters on the great convulsions of the 18th and 19th centuries, including the French Revolution, which he deems failed. (You can guess why—messianic, pre-totalitarian, marked by terror.) He’s more bullish on the First Industrial Revolution, British-born in the late 1700s and which saw the invention of the steam engine and factory manufacturing; and the Second Industrial Revolution, which mainly originated in the United States in the 19th century and is associated with the telephone and electricity.

In the book’s second half, “Revolutions Present,” Zakaria, the academic, gives way to Zakaria, the journalist. Over a breathless 140 pages, he describes the global trade boom that knit together the world’s economies in the 20th century, how the internet destroyed our communities, how civil rights and feminism reshuffled political alignments, and how an emboldened Russia and China are roiling the world.

Zakaria is a free trader at heart—what’s derisively called neoliberalism now—but he understands wisely that the explosion in global trade over the past 50 years left many workers behind and paved the way for the xenophobia and populism that is fueling the growth of right-wing parties in Europe and Trumpism in America. Again, this reflects a shift in thinking among the entire foreign and economic policy establishment, which is welcome but hardly new.

So, it’s no surprise that he concludes that our modern world has led us toward terrifying alienation and loneliness amid a swirl of new technologies, shifts in how we approach work, mass immigration, and the like. Borrowing from a French philosopher, he entitles his concluding chapter “The Infinite Abyss,” and in explaining the current appeal of populist ideology, he quotes Kierkegaard: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

“The greatest challenge remains to infuse that journey with moral meaning, to imbue it with the sense of pride and purpose that religion once did — to fill that hole in the heart,” Zakaria writes, locating solutions to our modern ills in policies like paid parental leave and subsidized childcare to promote family life; wealth redistribution to reduce precarity; and a Peace Corps-style service-oriented program in the United States. (It’s unclear whether he’s aware this already exists with Teach for America and AmeriCorps.) I’d add that the reinvigorated antitrust movement can also bring order to a chaotic world, allowing competition to return to monopolistic industries and creating more opportunities for underserved individuals and regions.

Age of Revolutions is Zakaria’s attempt to contextualize our modernity. In that sense, it’s a welcome background to the many elections taking place globally this year, from Zakaria’s native India to the U.S. Although he appears to quote anyone of any significance from the last four centuries, he leaves out—in a surprising omission—the most apropos sentiment of all: William Faulkner’s oft-cited quip, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The post Fareed Zakaria and Our Tumultuous World appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A century ago, amid the Roaring Twenties, three Republican presidential administrations devoted themselves to the interests of the wealthy, promoting union-busting and slashing regulations. The result was the nation’s most pronounced wealth inequality in its 150-year history—levels we see again today. We all know what happened next. The stock market’s precipitous slide began in the autumn of 1929, wiping out more than half its value and ushering in the Great Depression. The Dow Jones Industrial Average would not return to its pre-Black Friday high until 1954.

The story of how President Franklin D. Roosevelt pulled the country out of its misery through quick action and a prescience bordering on the clairvoyant—the ballyhooed first 100 days—is well-told by Diana B. Henriques, the author and veteran New York Times financial correspondent. Taming the Street: The Old Guard, the New Deal, and FDR’s Fight to Regulate American Capitalism sheds light on a less-trodden piece of this era, recounting how Roosevelt harnessed the ruthless impulses of Wall Street by establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission. She uses the lens of two larger-than-life figures FDR chose to lead the new financial watchdog—financier, bootlegger, and father to a Democratic dynasty, Joseph Kennedy, and William O. Douglas, who would become a liberal lion on the Supreme Court and was almost tapped as FDR’s vice president.

The early maneuvers of a regulatory agency, particularly one overseeing complex financial practices, wouldn’t immediately conjure high drama and colorful characters. But Henriques delivers. Taming the Street unfolds through the perspectives of four main characters—the patrician but haunted Roosevelt, the backslapping Kennedy, the driven Douglas, and Richard (Dick) Whitney, the embattled WASP president of the New York Stock Exchange and a walking apotheosis of the financial old guard if there ever was one.

In 1932, FDR, then governor of New York, accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in Chicago with a galvanizing promise and a rebuke to Herbert Hoover’s laissez-faire approach to the economic calamity that had befallen the nation: “I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people…a new order of competence and courage,” he vowed. Throughout the fall campaign, he decried a plutocratic economic vision—one still espoused today—in which the wealthy claim to, in Roosevelt’s words, “let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest of us.”

Roosevelt’s March 1933 inauguration coincided with a crippling month-long bank run in which Americans withdrew their deposits after losing faith in the financial system. His first presidential act was, famously, to temporarily shut down the nation’s banks, allowing regulators to examine their finances and shore them up with fresh capital if necessary. When the banks opened just a few days later, Americans lined up “to make deposits, not withdrawals,” Henriques writes. The stock market rose 15% on the reopening, impressing “even the princes of Wall Street.”

With banks stabilized Roosevelt turned his attention to the scandalous practices of Wall Street, which had been on flagrant display that winter through a series of congressional hearings. At one, the chairman of Citibank’s precursor offered testimony that led to revelations that the bank’s securities arms had underwritten suspect issues, manipulated stock prices (including its own), and purposely sold investors over $100 million of worthless Peruvian and Brazilian bonds. He resigned in a matter of days after testifying. Another hearing with executives from the House of Morgan uncovered a “preferred list” of influential insiders, including pols in both parties, to buy securities at below-market prices.

Demands to safeguard the public against Wall Street’s insider practices gathered strength, and just over a year after his term began, Roosevelt signed the Securities and Exchange Act, the law authorizing the new regulator. Roosevelt quickly tapped four New Dealers deeply involved in drafting securities legislation to be commissioners on the five-member panel. When picking a chair, FDR showed his cunning with a choice that would satisfy both reformers and Wall Street.

Kennedy, the father of John Fitzgerald and Robert Francis, had developed a reputation as an enterprising man about town—a businessman, Hollywood producer, and liquor distributor once Prohibition ended. He was intimately familiar with Wall Street and its shady practices. In one particularly innovative yet disreputable scheme, Kennedy and his cadre decided to run up prices on stocks that could be confused with those expected to rise on the repeal of Prohibition. So, instead of driving up a glass bottle manufacturer called Owens-Illinois Glass Company, they bought the similar-sounding Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company, which produced plate glass. Kennedy earned $60,000 from the deception, a princely sum in the 1930s, which he then plied into actual “repeal stocks,” tripling his investment.

To most New Deal acolytes, the appointment of Kennedy to SEC chair was akin to putting a fox in charge of the henhouse. “To FDR’s New Dealers and much of the general public, Kennedy was one of Wall Street’s own—but to Wall Street, Kennedy was what he had always been: an outsider who kept his secrets and played a solitary game,” Henriques writes, noting that Kennedy knew the practices he would be regulating. “Set a thief to catch a thief,” Roosevelt jibed.

In his new role, Kennedy became every bit the New Dealer Roosevelt would have hoped, ironically declaring, “The days of stock manipulation are over. Things that seemed all right a few years ago find no place in our present-day philosophy.” Kennedy steered the new regulator through its first year with prodigious energy against unrelenting resistance from Wall Street. The SEC chair wanted to show that regulation could work, as the author writes, by “restor[ing] the “public’s faith in the marketplace and level[ing] the playing field for honest professionals, without stifling the necessary work of capitalism.”

The SEC’s third hard-charging chairman, William O. Douglas, was a Yale Law School professor and the country’s top expert on corporate bankruptcy. After serving as one of the five SEC commissioners, Douglas assumed the chair a few months into Roosevelt’s second term, in which the president won 46 out of the 48 states. “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont,” went the old saw about the two states that supported Alf Landon. This kind of mandate emboldened the president and his appointees, including Douglas, who Henriques sees as an urban cowboy, a western marshal delivering justice. She describes the child of Washington State as “being in the grip of irreconcilable passions.” Raised in Yakima, she writes, “he loved the Western mountains, but he longed for the fame he found only in the concrete canyons of the urban East.”

Douglas’s determination to reform the New York Stock Exchange by persuading it “to trade its private-club traditions for professional management and clear safeguards for public investors” faced implacable opposition. Its most formidable foe was Dick Whitney, who, even after he stepped down as NYSE president after five years in 1935, continued to exert a powerful influence over its members, particularly among the intransigent old guard. “Tall, a bit beefy but impeccably dressed, he still moved with the grace of the Ivy League athlete he once was,” Henriques writes.

Despite his social status and membership in one of America’s most prominent families, Whitney had been embezzling millions for years from his own bankrupt company, a turn of events that only reinforced the need for government regulation. The two chapters detailing Whitney’s downfall read like a thriller. Whitney is not only charged and sent to prison for his crimes but found no supporters among the NYSE’s members: “There was no mercy in this room for the man who made their long crusade against federal regulation look like the self-serving maneuvers of a common thief.”

It is fitting that Henriques concludes her tale with Whitney’s undoing at the end of Roosevelt’s second term. His ruin is a bold marker in the administration’s fruitful attempts to regulate an intractable Wall Street. “Dick Whitney’s final gift to the New Deal was his confession,” she summarizes. “Whitney’s arrogant candor helped peel away any illusions that the public have had about the ability of Wall Street to police itself or its most powerful players.” Henriques’s triumph is her ability to narrate with drama and verve the early days of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a 90-year-old institution whose rules we now take for granted. It’s also a reminder that regulators and those looking to protect investors and keep the markets fair and transparent need the full support of presidents like Roosevelt, warriors like Douglas, and sly insiders like Kennedy—not to mention fraudsters like Dick Whitney (and their modern-day equivalents like Sam Bankman-Fried), whose contempt for regulation end up only reinforcing its urgency.

The post How Franklin Roosevelt Tamed Wall Street appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Sohrab Ahmari made his name a few years ago when, after rejecting the secularism of his Iranian immigrant parents and converting to Catholicism, he began trolling prominent Christian conservatives for being insufficiently radical. In 2019, for example, Ahmari famously attacked David French, who was then an evangelical constitutional lawyer best known for representing religious groups in disputes over issues like whether student prayer groups had a right to meet on campus. In a widely debated essay, Ahmari condemned French’s faith in earnest debate with liberals, proclaiming that there is “no polite, David French-ian third way through the cultural civil war.” In making the case for greater extremism on the Christian right, Ahmari repeatedly evoked the specter of drag queens reading to children in public libraries across the land. 

Now the alum of The Wall Street Journal and New York Post editorial pages is the editor of a much-discussed new publication, Compact, which promotes populist economics and paleoconservative values. He is also out with a new book, and there is not a word in it about transexuals. Nor are there any fulminations against “godless” communism, as one might expect. Instead, Amari’s new devil, as befitting his magazine, is the corporation and unfettered capitalism, and he proposes that the only way to check their power is through the embrace of big government. 

For example, Ahmari rails against what he calls “the class-based inequalities in power and income that are inherent to the workings of unrestrained capitalism.” A few pages later, he froths about the “coercive origins” of the Industrial Revolution, which sent peasants from working fields to “prison-style workhouses and factories, their bones and tears forming the working-class sediments that underlay the glories of Victorian capitalism.” He yearns for the New Deal era when labor won the countervailing power to keep big business in check, leading to the “productive genius of highly regulated, heavily unionized capitalism in which the government coordinated private economic activity.” 

The pundit has frequently been clubbed together with a coterie of so-called post-liberal thinkers, including political theorist Patrick Deneen, conservative writer Rod Dreher, and legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, who are not only at odds with contemporary liberalism but have a beef with Enlightenment mainstays like individual liberty, separation of government and religion and, of course, the free market. They’ve had kind words for government in the style of Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which is to say anti-immigration and anti-abortion, but with an expansive social welfare role for government. Describing himself in Newsweek last month as “ferociously conservative on cultural issues,” Ahmari endorses the ideas of his brethren but adds a union-loving twist that frets over the income inequality perverting our social compact. 

Putting aside cultural issues to focus on the economic ones, Ahmari structures Tyranny, Inc. as a catalog of corporate coercion, retelling horror stories likely to be familiar to readers of The Nation, Mother Jones, or Jacobin. For example, he documents the irregular work hours employers impose on workers and exposes how this interferes with the ability to line up childcare or pursue higher education. He points to the increasingly common practice of requiring workers to be on-call without compensation or to work back-to-back shifts. To bolster his conclusion that imposing such practices on parents threatens the social and mental development of their children, Ahmari points to an article from The New York Times, not the usual citation of today’s conservatives. 

Ahmari devotes two chapters to chronicling how corporations further tyrannize workers by forcing them to sign non-disparagement and non-compete contracts. His bill of indictment against corporations also includes their increasingly common practice of forcing workers to forfeit their right to sue and instead submit to binding arbitration in labor disputes. Ahmari notes the hypocrisy of prominent Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia, who gave their blessings to such practices. “It is worth noting that many of the conservative justices behind the hidden revolution, not least Scalia, publicly touted their fidelity to the Catholic faith,” Ahmari writes. “In the catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, withholding just wages from workers is one of the grave sins that ‘cry to heaven.’” This is more Dorothy Day than Opus Dei. 

Ahmari rounds out his discussion with a chapter on bankruptcy courts, describing the nefarious yet all-too-legal practices used by profitable corporate behemoths to claim Chapter 11 bankruptcy and escape liability. One such technique, the Texas two-step, involves cleaving off a unit, loading it up with liability claims, and then declaring bankruptcy. This is how Johnson & Johnson, with a market capitalization of $1 trillion, avoided liability for claims its talc powder caused cancer. The Sacklers of Purdue Pharma infamy have pursued similar tactics. 

Ahmari also sounds like a full-throated progressive in his takedown of private equity and hedge funds, noting how their vulturous practices have gutted once-storied companies like Sears, snapped up emergency services like firefighting and ambulances, and contributed to the demise of robustly reported local news across the country. 

Ahmari proposes something like a reinvigorated New Deal to remedy the tyranny of private power. “Faced with a crisis sparked by the power asymmetry between labor and capital, New Dealers pursued two broad types of reforms,” he writes. “The first—massive public-works projects intended to put the unemployed back to work and leave more spending cash in their pockets…The second was more long-term and involved government encouraging, where hitherto it had suppressed, workers’ ability to exercise countervailing power.” 

Ahmari’s embrace of unions, regulations, and a robust welfare state has won him some respectful reviews from public intellectuals who disagree with him about almost everything else. This includes thinkers like New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg and the liberal economist James K. Galbraith. I, too, found that his descriptions of corporate predation filled me with rage and tempted me to make common cause. But it is worth remembering that even when someone adopts central liberal policy planks, they still may be fundamentally illiberal when it comes to things like separation of church and state, tolerance of minorities, and embrace of crucial civil rights. 

Historically and today, many authoritarian governments have combined generous welfare states with blood-and-soil ethno-nationalism. See Nazi Germany’s “national socialism,” More recently, Hungary’s simultaneous embrace of the Catholic Church and pro-natalist family policies provide a theocratic variation. It can be a winning formula since, as the political scientist Lee Drutman has found, a plurality of voters, even in the United States, combine socially conservative views with demands that the state grant social security, health care, and other social benefits to people like themselves. Ahmari’s resentments extend far beyond mere “David French-ism.” They extend to liberalism itself. 

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