Ep 84 | Elon-Trump Domination: How Much POWER does Silicon Valley Have? | Sohrab Ahmari

Summary

Zero Hour with James Poulos – Episode 84 Summary

Title: Elon-Trump Domination: How Much POWER Does Silicon Valley Have?
Host: James Poulos
Guest: Sohrab Ahmari
Release Date: February 10, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 84 of Zero Hour, host James Poulos engages in a deep and insightful conversation with Sohrab Ahmari, founder and editor of Compact Journal and author of Tyranny Inc. The discussion centers around the intertwined influences of political figures like Donald Trump and tech moguls like Elon Musk on the current American socio-political landscape.

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Privatized Tyranny and Trump's Influence

[03:10] Sohrab Ahmari:
Ahmari introduces the core premise of his book, Tyranny Inc., emphasizing that coercion and market power have extended beyond government actions into the private sector. He discusses how Trump's administration represented a shift towards policies that empower native workers and promote manufacturing jobs through protectionist measures like tariffs.

Key Points:

• Reduction of Low-Skilled Migration: Enhances bargaining power for native workers.
• Revival of Protectionist Economics: Inspired by the Hamiltonian tradition, aiming to create stable, well-paying manufacturing jobs.
• Limitations of Libertarianism: Ahmari critiques Elon Musk’s rhetoric on reducing state influence, warning it could lead to increased private sector tyranny.

Notable Quote:
“Voters have to weigh and I think the majority, the working class majority, the non-college majority in this country said okay, I want to be externally protected.” ([03:10])

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The Decline of Wokeism

[06:53] Sohrab Ahmari:
Ahmari offers two reasons for optimism regarding the decline of wokeism:

1. Consumer Backlash: Events like the Bud Light boycott over transgender advertising signaled a rejection of woke corporate practices.
2. Economic Revival: A potential resurgence of manufacturing jobs could reduce competition for HR-driven ideologies, diminishing the influence of wokeness in the workplace.

Key Points:

• Peak and Decline of Woke Language: Terms like "systemic racism" have seen decreased usage in prominent publications.
• Impact of Consumer Preferences: Companies are shifting away from woke policies to better align with the preferences of working and middle-class Americans.

Notable Quote:
“Wokeism peaked in 2020, 2021, and has actually been on the, on a downhill slope since then.” ([06:53])

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Elon Musk and Big Tech’s Role in Politics

[15:59] James Poulos:
Poulos theorizes that Elon Musk's acquisition and transformation of Twitter (now X) played a pivotal role in undermining wokeism, positioning tech leaders as new power brokers in American politics.

Key Points:

• Direct Censorship: Musk’s hands-on approach to managing the platform contrasts with the bureaucratic censorship previously in place.
• Tech as the New Power Holder: Suggests that Silicon Valley's influence is now intertwined with political power dynamics.
• Potential Risks: Raises concerns about the concentration of power in the hands of a few tech elites.

Notable Quote:
“Tech killed wokeism, as if not, you know, obliterating it from the scene... they bear down on you less.” ([05:31])

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Future of Conservatism and the American Political Landscape

[27:01] Sohrab Ahmari:
Ahmari explores the potential trajectories of American conservatism in a post-neoliberal era. He discusses the fragmentation of traditional conservative coalitions and the emergence of Trumpism 2.0 as a dominant force.

Key Points:

• Decline of Neoconservatism: Many neoconservative elements have merged into other political factions or lost influence.
• Endurance of Movement Conservatism: Despite challenges, movement conservatism remains a resilient strand within American politics.
• Potential for Institutional Adaptation: The Democratic Party and the security apparatus must adapt to the evolving political climate shaped by populism and tech influence.

Notable Quote:
“The fusion, the three-legged stool of hawkish foreign policy, pro-business, and socially conservative have sort of separated from each other.” ([38:19])

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Religion and Social Conservatism in America

[41:00] James Poulos:
The conversation shifts to the role of religion in American society, particularly how the absence of an established church influences political and social dynamics.

Key Points:

• Polarization Along Gender Lines: Men, especially young men, are gravitating towards traditional liturgical forms, while women are drawn to more liberal religious expressions.
• Challenges for Social Conservatism: The right's distancing from traditional social conservatism, especially after significant court rulings like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, poses challenges for maintaining a cohesive conservative religious base.
• The Role of Churches in Social Stability: Ahmari underscores the importance of organized religion in providing social cohesion and support in democratic societies.

Notable Quote:
“Men, young men especially, are increasingly drawn to more traditional forms of liturgy... while women are drawn to more liberal Protestant formations.” ([42:54])

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Conclusion and Final Thoughts

As the conversation wraps up, both Poulos and Ahmari contemplate the future trajectory of American politics, the enduring influence of big tech, and the evolving role of religion and social conservatism.

Key Points:

• Tech Worship vs. Political Balancing: There's a tension between embracing technological solutions and maintaining a human-centric political approach.
• Resilience of American Political Institutions: Despite upheavals, American governance structures show adaptability.
• Need for Complementary Social Structures: The interplay between organized religion, political parties, and private power will shape the nation's path forward.

Final Quote:
“The American form of government sort of warps and bends and changes depending on kind of what's going on. It's proven pretty resilient.” ([35:10])

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Notable Quotes Summary

1. Sohrab Ahmari on Voter Preferences:
   “Voters have to weigh and I think the majority, the working class majority, the non-college majority in this country said okay, I want to be externally protected.” ([03:10])

2. Ahmari on the Decline of Wokeism:
   “Wokeism peaked in 2020, 2021, and has actually been on the, on a downhill slope since then.” ([06:53])

3. Poulos on Tech’s Influence:
   “Tech killed wokeism, as if not, you know, obliterating it from the scene...” ([05:31])

4. Ahmari on Conservatism’s Fragmentation:
   “The fusion, the three-legged stool of hawkish foreign policy, pro-business, and socially conservative have sort of separated from each other.” ([38:19])

5. Ahmari on Religious Polarization:
   “Men, young men especially, are increasingly drawn to more traditional forms of liturgy... while women are drawn to more liberal Protestant formations.” ([42:54])

6. Poulos on Government Resilience:
   “The American form of government sort of warps and bends and changes depending on kind of what's going on. It's proven pretty resilient.” ([35:10])

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Final Remarks

Episode 84 of Zero Hour delves into the complex interplay between political power, technological influence, and societal shifts in America. Through a nuanced conversation, James Poulos and Sohrab Ahmari explore the decline of wokeism, the resurgence of protectionist economic policies under Trump, the pivotal role of Silicon Valley under Elon Musk’s leadership, and the evolving landscape of American conservatism and religion. The episode offers a comprehensive analysis for listeners seeking to understand the current and future state of American socio-political dynamics.

Transcript

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[James Polis]

The GOP will never be the same. But who gets to decide what conservatism even means? Saurabh Amari is in the house. I'm James Polis. Welcome to Zero Hour.

[Saurabh Amari]

La la la la.

[James Polis]

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[Saurabh Amari]

Thanks for having me James.

[James Polis]

Okay, so this one Tyranny Inc. Basic idea is Tyranny's been privatized. It's not just something the government does anymore. Trump swept in. It's a huge change. Is your book suddenly invalid?

[Saurabh Amari]

No, no. I mean this big structural concerns about coercion and market power are not things that get solved so quickly or easily in some, I mean I, I think in some ways the incoming administration will mitigate it. So for example, when you reduce low skilled migration that increases the bargaining power of native born workers on the lower rungs of the labor market. That's obvious. And so I think that's one of the most pro worker elements of the Trump 2 administration. Likewise the tariffs which hark back to the Hamiltonian tradition. As you know, this country had a protectionist economy for most of the 19th century through the 19th century and even in the into the 20th. That just means that we'll have more, you know, the goal is, and I think it's an admirable and important one is to have more manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing jobs have a certain dignity that go with them. Manufacturing jobs have high pay, higher wages. They have a stability that go with them. And actually if you, if you care about raising up workers, countervailing power, they're also easier to organize compared to kind of gigafied service jobs. So those are the upsides that I see. That doesn't mean there aren't downsides. I mean, as you know, this is going to sound funny to you, but I am not a libertarian. I think some of the rhetoric you hear from Elon Musk about X degree of cutting the state I don't favor and I think that potentially raises up the power of you know, private tyranny in our, in our economy. But you know, voters have to weigh and I think the majority, the working class majority, the non college majority in this country said okay, I want to be externally protected. I don't want migration to compete at the lower rungs of the labor market with me and I and I want tariffs that overrides concerns that I might have about how kind of Elon style libertarianism might transform the domestic internal economy. So I'll trade internal protection for external protection. I think that makes sense when I.

[James Polis]

Think about private tyranny. I've been writing about the sort of human resources regime since gosh I think 2008 at this point, you know, and that sort of turned into that. All the pink police state stuff that I was doing in the 2010s. I've been following this for a while and, you know, that's, that's kind of what I think about first and specifically. And, you know, this is, I guess, controversial, but I'm, I'm just trying to call it like I see it with my political theorist hat on. This is a form of, of administrative control that just is dominated by women and by a certain type of woman. And Trump comes in and, yeah, maybe libertarianism sort of having this tech rebirth and maybe populism is back and maybe a lot of things are back, but it's going to be tough to just dislodge human resources bureaucratic management out of corporate America. Right? Because it's not just an ideological thing where you're like, well, we need more efficiency or, you know, we're making America great again. And so you poof. They're not going to go poof. And you're going to. Even if you do start to push those things out of, out of the corporations, this is still a large number of people who are doing these jobs. And it's just hard to see how you can get sort of near quote, unquote, full employment specifically for women if these, this kind of job is removed. Removed from the workforce. Right.

[Saurabh Amari]

So let me give you two reasons for optimism. The first is I think that wokeism in the culture, if not necessarily in the legal and corporate apparatuses that govern us. Wokeism peaked in 2020, 2021, and has actually been on the, on a down slope since then. You can cite both data and anecdotal evidence. In terms of data, one thing that Musa Al Gharbi, a sociologist I admire, has pointed out is that the use of certain very charged woke buzzwords, such as systemic racism, has declined in the pages of the New York Times. They peaked in 2020 21, and it's actually been coming down since.

[James Polis]

So I don't disagree. You know, there's some, some, some guys on the right are like, no, it's the worst. I tend to agree with you, but I'm not sure what your account is of why.

[Saurabh Amari]

I think partly it's a, it's a backlash. Consumer backlash mounted. You saw around the same time as the boycott of, of Help me here, the beer.

[James Polis]

So there's the Bud Light, Bud Light, Boycott Light.

[Saurabh Amari]

So let me, let me start, let me start that over. So partly I think it's in response to a Consumer backlash. Right. And you, I think that really an important flashpoint in that was the, the boycott of Bud Light over it's kind of transgender advertising. You saw around the same time the Wall Street Journal ran a story that said lots of corporations are downsizing or dramatically even getting rid of their DEI departments and consultants.

[James Polis]

So ESG started to kind of hit a wall.

[Saurabh Amari]

Yes, absolutely. And that became less and less of a conservative talking point because it was, I think it was on, it has been in some ways on the downslope. That's in response to consumer power and this sudden recognition, especially by certain brands that cater to working and middle class Americans that like, oh, okay, you know, John Deere tractors. There's no reason for it to say absurd things about, you know, the men becoming women or whatever. So I think that's one factor. And then the other one is, okay, is a more long term solution which might come about under the new kind of Trump 2 dispensation, and that's this. A lot of these jobs are, they're created and sought after because otherwise, if you're in our economy, working class and lower middle class jobs are just so precarious. So it's either you're in finance, media, oil, or in this kind of HR sphere or you face really dim prospects. But if we have a revival of manufacturing through industrial policy, through tariffs, et cetera, et cetera, and you have the ability for more people to just go into like vocations, come out with a two year degree and make a better living than the person who has a PhD in gender studies but still can't find an academic job. If you have an economy like that, you reduce the incentives for people to compete for these jobs, jobs. And the competition itself generates wokeness. Right, because there aren't enough jobs. So if I want to cut you out, James, at a company, one way I can do that is by saying I have greater victimhood status. But if I don't need that, I don't feel that pressure. I think it turns down the temperature. So I'm not saying all of wokeness is reducible to the shape of the labor market, but I think there's some nexus between the shape of the labor market and those things that you obviously pointed to. Last point I'd make is, you know, I think if we have an economy in which workers have greater bargaining power, you will reduce the power of the HR department. By definition, whatever the ideology of the HR department happens to be, it's going to become less, it's going to like bear down on you Less. My favorite example, by the way, just. Just to close this out, and it's in my book Tyranny Inc. Yeah. Is the degree to which this stuff can be used to actually disempower workers. Is rei, you know, the outdoor gear chain.

[James Polis]

Right.

[Saurabh Amari]

They had a podcast about a year ago where this woman comes on and the company podcast, internal company podcast. And this woman comes on and says, hello, I'm so. And so I use she, her pronouns. And I want to acknowledge that I'm coming to you from the traditional lands of the Ohlone people. And then she says, and I'm proud to serve as your corporate diversity and inclusion officer. And the topic for our podcast today is why you shouldn't join a labor union.

[James Polis]

Right. It's like nightmare fuel for compact.

[Saurabh Amari]

Exactly. But I think it's very typical of what role it played over the past eight years and what. I think we've had a seismic election. And so I'm a little bit more optimistic about being able to dislodge that stuff and. Or empower workers relative to it.

[James Polis]

Yeah. Okay. So, you know, I don't think I disagree with any of that. Here's my kind of theory on what's. What's going on with Wokeness. I'm going to run it by you and see. See what you make of it. So, like, two factors, and the first factor is there was a limited amount of time between, you know, 2020, when things really started to take off, lockdowns. That was kind of the beginning of what was supposed to be the new regime. Of course, there was stuff that led up to it, but that was really the moment when the rainbow flags appear everywhere and every plaza is renamed blm. And you can't say these things and you get kicked off the Internet. They had a good four years to destroy Trump, get him firmly out of the picture, and basically usurp the government and refound America. You know, that's a. That's. It can be done. But four years goes by pretty fast. And Trump proved to be a little more resilient, and. And the American people proved to be a little bit less pliant. And even at the top of the federal and the corporate food chain, there was some discomfort. And some people were, you know, not. Not ready to. To convert to the new faith, and they just ran out of time, and they sort of gave it their biggest push, and it turned out to just simply not be enough. And the minute that it looked like that big push was ebbing and there wasn't going to be an even stronger one Preference cascade. I think that's part of it, but I think the bigger part of it still is, well, why didn't Trump manage to disappear off stage? Why did he manage to survive? Why did he manage to att a larger coalition this time around? And what was the kind of backstop that made these people think like, well, you know, even if we manage to do a rerun of 2020 and, oh, it's five days after the election, but it turns out that once again, we turned out to be the winners, why didn't that work out for them? And the answer is Elon Musk. And the answer is all those tech guys who contributed to and came in the wake of Elon's strategic decision to go all in on Trump. Tech killed wokeness, as if not, you know, obliterating it from the scene, definitely as the sort of pretender to the throne of the American regime. And so if, if this is right, you have an attempt to create this kind of woke theocracy, it starts to run out of steam, tech comes along and kills it. We have like sort of two, two options going forward. One is just kind of another sort of generation of agonizing about what it really means to be a true conservative. You know, we, we know what that's like. Two is it's not going to be the woke theocracy. It's going to be tech worship. And there are a lot of, you know, a lot of, a lot of guys on the right who thought that it was curtains for them. And then Elon comes along, he's sort of the great savior. And suddenly, you know, well, of course, going to Mars is what we should have been doing all. You know, it's so tempting to just kind of give in to this sort of neo libertarianism. Many reasons why it feels good, and it's an easy answer. And, you know, the next thing you know, you're putting the chip in your brain and you're going full post human and we live happily ever after. I don't think that's, that's fated to happen. I think situations more complicated than that in a few interesting ways that maybe we can talk about. But I think that's kind of, it's an easy out for a lot of people who are looking to just bring an end to the conflict and end to the confusion, get rid of Wokeness, get rid of, you know, sort of all those, those old internecine conservative debates about who really counts as, you know, a real true believer and just lean hard into tech greatness.

[Saurabh Amari]

I am so done with those debates. And as you know, I famously engaged in them. And I now I just think of there are a series of problems that I care about and I want to solve them. And I'm, you know, I think some of them are ones that the old had good answers to. When I say the old left, I mean the left that was rooted in a working class and sought things like better wages and healthcare and so on.

[James Polis]

And you, you continue to take heat from guys on the right who are like, you just can't fold this in. We are not going to lie.

[Saurabh Amari]

Exactly. Right. So anyway, I, I agree with you about being done with that on the. So let's start with the four years they had. I actually, I agree with that. I think that the pandemic created these conditions where you were able to renew a utopian horizon for the left, having been so roundly defeated. And I think the utopians, yes, having so roundly defeated in the course of the 20th century, there was this kind of lack of a utopian horizon. And so the answer was, oh, we have an emergency. And this emergency allows for new forms of life. I mean, there was this concept of capitalist realism from this, he calls it. Mark Fisher British POLITICAL thinker and it's the idea that you can't imagine an alternative to capitalism. The line goes, it's easier to imagine the apocalypse than minor social democratic reforms.

[James Polis]

Right. The closest we'll get to utopia is Epstein Island.

[Saurabh Amari]

Right, right, right. And so that capitalist realism was so sort of depressing for the forces of the left that they thought, okay, but now we're reimagining forms of life in which you could tell people to stay home, in which you can tell people to mask up. And there's a sort of communal sense of solidarity, you know, clapping for the nurses at 7pm I lived in New York City then, as I do now. You walked around at 7pm Everyone would be banging pots and pans.

[James Polis]

Yeah, the choreographed dancing, all of that.

[Saurabh Amari]

It created this sense of, well, we can imagine a different society now. It was horrible, Right. It was actually isolating to mask people. It was isolating to leave people inside their homes and stuff. But I think that was, that was your. In a way, I'm, basically, I'm agreeing with you that they saw this kind of alternative society emerging after years of depressing capitalist realism where they couldn't overcome the 1990s. Basically, here they are, you know, we're doing new things, different things.

[James Polis]

Well, the right went through this in like sort of post 911 world, right? Where it was like, oh, everyone's so selfish. It's a nation of whiners. We need national service. But like we're not going to get it.

[Saurabh Amari]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

Like, not that people were sort of hoping for a cataclysm, but one sort of came along and it was like, this is it, you know, this is our chance for like solidarity and we can be leaders again. And they.

[Saurabh Amari]

That's really like that. There's a parallel that. Yes. That In a way 2020 was the left's 9 11. And in a way the failure that followed afterward is kind of parallel as well.

[James Polis]

And you get the same kind of criticisms of those things from like, you're Baudrillard, you're Agamben, this sort of like postmodern Europeans.

[Saurabh Amari]

Exactly. Saw right through and Agamben got canceled. Oh, of course. For, for opposing this right.

[James Polis]

Not like this.

[Saurabh Amari]

So I, so I agree with you there. This limited window to imagine a utopian possibility. On your second point, look, I think that Elon has been a factor. There's no doubt about it. I do think that the fundamental problem of overweening private power remains the same even with Elon being on side with conservatives for now. Here's what I mean by that. So I was the op editor, as you know, of the New York Post, when we did the Hunter Biden laptop story. And around that time, conservatives were floating the most serious attempts at bringing big tech tyranny under control. They were talking about Section 230 reform. Boring. But basically this 1996 Clinton era law that's supposed to allow platforms, although at the time neither Facebook nor Twitter existed, allow them to censor things like pornography and violent threats and so on, without carrying the liabilities of a traditional publisher. In other words, if I lib you in my book, not only am I liable for that for, for defamation, but my publisher is as well. Or if I libel you in a newspaper, both of us. But under the section 230, if I libel you on Facebook, only I can be sued. Facebook itself is immune, and that's thanks to the Communications Decency Act, Section 230. So conservatives were like, well, if Twitter, the pre. Elon. Twitter is gonna act like a censor in this kind of unreasonable way, then it should really bear all the liabilities of being a publisher and acting more.

[James Polis]

Like a publisher than like a neutral platform.

[Saurabh Amari]

Neutral platform. So that was on the table and then you had no less than a radical left wing figure like Justice Clarence Thomas saying, maybe we should subject these platforms to common carrier rules. Common carrier rules. Are go deep in common law, as you know, where the idea is that a provider of a public service like a toll bridge cannot unreasonably discriminate against you. In a way, the Civil Rights act was a codification of this old common law principle that had been suspended in the South. So that would have been just like your telephone company can't cut off your service based on what you say on the phone. Likewise, Twitter and Facebook shouldn't be able to do that. So what I point is that was a moment of excitement, of actual reform. And I think then Elon came around, bought Twitter, turned it into X, tweaked the algorithm in ways that I clearly discern. I don't necessarily always mind it. Sometimes I complain about some of it, but that favors the right. And a lot of people on the right were like, okay, well we don't need those reforms anymore. And all of that went away. So the kind of. And here's another point. I think you'll find this interesting that what Elon did with Twitter is Twitter had become a managerial class entity. Right. So that your censor, it's censored, but your censorship went through all these layers of bureaucracy and approval and blah, blah, blah, and FBI agents who apparently like former FBI staffers who would be like, yeah, we should flag that one, et cetera, et cetera. It was very kind of professional managerial class. Elon, in a way, to me, harkens back to the heroic age of capitalism. Sort of 19th century Carnegie type figure of like the old classic bourgeoisie. And so the censorship is much more, in a way, it's much more direct. If you like bother him in X, Y, in X, Y or Z way, he'll just, you know, directly interact to.

[James Polis]

Be the Next star on X.com?

[Saurabh Amari]

Exactly. He'll just, he'll throttle you or kill your account. But it's much more personal and it's. I find that possibility interesting.

[James Polis]

And classic patronage. You know, there are people making money posting, and it's just like a direct deposit.

[Saurabh Amari]

Yes. And others just go like every four hours you should go like, magnificent. Elon did this and that. And you'll get retweeted by him and be like. Or you can say something extremely cranky and weird and he'll be like, wow, no, it's not true. Whatever the topic. Anyway. But today I've been thinking, I happen to be thinking about what will the political economy look like under this new Trumpian? And the return of heroic capitalism is interesting because it also introduces the dialectical possibility of A response to that which had been mitigated by the welfare state. The welfare state and the New Deal model, which I like in many ways, but it was aimed at diminishing class conflict. It's a model of class reconciliation with professionals basically ministering to the problems of the poor and so on. If you get rid of it and you have ferocious 19th century style capitalism, as Elon certainly wants, in a way. He wouldn't put it that way. But then you also raise the possibility of, you know, an interesting reaction from people who are subjected to that. And you'll maybe get the next generation of reform and settlement. But maybe it's not such a bad thing for the heroic capitalist to come back on the scene.

[James Polis]

Well, in some of this, you know, you can go all the way back to like some of these memes, the 1600s, where it's got like the sad, you know, scrawny dog and it's like VCs, 2024, I love, you know, and you can like, oh, you try to raise and like you, you know, like, trying to maybe raise maybe was like a bad investment, you know, and then you have like the Chad 1600s.

[Saurabh Amari]

Yes.

[James Polis]

With like the Dutch pith helmet or whatever. And it's like, I'm conquering countries, you.

[Saurabh Amari]

Know, I'm like, I have a monopoly on nutmeg.

[James Polis]

Right. Yes, exactly. So some of this stuff making $60.

[Saurabh Amari]

Trillion, some of this stuff goes very far back. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, that's actually the age of mercantilism. Right. And I think there's an element of that that's coming back as well. And by the way, the interesting thing is that Trump came along and in a way, first time around 2015, Sixteen said, okay, neoliberal globalization isn't working for America. We're going to have tariffs and do this and that, although his administration was so hampered by this democratic lawfare that couldn't do much, although the tariffs were important. And then the Bidenites come along and they retain the tariffs on China and then they expand it to include electric vehicles, EV components. So it's become a kind of consensus. But what that means is we're really looking at a world that's much more divided into blocks, like bloc blocks. And that's the world of that Dutch guy.

[James Polis]

Bricks and blocks.

[Saurabh Amari]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[James Polis]

So I mean, it's interesting to think that perhaps, after all, neoliberalism is going to be out of power in a diminishing force, and instead of getting just one thing in exchange, we're going to get kind of everything but neoliberalism. So you've got your, you know, your, your hyper capitalist individuals over here. You've got your sort of like populist masses over there. Over here you've got kind of like the trads who just would rather sort of back away from everything. You've got, you know, like your Amish and your folks in there. And then you've got like your, your high energy patronage networks. You know, you got sort of like Mormons and Jews and, and Indians and sort of like just kind of this constellation of all.

[Saurabh Amari]

Potential substitutes and imams who endorse Trump.

[James Polis]

Yes. Right.

[Saurabh Amari]

What you didn't mention is the Democratic Party and its NGO Plex. The NGO Mediaplex of the Democratic Party and the deep state. Yeah. The security element of this, the security state element of this will not be so easily tamed.

[James Polis]

But can they survive without this like, neoliberalism substrate to feed off of?

[Saurabh Amari]

I think the American. And by the way, in some ways, in many ways, I like the American security apparatus. I want America to be the top dog in the world. Sure. So I think they've always found ways to adapt to whatever new conditions come along. I think they will adapt to populism. There's a guy named Chris Porter who has served as, I believe, director for Cyber intelligence under both Trump and Biden. And he was like, look, wrote a piece saying, like, if you want to be the deep state, fine, there is such a thing. But you've got to learn to work with populace because at some point they will come to power in such a decisive way that they're going to be in charge and you can no longer sort of undermine them. And so you've got to learn to work with them. And I think we just got the election that made that all too real. So we'll see how they react. And I'm curious, you know, where the Democrats go? I mean, they have, you know, they have their own, you know, interness and factional, you know, the, the Bernieites think if they had just run on socialism, they'd win. I think that's delusional. Of course you have the sort of resistance wine mom saying, you know, it was racism and sexism or whatever, but.

[James Polis]

Seems like they're gonna, I mean, I, I'm preparing for them to just go full bore against tech. This is the new bad guy. Donald Trump wasn't scary enough to keep us in power. So who is scary enough to get us back into power? Well, it's gotta be these hyper billionaires.

[Saurabh Amari]

Yeah. Okay. They can be I mean, I sometimes think, okay, if we have Mars colonization under Elon, you could have like a total recall scenario. It's like this kind of free economic zone that's not under any kind of U.S. jurisdiction. And like the workers rise up and he sort of turns off the air until they comply, you know.

[James Polis]

Well, he has said, you know, perhaps one day Mars will save Earth.

[Saurabh Amari]

Yes, yes. So you look, you should. I think I've learned to become suspicious of private power. And I think especially the reason I became so sensitive to private power was because of what Twitter did to the New York Post. And so I kind of like a guy who shares some of my views on gender now running one of the key platforms, maybe the most important platform, but we should be a little bit wary of, you know, his own ambitions and so on.

[James Polis]

Can anything cure private power of what ails it or does it just have to be broken up?

[Saurabh Amari]

Well, there's two, there's two interesting. In the American tradition, there are two interesting responses. The first is the Brandeisian tradition, which Woodrow Wilson also embodied, which is Break it Up. If it's big, break it up. Teddy Roosevelt Roosevelt would be a little bit different. That was an internationalism. The Teddy Roosevelt strand actually becomes more of the New Deal, which is we need big. Big is rational in many ways, but if we're going to have big, then we should have the countervailing power of people on the other side of the market. So for example, if you have like big utility companies, you need to have like state backed utility co ops that can negotiate with them on rates and so on. If you're going to have big employers, you have big labor to compete with that. And right now the reform debates are between. I think the most interesting reform debates are between these two camps. The break it up types got kind of a boost under Biden because of Lina Khan, the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, whom J.D. vance described as the only person in the Biden administration that's doing her job. And so they got a boost. Now we'll see what happens with that because believe that Vance is kind of sympathetic to some of that. But yeah, this is how the American tradition has dealt with it in the past. Either you know, kind of break it up or raise up the power of people on the other side of the market. The problem with Break it Up for me is like okay, in a post industrial economy, it just bigness, consolidation and concentration is just natural. So like it doesn't make sense if you have 200 towns to connect them with 100 separate railroads, there's network effects. And so it makes sense to only have about two or three railroads that basically don't compete. You know, they're like cartelized and they serve, you know, each serve about 60 of the towns in that network. That makes more sense to me than, or in the factory context. If we're going to bring back manufacturing, it can't be done small. There's a reason why, save for very, very high end Italian sports cars, for the most part. You don't make cars in small factories. You can't have a mom and pop tire factory. So it's because of increasing returns to scale, because of factory effect. So I think we should learn to live with big, but then countervail big by raising up the power of people on the other side of it. If it's workers, labor, organized labor, if it's, if it's sellers, the other side would be consumer co ops and so on.

[James Polis]

Well, and to a degree that seems to be more or less the Trump sales pitch. So, you know, you get some daylight between Trump and Elon. And what daylight there is, I think is, I mean, look, there are some guys in Silicon Valley who are like, I'm sorry, James, but politics is going to be solved by artificial intelligence. Mortality is going to be solved. Jobs, you know, it's all going away and it's all going to be replaced by these sort of automated machines that ever become ever more cost effective at doing whatever there is to do. But then you have other guys who are like, well, no, at the end of the day, this is more about sort of like unleashing the power of the truly exceptional individual to kind of have his, his will in the world.

[Saurabh Amari]

Yeah.

[James Polis]

And so it's, you know, Elon has been evolving and I think he's probably going to continue to evolve. It'll be interesting to see in which direction he goes. But Trump has not really evolved in any way since he first sort of appeared on the scene as someone who is sort of a household name. And from the beginning, you know, he's been, he's been a guy about people. And when, whether he's talking about technology or greatness or tariffs or manufacturing or, you know, superstructure stuff, system stuff, he clocks all that. But he always comes back to people. And I think if there's a hope for that kind of interplay or balance that you describe, it's going to have to come from a guy who understands how to deal with people. And that's going to, I think, be its own kind of, you know, from time to time. The American form of government sort of warps and bends and changes depending on kind of what's going on. It's proven pretty resilient. Even if it has decayed and degraded in some ways, still there's life in it yet. And that kind of sort of Trumpian nationalism where tech does play this, this big role, but there's maybe these sort of big counterbalancing, not adversarial, but just, you know, just keeping things in a sort of balance that's going to involve a lot of sort of like dealing with people and groups of people and emissaries from these different interest groups and identity groups, patronage, and just sort of, you know, in a more kind of imperial way, just kind of figuring out, you know, how to keep everyone feeling more or less okay and working those different balances.

[Saurabh Amari]

You're so right. And I think that's such a good point because it depends on basically bringing the social estates together. You know, employers, workers, churches, synagogues, and kind of and, you know, various identity groups. And you do have those and kind of bringing them together and occasionally cajoling them, banging their heads together to get a deal. And I actually think Trump is into that. And the coalition he woven reflects that. He goes here, he's, like I said, he's dealing with the imam in Michigan. Then he goes over there.

[James Polis]

Muslims, we love poor people.

[Saurabh Amari]

He's among the super orthodox, you know, in New York. So it's like.

[James Polis]

And it's, it's not easy to pull that off. People smell the stink on you from a mile away. If they feel that you are just trying to humor them or just trying to cajole.

[Saurabh Amari]

Yeah, Yep. No, it's real. But I think that the larger point. Well, one larger point. You said that the tech guys think tech will solve politics. And I think actually your own work is pretty critical of that kind of techno utopianism and techno religion. However, look, it's not bad to have robots doing stuff. If we can do it cheaply on a mass scale, that's good. Let's get there. And the way that Trump will help with that is by limiting immigration, because one of the. But one of the biggest impediments to labor saving technology is if employers are always able to do things with cheaper and cheaper labor, then they don't have an incentive to invest in labor saving technology. It's why agriculture took so much longer to mechanize in the south than in the North. In the north, you had to pay workers. And so, yeah, there's an incentive to industrialize So I think in that case he's helping them. But you're right, he's not going to go all the way into the idea that technology will make, will obviate politics. You know, he's like the return of the political in human flesh form. Like, he's like, no, no political contestation, you know, and look at what he does. The first thing he does is like he promised lower immigration levels today. He appointed Tom Holman, a pretty hardline guy, to be a kind of border czar. And Stephen Miller as deputy Chief of staff, said, like, politics is back.

[James Polis]

Yeah, okay, so I'm curious what you think about this because you've been tracking this for a long time and it's becoming almost a parlor game at this point now, which is how much of sort of legacy movement conservatism is actually going to survive the second Trump era. I mean, Paul Ryan's still out there kind of trying to chip away at this thing. There's consternation over whether which senators are gonna get with the Trump program and which aren't. But gosh, you know, if, if neoliberalism is, is fading, neoconservatism mostly fading, then you're sort of like, okay, you know, which is the next domino. How much of, of sort of just 20th century conservatism is gonna, is gonna survive?

[Saurabh Amari]

That's, that's, that's, that's an essay that, that you should write, but because it's a big one. But it, you just turn that one right around. Well, no, no, no. So the neoconservatives was in 2016, more or less, largely, not entirely, but in a big way. At least a part of them folded into the Democratic coalition. And by the way, I think they may have cost them the 2024 election by all this emphasis on Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, such beloved figures.

[James Polis]

Oh yeah.

[Saurabh Amari]

But these intellectual tendencies, I have to think they just don't die. That kind of movement conservatism of which, as you know, I'm more and more alienated, you know, is a real strand in American, in the American tradition, you could argue, okay, it's sort of the fusionist version of it is manufactured in response to communism. And now that communism is gone, the fusion, the three foot, the, the, the, the, the, the three legged stool of hawkish foreign policy, pro business and socially conservative have sort of separated from each other. And that's fine, but there's that, that kind of Paul Ryan conservatism has some roots, I would say, going back to the 19th century with the Whigs in, in some ways. And so I don't think, I don't think it'll go away. And look, these people have donor apparatuses still to some extent. They have operations and so on. It was fair enough. And I think they will look to see if Trumpism 2.0 fails and then they can swoop in in a big way to collect the remains. But that seems pretty unlikely from the vantage point of the kind of electoral majority that Trump just wove together. Yeah, but the idea, core idea, and some of the institutions like National Review is gonna stick around. It's not, you know, I think that's not gonna go away. I don't know if you agree.

[James Polis]

I don't know. You know, I, I mean, I think that, that so much of, of what has caused American politics to be this kind of, you know, barely controlled chaos and a lot of, like, upheaval and eras and power struggles. You know, this is a country that has never had one church. And I'm not talking about an established church or, you know, or anything like.

[Saurabh Amari]

That, although we haven't had that either.

[James Polis]

Well, you know, the states, you know.

[Saurabh Amari]

Established like the Anglican Church.

[James Polis]

Right. But never had an established church. And I think, you know, I think that's part of why, why the big push for wokeness failed is people started to realize, like, wait a minute, you know, this isn't just another ideology. It isn't even just sort of Marxism or cultural Marxism or psychological, sexual or whatever. You know, it's this is, this is a theocracy in the making and that it's really hard to get that to take in America. But, you know, if you go way over here in the other direction, you have just a kind of cult factory and you've got rising and falling sects, and there's no center of gravity in terms of the organized religion in the country. And I think that a lot of that energy has been sort of displaced onto political life and this constant struggle to like, figure out how to address spiritual problems through policies and through politics without an established church, without a theocracy and without sort of one long lasting church to kind of hold that kind of spiritual center in public life. And so, you know, I mean, you've read your Tocqueville, you know, that he was concerned that for all the dynamism of the individualistic Protestants in America, you know, you give them one hard hit and they drop all the way to the bottom and their life is shattered. And he was concerned about that because, you know, in the democratic age, the individual can feel Very interchangeable and insignificant. And his expectation or his prediction, such as it was, was that because of these pressures, organized religion, the church shored people up in democratic life right where they were weakest. And so everyone would more or less either gravitate to Rome or gravitate toward sort of rank materialism. You know, it's, it's early days, but. And you know, we can close out with this just kind of your thoughts on where America is gonna, is gonna trend as far as religion in the church is concerned.

[Saurabh Amari]

There is of course, the sort of long term secularization that's been going on for a while, the rise of the nuns, the, not the kind of nuns that I like, but. N o n. Yes, but the other trend is the polarization between men and women in terms of what kind of church they like. Men, young men especially, are increasingly drawn to more traditional forms of liturgy, and that is in numerous denominations. It even touches the Protestant and a kind of masculine ethos and reintroduction of what it means to be a man in the body of Christ. Meanwhile, women are drawn to more and more kind of liberal Protestant formations and within the Catholic Church, the kind of liberal corners of the Church that's a very interesting and potentially unhealthy dynamic because ideally you want this kind of complementarity of the two coming together. So that's one interesting element. The other is, it seems to me, is social conservatism as rooted in the church. And I don't mean the Catholic Church per se, just so people. I'm a Catholic convert, so I don't want to seem like, when I say the church, I just mean my own. I just mean the Church in general has taken some hits in the bargain of this election. Right. I mean, you know, the Trump Vance campaign went out of its way to distance itself from the pro life movement, going so far as to say we might publicly fund in vitro fertilization. And so I think that's a challenge and an opportunity to think about. Okay. Social conservatism won a big victory in the overthrow of the Roe v. Wade regime. But, but that, that came at a price. It came at a, in part, popular referenda, even in red states seemed to favor the, the pro abortion position. And so, and then, and it, that in turn compelled the, the right, the party of the right, the Republican Party, to sort of abandon, or at least try to sort of distance itself from, from social conservatism of that kind. Yeah, so I don't know, you know, that's, that's, that's depressing. In a way, but it's also an opportunity to think what is, what is social conservatism? What does. Or what is just. What is, what is public Christianity mean in the aftermath of all this?

[James Polis]

Yeah.

[Saurabh Amari]

You know, and I think there are gonna, there are interesting experiments in various denominational communities to try to answer that, but it's not going to be social concern. Christian social conservatism as we recognized it pre2024 still, to some extent.

[James Polis]

Yeah. I wonder if we're moving in the direction of a sort of, you know, usually subsidiary or. Let's see if I can get this word out. Subsidiarity.

[Saurabh Amari]

Yes.

[James Polis]

Usually subsidiarity is thought of as like, as a voluntary program where everyone involved in it is sort of like, well, this is obviously best and it's kind of going to help everyone and, and we live and let live what is solve problems at the smallest possible level as a sort of logic. But we might be headed toward like a practical involuntary subsidiarity where it's like, okay, social conservatives, you can live the way you want. Look at the Amish, they're doing great. But you're not turning the country Amish. You're not turning the country into what you want it to be. People are, you know, maybe a state away, are going to be living lives that you think are going to send them straight to hell. And maybe you might not like that, but, you know, I, Donald Trump, am going to prevent you from trying to go cross this boundary and try to conquer these people.

[Saurabh Amari]

I'm going to protect you. Yeah, but I'm also going to protect them, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a very good description.

[James Polis]

Yeah. Well, we'll see. Saurabh Amari, thanks for joining us.

[Saurabh Amari]

Thanks, James.

[James Polis]

All right, that's all the time we got till next time around. I am James Polis. This is Zero Hour. May God have mercy on us all.