Corporate America: A Long History of Private Tyranny
REVIEW ESSAY
Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—
and What to Do about It
by Sohrab Ahmari
Forum Books, 2023, 288 pages
Tyranny, Inc. is a book about the nature of labor relations, the conduct of corporations, and political possibilities in postindustrial America. Sohrab Ahmari, a journalist and editor whose magazine credits span the ideological spectrum from Dissent to the American Conservative, here combines anecdote and analysis with the awful ring of truth. It would be exhilarating if the portrait were not so grim.
Ahmari’s first theme is coercion as practiced by the American business enterprise, mostly on workers, sometimes on customers or bystanders. This coercion is not crude; brute force is rarely needed. The issues also rarely involve the violation of law. Rather, in the main, Ahmari describes the use of the law as a coercive tool. His image of the American worker, collectively, brings to mind a Gulliver in Lilliput, tied down by threads, mostly spun by lawyers on behalf of oligarchs, whose spindles have been at work for over five decades or more, a systematic conquest of the courts.
In the portfolio of coercive control over employees there are, in Ahmari’s judgment, three main methods. These are: abusive conditions of work, such as arbitrary and capricious scheduling demands that may not be refused; job contracts that protect the employer from public exposure or other recourse in the event of gross misconduct, notably sexual harassment; and the institution of mandatory arbitration—the “bosses’ court”—to prevent employees from gaining access to (what was, at one point, at least thought to be) impartial justice.
In the gallery of corporate misconduct, Ahmari’s second theme, we read also of three phenomena. The first is what Ahmari calls “erosion” of an otherwise potentially viable firm by its owners; other words for this practice include asset-stripping and looting. In this process, illustrated by the case of Sears, workers and their communities, built up over a generation or longer, are cast off alongside the commercial locations and physical equipment. Second, there is privatization of public services, illustrated by the notably malicious case of for-profit firefighters, entitled to charge the victims of house fires for the services of a (dubiously effective) fire truck. Third, there is the matter of bankruptcy for profit, a maneuver enabling the rich and powerful (Johnson & Johnson as well as the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma are examples given) to offload the liabilities from adverse legal decisions to an entity without assets.
To round out his collection, Ahmari includes a chapter on the destruction of community information flows, as small newspapers have shrunk and disappeared. This is a peculiar artifact of the “information age”—which spreads content to the remotest corners of the world courtesy of Zuckerberg and Musk, but at the same time cuts off the routine knowledge of petty corruption, predatory behavior, and simple incompetence and inefficiency in the work of local administrations and the companies they hire to provide (what were once considered) basic public services and environmental protections.
Ahmari embeds these portraits of modern private tyranny in a political or philosophical message aimed largely at conservative readers. This comes in two parts. One is a critique of the fantasies of libertarian individualism advanced by such mid-twentieth century figures as Milton Friedman, woven partly from Defoe’s fable of Robinson Crusoe and tied to a mythology of free markets and economic equilibrium. The other is the conservative’s habitual animus toward public power, and especially the command-and-control apparatus of the modern state. Though it has antecedents going back to 1776, this animus is largely a twentieth-century concern—the response of the committed capitalist to what was described as totalitarianism, mostly of the communist type. Ahmari’s message to conservatives, in short, is that the state is not the only tyrant, and the market is not a reliable locus of true freedom.
An Oligarch’s Redoubt
All this is of great value. And yet, the narrative of a rise in private tyrannies subverting traditional, once-dominant “American liberties” that were and would be otherwise protected by the Constitution, laws, and traditions of the United States involves its own elements of myth. In truth, the American republic was an oligarch’s redoubt from the very beginning. The coexistence of a rhetoric of liberty with a reality of private tyranny is a defining feature of Americanism. The archetypal Founding Father was a slaveowner. The Northern shipmasters and mill-owners were the allies of the slaveowner; the slave states were their market and their source of cotton, the great industrial raw material of that time. After the Civil War, the country was run by the robber barons of the railroad age, succeeded in the early twentieth century by the even greater barons of oil and banking.
Ahmari clouds this picture, to a degree, with a description of the American workingman of the pre–Civil War era, influenced by an account given by my University of Texas colleagues William Forbath and Joseph Fishkin. According to their view, the typical American workman in those years was a proto-capitalist, a craftsman, owner of tools and specialized skills, whose relatively high earnings were partly a reward of effort, and partly a matter of profit on capital invested and equipment owned. A quotation from one of Abraham Lincoln’s less-celebrated speeches serves to support this depiction. Ahmari writes that “Lincoln didn’t imagine it possible that some people, perhaps the vast share of workers, would end up spending their entire lives working for others in exchange for wages.”
I don’t think that’s quite right. Lincoln surely could, and did, imagine this, although in the speech cited he may have been flattering his audience of Wisconsin farmers. The industrial revolution was well underway in the United States by the mid-nineteenth century, led—as in England—by textiles, railroads, gunsmiths, and other manufactures, each of them a fully-fledged capitalist operation with workforces paid an hourly or daily wage.
And yet, it is true that those wages were high by European standards; the United States was a magnet for immigrants, many of whom accepted factory labor. The credit for high American wages is normally given, in part, to the availability of rich land on the advancing frontier. But even more, it lay with a politics of tariffs aimed precisely at the vote of the working classes. This struggle was a political one, pitting Northern labor against the free-trading Southern oligarchs, and not a small part of the movement for secession in the South.
Liberty in America has thus always been a universal ideal with a strictly limited sphere of application. Its expansions—in labor battles, in the Civil War, in the suffragist movement, in the New Deal and the Civil Rights era—have always been the consequence of moral and political struggle. These struggles never end; with each success, new forms of private tyranny emerge. The story that Ahmari tells is just one of the recent forms of this recurrent drama.
The broad sweep of American history presents us with multiple and diverse examples of resistance to tyranny. Some—from Shays’s rebellion to the Civil War—were necessarily violent, as were labor battles well into the twentieth century. Others were predominantly political and moral—the cases of suffragism, the antiwar movement, and civil rights, suffused in the latter case with the authority of the church. And in the 1930s, labor struggles were largely moved into the nonviolent sphere by legitimizing unions, the right to strike, and the organization of working people into a powerful voting and fundraising bloc.
Countervailing Power’s Absent Conditions
It is to the economic system built by labor and its allies in the Democratic Party during the New Deal that Ahmari appeals for a remedy to Tyranny, Inc. The necessary element is “countervailing power,” a phrase invented by my father, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, for a 1952 book, American Capitalism, to describe the then-emergent world of large organizations: industrial corporations, trade unions, powerful government, and an engaged, somewhat coherent “scientific/educational estate.”
As the curator of my father’s legacy, I can only thank Ahmari for his thoughtful and generous evocation of these ideas. And yet, one has to ask, do the material and social conditions that made a society based on the “concept of countervailing power” still apply in today’s United States?
The United States in the 1950s was the dominant industrial power in the world. Its manufacturing corporations, in steel, rubber, automobiles, appliances, communications, business machinery, farm machinery, machine tools, and aircraft had at that point few significant competitors. And each of these industrial giants had a workforce, mostly of men, heavily organized into a phalanx of trade unions, to which one could add the ranks of Teamsters and Mineworkers, among others. About 30 percent of the whole workforce belonged to unions, whose members were often military veterans and whose jobs fostered a discipline of teamwork and the rhythm of machinery and assembly lines. Although there were still many small businesses, family farms, and sole proprietorships, the dominant social forces in the national economy were teams of managers on one side and teams of workers (or their representatives) on the other. Countervailing power emerged from this reality.
This facilitating material framework no longer exists. In part, it was always a transitional phenomenon, destined to erode as Europe and Japan recovered from the war. But that erosion was greatly deepened and accelerated by policy decisions. In the 1950s, the Korean War helped to revive Japan. In the 1960s, both Germany and Japan began to make inroads into American industrial markets, which they were permitted to do for reason of their status as frontline states in the Cold War; South Korea would join them a bit later on. From the 1970s onward, the Federal Reserve deployed its powers to weaken labor, by means which had the side effect of destroying the industrial base on which labor organization had been built. Environmental policies, affecting coal, and deregulation, affecting trucking and the airlines, added to the damage. And then, following a massive revaluation of the dollar in the early 1980s, Mexico and later China emerged as prime centers for offshore manufacturing.
The United States in consequence became a services-and-real-estate economy, with lucrative sidelines in finance, high technology, armaments, and oil. Manufacturing employment has been falling since 1979, and is now barely higher than it was in 1940, despite a more-than-doubling of the population. Neither the remaining leading sectors nor the vast hinterland of basic services are fertile territory for organized labor. In finance and technology, pay is high but highly personalized, and jobs are very few. In services and construction work, units are small, atomized, and undifferentiated; the workers themselves are transient and easily replaced; in the nastier operations (like poultry plants and meatpacking), they are often, if not usually, immigrants with or without official documentation.
Moreover, with multiple employees per household, the new normal since the 1980s, the locus of family security has shifted. Ahmari notes that “real wages”—per worker, adjusting for inflation—have not increased since the 1970s. This commonplace observation overlooks the fact that workers per household (and hours per worker, in many cases) have increased greatly, and with a flood of cheap imports, real incomes per household have certainly risen. But incomes are far less secure. So households have come to rely on the presence of multiple incomes, making it possible to offset spells of unemployment and job change in a world where far fewer workers enjoy long-term employment with a single supporting enterprise. Marriage contracts (or their common-law equivalent) take the place of union contracts in providing a fragile modicum of security in a much-more-precarious economy, at least until the age of Social Security and Medicare is reached—though marriage rates, too, have declined considerably since the mid-twentieth century.
If this judgment is correct—and if my father’s ghost forgives me for offering it—where does that leave the United States? Ahmari’s answer is rooted in the most successful era of economic democratization in American history. But it does not cover the material, social, and political conditions created by the age of neoliberal globalization. And we may further stipulate that the Trumpian answer—MAGA reindustrialization (via tariffs, subsidies, and industrial policy)—is beyond easy reach in the modern world. What was destroyed over forty or fifty years cannot be put back in four or eight, even if all the political stars were to align, which they will not.
The legal backbone of Ahmari’s new tyrannies adds further obstacles. As he shows, organizations and oligarchs can overwhelm and exhaust the comparatively penniless litigants they harm. The courts are in line; the Federalist Society and its sponsors have known their business, in pressing for young judges with life tenure. As for the Supreme Court, nothing needs to be said. Ahmari does not use the word “lawfare,” but the term captures the conversion of the legal system into an implement of private power, much as it was in the days of Dred Scott and, later, the Lochner era.
What then? In France these days we see one pathway unfolding from a similar cause: a convulsive insurrection, with no immediate outlet in electoral politics but certainly favoring the rise of the extreme Right. This seems unlikely in the United States, a much larger and more decentralized country. Washington is not Paris. And even the massive marches of the 1960s for civil rights and against the Vietnam War required a spirit of and capacity for organization no longer present.
The other plausible pathway is what we presently do observe in the United States: social dissolution, bit by bit. Homelessness is a scourge in all major American cities—where did it come from? Why is nothing being done? Opioids, fentanyl, synthetic tranquilizers—not to mention alcohol and now-legal cannabis—blunt the pain. Depression sets in for tens of millions, with suicide as the final step for many of those, alongside the occasional mass murder.
Meanwhile, the elite groups that run the country have other priorities. They are blinded, to a degree, by economic statistics built for another era, according to which, so long as unemployment is low and inflation is coming down, all is well. So they are free to natter on about China, Russia, and the “rules-based order,” to bloat up the Pentagon’s budget, and to champion “democracy and human rights” in every country except our own. Perhaps someday, a new moral force will emerge to sweep them all away. But it’s difficult to see how that might happen, and so, even more, to share Sohrab Ahmari’s noble hope that American politics may be up to the task of saving us from ourselves.