For Ahmari and his fellow Compact writers, there is no enemy more despicable than liberalism. Last year, the magazine’s co-editor Matthew Schmitz, another convert to Catholicism, paraphrased an old quip from Norman Mailer: “You can call me anything you want, just don’t call me a liberal.” It is libertarians on the right who uphold the freedom of capitalists to crush unions, and liberals on the left who think people should be free to marry someone of the same gender or change that gender at will. In his new book, Regime Change, promoted by Compact, Patrick Deneen deplores “the rise of a distinctive ruling class that today dominates the institutions of the West. Members of this ruling class are selected for their support and defense of the liberal order.” Only the overthrow of this “regime” that, according to Deneen, “has globally ravaged the working classes, leaving them simultaneously in a condition of economic precarity and social disintegration,” will do.
Liberals and leftists who muse about forming a united front with the right against the corporate elite might study how an earlier uneasy alliance worked out—between the Northern and Southern Democrats who enacted the signature legislation of the New Deal. Both party factions endorsed FDR and cheered his populist attacks on the “economic royalists” in the GOP who fought to preserve their largely unregulated wealth and power. While vowing to uphold Jim Crow forever, Dixie politicians also happily voted to create Social Security, fund public works jobs, subsidize crop prices, and bring electricity to farms and homes in their region, then the poorest in the nation. Co-sponsor of the act that established the Tennessee Valley Authority was Representative John E. Rankin from Mississippi—a vicious figure who also proposed a ban on interracial marriage and claimed a federal anti-lynching bill would “encourage Negroes to think they can rape our white women!”
It’s hard to see how contemporary populists, right and left, would find a way to work together to emulate that alliance. As steadfast cultural conservatives, Ahmari, Deneen, and their ilk are quite unlikely to support Democrats like Sherrod Brown and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who share their economic views but feel just as strongly about protecting reproductive freedom and marriage equality. The progressive activists who routinely campaign for the latter would probably desert those politicians in a hurry if they welcomed a partnership with former and future backers of Trump. And although Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio blurbed Tyranny, Inc., neither they nor any other Republican senators support the PRO Act, which would remove some of the major legal barriers to organizing unions. Not a single GOP lawmaker voted to confirm Jared Bernstein, long one of the most prominent pro-labor scholars in the United States, to chair Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.