Two weeks from today (on Sunday, May 17th) I’ll be one half of a discsussion on “Trump, Zohran, and the Future of Populism” with UnHerd editor Sohrab Ahmari at Bar Freda in Queens.
You can get tickets here.
I’ve known Sohrab for years. He’s edited my work first at Compact and then at UnHerd, and as far as I know he’s the only conservative to have ever taken one of my Capital classes, which says something about his intellectual curiosity. I’d certainly consider him to be a personal friend (I’ve sat around drinking whiskey on the roof of his apartment), but I’ve often half-jokingly called him an “ideological frenemy.” I agree with him on a long list of issues, from the war in Iran to the importance of rebuilding the labor movement, but we also have a long list of disagreements on issues that matter to me. While he turned hard on the administration after the beginning of the war (and he had many criticisms earlier), he supported Trump in 2024 and he’s generally conservative on social issues. All of that makes him a relatively unusual creature in the U.S. setting, though he’d be less so in any of the European countries where “Christian Democrat” parties are a normal part of the political landscape.
On the “Trump” part of the discussion topic on the 17th, during the 2024 election Kuba Wrzesniewski and I argued that a second Trump term was likely to be far uglier and more authoritarian than the first round. Since he took office, our worst fears about that were realized, and a lot of my commentary in the last year and a half has probably make me sound a bit like first-term “resistance lib.”
Bluntly: The kidnappings of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk for political speech that displeases the administration, the transfer of detainees convicted of nothing to CECOT, and the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti scared the hell out of me, and in a strange way even negatively polarized me into realizing how attached I am to many existing American institutions. Birthright citizenship, for example, really is a civilizational achievement, as I argued in Jacobin last year and again in a different register for a 4th of July article at UnHerd. The same is true of America’s unusually expansive free speech protections.
In my Jacobin article about the No Kings protests in March, I wrote:
Anyone on the socialist left who thinks the fight against Trump’s authoritarianism isn’t our fight because it merely pits liberals against conservatives is very deeply missing the point. Liberal capitalist democracy is profoundly flawed, and its promises are destined to go unfulfilled. But as workers’ movements have always understood, it’s a good starting point for the struggle for something better.
If we’re going to arrive at a form of society that extends democracy from politics to economics, we need to fight like hell to defend the level of democracy we already have — which is precisely what gives us room to agitate, organize, and maneuver.
So, while it’s not going to be a “debate” so much as an open-ended discussion that includes elements of strong disagreement, I do think Sohrab and I are coming from substantially different places here. My sense is that his position is that Trump’s second term has been bitterly disappointing, but he was on board with at least significant elements of what Trump and Vance were talking about in 2024. Without being too flippant about serious issues, I come about as close as an atheistic materialist can to agreeing with Tucker Carlson’s recent speculation that Trump may be the Antichrist.
On Zohran, there’s a broadly similar split. Sohrab has been sympathetic to aspects of the mayor’s agenda, but he’s also been very critical of the Cea Weaver nomination and the inauguration line about “the warmth of collectivism.” I wrote articles for Jacobin defending the mayor on both issues. The night he won the election last year, there was a GTAA live show in the same venue that the discussion with Sohrab is going to be in, and the bar gave everyone champagne to toast after his victory speech. I’m an unabashed partisan.
Even though “Trump” and “Zohran” are included in the title more as illustrative figures for a broader discussion on types of left and right “populism,” their contradictions, and their possibilities going forward, I’m still sure several of these disagreements will come up in some form in the discussion on the 17th. (I asked my friend Cynthia, who might soon be starting a podcast of her own, to moderate the discussion, and I’m sure if we get into an extended stretch of boring everyone about the things we agree on, she’ll prompt us to go down a more interesting fork.) But it really is going to be a discussion more than a real debate, since part of what makes Sohrab such an interesting interlocutor is that (a) he’s thoughtful and tends to take a pretty long view of political developments, and (b) we really do have some common premises.
The man got through all of Capital Vol. 1, and it shows—he’s one of the rare non-Marxists (especially on the contemporary right) to make a real effort to understand it and incorporate some of the framework’s insights. It’s interesting to see, for example, how the class analysis near the end of his article Cole Tomas Allen is a Postmodern Symptom rhymes with some of what Nick French writes (from an explicitly Marxist perspective) here.
My goal isn’t to, like, have a clip I can post as “Ben Burgis DESTROYS Sohrab Ahmari.” I think he’s often insightful and I’m interested in what he has to say as we both think through the current moment.
Also, it should be fun. Living out here on the opposite coast, I really don’t spend that much time in NYC, and this kind of thing is always a bit of a reunion with people I don’t see nearly as often as I’d like to. I’d be pretty shocked if we didn’t get some Q&A questions from faces you’ll find familiar from the podcast.
So, if you’re going to be anywhere near New York on the 17th, come check it out. It’s going to be a good time.
Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.
From Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis via This RSS Feed.