Sohrab Ahmari
speaker
699 appearances
6 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 10 Aug
Sohrab Ahmari’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Who's not part of the Islamic Republic?
If the if the vision is really total regime change and I, you know, I can't think of someone.
Maybe there was one the president had in mind, but we killed him.
Yeah. So I agree with Adam in the sense that what we see is too often under the Trumpians, but also under the Biden administration. These two, as Adam pointed out, have actually been in a kind of continuity. The Biden administration came in and kept the tariffs against certain Chinese goods, in fact, expanded them to electric vehicle components and so on.
So there's this broad attempt by the American ruling class to try to have a different political economy. And I agree that what they're doing including under Trump too, is not enough.
Where I disagree is the idea that the sectoral mix of an economy between agriculture, services, manufacturing, and so on is impossible to change or re-engineer because in a way, the tradition that I look to, the Hamiltonian tradition, it wasn't inevitable that the US would become an industrial superpower, a manufacturing superpower. It was a result of policies advanced by the Hamiltonians.
And when I say the Hamiltonians, I don't just mean Alexander Hamilton himself, although he laid down the vision, but a series of political leaders who advanced it.
Yeah. The triple foundations where you can summarize them in kind of one word terms as tariff, canal, and bank. Talking about the early republic's economy, the tariff being, of course, an attempt to protect America's nascent manufacturing sector from the manufacturing superpower of that time, which was Great Britain.
And the Brits, as Hamilton knew well, really were determined to turn and maintain America as a kind of backwater, a swampy backwater that was a resource pool for them and that would be a captive market for their manufacturers. In fact, in 1721, the British Board of Trade declared, quote, that the colonies, lacking their own manufacturers, will always remain dependent on Great Britain.
So knowing that, the Hamiltonians said, no, we're going to protect our nascent industries with tariffs by protecting also the sort of maintaining industrial workers, trained, competent industrial workers in the country. But not just that, and that's the part where I think the Trumpians are getting it wrong by just doing tariffs.
He also did, you mentioned the bank, which ensures the steady flow, disciplined flow of credit and the idea of, that the financial system should serve the real economy. That is, we don't have finance for its own sake. And that's why banking, for much of the country, wasn't nearly as important as it is today. Wall Street now plays this overweening role in the economy. The Hamiltonians stopped that.
And then when we say canal, it means infrastructure, which today might mean different things than canals.
Apparently, no, today it still means canal.
Yeah, so with all this talk of plastic surgery, I'm reminded of Michelle Welbeck, the French novelist who said, you know, the prevalence of plastic surgery is a sign of sexual generosity. I don't know how that applies to many factories.
I definitely have some Welbeck in the back. All right. But here's what I'd say is that, so the reason that the Hamiltonian tradition, again, not just Hamilton himself, but I would include Abraham Lincoln and his economic advisor, Henry Charles Carey and Teddy Roosevelt, and especially the FDR and the New Deal order, they all emphasize manufacturing. It goes back to Hamilton himself said for the
For the safety and independence of national life, you need manufacturing independence, something that we encountered in 2020 during the pandemic when we realized that from basic components for many drugs to personal protective equipment for our first responders and so on, couldn't produce that on our own because we'd offshored so much manufacturing.
And I heard you railing against offshoring, John, in your conversation with Senator Sanders as well. I don't care for it. So I would say, look, there is something special about manufacturing because the period of lowest inequality in American history, the New Deal order, did coincide in an industry-led economy. Manufacturing was about nearly a third of the US GDP in 1950, down to about 10% today.
Now, I don't know how much Adam agrees with this or not. I think that that wasn't the result of world historical deterministic inevitability, it was a result of concrete policy choices where in the beginning of the 1970s, we decided to favor finance over the real economy. And this kind of addiction to cheap labor began where not just through offshoring, but also
lots of immigration and so on, we disempowered the American working class. And of course, the anti-union thrust of American policy that really took off under Reagan. So there is something about manufacturing, for example, the NYU sociologist, Vivek Chhibber is a Marxist, but lots of other scholars as well have shown that manufacturing jobs are easier to unionize, certainly than service sectors.
There's something about the proximity of workers in a regular stable hours during the day, and even the kind of geographic proximity that factory life creates compared to gigafied labor. Even the Biden administration was as friendly as you could get to organize labor, but the union density, the share of workers that are covered by collective bargaining was so low now.
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