The inside story of how our political class enabled an era of unaccountable corporate power that left ordinary Americans isolated and powerless—and how we can fight back—from the acclaimed author of The Unbroken Thread

Over the past two generations, GOP leaders promoted a vision of deregulation and small government on the belief that encouraging private actors to pursue their self-interests would yield a better economy and a freer society. But across those same decades, the opposite happened. Americans on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder were robbed of stable, meaningful work. Free trade decimated local communities while social liberalism and big business began to dictate what their employees are, and aren’t, allowed to think. The corporations that aligned themselves with this vision, and the mega-donors who underwrote it, knew exactly what they were getting: perfect conditions for what Sohrab Ahmari calls private tyranny.

Drawing on original reporting and research, Ahmari chronicles how this generational effort mounted by some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and companies has eroded our liberties and allowed private actors to gain control of institutions that were supposed to serve the common good—from employment agreements that keep employees from speaking out about bosses' wrongoing, to Wall Street’s decimation of local fire departments and water supplies, to the bullying and demotion of a rising star employee at Walmart, to they way employees across the country who are forced to silence themselves just to earn a paycheck. And he shows how ordinary working- and middle-class people are beginning to fight back. 

Provocative, original, and cutting across typical partisan lines of right-vs.-left, Tyranny Inc. is a revelatory read on the most important political story of our time.

Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact. Previously, he spent nearly a decade at News Corp., as op-ed editor of the New York Post and as a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London. In addition to those publications, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement, Dissent, and The American Conservative, for which he is a contributing editor. His books include From Fire, by Water and The Unbroken Thread.