For the New York City launch of his new book last Thursday, Sohrab Ahmari, best known as a pugilistic voice of the Trumpist new right, held a dialogue with Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of the socialist journal Jacobin and president of the left-wing magazine The Nation. The talk took place at a packed, sweltering event space on the Lower East Side, before an audience heavy on Twitter (now X) personalities and writers for small magazines. Introducing the discussion, Sunkara said that when Ahmari invited him to participate, he was skeptical. But then he read Ahmari’s book, “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It,” and found, as he explained, “surprisingly very little to criticize.”

The book surprised me as well. It was only a few years ago that Ahmari, in an attack on my Times colleague David French, called on conservatives to “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square reordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” I’d therefore expected “Tyranny, Inc.” to be yet another broadside against what the right often calls “woke capitalism.” Instead, it’s a scathing critique of capitalism more broadly, at least in its contemporary, market-fundamentalist form.

Summarizing his thesis, Ahmari writes that the “general tendency of Tyranny, Inc., is the domination of working- and middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the asset-rich.” He examines such topics as coercive arbitration agreements that prevent exploited workers from pressing their claims in court, the ruinous privatization of emergency services and the role of hedge funds in destroying local newspapers. He celebrates “the achievements of social democracy,” which “remind us that there once was an alternative — and that there could be one again.”

If you squint, you can still see the conservative influence on “Tyranny, Inc.” Ahmari’s litany of neoliberal sins includes, for example, “the leasing of wombs via commercial surrogacy.” But much of the book’s analysis feels decidedly leftist. As Sunkara pointed out, the word “woke” appears only a handful of times, in most cases in reference to the blind spots of the anti-woke right. Reading “Tyranny, Inc.,” I kept wondering how Ahmari had gone from conservative cultural crusader to genuine economic populist and, more important, whether any other social traditionalists could make the same leap.