How to beat Trump? In his new book, Turf War, the architect Steven Robinson shows us how it can be done. In the late 1980s, a band of New York civic groups set out to stop Donald Trump from building his self-styled “masterpiece,” a half-mile of gargantuan buildings overlooking the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side. After five years of community organizing and strategic opposition, Turf War explains, they defeated his proposal. So fast forward forty years. What, I asked Robinson, are the lessons of Turf War for the mid 2020’s? How can activists successfully resist Trump’s latest assault on the environment and on the civil rights of women and migrants?Steven Robinson has been an award-winning architect, a land-use planner, community activist, and writer in New York and New Mexico since 1985. His buildings and public space designs in urban and rural landscapes have served private clients, academic institutions, and native communities. He was a founder of Westpride, the grassroots nonprofit that initiated the defeat of Donald Trump’s overwhelming proposal for Manhattan’s West Side and was a designer on the ensuing civic-oriented master plan, the buildings, and the riverfront park for that site. In New Mexico, Mr. Robinson has served as the founding president of the nonprofit which revitalized the nationally acclaimed downtown Santa Fe Railyard. He has been a featured speaker at the National Trust for Historic Preservation and taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Mr. Robinson received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania and earned a Master of Architecture degree from Yale University. He lives in New Mexico.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Former New York Times reporter John Markoff has been writing about Silicon Valley for almost a half century. In December 1993 the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist wrote one of the earliest articles about the World Wide Web, referring to it as a "map to the buried treasures of the Information Age." So where are we now in the history of tech, I asked Markoff. Is the AI boom just one more Silicon Valley cycle of irrational exuberance? And how do contemporary tech titans like Sam Altman and Elon Musk compare with Steve Jobs, who Markoff covered for many years.John Markoff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He has reported on Silicon Valley for more than four decades and wrote for The New York Times’ science and technology beat for 28 years, where he was widely regarded as the paper’s star technology reporter. He is the author of five books about the technology industry including his upcoming book Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (on sale in March 2022). For decades Markoff has chronicled how technology has shaped our society. In Whole Earth, he delivers the definitive biography of one the most influential visionaries to inspire the technological and cultural revolutions of the last six decades. While Stewart Brand is largely known as the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog that became a counterculture bible for a generation of young Americans during the 1960s, his life’s work is much larger. Brand became a key influence in the ‘70s environmental movement and the computing world of the ‘80s. Steve Jobs adopted Brand’s famous mantra “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” as his code to live by, and to this day Brand epitomizes what Markoff calls “that California state of mind.” Brand has always had “an eerie knack for showing up first at the onset of some social movement or technological inflection point,” Markoff writes, “and then moving on just when everyone else catches up.” Brand’s uncanny ahead-of-the-curve-ness is what makes John Markoff his ideal biographer. Markoff’s reporting has always been at the cutting edge of tech revolutions—he wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993 and broke the story of Google’s self-driving car in 2010. Stewart Brand gave Markoff carte blanche access in interviews for the book, so Markoff gets a clearer story than has ever been set down before, ranging across Brand’s time with the Merry Pranksters to his fostering of the marriage of environmental consciousness with hacker capitalism and the rise of a new planetary culture. Markoff’s other books are: The High Cost of High Tech (with Lennie Siegel); Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (with Katie Hafner); Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America’s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw (with Tsutomu Shimomura); What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry; and Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots. He is a Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has been a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism, and an adjunct faculty member at the Stanford Graduate Program on Journalism. In 2013, Markoff was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team for Explanatory Reporting “for its penetrating look into business practices by Apple and other technology companies that illustrates the darker side of a changing global economy for workers and consumers.” He continues to work as a freelance journalist for The Times and other organizations. Markoff graduated from Whitman College with a B.A. in sociology, and an M.A. in sociology from the University of Oregon.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Few Americans have been as consistently critical of Donald Trump’s morality than the New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner. How to prevent the worst happening, Wehner thus wrote, in his final Atlantic column before the election. So now that the worst has actually happened, how exactly is Wehner - who worked in several Republican administrations - feeling about the future of the American Republic? More optimist than one might. American self-renewal is a wonder of the world, Wehner explained to me, which is why, he believes, we should still be remain cheerful about American democracy.Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. His books include The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era, which he co-wrote with Michael J. Gerson, and Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism. He was formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Wehner is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and his work also appears in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and National Affairs.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Transcript“What we're called to be in our lives, personally and maybe vocationally, is to be faithful, not necessarily successful. Whether a person is successful in life depends often on circumstances that they can't control. That's just the nature of human existence. But you do have some measure of control of whether you're faithful or not. And that's really what honor is.” -Pete WehnerAK: Hello everybody. Election was two weeks ago, but we're trying to figure out the implications of the Trump/Vance win in the presidential election. We've done a number of shows, one with my old friend Jonathan Rauch. Rauch believes that November 5th represents what he calls a "moral catastrophe." And I'm curious as to what my guest today will say, whether he'll try to trump his old friend John Rauch. Wehner I've always seen as the conscience of American conservatism. He wrote a piece in The Atlantic—he writes a lot both for The Atlantic and The New York Times. Before the election, he wrote a piece for The Atlantic about preventing the worst from happening. He's joining us now two weeks after the election. Pete, did the worst happen? Is it a moral catastrophe?PETE WEHNER: Well, I see the worst happened in terms of what the binary choice was for this this election. Obviously, it's not the worst that could conceivably happen to a country, but given the circumstances, it's the worst that happened. Is it a moral catastrophe? You know, it's a moral blow. And I think it's a moral indictment, actually, of of much of the country as well. Whether it's a moral catastrophe remains to be seen. I mean, events will write that story. But I'm certainly concerned about where we are politically in terms of classical liberalism, in terms of the moral life and moral compass of America.AK: Immediately after the election. Peter Baker, New York Times writer, one of your one of your companions, colleagues on The Times, wrote an interesting piece about Trump's America, suggesting that this is the America who we are. Kamala Harris argued that we were different. But Baker believes that this is the America. It's Trump's America. As you know, Pete, he quoted you in the piece. You said, "This election was a CAT scan on the American people. And as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption." Tell me more about this CAT scan. What does it tell us about the America of late 2024?PETE WEHNER: Well, I think it tells us things that are disturbing. It doesn't mean—and I wouldn't say and I didn't mean to imply—that people who themselves voted for Donald Trump are morally corrupt. But what I do mean to argue is that everybody who voted for Donald Trump voted for a man of borderless corruption, a man of moral depravity. And that's disturbing.AK: It's more than disturbing, Pete, the way you put it. "Moral depravity." In what way is he depraved?PETE WEHNER: Well, let me count the ways. I mean, the man was found liable to sexual assault. He's adulterer, porn star. He's cheated on his taxes and charitable giving. He tried to coerce an ally to find dirt on his opponent. He invited a hostile foreign power in the election. He instigated an insurrection against the Capitol. He tried to urge a violent mob to hang his vice president. He's a man who says racist things. He's a misogynist. He surrounds himself with people who are themselves deeply problematic, including picks that he wants for his cabinet. I would say that corruption has touched every area of his life, personal, professional, and in the presidency. So I don't think that that's a difficult argument to make. I think there's empirical evidence for it. But if there is a counter argument, I'm open to hearing it.AK: Well, I'm certainly not going to make that counter argument. You seem on the one hand, Pete, a little...tentative about, shall we say, morally smearing all Trump voters with his depravity. On the other hand, you know that everybody knows everything about Trump. There are no secrets here.PETE WEHNER: Right.AK: Can one then vote for Trump and not be in any way smeared by this moral depravity?PETE WEHNER: Yeah, it's a good question and I've thought a lot about it, Andrew. The way I think about it is that for Trump supporters, many of them, in any event, look, I know them. I mean, we've friends throughout our life, and I wouldn't deny that you can be a Trump voter and be a wonderful parent or neighbor and a person of high moral quality in a lot of areas in your life. On the other hand, I would say that this was an important election, and that Trump's depravity was undisguised. In fact, he kind of hung a neon light on it. And for an individual to cast a vote for that kind of man, who has done the things that he's done, and he's promised to do the things that he's done, I do think reflects on the person's character. And I don't think it's says everything about a person's character. I don't think this is the most important thing about a person's character. But I do think it says something. And I think that the people who voted for him should at least own up to who he is and the kind of man that that they cast their vote for. So if that's the tentativeness that you hear from me, that's an effort to explain why it's both tentative but something that I have fairly strong convictions on.AK: Pete, you and I talked about this a lot. You've been on the show many times. So it's a wonderful opportunity to talk to you. Is the church/state division in your head as sharp as it should be? For you, is politics essentially an extension of morality? I've always suspected there's an element of that, and I don't necessarily mean that as a criticism. It's just a reality of how you think.PETE WEHNER: Yeah, I don't take it as a criticism. I do think that politics is an extension of of morality. I don't think it's the most important extension of morality. And I do believe that the people who are indifferent to politics, you know, their morality expresses itself in different ways. But yeah, I think from my youngest days, at least in junior high and high school and on, I've always had a sense that politics, at its core, is about justice and the pursuit of justice. And it's about a lot of other things. And it's an imperfect means to achieve justice; there's other ways to achieve justice. But I do think that that's what politics is about. And politics is also the expression of a set of moral beliefs. I mean, that, after all, is what law is in many cases. So I do think that morality and politics are tied. The last point I'll make on it, Andrew, is that if politics goes bad, if it goes really bad, it can have catastrophic human consequences. Gulags and killing fields and genocide and a lot of things less bad than that but that are bad enough. And so I just feel like that matters. And that's certainly a manifestation of morality.AK: What about the argument, Pete, that for all the immorality, the depravity, to use your word, of Trump, most of the voters are voting for change. There's a photo in one of your pieces, I think it may be in the Baker piece, of a Trump supporter on a motorbike with a "Trump 2024" flag, and the suggestion that the rules have changed. It seems to be clear in the two weeks after the election that Trump is determined to change the rules. I mean all his appointments seem to be challenging the current assumptions, institutions, elites, and conventions. Isn't that a good thing? America seems bogged down—I mean, I know you're a conservative, but there were many areas from health care to foreign policy to the environment, and they need to be fundamentally changed. It was a very odd election in the sense that Kamala Harris was supposed to be the progressive, and yet she turned out to be the conservative. She seemed to be suggesting that not much in America needs changing. She didn't seem to want to distance herself too much from Joe Biden, whereas Trump is the candidate of change. Is that a credible argument?PETE WEHNER: No, I don't think it's credible. At least let me qualify that. He's certainly a candidate of change. I think whether it's positive or negative change is really what matters. I think it's one thing to say that institutions need to be reformed, which I agree with and have agreed with for many years and have been part of various efforts, throughout the years, to advocate for the reform of institutions. It's another thing to try and destroy institutions, to burn them down. And I think that Trump and the MAGA world is in the latter category. I think that that is the ethos which defines them. So, you know, in terms of people who voted for Trump out of the country, 50%, whatever, the number is going to end up being, vote for him. I understand the impulse, some of the frustrations that have been expressed. So that is its own topic of conversation, which we can get into. But to me, the idea that Donald Trump is the solution to the problems is not plausible. And I point out too, Andrew, that he did have one term prior to it. And in many respects, the things that people are unhappy about got worse, not better, under his watch. So if you compare what his promises have been to what his record was in the first term, I just don't think it squares. And in addition to that, the kind of things that he's promoting now, I think will make things worse. Just to take one specific area, the manufacturing crisis. There's no question that, for a whole variety of reasons, that there's people who have been in the manufacturing industry have suffered. But actually, it was worse during Trump's watch than it was under Biden's watch. So I don't think that Donald Trump is is the answer to the to the question, even a legitimate question, that's being presented or posed.AK: Pete, you've always described yourself as a conservative. You believe that now you're homeless as a conservative. I wonder what you made, though, of the Harris campaign. Her association with Liz Cheney, of course, represents the conservative wing of the Republican Party that you've been involved with all your life. You work with Cheney and Bush and Reagan. Do you blame Harris for losing the election? Did she make a series of mistakes? And what does it tell us about the Democratic Party? I mean, it's always easy—you've written extensively about the crisis of the Republican Party and its Trump-ification. But is there a similar crisis within the Democratic Party?PETE WEHNER: Well, I think there's a crisis, or at least a challenge, in the Democratic Party, which I'll turn to in a second. I mean, they've they've lost two of the last three elections to Donald Trump. So that is a cause for for self-reflection, for for sure. In terms of the Harris campaign, I'm not as critical as a lot of people are of her. I thought she ran a much better campaign than I thought that she would. It wasn't a perfect campaign by any means, but given the tasks she faced, given her own history, I thought that she did extremely well. And I don't blame her for the loss. I think there were certain intrinsic disadvantages that she had. I mean, she was essentially an incumbent in an election where the impulse for the public was change. Joe Biden's approval rating was 41%. She's going to end up with about 48% of the popular vote. That actually, to me is pretty impressive. The idea that she could have beaten, or have been ten points better, in the popular vote from the Biden approval rating would have been a spectacular achievement. I don't think it was achievable. She made mistakes. She didn't distance herself sufficiently from the Biden administration, but I don't think she ever really could have, because she was vice president. I think that the biggest stage, the biggest moment with the largest audience of all, she absolutely obliterated Donald Trump in the debate. I thought her convention speech was good. I'd sort of graded it at a B plus. I thought the convention itself made a lot of sense. I thought her rallies were very good. She was better on the stump than I thought. She had a huge amount of of energy. I thought she was not so good on interviews. And I think she stumbled at a few points, particularly when she was asked on The View where she differed from Joe Biden. She couldn't come up with anything. I think that she should have been prepared for that.AK: But to put it mildly, I mean, that was the most obvious question that everyone wanted to know. How could she have been so unprepared?PETE WEHNER: Well, I don't know if she was unprepared, I assume—AK: Or unwilling or unable to answer this fundamental question.PETE WEHNER: Yeah, I'm guessing that what was going through her mind, and probably the mind of the people that she spoke with, was that there was still a lot of loyalty to Joe Biden. And so she had to be careful in how far she distanced herself from him and whether that would create some unhappiness among Biden supporters. Secondly, she was vice president. And so there's a plausibility issue here, which is: how much can you separate yourself from a president if you're vice president? That said, look, I think she should have had 2 or 3 things that she could have named. And there was a relatively easy explanation, various explanations she could have offered: look, I believe in learning. When facts change, people change. I think that, you know, in my in my earlier life, I was wrong on certain issues and name what they were, and say that hopefully I've learned from that, I hope to continue to learn. I mean, there are all sorts of ways you could answer that. But look, Andrew, I will say this, too, which is having worked on several campaigns and having observed a lot of them over the decades, it's a lot harder to run as a candidate than people can imagine. And every candidate, no matter how good they are, whether you're Barack Obama or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan, have made mistakes. And the prism through which people view it is completely based on whether you win or not. If Trump had lost, you can imagine all of the things that we would say about, you know, really, was it wise to to close the argument talking about the penis size of Arnold Palmer or feigning masturbation with a microphone? I mean, there are there are dozens and dozens of things we would have said.AK: Yeah, I take your point, but of course he didn't. Let's talk about conservatism. You always made the argument—you were on MSNBC recently talking about why Trump is an enemy of conservatism. Is now, shall we say, the Harris wing, which is the center/right of the Democratic Party, which seems to have got into bed, so to speak, with Liz Cheney, are they really the conservatives now in America? I mean, they seem to think that America works pretty well. They always talk about America being American, and we're better than that. Is your conservative Republican Party, has it been swallowed by the Democratic Party?PETE WEHNER: I don't think it's been swallowed by the Democratic Party. And of course, it depends on what aspects of conservatism one is talking about. I would say that given the current constellation of reality in the two main parties in America, that conservatives have a better home in the Democratic Party than the Republican Party right now. But I don't think it's a natural home, and it's certainly not the kind of home that conservatives have been used to in the Republican Party pre-Donald Trump. I'd say the main point in terms of the question you asked is to underscore how fundamentally unconservative the Republican Party, Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, are. You know, there's a line in the movie The Dark Knight, the Batman movie, in which Alfred is talking to Bruce Wayne, and Bruce Wayne is trying to explain the criminal mindset to Alfred. And Alfred is saying, but you don't understand. And here he's talking about the Joker. He says, some people can't be bought, bribed, coerced. Some people just want to watch the world burn. And I think that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have within them that kind of sensibility. I don't think it's defining to all of them, and I don't think it's completely defining to them. But I think that there is a nihilistic impulse, this effort not to reform, as I said earlier, institutions, but just to burn them to the ground, to take a wrecking ball. But, you know, Matt Gaetz as attorney general, or Pete Hegseth as defense secretary or Tulsi Gabbard as the head of the intelligence agencies, and just, out of anger, grievance, try and destroy them, try and destroy the so-called deep state. That's so fundamentally unconservative, in my estimation, that a conservative couldn't, in good conscience, find a home there. And right now, the alternative is the Democratic Party. And I don't think, on that central question of disposition and temperament, the Democrats are nearly as unconservative, nearly as radical, nearly as revolutionary, as the current-day Republican Party.AK: It all reminds me a little bit of a cowboy movie, The Magnificent Seven (or perhaps the Un-Magnificent Seven.) Talk about a natural party, Pete, but does that really work in American politics, where most African-Americans now vote for a Democratic Party that was in favor of segregation?PETE WEHNER: I'm sorry, say that again.AK: You talk about a natural party. You said, well, conservatives said that the Democrats aren't the natural party of conservatism. But can we use this term convincingly in American politics? After all, most African-Americans vote for the Democratic Party, which was the party of segregation.PETE WEHNER: Yeah, the Democratic Party was the party of segregation. And they changed in the end, you know, it took them longer than it should have. No, I don't think that there's anything, you know, endemic or intrinsic to parties that makes them a natural home to any political movement or political philosophy. Because parties change, circumstances change, coalitions change, the base of a party changes. We've seen that really with the Republican Party. It's just a fundamentally different party than it was in the 80s and 90s and 2000s. And the Democratic Party has changed, and changed in some ways, to the worse. And I think they paid a price for that. I do think that you can take a step back and say, look, over the last 50 years, when you chart the trajectory of the Democratic and Republican Party, there are certain trends that you can see. And so for some period of time, I think that the Democratic and Republican parties were natural homes to certain movements.AK: Is there anything we should celebrate about the election? There were a lot of warnings beforehand that there was going to be a massive gender split, and it didn't turn out to be true. Trump promised that he would get a lot of Hispanic and African-American voters. He got a lot of Hispanic and quite a few African-Americans, especially men. Could one argue that November 5th, 2024 was the first post-identity politics election? Is that something to be encouraged about?PETE WEHNER: Well, in this case, I'd say no, because I think the results of that post-identity politics is going to have really damaging consequences. I see your point, and I do think that to the extent that political parties can't count on certain groups constituencies, that's probably, as a general matter, good. It means you have to go out and earn their vote rather than reflexively rely on them. But as somebody who's been a Trump critic, and who has predicted what four more years under Donald Trump is going to be like, I just think that that overwhelms whatever good that could have come out of it. I suppose I would add, there's one good thing that's come out of this, which is there hasn't been violence. But honestly, I think that's because Donald Trump lost, and the Democratic Party believes in the peaceful transfer of power, and they're not going to do in 2024 what Donald Trump and his supporters did in 2020. I'm glad that's not happening, but I think it is worth reflecting on the fact that violence won't happen because the Democratic Party is the more responsible and civilized party in that respect.AK: How are you doing personally? Trump hasn't been shy to boast about his revengefulness. You've being one of his most articulate critics in The Times, in The Atlantic, certainly from the right, or from traditional conservatism, a very strong moral critic. How are you dealing personally with this situation?PETE WEHNER: You know, I think I'm probably dealing with it better than a lot of people would imagine given my own views on Trump. I think just disposition, temperamentally, I'm not a person who has found politics to be overwhelming or disorienting. I don't want to pretend that it's not a difficult moment, both in terms of what I think it means for the country and for what, as I said earlier, what I think it says about the country. And for somebody who grew up loving America and probably, to some extent, mythologizing America, seeing this happen is difficult. But most of my life and the spirit of my life and is based on my relationships mostly with family and with friends. And those, to me, are the things that really determine what my mood is on any given day or any week. I will say that my wife Cindy and I, in the last two weeks, have really been struck by the number of people that we have heard from who are deeply grieved and fearful of what's happening. We saw somebody a week ago Sunday, and Cindy asked this person, how are you doing? And she burst into tears. She had been abused by her husband. And she said that Donald Trump was a person just like her husband, and she couldn't fathom that America elected him. And we have a friend who's a family therapist, and she said she had spent the week before with sexual abuse victims, and the fact that Trump had been elected and that people in her family were celebrating that...other people who felt like much of what they had given their lives to was shattering. So we've really felt more, I suppose, in a listening mode, in a comforting mode, trying to help people to sort through it. It's different, Andrew, I will say, in my experience and the experience of the people around me, I think, in the country now than it was in 2016. I think 2016 could be argued that that was an aberration, a parenthesis, and I think it's clearly not the case. This is the Trump era, and I think that's hard for a lot of people to come to terms with. Other people are celebrating it. They think that this is wonderful. Donald Trump is, to them, the personification of what they want in a leader and a human being. And now we've got it.AK: Yeah, we will see. You wrote an interesting piece in The Atlantic after the election suggesting that 2024 is different from 2016. It's less shocking, more a confirmation. You wrote an interesting piece in response to what happened, "Don't Give Up on the Truth," in The Atlantic. We are where we are. But there is, if not reason to celebrate, reason to, at least, resist. Are you part of a moral resistance, in some ways, Pete, do you think, to Trump, or at least Trumpism, in America?PETE WEHNER: Yeah, I think that's fair. I think some people who have been critical of Trump are going to dial back their criticism, or they just might find other things to think about or talk about or write about. And I understand that. That's not where I am. I mean, I have to think about what my posture is going to be in the Trump era. That's not clear to me yet. And I think it'll become clear to me as circumstances unfold. But, you know, what I wrote, I believed, and I continue to believe in, and the fact that Donald Trump won the election doesn't allay my concerns, it deepens them. I hope I have enough intellectual independence that if he is different than I think, and if he does things that I agree with, that I'm willing publicly to say that. I tried to do that in the first term. And I hope I can do it in a second term and I hope I'm given reasons to do it, and I hope that my foreboding of what this means for America is wrong. But I can't shake what I believe to be true. And I read the opposite views of mine and critiques of mine and try to understand what I'm getting wrong about Donald Trump. And I may be blinded on this, but I don't think I have been wrong about him. I think all of the things that I've been writing about him since 2015—actually, 2011, and go back to the birther moment—I think they've been validated. And I feel like given my role in life and the outlets that I have, that I can't help but give voice to those concerns. And whether that makes a difference or not, time will tell. It certainly didn't have an impact this time around, that's for sure.“Parties change, circumstances change, coalitions change, the base of a party changes. We've seen that really with the Republican Party. It's just a fundamentally different party than it was in the 80s and 90s and 2000s. And the Democratic Party has changed, and changed in some ways, to the worse. And I think they paid a price for that.” -PWAK: Well, you certainly have a natural home on this show, Pete. And in your excellent Atlantic piece, you talk about the importance of truth telling. You are a truth teller, that goes without saying. What do you think is the most effective way, though, to tell the truth these days? I don't think you're a big social media guy, you're not going on X or Instagram or TikTok. How does one most effectively tell the truth in Trump's America?PETE WEHNER: That's such a good question, Andrew, and a deep one. I'm not sure what the answer is. I think in terms of what each individual has to do, they just have to find within the circumstances of their life the places that they can tell the truth. Some of that just may be with family and friends, maybe in neighborhoods and community groups. It may be in churches. It may be, if you're a writer, in The Atlantic, in The New York Times. You know, I think that what's important in telling the truth is that one does it truthfully. That is, that it corresponds and aligns to reality, that it's rooted in empirical evidence, and that one does not dehumanize in the process. And if you're dealing with a person—for example, in my estimation of Donald Trump and what I do believe is this moral depravity, I just think that is true about him—how do you say that? How do you say that without crossing lines? How do you engage with people who are Trump supporters, as I have, many of them, and to try and point out and argue for my position, and to do so in a way that isn't disrespectful or dehumanizing? Those aren't easy questions. I'm sure I haven't gotten them right. But I think you just try the best you can in the world that you live in to try and give voice to the truth. And probably it helps to look back to others who have faced far more difficult circumstances than we have. I mentioned in my most recent Atlantic essay Solzhenitsyn and Havel who were great dissidents and spoke, in the case of Solzhenitsyn, when the Soviet Union was a country to which he was hostage to, and for Havel, there was a communist movement in Czechoslovakia. And they and so many others, Orwell in a different way, and Jesus in a different way, said that the important thing to do was to speak the truth. It doesn't mean you succeed, necessarily, when you do it, but it's important to do. Times change. Circumstances change. Inflection points can happen. And sometimes speaking the truth can create those moments. And other times when those moments open up, people who spoke the truth have a capacity to shape events in a way that they didn't before that. I should say one interesting example that apposite, maybe, you and your own history knowledge: you take someone like Winston Churchill. And Churchill was the same man in the 30s as he was in the 40s, and in the 30s he was viewed as a social pariah, an alarmist, a kind of ridiculous figure, he had very, very little influence. But events changed, the war came, and all of a sudden Churchill became arguably the greatest person of the 20th century. So there's probably a lesson in that for people who want to be truth tellers.AK: Yeah, I've always thought of you, Pete, as the moral conscience of America, although you've been involved in politics, but I can't imagine you ever running for political office. You talked about Solzhenitsyn and Havel in particular as an activist, as someone who stood up very bravely and indeed humorously to the Russian colonialists in Czechoslovakia or Soviet colonialism. Does the anti-Trump movement need a Havel, a Solzhenitsyn, a Winston Churchill? Seems to be lacking, Harris clearly wasn't. I've always wondered whether Michelle Obama could have been that person. And I know that everyone says, well, she couldn't have run. She doesn't like politics, but maybe she had almost a moral responsibility as an American. But where are we going to get an America? Where are we going to get our Churchill, our Havel, our Solzhenitsyn? All of course, white men. Maybe we need some women, too.PETE WEHNER: Yeah, you know, those are rare people. And it's not a dime a dozen. Yeah, I felt like Liz Cheney was that person in this moment more than Harris, more than others. I think I felt that way about Liz, because there was a cost, there was a very concrete and practical cost, to what she had done. And that, to me, is a sign and a symbol of courage, which is: if you do the right thing when there's a cost to doing the right thing. And I thought her articulation of why she broke with Trump and voted for Harris was extremely powerful. So I'd say of the people in the landscape in American politics right now, Liz Cheney would be supreme for me, but of course, she was tossed out of the Republican Party. She was beaten in a primary. And the Democratic Party's not a natural home for her either. So these are her wilderness years, Churchill had his, I'm not saying that Liz is Churchill, Churchill was Churchill and that's about it. But she showed enormous courage and articulation. I think the fact that for a person of my view, she made such a powerful and persuasive case, and it just didn't win over enough voters. And I think that that's an indictment not of Liz, but I think it's an indictment of an awful lot of voters in America. But that would make sense, because I see the world in a certain way, and the majority of Americans saw it differently. And this is a democracy. And so now we've got Trump and the people who voted for him, and the rest of us get to live with them.AK: Are there hierarchies of morality, Pete? There's a great deal of revisionism now on on Churchill reminding us all that he was an overt racist, a colonialist, a warmonger in some ways, although, of course, we don't use that word in terms of his opposition to Hitler. Trump made that point about Cheney, I mean, in his own vulgar way, but Cheney, of course, was also a warmonger—or, certainly her father was, millions of people—well, certainly hundreds of thousands of people—in the Middle East lost their lives because of catastrophic American wars in the region. Could one argue that Cheney's support for these catastrophic wars are equally immoral, if not more immoral, than Trump's moral transgressions?PETE WEHNER: Yeah, if you believe that narrative, I mean, I think that narrative is flawed. I don't mean that the wars weren't mistaken, but I think the way you framed it is is a caricature. But if you believe that, if you're right and I'm wrong, sure, then, of course. And there is a moral hierarchy. I mean, you know, morality is judged by the actions that you take in the moment that you live and the consequences that they create. And if a person or an individual does an action that creates massive harm and the destruction of human lives, human civilizations, if someone is advocating maliciousness and malevolence on a wide scale, that obviously has to be judged differently than if you lose your temper as a boss or somebody who works for you. So morality is a complicated subject. You also have to take into account, to some degree, the circumstances in which people lived. If you lived in the 14th century, if you lived in the 18th century, if you lived in the 20th century, if you lived in the 21st century, there were different moral standards and moral ethics and moral norms. That doesn't mean, in the case of the American founders, the slave holders, that was a grave sin, and I think probably traditionally on the on the American right, because there's been almost a defecation of the founding fathers, that they've been excused too much for tolerating slavery. Lincoln himself, who I think is the greatest American in history, his history was somewhat spotty. I think he was a magnificent figure. And he grew, but that happens. But just to come back to what you said earlier, if you were to say to me, Liz Cheney versus Donald Trump on any reasonable moral spectrum, I would say that that Liz Cheney has him beat by a country mile, by virtually any metric that you want to judge her and him on.AK: In that excellent Atlantic piece, Pete, you talked about this being a moment where we, and I'm quoting you, we need to guard our souls. But what about for those of us who might not believe in the existence of souls?PETE WEHNER: Yeah. Then I would use a different word.AK: What word would you use?PETE WEHNER: Your inner life, your interior life, your sense of humanity, how you view others. I think most people, whether soul is the word that they use, I think most people aren't strict materialists, or they don't believe in scientism. They believe that there are parts of human life, human existence, human reality that aren't materialistic, that has to do with beauty and esthetics and love and = humanity and caring for the least of these. And, you know, many people that I know that are not believers personify those high virtues, honestly, in ways that are more impressive than people I know who claim to be followers of Jesus. So I use the word soul because I think it speaks to something that is true for human life and human beings. But I understand if you're not a believer that you wouldn't use that term. But I imagine that there's some other term that would get at essentially the same thing, which is your core humanity. What makes you an estimable human being. Compassion, honor, dignity, being a peacemaker, and so forth.AK: You're also more cheerful in the sense that you want to remind everyone that, of course, we want to cultivate hope, humanistic hope. But all this needs to be understood within the historical context. You argue that, in the Atlantic piece, presumably Trump's only going to be around for four years. Things change, there are always party realignments, so, cheer us up, Pete. Why might this just be a blip in the history of humanity rather than the end of it in some way?PETE WEHNER: Yeah. It's not going to be the end of humanity. Even if my most dire warnings are realized. Look, I would say that there can be a kind of catastrophism that happens on all sides and that we need to be careful about it. Life is complicated. Human history is complicated. There are moments of glory and moments of catastrophe and disaster. You know, in the American experience, we had the 1850s that lead up to the Civil War. We had the Civil War. We had the profound difficulties in reconstruction. We had segregation, child labor laws, women can't vote. Just enormous challenges in this country. The first election, really contested election in America between Adams and Jefferson in 1800, was a vicious affair. So, you know, we've we've faced a lot. And that's just America. And, you know, you look at world history, I quote it at the end of my essay, "Don't Give Up on the Truth" in The Atlantic, a speech, one of my favorite speeches, that Bobby Kennedy gave in 1966 at University of Cape Town in South Africa, where he talked about the ripples of hope, and how the ripples of hope can overcome the worst and highest walls of oppression. Now, when Kennedy gave that speech, it was 66. It was at the apex of of apartheid, and eventually apartheid was overthrown, and—AK: Yeah, it's worth repeating the RFK quote, "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." Of course, it's particularly resonant given that his son is involved in the Trump administration and is probably not someone you're particularly keen on.PETE WEHNER: No, he's, no pun intended, but I'm not particularly keen on his son. But the father I admired, and I think those words are timeless words. And we shouldn't forget them. Look, the other thing I'd say, Andrew, is that what we're called to be in our lives, personally and maybe vocationally, is to be faithful, not necessarily successful. Whether a person is successful in life depends often on circumstances that they can't control. That's just the nature of human existence. But you do have some measure of control of whether you're faithful or not. And that's really what honor is. I mean, honor is living a life—an imperfect life. We all struggle, we're all fallen, we're all flawed—But trying to advance that. And the other thing I would emphasize again is that human life, human history, the progression of countries, are not straight lines. There's forward and backward, there's zigs, there's zags, inflection points develop, and things change in ways that a person may never anticipate. You mentioned John Rauch earlier, and he and Andrew Sullivan were leading the campaign for same sex marriage. When they started that campaign, especially, Andrew, in 1989, I think he wrote a cover story in The New Republic on the conservative case for gay marriage. Now, if you would have asked either of them in the late 80s, 90s and so forth, whether gay marriage would be prevalent or even be found to be a constitutional right, they would have said that's inconceivable. It couldn't happen. And it happened. Whether you agree or not with same sex marriage, it shows capacity of events to change. And you and I could name a lot of things in which that's happened. So you don't know when those moments come, when those inflection points happen. And I also believe the American capacity for self-renewal is a kind of wonder of the world and that people will—AK: Say that again: American self-renewal is a wonder of the world.PETE WEHNER: Yeah. I think the American capacity for self-renewal is extraordinary. I think it's shown itself throughout history. Again, it's a mixed history, but—AK: But where does that come from, that American self-renewal? Is it a spiritual thing? Is it an economic thing? “I think that what's important in telling the truth is that one does it truthfully. That is, that it corresponds and aligns to reality, that it's rooted in empirical evidence, and that one does not dehumanize in the process.” -PWPETE WEHNER: You know, I'd imagine part of it is part of the American DNA. The things that shape anybody in any country, the factors, the history...there's certainly something, I think it's reasonable to say, in America, about freedom and liberty, that is part of the American character. You know, people could go back and read Tocqueville, which is still relevant to what Americans are like. I think our political history has helped shape us. Civil society has helped shape us. So, you know, each country has a certain kind of a DNA. And I think by and large, America's has been good. So there's history to give you hope, and not just American history. So, I just think you need to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I think you have to call out things that happen that are wrong, immoral or illegal as they as they happen, and hope that over time you bend events enough in your direction. Martin Luther King Junior had that quote, which is pretty well known, about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, but that does not—AK: It's not natural, is it? As you suggest, it requires human agency, doesn't bend on its own. Finally, Pete, and you've been very generous, as always, with your time. A lot of comparisons, there always have been, with America and the Roman Republic, this shift into, sort of, decadence. There's also a fashion these days for stoicism. Some of the ideologies or the intellectual movements of the late Roman decadent, not the republic, but imperial Rome. What would you say to people—won't say necessarily Stoics formally, but people who are espousing a kind of stoicism—who will say, "Well, I'm just not going to watch the news for the next four years, Trump doesn't really affect me. I'm just going to ignore him. I'm going to go to sleep for four years, and when I wake up, things will have changed." Do we all need to stay awake? Is the stoical response to essentially ignore the political world, is that healthy in Trump's America?PETE WEHNER: I think some people need to stay awake. You know, it really would depend on the facts and circumstances, Andrew. I mean, if you're an individual who feels overwhelmed by what Trump represents and really can't process it in a very healthy way, and you find your spirit being pulled down and obsessing on him and just, you know, casting shadows over your life, then I'd say, yeah, just to the degree that you can pull the plug. Don't follow, you know, the unfolding events, and attend to your life, your inner life, and the people that you love and care for. On the other hand, if that happens more broadly, and just people shut up and don't speak out, I think that that would be a great tragedy, because I think it's important to speak the truth in its own terms. I think it's important that there are individuals who give voice to what people believe and the moral concerns that they have when they don't have the capacity to do it on a large scale. And as I said, you know, I mentioned earlier, Solzhenitsyn and Havel, and I don't pretend that America is in a situation like the two of them faced. So the challenges and sacrifices that are called on Americans today who are in the so-called resistance isn't comparable to what Solzhenitsyn and Havel and many others have faced. But you need to speak out, and you can't go to sleep. Democracy is, as you said earlier, about human agency. We're not corks in the ocean. We're not fatalistic. We shouldn't be fatalistic. We can create movements and trends and moments and trajectories and moments of and periods of honor and and virtuous chapters in the American story. But they don't happen accidentally. And you can be discouraged, but you've got to stay at it. A friend of mine once said that you could be a theoretical pessimist, but you should be an operational optimist.AK: That's a nice way of putting it. Peter Wehner, I'm not sure about American self-renewal being a wonder of the world, certainly your self-renewal is a wonder of the world. It's wonderful to have you around, and we will be calling on your wisdom, your ethical spirit of resistance against injustice, over the next four years. Keep well, keep safe, Pete, and we will talk again in the not-too-distant future. Thank you so much.PETE WEHNER: Thanks. It's great to be with you, Andrew. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

It’s hard to know if F.H. Buckley is keen on Donald Trump. On the one hand, Buckley and his wife wrote a number of speeches for Trump in his 2016 campaign; on the other, Buckley publicly wrote Donald Trump off in 2022, arguing in the Wall Street Journal that Trump “can’t win another presidential election”. What Buckley was explicitly calling for was Trumpism without Trump. So what, exactly, is “Trumpism”. In his new book, The Roots of Liberalism, Buckley lays out a kind of aristocratic version of liberalism based upon chivalry and kindness. It’s Lord of the Rings meets Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen, with a bit of patrimonial welfare state thrown in to satisfy the Republican social conscience. Kind of interesting, I guess, for grown-ups with childishly atavistic notions of gentlemanly honor. But certainly no validation of Donald Trump himself, who is about as chivalrous or gentlemanly as Uriah Heep.F.H. BUCKLEY is a Foundation Professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law. He is a frequent media guest and has appeared on Morning Joe, CNN, The Rush Limbaugh Show, C‑SPAN, NPR, and numerous other outlets. He is a senior editor at the American Spectator and a columnist for the New York Post, and he has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and many other newspapers. His most recent books are The Republican Workers Party (2018); The Republic of Virtue (2017); The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America (2016); The Once and Future King (2015); and American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup (2020).Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

So how can The Dude and The Boss save America? According to the cultural critic, David Masciotra, Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski and Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen, represent the antithesis of Donald Trumps’s illiberal authoritarianism. Masciotra’s thesis of Lebowski and Springsteen as twin paragons of American liberalism is compelling. Both men have a childish faith in the goodness of others. Both offer liberal solace in an America which, I fear, is about to become as darkly surreal as The Big Lebowski. Transcript:“[Springsteen] represents, as cultural icon, a certain expression of liberalism, a big-hearted, humanistic liberalism that exercises creativity to represent diverse constituencies in our society, that believes in art as a tool of democratic engagement, and that seeks to lead with an abounding, an abiding sense of compassion and empathy. That is the kind of liberalism, both with the small and capital L, that I believe in, and that I have spent my career documenting and attempting to advance.” -David MasciotraAK: Hello, everybody. We're still processing November the 5th. I was in the countryside of Northern Virginia a few days ago, I saw a sign, for people just listening, Trump/Vance 2024 sign with "winner" underneath. Some people are happy. Most, I guess, of our listeners probably aren't, certainly a lot of our guests aren't, my old friend John Rauch was on the show yesterday talking about what he called the "catastrophic ordinariness" of the election and of contemporary America. He authored two responses to the election. Firstly, he described it in UnPopulist as a moral catastrophe. But wearing his Brookings hat, he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, described it as an ordinary election. I think a lot of people are scratching their head, trying to make sense of it. Another old friend of the show, David Masciotra, cultural writer, political writer. An interesting piece in the Washington Monthly entitled "How Francis Fukuyama and The Big Lebowski Explain Trump's Victory." A very creative piece. And he is joining us from Highland Indiana, not too far from Chicago. David. The Big Lebowski and Francis Fukuyama. Those two don't normally go together, certainly in a title. Let's talk first about Fukuyama. How does Fukuyama explain November the 5th? DAVID MASCIOTRA: In his. Well, first, thanks for having me. And I should say I watched your conversation with Jonathan Rauch, and it was quite riveting and quite sobering. And you talked about Fukuyama in that discussion as well. And you referenced his book, The End of History and the Last Man, a very often misinterpreted book, but nonetheless, toward its conclusion, Fukuyama warns that without an external enemy, liberal democracies may indeed turn against themselves, and we may witness an implosion rather than an explosion. And Fukuyama said that this won't happen so much for ideological reasons, but it will happen for deeply psychological ones, namely, without a just cause for which to struggle, people will turn against the just cause itself, which in this case is liberal democracy, and out of a sense of boredom and alienation, they'll grow increasingly tired of their society and cultivate something of a death wish in which they enjoy imagining their society's downfall, or at least the downfall of some of the institutions that are central to their society. And now I would argue that after the election results, we've witnessed the transformation of imagining to inviting. So, there is a certain death wish and a sense of...alienation and detachment from that which made the United States of America a uniquely prosperous and stable country with the ability to self-correct the myriad injustices we know are part of its history. Well now, people--because they aren't aware of the institutions or norms that created this robust engine of commerce and liberty--they've turned against it, and they no longer invest in that which is necessary to preserve it.AK: That's interesting, David. The more progressives I talk to about this, the more it--there's an odd thing going on--you're all sounding very conservative. The subtitle of the piece in the Washington Monthly was "looking at constituencies or issues misses the big point. On Tuesday, nihilism was on display, even a death wish in a society wrought by cynicism." Words like nihilism and cynicism, David, historically have always been used by people like Allan Blum, whose book, of course, The Closing of the American Mind, became very powerful amongst American conservatives now 40 or 50 years ago. Would you accept that using language like nihilism and cynicism isn't always associated--I mean, you're a proud progressive. You're a man of the left. You've never disguised that. It's rather odd to imagine that the guys like you--and in his own way, John Rauch too, who talks about the moral catastrophe of the election couple of weeks ago. You're all speaking about the loss of morality of the voter, or of America. Is there any truth to that? Making some sense?DAVID MASCIOTRA: That's a that's a fair observation. And Jonathan Rauch, during your conversation and in his own writing, identifies a center right. I would say I'm center left.AK: And he's--but what's interesting, what ties you together, is that you both use the L-word, liberal, to define yourselves. He's perhaps a liberal on the right. You're a liberal on the left.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes. And I think that the Trump era, if we can trace that back to 2015, has made thoughtful liberals more conservative in thought and articulation, because it forces a confrontation and interrogation of a certain naivete. George Will writes in his book, The Conservative Sensibility, that the progressive imagines that which is the best possible outcome and strives to make it real, whereas the conservative imagines the worst possible outcome and does everything he can to guard against it. And now it feels like we've experienced, at least electorally, the worst possible outcome. So there a certain revisitation of that which made America great, to appropriate a phrase, and look for where we went wrong in failing to preserve it. So that kind of thinking inevitably leads one to use more conservative language and deal in more conservative thought.AK: Yeah. So for you, what made America great, to use the term you just introduced, was what? Its morality? The intrinsic morality of people living in it and in the country? Is that, for you, what liberalism is?DAVID MASCIOTRA: Liberalism is a system in and the culture that emanates out of that system. So it's a constitutional order that creates or that places a premium on individual rights and allows for a flourishing free market. Now, where my conception of liberalism would enter the picture and, perhaps Jonathan Rauch and I would have some disagreements, certainly George Will and I, is that a bit of governmental regulation is necessary along with the social welfare state, to civilize the free market. But the culture that one expects to flow from that societal order and arrangement is one of aspiration, one in which citizens fully accept that they are contributing agents to this experiment in self-governance and therefore need to spend time in--to use a Walt Whitman phrase--freedom's gymnasium. Sharpening the intellect, sharpening one's sense of moral duty and obligation to the commons, to the public good. And as our society has become more individualistic and narcissistic in nature, those commitments have vanished. And as our society has become more anti-intellectual in nature, we are seeing a lack of understanding of why those commitments are even necessary. So that's why you get a result like we witnessed on Tuesday, and that I argue in my piece that you were kind enough to have me on to discuss, is a form of nihilism, and The Big Lebowski reference, of course--AK: And of course, I want to get to Lebowski, because the Fukuyama stuff is interesting, but everyone's writing about Fukuyama and the end of history and why history never really ended, of course. It's been going on for years now, but it's a particularly interesting moment. We've had Fukuyama on the show. I've never heard anyone, though, compare the success of Trump and Trumpism with The Big Lebowski. So, one of the great movies, of course, American movies. What's the connection, David, between November 5th and The Big Lebowski? DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, The Big Lebowski is one of my favorite films. I've written about it, and I even appeared at one of the The Big Lebowski festivals that takes place in United States a number of years ago. But my mind went to the scene when The Dude is in his bathtub and these three menacing figures break into his apartment. They drop a gerbil in the bathtub. And The Dude, who was enjoying a joint by candlelight, is, of course, startled and frightened. And these three men tell him that if he does not pay the money they believe he owes them, they will come back and, in their words, "cut off your Johnson." And The Dude gives them a quizzical, bemused look. And one of them says, "You think we are kidding? We are nihilists. We believe in nothing." And then one of them screams, "We'll cut off your Johnson." Well, I thought, you know, we're looking at an electorate that increasingly, or at least a portion of the electorate, increasingly believes in nothing. So we've lost faith.AK: It's the nihilists again. And of course, another Johnson in America, there was once a president called Johnson who enjoyed waving his Johnson, I think, around in public. And now there's the head of the house is another Johnson, I think he's a little shyer than presidents LBJ. But David, coming back to this idea of nihilism. It often seems to be a word used by people who don't like what other people think and therefore just write it off as nihilism. Are you suggesting that the Trump crowd have no beliefs? Is that what nihilism for you is? I mean, he was very clear about what he believes in. You may not like it, but it doesn't seem to be nihilistic.DAVID MASCIOTRA: That's another fair point. What I'm referring to is not too long ago, we lived in a country that had a shared set of values. Those values have vanished. And those values involve adherence to our democratic norms. It's very difficult to imagine had George H. W. Bush attempted to steal the election in which Bill Clinton won, that George H. W. Bush could have run again and won. So we've lost faith in something essential to our electoral system. We've lost faith in the standards of decency that used to, albeit imperfectly, regulate our national politics. So the man to whom I just refered, Bill Clinton, was nearly run out of office for having an extramarital affair, a misdeed that cannot compare to the myriad infractions of Donald Trump. And yet, Trump's misdeeds almost give him a cultural cachet among his supporters. It almost makes him, for lack of a better word, cool. And now we see, even with Trump's appointments, I mean, of course, it remains to be seen how it plays out, that we're losing faith in credentials and experience--AK: Well they're certainly a band of outlaws and very proud to be outlaws. It could almost be a Hollywood script. But I wonder, David, whether there's a more serious critique here. You, like so many other people, both on the left and the right, are nostalgic for an age in which everyone supposedly agreed on things, a most civil and civilized age. And you go back to the Bushes, back to Clinton. But the second Bush, who now seems to have appeared as this icon, at least moral icon, many critics of Trump, was also someone who unleashed a terrible war, killing tens of thousands of people, creating enormous suffering for millions of others. And I think that would be the Trump response, that he's simply more honest, that in the old days, the Bushes of the world can speak politely and talk about consensus, and then unleash terrible suffering overseas--and at home in their neoliberal policies of globalization--Trump's simply more honest. He tells it as it is. And that isn't nihilistic, is it?DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, you are gesturing towards an important factor in our society. Trump, of course, we know, is a dishonest man, a profoundly dishonest--AK: Well, in some ways. But in other ways, he isn't. I mean, in some ways he just tells the truth as it is. It's a truth we're uncomfortable with. But it's certainly very truthful about the impact of foreign wars on America, for example, or even the impact of globalization. DAVID MASCIOTRA: What you're describing is an authenticity. That that Trump is authentic. And authenticity has become chief among the modern virtues, which I would argue is a colossal error. Stanley Crouch, a great writer, spent decades analyzing the way in which we consider authenticity and how it inevitably leads to, to borrow his phrase, cast impurity onto the bottom. So anything that which requires effort, refinement, self-restraint, self-control, plays to the crowd as inauthentic, as artificial--AK: Those are all aristocratic values that may have once worked but don't anymore. Should we be nostalgic for the aristocratic way of the Bushes?DAVID MASCIOTRA: I think in a certain respect, we should. We shouldn't be nostalgic for George W. Bush's policies. I agree with you, the war in Iraq was catastrophic, arguably worse than anything Trump did while he was president. His notoriously poor response to Hurricane Katrina--I mean, we can go on and on cataloging the various disasters of the Bush administration. However, George W. Bush as president and the people around him did have a certain belief in the liberal order of the United States and the liberal order of the world. Institutions like NATO and the EU, and those institutions, and that order, has given the United States, and the world more broadly, an unrivaled period of peace and prosperity.AK: Well it wasn't peace, David. And the wars, the post-9/11 wars, were catastrophic. And again, they seem to be just facades--DAVID MASCIOTRA: We also had the Vietnam War, the Korean War. When I say peace, I mean we didn't have a world war break out as we did in the First World War, in the Second World War. And that's largely due to the creation and maintenance of institutions following the Second World War that were aimed at the preservation of order and, at least, amicable relations between countries that might otherwise collide.AK: You're also the author, David, of a book we've always wanted to talk about. Now we're figuring out a way to integrate it into the show. You wrote a book, an interesting book, about Bruce Springsteen. Working on a Dream: the Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen. Bruce Springsteen has made himself very clear. He turned out for Harris. Showed up with his old friend, Barack Obama. Clearly didn't have the kind of impact he wanted. You wrote an interesting piece for UnHerd a few weeks ago with the title, "Bruce Springsteen is the Last American Liberal: he's still proud to be born in the USA." Is he the model of a liberal response to the MAGA movement, Springsteen? DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, of course, I wouldn't go so far as to say the last liberal. As most readers just probably know, writers don't compose their own headlines--AK: But he's certainly, if not the last American liberal, the quintessential American liberal.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes. He represents, as cultural icon, a certain expression of liberalism, a big-hearted, humanistic liberalism that exercises creativity to represent diverse constituencies in our society, that believes in art as a tool of democratic engagement, and that seeks to lead with an abounding, an abiding sense of compassion and empathy. That is the kind of liberalism, both with the small and capital L, that I believe in, and that I have spent my career documenting and attempting to advance. And those are, of course, the forms of liberalism that now feel as if they are under threat. Now, to that point, you know, this could have just come down to inflation and some egregious campaign errors of Kamala Harris. But it does feel as if when you have 70 some odd million people vote for the likes of Donald Trump, that the values one can observe in the music of Bruce Springsteen or in the rhetoric of Barack Obama, for that matter, are no longer as powerful and pervasive as they were in their respective glory days. No pun intended.AK: Yeah. And of course, Springsteen is famous for singing "Glory Days." I wonder, though, where Springsteen himself is is a little bit more complex and we might be a little bit more ambivalent about him, there was a piece recently about him becoming a billionaire. So it's all very well him being proud to be born in the USA. He's part--for better or worse, I mean, it's not a criticism, but it's a reality--he's part of the super rich. He showed out for Harris, but it didn't seem to make any impact. You talked about the diversity of Springsteen. I went to one of his concerts in San Francisco earlier this year, and I have to admit, I was struck by the fact that everyone, practically everyone at the concert, was white, everyone was wealthy, everyone paid several hundred dollars to watch a 70 year old man prance around on stage and behave as if he's still 20 or 30 years old. I wonder whether Springsteen himself is also emblematic of a kind of cultural, or political, or even moral crisis of our old cultural elites. Or am I being unfair to Springsteen?DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, I remember once attending a Springsteen show in which the only black person I saw who wasn't an employee of the arena was Clarence Clemons.AK: Right. And then Bruce, of course, always made a big deal. And there was an interesting conversation when Springsteen and Obama did a podcast together. Obama, in his own unique way, lectured Bruce a little bit about Clarence Clemons in terms of his race. But sorry. Go on.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yeah. And Springsteen has written and discussed how he had wished he had a more diverse audience. When I referred to diversity in his music, I meant the stories he aimed to tell in song certainly represented a wide range of the American experience. But when you talk about Springsteen, perhaps himself representing a moral crisis--AK: I wouldn't say a crisis, but he represents the, shall we say, the redundancy of that liberal worldview of the late 20th century. I mean, he clearly wears his heart on his sleeve. He means well. He's not a bad guy. But he doesn't reach a diverse audience. His work is built around the American working class. None of them can afford to show up to what he puts on. I mean, Chris Christie is a much more typical fan than the white working class. Does it speak of the fact that there's a...I don't know if you call it a crisis, it's just...Springsteen isn't relevant anymore in the America of the 2020s, or at least when he sang and wrote about no longer exists.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes, I agree with that. So first of all, the working class bit was always a bit overblown with Springsteen. Springsteen, of course, was never really part of the working class, except when he was a child. But by his own admission, he never had a 9 to 5 job. And Springsteen sang about working class life like William Shakespeare wrote about teenage love. He did so with a poetic grandeur that inspired some of his best work. And outside looking in, he actually managed to offer more insights than sometimes people on the inside can amount to themselves. But you're certainly correct. I mean, the Broadway show, for example, when the tickets were something like a thousand a piece and it was $25 to buy a beer. There is a certain--AK: Yeah and in that Broadway show, which I went to--I thought it was astonishing, actually, a million times better than the show in San Francisco.DAVID MASCIOTRA: It was one of the best things he ever did.AK: He acknowledges that he made everything up, that he wasn't part of the American working class, and that he'd never worked a day in his life, and yet his whole career is is built around representing a social class and a way of life that he was never part of.“Not too long ago, we lived in a country that had a shared set of values. Those values have vanished. And those values involve adherence to our democratic norms.” -DMDAVID MASCIOTRA: Right. And he has a lyric himself: "It's a sad, funny ending when you find yourself pretending a rich man in a poor man's shirt." So there always was this hypocrisy--hypocrisy might be a little too strong--inconsistency. And he adopted a playful attitude toward it in the 90s and in later years. But to your point of relevance, I think you're on to something there. One of the crises I would measure in our society is that we no longer live in a culture of ambition and aspiration. So you hear this when people say that they want a political leader who talks like the average person, or the common man. And you hear this when "college educated" is actually used as an insult against a certain base of Democratic voters. There were fewer college-educated voters when John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan ran for president, all of whom spoke with greater eloquence and a more expansive vocabulary and a greater sense of cultural sophistication than Donald Trump or Kamala Harris did. And yet there was no objection, because people understood that we should aspire to something more sophisticated. We should aspire to something more elevated beyond the everyday vernacular of the working class. And for that reason, Springsteen was able to become something of a working-class poet, despite never living among the working class beyond his childhood. Because his poetry put to music represented something idealistic about the working class.AK: But oddly enough, it was a dream--there's was a word that Springsteen uses a lot in his work--that was bought by the middle class. It wasn't something that was--although, I think in the early days, probably certainly in New Jersey, that he had a more working-class following.DAVID MASCIOTRA: We have to deal with the interesting and frustrating reality that the people about whom Springsteen sings in those early songs like "Darkness on the Edge of Town" or "The River" would probably be Trump supporters if they were real.AK: Yeah. And in your piece you refer to, not perhaps one of his most famous albums, The Rising, but you use it to compare Springsteen with another major figure now in America, much younger man to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has a new book out, which is an important new book, The Message. You seem to be keener on Springsteen than Coates. Tell us about this comparison and what the comparison tells us about the America of the 2020s.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, Coates...the reason I make the comparison is that one of Springsteen's greatest artistic moments, in which he kind of resurrected his status as cultural icon, was the record he put out after the 9/11 attack on the United States, The Rising. And throughout that record he pays tribute, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly, to the first responders who ascended in the tower knowing they would perhaps die.AK: Yeah. You quote him "love and duty called you someplace higher." So he was idealizing those very brave firefighters, policemen who gave up their lives on 9/11.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Exactly. Representing the best of humanity. Whereas Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has become the literary superstar of the American left, wrote in his memoir that on 9/11, he felt nothing and did not see the first responders as human. Rather, they were part of the fire that could, in his words, crush his body.AK: Yeah, he wrote a piece, "What Is 9/11 to Descendants of Slaves?"DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes. And my point in making that comparison, and this was before the election, was to say that the American left has its own crisis of...if we don't want to use the word nihilism, you objected to it earlier--AK: Well, I'm not objecting. I like the word. It's just curious to hear it come from somebody like yourself, a man, certainly a progressive, maybe not--you might define yourself as being on the left, but certainly more on the left and on the right.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes, I would agree with that characterization. But that the left has its own crisis of nihilism. If if you are celebrating a man who, despite his journalistic talents and intelligence, none of which I would deny, refused to see the humanity of the first responders on the 9/11 attack and, said that he felt nothing for the victims, presumably even those who were black and impoverished, then you have your own crisis of belief, and juxtaposing that with the big hearted, humanistic liberalism of Springsteen for me shows the left a better path forward. Now, that's a path that will increasingly close after the victory of Trump, because extremism typically begets extremism, and we're probably about to undergo four years of dueling cynicism and rage and unhappy times.AK: I mean, you might respond, David, and say, well, Coates is just telling the truth. Why should a people with a history of slavery care that much about a few white people killed on 9/11 when their own people lost millions through slavery? And you compare them to Springsteen, as you've acknowledged, a man who wasn't exactly telling the truth in his heart. I mean, he's a very good artist, but he writes about a working class, which even he acknowledges, he made most of it up. So isn't Coates like Trump in an odd kind of way, aren't they just telling an unvarnished truth that people don't want to hear, an impolite truth?DAVID MASCIOTRA: I'm not sure. I typically shy away from the expression "my truth" or "his truth" because it's too relativistic. But I'll make an exception in this case. I think Coates is telling HIS truth just as Trump is telling HIS truth, if that adds up to THE truth, is much more dubious. Yes, we could certainly say that, you know, because the United States enslaved, tortured, and otherwise oppressed millions of black people, it may be hard for some black observers to get teary eyed on 9/11, but the black leaders whom I most admire didn't have that reaction. I wrote a book about Jesse Jackson after spending six years interviewing with him and traveling with him. He certainly didn't react that way on 9/11. Congressman John Lewis didn't react that way on 9/11. So, the heroes of the civil rights movement, who helped to overcome those brutal systems of oppression--and I wouldn't argue that they're overcome entirely, but they helped to revolutionize the United States--they maintained a big-hearted sense of empathy and compassion, and they recognized that the unjust loss of life demands mourning and respect, whether it's within their own community or another. So I would say that, here again, we're back to the point of ambition, whether it's intellectual ambition or moral ambition. Ambition is what allows a society to grow. And it seems like ambition has fallen far out of fashion. And that is why the country--the slim majority of the electorate that did vote and the 40% of the electorate that did not vote, or voting-age public, I should say--settled for the likes of Donald Trump.AK: I wonder what The Dude would do, if he was around, at the victory of Trump, or even at 9/11. He'd probably continue to sit in the bath tub and enjoy...enjoy whatever he does in his bathtub. I mean, he's not a believer. Isn't he the ultimate nihilist? The Dude in Lebowski?DAVID MASCIOTRA: That's an interesting interpretation. I would say that...Is The Dude a nihilist? You have this juxtaposition... The Dude kind of occupies this middle ground between the nihilists who proudly declare they believe in nothing and his friend Walter Sobchak, who's, you know, almost this raving explosion of belief. Yeah, ex-Vietnam veteran who's always confronting people with his beliefs and screaming and demanding they all adhere to his rules. I don't know if The Dude's a nihilist as much as he has a Zen detachment.AK: Right, well, I think what makes The Big Lebowski such a wonderful film, and perhaps so relevant today, is Lebowski, unlike so many Americans is unjudgmental. He's not an angry man. He's incredibly tolerant. He accepts everyone, even when they're beating him up or ripping him off. And he's so, in that sense, different from the America of the 2020s, where everyone is angry and everyone blames someone else for whatever's wrong in their lives.DAVID MASCIOTRA: That's exactly right.AK: Is that liberal or just Zen? I don't know.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yeah. It's perhaps even libertarian in a sense. But there's a very interesting and important book by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke called Why It's Okay to Mind Your Own Business. And in it they argue--they're both political scientists although the one may be a...they may be philosophers...but that aside--they present an argument for why Americans need to do just that. Mind their own business.AK: Which means, yeah, not living politics, which certainly Lebowski is. It's probably the least political movie, Lebowski, I mean, he doesn't have a political bone in his body. Finally, David, there there's so much to talk about here, it's all very interesting. You first came on the show, you had a book out, that came out either earlier this year or last year. Yeah, it was in April of this year, Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy. And you wrote about the outskirts of suburbia, which you call "exurbia." Jonathan Rauch, wearing his Brookings cap, described this as an ordinary election. I'm not sure how much digging you've done, but did the exurbian vote determine this election? I mean, the election was determined by a few hundred thousand voters in the Midwest. Were these voters mostly on the edge of the suburb? And I'm guessing most of them voted for Trump.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, Trump's numbers in exurbia...I've dug around and I've been able to find the exurbian returns for Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona. So three crucial swing states. If Kamala Harris had won those three states, she would be president. And Trump's support in exurbia was off the charts, as it was in 2020 and 2016, and as I predicted, it would be in 2024. I'm not sure that that would have been sufficient to deliver him the race and certainly not in the fashion that he won. Trump made gains with some groups that surprised people, other groups that didn't surprise people, but he did much better than expected. So unlike, say, in 2016, where we could have definitively and conclusively said Trump won because of a spike in turnout for him in rural America and in exurbia, here, the results are more mixed. But it remains the case that the base most committed to Trump and most fervently loyal to his agenda is rural and exurban.AK: So just outside the cities. And finally, I argued, maybe counterintuitively, that America remains split today as it was before November the 5th, so I'm not convinced that this election is the big deal that some people think it is. But you wrote an interesting piece in Salon back in 2020 arguing that Trump has poisoned American culture, but the toxin was here all along. Of course, there is more, if anything, of that toxin now. So even if Harris had won the election, that toxin was still here. And finally, David, how do we get rid of that toxin? Do we just go to put Bruce Springsteen on and go and watch Big Lebowski? I mean, how do we get beyond this toxin?DAVID MASCIOTRA: I would I would love it if that was the way to do it.AK: We'll sit in our bathtub and wait for the thugs to come along?DAVID MASCIOTRA: Right, exactly. No, what you're asking is, of course, the big question. We need to find a way to resurrect some sense of, I'll use another conservative phrase, civic virtue. And in doing--AK: And resurrection, of course, by definition, is conservative, because you're bringing something back.“Ambition is what allows a society to grow. And it seems like ambition has fallen far out of fashion.” -DMDAVID MASCIOTRA: Exactly. And we also have to resurrect, offer something more practical, we have to resurrect a sense of civics. One thing on which--I have immense respect and admiration for Jonathan Rauch--one minor quibble I would have with him from your conversation is when he said that the voters rejected the liberal intellectual class and their ideas. Some voters certainly rejected, but some voters were unaware. The lack of civic knowledge in the United States is detrimental to our institutions. I mean, a majority of Americans don't know how many justices are on the Supreme Court. They can't name more than one freedom enumerated in the Bill of Rights. So we need to find a way to make citizenship a vital part of our national identity again. And there are some practical means of doing that in the educational system. Certainly won't happen in the next four years. But to get to the less tangible matter of how to resurrect something like civic virtue and bring back ambition and aspiration in our sense of national identity, along with empathy, is much tougher. I mean, Robert Putnam says it thrives upon community and voluntary associations.AK: Putnam has been on the show, of course.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yeah. So, I mean, this is a conversation that will develop. I wish I had the answer, and I wish it was just to listen to Born to Run in the bathtub with with a poster of The Dude hanging overhead. But as I said to you before we went on the air, I think that you have a significant insight to learn this conversation because, in many ways, your books were prescient. We certainly live with the cult of the amateur now, more so than when you wrote that book. So, I'd love to hear your ideas.AK: Well, that's very generous of you, David. And next time we appear, you're going to interview me about why the cult of the amateur is so important. So we will see you again soon. But we're going to swap seats. So, David will interview me about the relevance of Cult of the Amateur. Wonderful conversation, David. I've never thought about Lebowski or Francis Fukuyama, particularly Lebowski, in terms of what happened on November 5th. So, very insightful. Thank you, David, and we'll see you again in the not-too-distant future.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Thank you. I'm going to reread Cult of the Amateur to prepare. I may even do it in the bathtub. I look forward to our discussion.David Masciotra is an author, lecturer, and journalist. He is the author of I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (I.B. Tauris, 2020), Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky), Barack Obama: Invisible Man (Eyewear Publishers, 2017), and Metallica by Metallica, a 33 1/3 book from Bloomsbury Publishers, which has been translated into Chinese. In 2010, Continuum Books published his first book, Working On a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen.His 2024 book, Exurbia Now: Notes from the Battleground of American Democracy, is published by Melville House Books. Masciotra writes regularly for the New Republic, Washington Monthly, Progressive, the Los Angeles Review of Books, CrimeReads, No Depression, and the Daily Ripple. He has also written for Salon, the Daily Beast, CNN, Atlantic, Washington Post, AlterNet, Indianapolis Star, and CounterPunch. Several of his political essays have been translated into Spanish for publication at Korazon de Perro. His poetry has appeared in Be About It Press, This Zine Will Change Your Life, and the Pangolin Review. Masciotra has a Master’s Degree in English Studies and Communication from Valparaiso University. He also has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from the University of St. Francis. He is public lecturer, speaking on a wide variety of topics, from the history of protest music in the United States to the importance of bars in American culture. David Masciotra has spoken at the University of Wisconsin, University of South Carolina, Lewis University, Indiana University, the Chicago Public Library, the Lambeth Library (UK), and an additional range of colleges, libraries, arts centers, and bookstores. As a journalist, he has conducted interviews with political leaders, musicians, authors, and cultural figures, including Jesse Jackson, John Mellencamp, Noam Chomsky, all members of Metallica, David Mamet, James Lee Burke, Warren Haynes, Norah Jones, Joan Osborne, Martín Espada, Steve Earle, and Rita Dove. Masciotra lives in Indiana, and teaches literature and political science courses at the University of St. Francis and Indiana University Northwest. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

So was November 5 a moral catastrophe signaling the death knell of American liberalism or just another election in the turbulent history of American democracy. According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch, the Trump-Harris election was both. On the one hand, Rauch argues, wearing his unashamedly liberal cap, November 5 was a moral catastrophe for the future of American democracy. But, on the other, slapping on his Brookings analyst’s cap, Rauch celebrates November 5 as an ordinary election. I suspect the double capped Rauch is onto a singular thing here. There is a feeling of catastrophic ordinariness about America right now. It’s that moment before a crash when everything slows down and you know something dramatic is about to happen. Enjoy the (horror) show, Rauch seems to be saying. America is about to become very unordinary. Transcript:“When I say a moral catastrophe, it means that people like me, we don't know what to do.” -Jonathan RauchAK: Hello, everybody. I'm just back from a little bit of an East Coast jaunt. I drove around rural Virginia a couple of days ago, and I saw this sign, for people who are just listening, there's a "Trump/Vance 2024" flag, and then underneath someone has put "winner." And that is clear. There's no doubt the Trump and Vance in 2024 are the clear winners in every sense. From the point of view of liberals, it's very concerning. Francis Fukuyama, who might be described as the pope of American liberalism, believes that the Trump win marks a decisive rejection of liberalism. So it's a historic change. And my guest today on the show, an old friend of of show, Jonathan Rauch, I think agrees. He's described the November election as "Tuesday's moral catastrophe." In spite of that moral catastrophe, John Rauch is still around. Just back from the south of France. It's a hard place to go, John. What do you mean by a moral catastrophe? I mean, those are strong words.JONATHAN RAUCH: I mean in a specific sense. We don't write our own headlines, of course. And that one is a little blunt. What I meant by that is that for the last eight years, people like me, including me, have done everything in our power to persuade the American electorate that Donald Trump was an unacceptable candidate from the point of view of morality and character and basic decency and observation of the fundamental norms on which our country and constitution rely. And this election, 2024, was a complete, I think, repudiation of that view. It was an ordinary election. The good news is that it was an ordinary election. We did—AK: And you wrote a piece for Brookings. You're a fellow of Brookings—JONATHAN RAUCH: Yeah, that's right.AK: —On this ordinary election. So on the one hand, it was ordinary. On the other hand, it was extraordinary. It was a moral catastrophe.JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, it was. Yeah, that's right. The good news is that it was an ordinary election. It was a rerun of 2016. It was an anti-incumbent election. It was close. It was undisputed. We've seen all that before. The bad news, for someone like me who's been saying for eight years is this this guy is not someone who should be anywhere near the White House, is that it was an ordinary election. The voters looked at everything that he's done and everything that people like me said. And they shrugged and they said, well, you know what? You're either wrong or we're not interested. They treated him as you would another candidate. And so from that point of view, this is a, I think, a decisive rejection of what folks like me have been saying. And we have to change.AK: John, I know you don't have any kids. I've got kids. And I think rule number one of parenting—and I'm certainly not the person to lecture anyone on good or bad, or certainly good parenting—rule number one of parenting always seemed to me, was if you tell a kid enough times that they can't do something, in the end, they will. And I don't mean to trivialize your argument, but what you just said to me sounded like—and correct me if I'm wrong, that the John Rauchs of the world, fellows at Brookings, authors of bestselling books like Constitution of Knowledge, for eight years, you warn the American people that the guy on the ballot, Donald Trump, was a bad deal, that he was a bad man, that he was unethical, all the rest of it. For eight years, you told them, you made it clear, and they have disobeyed you. And this is a crisis. In terms of that narrative, were you, you collectively I mean, you can't speak on behalf of your Brookings class, but weren’t you are asking for trouble by making it so clear that you disapproved of this particular candidate?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, it certainly appears that way today, doesn't it? On the other hand, one cannot deny what you said. Clearly, all the things that people like me have have said, and many, many other people, the editorial boards of many newspapers, and Frank Fukuyama, a brilliant man and wonderful scholar. They've been rejected, and so they've just clearly failed. So you're undoubtedly right. The question is, should we have just shut up this whole time? Should we not have pointed out, for example, that this is someone who led an effort to overthrow the United States government, that this is someone who lied by actual account, average of 20 times a day while he was in office? You can't really not point these things out in a liberal democracy, can you? So when I say a moral catastrophe, it means that people like me, we don't know what to do.AK: Are you saying then in a sense that it's a moral catastrophe not for America, but to quote you, for people like John Rauch, that your ideas, that you grew up with it you clearly believe in, you're one of the upholders ethically, philosophically of liberal ideals. Is this a catastrophe for yourself?JONATHAN RAUCH: That is exactly what I'm saying. You just said it better.AK: Well, you said it well, John, a moral catastrophe for yourself. And does that suggest that, really, you're beginning to question your own ideas, that more than half of America, maybe 51, 52 percent of the people who voted suggested that you were wrong?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, I'm not a populist, and in fact, as an atheistic homosexual Jew, I'm very used to being part of an unpopular minority and thinking that I was right regardless. And I don't think I can or want to change fundamentally in my view. For example, the founders, the U.S. Constitution, the benefits of small liberalism. I don't mean left wing progressivism. I'm center right myself, but I mean the ideals of the American founding and the Enlightenment. I still think that there's actually—Fukuyama was right in what he said in the early 90s. There's no real alternative to those things if what you want is peace, prosperity, freedom, and knowledge. But where I think I have to go back to square one is trying to figure out how to make that case. People like me, you know, I assumed that we were the majority, that we spoke for mainstream America, and that that Trump was a fringe candidate who had somehow managed to commandeer the commanding heights of politics. And I think someone like you is quicker to understand, no, that it's actually the other way around. A large number of the people, and now clearly a majority of the people, are on his side. And that means that we, people like me, again, liberals of the world need to recalibrate and understand we're no longer the mainstream. We're now the dissident faction. It's a very different world than we thought we lived in.AK: Although, in a way, it's a return to some. And you and I spent some time together this summer at the Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference. It was actually put on, I think, by the same people who published your "Tuesday’s Moral Catastrophe," the UnPopulist. But I wonder, in your piece, you talk about something called "the moral minority." I mean, isn't that the foundations of classical liberalism? Isn't that what John Stuart Mill, perhaps the most influential of all 19th century liberals, focused in on liberalism? What's wrong with being in the moral minority? Is there something...insecure about wanting to be in the moral majority, John?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, again, Andrew, I think you're exactly right. And the problem is that I forgot that. We had such—liberals, you know, again, I always use the word liberal in this conversation. I hope you're—AK: Yeah, with a small L. We're not talking about left-wing democrats.JONATHAN RAUCH: With a small L. Madison and Jefferson and Burke and Locke and Tocqueville and all of that. The founding ideas of liberal democracy. So we had an easy ride for many years. We assumed that we were the good guys. We were certainly right when the opponents were of fascism and communism. And then in the 90s it appeared that the world had simply come around, and that America was on a straight path to to just preserving this model forever. And what we've seen now is that that's not true. What we've seen is a lot of people feel left behind. Now, we knew a lot of people were being left behind. And at the think tank where I work, Brookings, for decades now, we have been hatching ideas every day about how to help those people, you know, retraining, trade adjustment assessment, apprenticeship programs, better forms of welfare. It's all we do all day, is try to help those who are left behind. Nonetheless, it's just as you say, I think we got complacent. I think now it's now obvious we are complacent. What else can you say after an election like this?AK: And yet you talk about this moral minority. Earlier you defined yourself as an atheist, a homosexual, a Jew—probably a secular Jew. And when I think of John Rauch, I would think is much more comfortable in a—I mean, he is a minority guy. I mean, that's your mentality. So what's changed? So, your political party—with a small P—your liberals, they're in the minority. So what?JONATHAN RAUCH: So I thought that...I was certainly in a minority in my lack of belief in God, and in being a member of a minority religion, and especially growing up gay in a world where that made you a pariah. But all of those things we saw remarkable progress. In the world I grew up in, of course, homosexuality was illegal. You couldn't serve in the military. Marriage was a ridiculous idea. Atheists were the most unpopular people in the country. Polls found that, you know, Gallup results would show that atheists were unelectable to public office. And we'd just come out of the shadow of the Holocaust. And my father, who is, we're talking about the 1950s in Phoenix, Arizona. He moved to Phoenix because as a Jew, he couldn't get a job on the East Coast, because he wasn't in the top half of his law school class. And we saw immense improvements—AK: I'm sorry to jump in here, John, and I'm not trivializing this, but if he had been in the top half, would he have got a job as a Jew?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, what he told me is that because he wasn't in the top half, he couldn't. And he had to move to Phoenix to get a job. So more than that, I can't tell you, but—AK: But that's going back to parenting. It was probably smart. You'd never be even close to being the bottom half of anything.JONATHAN RAUCH: But, you know, when he moved to Phoenix in the 50s, and when I grew up in the 60s, Jews could not join the Phoenix Country Club. So the story that I heard is the story of liberalism—again, small L-liberalism—coming through for people like me. And I thought, that's the nature of our country, where we are fundamentally, at the end of the day—we may make wrong decisions in the short term—but we are about advancing rights according to liberal doctrine. And so I now feel an outsider in the one category where I always felt an insider.AK: I think you probably seek—you would never acknowledge it publicly—but I don't think that unhappy about it.JONATHAN RAUCH: About which?AK: About being an outsider.JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, that's interesting. I am unhappy about the decision that my country has taken in a direction that I think is very, very bad for all kinds of reasons, which we can discuss. I am very unhappy that so many people would support a person whose candidacy and character I think are indefensible. I am certainly unhappy about that. And I'm unhappy about thinking that my country is a different kind of place than I thought. All of those things make me very unhappy. The broader way in which you're maybe right, and I've have never had to think about it quite this way, is: it was unhealthy for liberals to become complacent, to become insiders, to not listen, to not notice. And it may be good for us—in fact, it may be necessary for us to start from scratch, which is kind of where I think we are. AK: I wonder, John, whether one of the problems—and I'm as much of a liberal as you, although I'm naturally I'm always uncomfortable if I'm in the majority, by definition, if I'm in the majority, then I'll change my mind to go into the minority—I wonder whether one of the problems—Fukuyama's an old friend of yours, certainly the high priest, the pope of American liberalism. Of course, much misunderstood in terms of his end-of-history narrative. But he did have a—and you talked about it earlier—a kind of teleology, and he perhaps still does, the idea of history progressing towards something better. It's Martin Luther King's moral arc of the universe. Might that be one of the problems with American liberalism? That we've accepted this Fukuyama/MLK-style teleological narrative, that the world is always becoming a better place?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, I don't know that I'd put the Fukuyama thesis quite that way. It wasn't that the world's always becoming a better place, but it was a view of the moral directionality of liberalism, that is, over time, if you have liberal forms of government and economics and epistemology—that is, science, the way you go about finding knowledge—that you will over time tend to increase peace, freedom, prosperity, and knowledge. So they were saying that, and I still think that's true, Andrew. I still think that the people proposing various alternatives to liberalism, Christian nationalism, or various forms of state enterprise, or Chinese-style communism, or postmodernism or wokeism. I think those are bad ideas, and I think they won't work. I think they'll make people less free and less knowledgeable, and there will be more conflict. And so I think Frank Fukuyama was fundamentally actually right. There's really only one system in the 200,000 years of the human species which has surmounted our tribal instincts and allowed us to knit together into a global community, which has over time, increased prosperity, knowledge, diminished war and poverty. So I don't challenge that premise. Where I think you're right, and what I think we were too complacent about, is we kind of assumed that that would be on autopilot and that the people who are left behind, for example, or who are unhappy with demographic change, or the way the country was changing, that they could just be kind of dismissed, you know, that they would be happy because GDP is is growing. And that turns out, of course, to be wrong.AK:  You talk about—I don't remember if you said 20,000 or 2000 years—but is the one system over—JONATHAN RAUCH: Two hundred thousand.AK: A hundred, wow, it's even more, 100,000. I'll use that as the title for the interview, John. One system over 100,000 years that—JONATHAN RAUCH: Two hundred thousand.AK: Two hundred? We'll put it up.JONATHAN RAUCH: Three hundred, depending when you date the—AK: Yeah, maybe a million. Well, certainly a lot of years since we've overcome tribalism. But some people might respond—including some people who think of themselves as liberals. Yascha Mounk comes to mind—that the idea of overcoming tribalism is itself a kind of unrealistic, almost utopian, ideology, that we are, by definition, tribal. In fact, we've had a number of shows on the value of tribalism. There's a guy at Columbia whose book in defense of corporate and social tribalism is actually shortlisted for the F.T. Book of the Year. So are you suggesting that—in your view, at least, you use this word tribalism, it's your word, Jon, rather than mine—are you suggesting that it's fundamentally incompatible with liberalism, that for a liberal system to work, we can't think tribally? In racial, cultural, I don't know, in every sense, linguistic terms?JONATHAN RAUCH: No, I'm saying, in a way, the opposite. The great liberal theorists going back to John Locke, but especially my favorite of them, my hero, James Madison, understood that what could be called tribalism, or what can also be called partizanship of a certain type, and what Madison called faction, that this is a fundamental driver of the human species, and that you're not going to make it go away, and that the flaw of most of these other systems, you know, monarchy and autocracy and theocracy, is that they tried to stamp out the identities of individuals and of groups and tribes and simply impose one on everybody. You know, we're all now going to be the tribe of Catholics, for example. And a certain type of Catholic. You're going to stamp out all the heresies. Liberalism's innovation is to say, no. That stamping out human nature—we will always be tribal and partizan and factional. So you want to build a society where people in their factions and in their tribes can nonetheless get along through negotiation and compromise and persuasion. And then you set up mechanisms and constitutions that try to get them to do that. And then you teach norms that get them to support those things. And that's all extremely difficult. But the core of liberalism is understanding that the factions are always there, and managing them is always hard. And guess what? The things that we thought were working haven't been working so well.AK:  Yeah. So John, you're collapsing tribalism and Madison's notion of faction.JONATHAN RAUCH: Am I wrong?AK: Well, I've never thought of them quite in the same way. I mean, people are...didn't Madison mean by faction people's self-interest? So, business owners or exporters or importers or people whose interests happened to coincide? That's what faction is. Tribalism is something that we...we tend to be born in to tribes. And isn't that the problem that liberals have with tribalism? That it can't be overcome? I mean, you know, the classic one is, is race. You're born white or black. You can't choose what you're born and how you can't repaint yourself. So there is a difference between, I mean, in my sense, between tribalism and faction.JONATHAN RAUCH: I would I would dispute that actually. I think Madison—my interpretation of Madison is, right? Which is that these are all just forms of groupieness. You know, you've seen these experiments. There are tons of them. But you take students and you divide them randomly into two groups and you put one of them in red jerseys and the other in green jerseys and you tell them they're different groups. And then you put them through experiments like how altruistic they are, and they almost instantly bond into groups based on entirely random categories with people they've never known before. And so you can be born into one of those things. Of course, I actually am not convinced race is something you're born into. I think it's socially constructed to a large extent. But setting that aside, I think all of these things just come down to the natural tendency of humans to form groups and to form loyalties in those groups and then have insiders and outsiders—partizanship, which used to be pretty fungible, we saw bipartisanship all the time, has now become tribal, just in the sense that people put their identities into it. They define it as an identity. And, you know, the color jersey you wear can define your identity, and certainly your identity as a farmer can define it. So however you call it, you know, I think we're talking about the same basic phenomenon, which is what do you do about our tendency to groupieness and to—I guess I hate this term, but I'll use it—"othering," saying, the world is people like us, and people like them, and we're people like us, and we're against people like them.AK: John, Tuesday's moral catastrophe—and it was a couple of Tuesdays ago—is it a unique catastrophe? And there was an interesting piece in this weekend's Financial Times by Mark Mazower, excellent Columbia University historian, and why he said, he was suggesting that Trump's victory will change America. That goes without saying. Europe is going to respond very differently. He doesn't believe it's fascist, but he said something very interesting in the piece. He said, the U.S. is the only nation in the world currently governed by a document drawn up in the age of the Enlightenment. Of course, perhaps the most influential figure in that is your hero, Madison. Does this make what's happening in America, this rejection, in your eyes, at least, of liberalism so particularly important? Is it the final nail in the coffin of the Enlightenment, John?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, it's certainly not the final nail. This is an ongoing story. And for just the reasons we've discussed, I have hope that I and my friends and the people who are with us at the conference that you mentioned in July will be shaken out of our complacency and find ways both to solve, or help solve the kinds of problems that liberalism has, and also find better ways to explain it and its enormous advantages. I can tell you that I think Chinese communism, for example, is is not the solution. I do think it's important to note that what's happening now is not just in America. It's global. We've seen—this year has been, according to the people who look at such things—this year has been a record year for anti-incumbency all around the world. In fact, as far back as—AK: I mean, as you say in your Brookings piece, a very ordinary election, inflation historically always made it very hard for incumbents to keep their power in an election.“The question is, should we have just shut up this whole time? Should we not have pointed out, for example, that this is someone who led an effort to overthrow the United States government, that this is someone who lied by actual account, average of 20 times a day while he was in office? You can't really not point these things out in a liberal democracy, can you? So when I say a moral catastrophe, it means that people like me, we don't know what to do.” -JRJONATHAN RAUCH: Well, that's right. But everywhere you look, Japan, we had a serious upset. Germany's government has collapsed. Macron's government has collapsed. Everywhere you look, you see voters who are unhappy with the status quo and grabbing vehicles to oppose it. And sometimes those vehicles are far right-wing parties in Europe, which have been fringe or nonexistent until now. And America is part of that trend. And one of the things that folks like me need to try to figure out is why are people so damn unhappy?AK: Well, you know that, you don't need...I mean, you just need to look at the inflation numbers, the poverty numbers, the inequality numbers, the addiction numbers, the death of despair numbers. That's not hard for a guy like you to understand, is it, John?JONATHAN RAUCH: A lot of those numbers are better. A lot of the—AK: But that does still make it...I mean, they haven't gone away.JONATHAN RAUCH: Well sure, there are always problems, I'm not denying, and I'm not saying something silly. But the American economy was objectively much better than people gave it credit for. People were telling pollsters that the United States economy today is as bad as it was in the Great Depression of the 1930s. And I can tell you that's just not the case. And...increasingly people attribute what's happening not just to objective factors like economic growth and inflation, though of course those are there, I wouldn't deny it, but to anomie, to things like loneliness, to the lack of connection. David Brooks has a very big article in The Atlantic on the many ways—you alluded to some of them—that people are finding their lives coming up short and a lot of them have to do with intangible factors like do they have friends, do they feel secure if they're in trouble? Do they have someone to call? Do they feel that they live in an environment which is safe? And those things...we at Brookings pay attention to the numbers, right? These intangibles are harder to cope. AK: I wonder, it'd be really interesting, I don't know if everyone's done the research on this, John, whether your point about the age of anxiety and loneliness, David Brooks has written about it, all sorts of other people, it's one of the dominant intellectual strains of our age. But I wonder whether anyone's done any research of whether...a sense of loneliness is more dominant in the minds of Harris voters versus Trump voters. My guess, and it's just a guess, is that the Trump voter is less likely to be lonely than the Harris voter, because they're less urban, less bound up in all the enemy of post-post digital capitalism.JONATHAN RAUCH: I know those numbers exist. I don't know what they show. A couple related trends, which I do know a little bit, is that indicators go in different directions. Progressives, people on the left with college degrees and all that, who are very progressive, are more neurotic and less happy than conservatives. And that stands to reason, since they seem to spend their days telling themselves that we will never have progress on race and that we live in a terrible and unjust society of settler colonialism. So there's that. On the other hand, we have a scholar at Brookings who studies happiness and hope. Happiness not in the sense of mood, you know, how cheerful I am, but life satisfaction, how good do I think my life is? And the ethnic group in America—the socioeconomic group, I should say—that is least hopeful is working class whites. And it turns out college educated whites are also low on the hope scale. And the most hopeful people in America are African-Americans.AK: Well they've been—I know this from families—they've been through so much hell historically that whatever they do now doesn't compare with what's happened in the past. Yeah that's a—JONATHAN RAUCH: Bingo. Yes. That's exactly what Carol thinks. I mean, we don't know we don't have a—AK: Who is the person at Brookings who does this?JONATHAN RAUCH: Carol Graham. She terrific. She's studying hope, actually. But that's right. The trajectory for African-Americans is much like my trajectory as a gay American, which is you've seen this remarkable progress. And that gives you hope, the trajectory for whites, especially working-class whites who really are having a bad time economically, they're looking back at a world in which they had more stock.AK: Yeah, but...I take your point on that, but my point was not on that. It was about loneliness as opposed to unhappiness. But maybe we can get her on the show. I'm guessing John, I'm the last cheerful progressive, am I?JONATHAN RAUCH: Are you cheerful, Andrew?AK: I'm very cheerful. I'm sort of...I always think Americans are miserable optimists, and I'm a cheerful pessimist. So whatever happens now makes me more cheerful. When the news is good always makes me nervous and miserable. You've talked, John, and we're going to reverse this, actually, next week you're going to interview me because you're one of the people I most respect, I'm interested in getting your take on what I think. You'll help me figure that out. You keep on mentioning complacency. You and I were at this Liberalism for the 21st Century, and I think I told you at the time, I thought it was very complacent, very elitist. It sort of reflected the problem rather than the solution. One thing that I have to admit, I disagreed with you in your moral catastrophe piece was the idea that Harris, and I'm quoting you here, ran an exemplary campaign. I mean, okay, everybody knows she got thrown in the deep end and all the rest of it. You don't need me to tell you that. But I think it was anything but exemplary. It was complacent. She had no, in my view, at least, no sense of why she wanted to be president. She rested on the Biden assumption that the economy was good and that there was no real reason to fundamentally change that. So what was, in your view, exemplary about the Harris campaign? She didn't manifest any kind of confidence. She wasn't even willing to go on the Joe Rogan Show because apparently some of her staff were uncomfortable with that. What do you admire about the Harris campaign?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, as I think you agree, she was cast into extremely challenging circles.AK: Yeah, I've said that. I acknowledged that. But—JONATHAN RAUCH: You acknowledged that. And when I say exemplary, I don't mean against a standard in which she could start from scratch, go through an entire primary campaign, develop policy proposals. And most importantly—and this really is important—not be an incumbent. She was an incumbent. She tried not to sound like she wasn't an incumbent, you know, turn the page and all of that, but the voters are not dumb. And they said, well, you are the sitting vice president of the United States. And they refused to separate her from Joe Biden, whose popularity was extremely low, low 40s, high 30s. That's a massive headwind. And those are conditions she can't change. The conditions that she could change begin with handling Biden extremely well. There were no leaks from the Harris operation trying to nudge Biden out, and that actually helped get him out. Then she was able to corral the delegates she needed in 36 hours. That seemed like a very heavy lift. People—AK: I think that reflects very poorly, actually, on the Democratic Party, that they were pushed into this.JONATHAN RAUCH: No, well, they got the delegates. Now, part of that is because the Democrats didn't have time to go through a proper primary process. And people who thought that they could somehow do an abbreviated version of that in three weeks were just on drugs. There was no way that was going to happen. She raised a stupendous amount of money. She had an extremely good team with essentially zero internal money.AK: The money was worthless. She had no idea that she was spending it. I mean, she raised ridiculous amounts of money that were just wasted.JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, I mean, I don't know. She'll probably wind up within a percentage point of Trump in the popular vote and the places—AK: Are you claiming victory, then, a moral victory, John?JONATHAN RAUCH: No, no, no. I'm saying that the places where she spent money, which are the seven swing states, the evidence that people who study this thing are saying, is that all of those places were much closer than the places that she didn't spend money. And part of that is because she was able to focus resources. But, you know, to continue, she crushed her opponent in a debate. So when I say exemplary, I mean, I think she did as good a job as you can expect someone to do in that situation. She still lost, because the country wanted a change and they understood the status quo.AK: I mean...she took no risks. She was unwilling. There was no reason...she's not in Biden's pocket. There was no reason why she couldn't have crushed Biden. When she was asked—the famous moment, to me, the whole campaign was finished when, I think it was on one of the morning shows, someone said, "Well, how would you be different from Biden?" And there was this long "um," and then she had no idea. The fact that—she'd clearly been thinking about this for years, I mean, it was obvious what might happen. But she had no idea of how she was different. I mean, what most troubles me about Harris, and this perhaps goes to the complacency of the liberal establishment, and you're not really part of that establishment, although you know it better than I do, is that complacency, their idea that actually things are pretty good, and that Biden did a good job, and the economy was good and it's not Trump, and if you just reminded people that the economy was improving and you're not Donald Trump and you're a small liberal, then you're going to win. To me, it was anything but exemplary.JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, we'll agree to disagree, but I will agree with you that that was a terrible answer. It was a bad moment.AK: But it's more than just a bad answer. The truth is—JONATHAN RAUCH: Here's where we disagree, which is: like it or not, she's the incumbent. And it is not credible for an incumbent, it just never has been, for a vice president to say, "the administration that just happened wasn't me." Because it was her. So that moment was a bad moment and she could and should have done better. But I think the screw up was that the Biden administration ignored immigration and inflation for too long. And in hindsight, that's pretty clear. But that that was baked in, right? That's the world she inherited. So I guess we could go round and round on that, you know, if they'd had a full primary process and Biden had gotten out and you had had someone who was not in government, like Josh Shapiro, or maybe Gavin Newsom, you know, all these people have their flaws. You know Gavin Newsom a lot better than I do.AK: And Newsom's been on the show. I think he's a bit too smirk.JONATHAN RAUCH: Yeah, he might be. But then I think he would have had time to develop those things. But I think what we did have is a test in this election. She ran as an avatar of the Biden administration because she was, you just can't run away from that. She's sitting vice president. And she ran into an electorate which said, you know what? We think Biden is a failed president and that makes you a failed vice president. And we don't want to fail another term of that. We want something else. That's Donald Trump. And where people like me fell on our faces is that we tried to tell them, well, Donald Trump is unacceptable. So go with the failed presidency. Go with the failed administration. And they're not willing to do that.“Liberals of the world need to recalibrate and understand we're no longer the mainstream. We're now the dissident faction. It's a very different world than we thought we lived in.” -JRAK: Right. And you write about in your excellent piece, "The Moral Catastrophe," you quote along elections determining norms, which is certainly the case in this last election. I mean, briefly, going back to Harris, what about...does the fact that she seemed to be running by committee, she's like an American car or something designed by committee, completely unwilling, I mean, she's the reverse of Trump, completely unwilling to take risks, completely unwilling to do or say anything that might offend anyone or create any kind of controversy. Is that just a problem with Harris and her camp, or is this a problem, John, with small-L liberals in America today, this unwillingness to challenge, to tell the truth? I mean, coming back to Biden, there seems to be, in my view, at least, a kind of conspiracy amongst mainstream media not to tell the truth about Biden over the last 2 or 3 years, that he was clearly...not fit to be president, that he was too old, that he'd lost something that made him barely presidential. And yet the press never focused on this. So why is our—and I'm part of your class—why is our class so unwilling to take risks.JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, there's two things there. One is about the coverage of Biden, and that's a separate conversation. And I have a minority view on that.AK: Do you agree or disagree with me?JONATHAN RAUCH: I disagree. I think that the reason that the Biden's condition wasn't broadly reported is that the administration hid, it and they clobbered you if you tried to write on it, and when The Wall Street Journal finally was able to get a story in about it April, they could only get one person to go on the record about Biden's condition. And that was former Speaker McCarthy, who is not an unbiased source. Biden held essentially no press conferences. He shut that down. He withheld himself from the press. I think he's Parkinsonian. They have good days and they have bad days. Doesn't mean Parkinson's disease, by the way. There are lots of things that can cause the things you see of him, kind of the slurred speech and the slack-jawed look and the stumbling gait. But he was hiding that. And he was abetted in hiding it by people who should not have done that.AK: But it's the whole administration. It's all these—JONATHAN RAUCH: But that's a side question. Your big question—yeah, I shouldn't have gone down that rabbit hole, because who knows? But your big point is, are liberals refusing to take risks and tell the truth? I don't know about liberals because it's a very big group. And my friends at the Cato Institute, for example, who are classical liberal libertarians, say all kinds of things that are very risky, like privatize all the schools. I do think, though, that that's the case about Democrats, and that they should, for example, have separated Biden and Harris, and other people should have separated themselves from the academic left, you know, the genderqueer people and the critical race theory, social justice, critical, everything people, they should have separated themselves from those people and they should have been willing to say that a woman is an adult human female, and that they've been afraid to do that because that part of the coalition can be so noisy. And in fact, when things are this close in the country, when you're having one 50/50 election after another, you're afraid of losing part of your base. But there, yeah, I agree with you. Democrats need to learn a page from Republicans who have been nothing if not risk takers. “Increasingly people attribute what's happening not just to objective factors like economic growth and inflation, though of course those are there, I wouldn't deny it, but to anomie, to things like loneliness, to the lack of connection.” -JRAK: That the party then needs its Sister Souljah movement. You've been very generous with your time, John, and we're going to continue this conversation. Still a lot to talk about. Back in. Back in August 2022, a couple of years ago, it seems a long time ago now, you wrote for The Atlantic: Trump's second term would look like this. And you talked about the extinction of American democracy. Where are you? I mean, you're obviously worried this these are difficult times, to put it euphemistically from your point of view. How fearful are you about this second term? I mean, we're speaking after the appointment of certain cabinet ministers, appointments for the attorney general, RFK Junior. I mean, there's a there's a whole episode to talk about here, but...when you look back to August 2022, so a couple of years ago, more than two years ago, when you talked about the Trump second term, are you more or less pessimistic about the fate of American democracy?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, you are right that that would be a great opening point for a separate episode, because there's so much to discuss there, and I am so interested in your view of that, which has been very different from mine, and perhaps, I hope, will prove correct. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'm about a nine. The things that I said in August of 2022 that they would do, they are doing, and they can do, and we know what they are, because they've either told us what they are or they've actually tried to do them in Trump's first term. And we will see them unfold. And if I'm correct about the sixth out of six of them, the one thing that he did not do in his first term, then that's the end of liberal democracy in America as we've known it. And what that sixth thing is, is the open violation of court orders, making Supreme Court orders, rulings, optional. I fully expect that they will do that. Now, I hope I'm wrong about that. But if that happens, in addition to the other five things that we predicted and that we know they want to do and that they're now setting about doing, yeah, I think we live in a fundamentally different kind of regime. It's not, of course, China, but it's in the direction of Hungary...and yeah, so I'm pretty much hair on fire. I'd like to be wrong, though. I'd like you to be right. And as you know, I give your view great weight. I view you as kind of a canary in the mineshaft of people who said, you know, I'm too hysterical. AK: I like being called the canary in the mineshaft. Jonathan Rauch, we will continue this conversation. We're going to switch hats. It's going to be my hair on fire the next time around. John's going to come back on the show and talk to me.JONATHAN RAUCH: You have a lot more hair to set on fire.AK: Yeah, well, for the moment. But we will continue this conversation. John, It's always an honor and a lot of fun to have you on the show. You are certainly the most the most human of liberals, I would say. Warts and all, you don't deny any aspect of the liberal condition. So it's always an honor to have you on the show, which is, I think, the essence of liberalism, in contrast to some of the utopianism of other ideologies. So we will—JONATHAN RAUCH: Andrew Keen meets out his compliments with parsimony. So I take that as a as a good one.AK: Good John, well, honor. And I hope you survive the next week, because I want you back on the show and you're going to interview me. So we'll talk again in the not-too-distant future. John Rauch, keep well, keep worrying. We need you to worry. If you worry, then makes it easier for the rest of us. Thank you so much.Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the governance studies program at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award. His books include The Constitution of Knowledge, The Happiness Curve, and Gay Marriage. He lives in northern Virginia.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

“There is one winner regarding the most significant story this week,” Keith Teare writes in his That Was The Week technology newsletter. But, as he explains, there are, in fact, two winners: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneurs trusted by Trump to reform and shrink the federal government. So how seriously might we take Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)? Should we welcome this attempt to reform (ie: cut) the Federal government. And is Musk’s SpaceX really a positive model for streamlining the state bureaucracy. Keith, as always, is hopeful; Andrew, as always, is skeptical. But, like it or not, DOGE is going to be one of the more intriguing and impactful experiments of the incoming administration.Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for TechCrunch and publishes the “That Was The Week” newsletter.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In association with our friends at Digital-Life-Design (DLD), Europe’s iconic annual tech conference which next January celebrates its twentieth anniversary, we are starting a series of conversations with DLD speakers looking back over the last twenty years. First up is Silicon Valley entrepreneur, speaker and author John Hagel, who talked, quite openly, about his lifelong fear of fear and how he’s cured himself of this affliction over the last two decades.John Hagel III has more than 40 years’ experience as a management consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur. After recently retiring as a partner from Deloitte, McGraw Hill published in May 2021 his latest book, The Journey Beyond Fear, that addresses the psychology of change and he is developing a series of programs to help people navigate through change at many levels. John has founded a new company, Beyond Our Edge, LLC, that works with companies and people who are seeking to anticipate the future and achieve much greater impact. While at Deloitte, John was the founder and chairman of the Silicon Valley-based Deloitte Center for the Edge, focusing on identifying emerging business opportunities that are not yet on the CEO’s agenda. Before joining Deloitte, John was an independent consultant and writer and prior to that was a principal at McKinsey & Company and a leader of their Strategy Practice as well as the founder of their E-Commerce Practice. John has served as senior vice president of strategy at Atari, Inc., and is the founder of two Silicon Valley startups. John is also a faculty member at Singularity University where he gives frequent talks on the mounting performance pressure created by digital technology and promising approaches to help traditional companies make the transition from a linear to an exponential world. He is also on the Board of Trustees at the Santa Fe Institute, an organization that conducts leading edge research on complex adaptive systems. He has also led a number of initiatives regarding business transformation with the World Economic Forum. John is the author of The Power of Pull, published by Basic Books in April 2010. He is also the author of a series of best-selling business books, Net Gain, Net Worth, Out of the Box, and The Only Sustainable Edge. He is widely published and quoted in major business publications including The Economist, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal, as well as general media like the New York Times, NBC and BBC. He has won two awards from Harvard Business Review for best articles in that publication and has been recognized as an industry thought leader by a variety of publications and institutions, including the World Economic Forum and Business Week. John has his own website at www.johnhagel.com, and for many years wrote personal blogs at www.edgeperspectives.typepad.com as well as contributing postings on the Harvard Business Review, Fortune and Techonomy websites. He is active in social media and can be followed on Twitter at @jhagel and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhagel/ John holds a BA from Wesleyan University, a B.Phil. from Oxford University, and a JD and MBA from Harvard University. John Hagel has spent over 40 years in Silicon Valley and has experience as a management consultant, entrepreneur, speaker and author. He is driven by a desire to help individuals and institutions around the world to increase their impact in a rapidly changing world. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. TRANSCRIPTKEEN: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. We're going to do things a little differently today. We're starting a new series on KEEN ON in association with my dear friends at the DLD conference. It's an annual conference held each year in Munich. My view? Certainly the best tech conference in Europe, if not in the world. And in January 2025, they're celebrating their 20th anniversary. And in association with DLD, we're talking to some of their most notable speakers about their experiences over the last 20 years. We're beginning with an old friend of mine, John Hagel, a very distinguished author, futurist. His last book was called The Journey Beyond Fear, and John spoke at DLD '16 about narratives and business. And I began our DLD KEEN ON conversation with John Hagel by asking him to cast his mind back to January 2005.HAGEL: In January 2005, I was working as an independent consultant in Silicon Valley. I'd been there for 25 years already. I was fascinated with the degree to which digital technology was exponentially improving, and I was being aggressively recruited, at the time, by a large consulting firm, Deloitte, that wanted me to join. I was a bit resistant. I turned them down four times because I didn't want to go work for another large consulting firm. I'd been a partner with McKinsey before that, but ultimately they prevailed. They persuaded me that they would help me create a new research center that would be autonomous, even though it was part of Deloitte and it was really focused on trying to understand the long-term trends that are reshaping the global economy and what the implications are for people. And that was my passion, and I'm very grateful that I was able to pursue that.KEEN: What was the global economy, John, like in 2005?HAGEL: It was definitely becoming more and more connected. It was going through fundamental change even at that stage. I've come to call it "the big shift," but basically, some long-term trends that were playing out were creating mounting performance pressure on all of us. One form of pressure was intensifying competition on a global scale. Companies were competing with companies from around the world. Workers were competing with workers from around the world. So there was a lot of intensifying competition. The pace of change was accelerating. Things you thought you could count on were no longer there. And then, as if that weren't enough, all the connectivity we were creating...a small event in a faraway place in the world quickly cascades into an extreme, disruptive event. So it creates a lot of performance pressure on all people. And we were just in the early stages of that. I think we're actually still in the early stages of "the big shift." A lot more to come.KEEN: What was it, John, about "the big shift?" It was your term, is still, I think, one of the best terms to describe the first quarter of the 21st century. What both most worried and excited you about "the big shift" in 2005? Back then, not today.HAGEL: Well, at the time, I was starting to realize that fundamental change was going to be required in all companies, all organizations, governments, universities. And I was worried that that would be a challenge, that not many people really embrace that kind of change, and so how do you get people to make that transition? But on the other side, I was excited about the fact that the changes that we were seeing—I love paradox. And one of the paradoxes of the big shift is, I mentioned the mounting performance pressure as one of the trends and the big shift. Another trend was exponentially expanding opportunity. We can create far more value with far less resource, far more quickly, given all the connectivity that's been created. So the excitement was that if we understood the changes that were happening and were willing to make the changes, we could create value that would have never been imagined before.KEEN: Back in 2005, John, what were the lessons of the past that we were trying to correct? History obviously always changes. Today, in 2025, we seem to be wanting to learn from, perhaps, 2005. But what were we reacting against in 2005?HAGEL: Well, frankly, I think we're still reacting against it. But in 2005, the way I describe it is all new large institutions around the world, not just companies, but again, governments and universities and foundations, all the large organizations around the world were built on a model that I call scalable efficiency. The key to success is becoming more and more efficient and scale. Do things faster and cheaper. And hard to argue, because for over a century that model of scalable efficiency gave us all the global, large institutions we know around the world today. So, a huge success with that model. The challenge is that in a rapidly changing world, scalable efficiency becomes more and more inefficient. We're not able to respond to the changes that are going on. We're just focused on doing what we've always done faster and cheaper. So I think that's an interesting dilemma that we were confronting in 2005 and frankly still confronting.KEEN: Were there organizations in particular back in 2005 that captured what you call this paradox of the great shift?HAGEL: Yes. I think that one of the things that I was focused on—I wrote a number of books in the past 20 years, three books. And one of them was called The Only Sustainable Edge. And it was a notion that in a world of more rapid change, we need to focus on what I call scalable learning. And learning not in the form of sharing existing knowledge, not in the form of training programs, but learning in the form of creating new knowledge as we confront entirely new situations and figure out how to create value in those situations, and do that throughout the organization, not just in the research department or the product development group, but every department needs to be focused on scalable learning. And part of that, it's how do you reach out and connect with broader networks of third parties, rather than just try to do it all yourself inside your organization? And in that context, I was looking at companies in a very large part of the developing world, China, for example. There were companies that were pursuing really innovative approaches to scalable learning in global networks, where they were connecting in global networks and focusing on driving innovation and learning throughout the network. So that really inspired me with the notion that this is not only possible but necessary.KEEN: John, one of the words that I always associate with your name is is "the edge." You popularized it, you were part of a group that focused on researching the impact of edge technologies in organizations. Why is this word "the edge" so important to making sense of the last 20 years?HAGEL: Well, I actually founded the Center for the Edge, and it took me a while to get Deloitte to approve the title because they said, wait a minute, you're either the center or you're the edge. How can you be both? And again, I love paradox, but in the context of the question about what do we mean by edge, it was the belief that if you're looking for change that's coming into the world, start by looking at edges. It could be geographic edges, developing economies. It could be demographic edges, younger generations coming into the workforce or into the marketplace. It could be edges across disciplines and academic world, many different kinds of edges. But it's venture out into those edges and look for emerging things that have the potential to scale and become really significant as change agents. And I think that that's what drove us to really do our research, was to find those edges and learn from the edge.KEEN: What did you believe in, John, in 2005, or is that an inappropriate question?HAGEL: What did I believe in? Well, I believe that again, digital technology is a key catalyst, changing the world. As was mentioned, I've been in Silicon Valley for many decades, but I've also, while I've been based here in Silicon Valley, I've been working with large organizations around the world, so I've got a global perspective as well as focusing on the digital technology and how it's driving change. But I think it was a notion that, again, we are seeing some significant change that's happening. But I think that one of the things that I came to realize over time, because I was so focused on these opportunities and things that were emerging around the world and the need for change and the need for transformation. And I was encountering significant resistance from leaders of organizations and from people within the organization. When I talked about the need for change and transformation. And the thing that I learned, and has become a real focus for my work now, is rather than just focusing on strategy and business, focus on emotions. Focus on the emotions that are shaping our choices and actions. And one of the things I came to realize was that in a world of rapid change, the emotion of fear becomes more and more prevalent. And fear? Well, it's understandable. I think there are reasons for fear in a rapidly changing world. It's also very limiting. It holds you back. You become much more risk averse. You erode trust in other people. You don't want to look out into the future. You just want to focus on today. You need to find ways to move beyond the fear and cultivate other emotions that will help you to have much more impact that's meaningful to you and others. And that's become a real focus for me, is how do we make that journey beyond the fear? It was my most recent book is The Journey Beyond Fear, because I've come to believe that psychology and emotions are really the key that's going to determine how we move forward.KEEN: That was very personable, John. And I know that you've had a lot of experience of fear in your own personal life as well as in a professional context. Do you think one of the narratives, perhaps the central story for you over the last 20 years, has been overcoming fear?HAGEL: Yes. Well, I think that it certainly was a period of change for me and helped me to really reflect on how much the emotion of fear had been driving my life. But at the same time, I began to see that there were things that had really excited me throughout my life. And while they were quite different, you know, my first book was in 1976, and it was on alternative energy technologies. A little bit early, but throughout my life I had been excited about certain things, like alternative energy technologies, and when I stepped back and reflected, well, was I just shifting all over the place to different things, or was there a common element in all of these? I began to realize that what really excited me, and where my passion was, was in looking into the future and seeing emerging opportunities and helping to make people aware of those opportunities and ultimately motivate them to address those opportunities. And that was my passion and really helped me to overcome my fear, even though there's still fear there, it's never fully eliminated. But it's what really kept me going and keeps me going today.KEEN: Your 20-year narrative, John seems to have been pretty successful. You've learned a lot. You've published a lot. You succeeded in many ways. But that personal narrative, is that reflected in the world itself? It seems in some ways, certainly according to the pessimists who seem to be dominant these days in our zeitgeist, the world is taking a step back. If John Hagel took a step forward between 2005 and 2025, the world has taken a step back. Is that fair?HAGEL: No, I think it's very fair. I think that if I had to generalize, and obviously generalizations need some qualification, but generalizing, I would say that over the past 20 years, the emotion of fear has become more and more prevalent around the world. At the highest levels of organizations, lowest levels out in the communities. And again, while I think it's understandable, I think it's a very limiting emotion, and it's creating more and more challenge for us in terms of: how do we really embrace the change that's going to be required and capture the opportunities that are available to us? So I think that it's become a real focus for me and again, was the motivation for me to write the book The Journey Beyond Fear. I'm wanting to help people, first of all, acknowledge the fear, because I think many people don't even want to admit that they're afraid. And we live in cultures where if you say you're afraid, you're a weakling. But acknowledge the fear, recognize its limits, and find ways to move forward beyond it. And that's what I'm focused on now.KEEN: Is that fear, John, has it been most clearly manifested over the last 20 years in politics, particularly in the growth of liberal populism, which, in many people's views, you may or may not agree with it, is the way in which politicians take advantage of the culture of fear?HAGEL: It's complicated. I think there are factors that are helping to intensify the fear. A bit controversial or provocative. But I actually, in the United States, I believe both sides of our political spectrum are equally guilty in the sense that they have both focused on what I call "threat-based narratives," the enemies coming together. So, we're all going to die. We need to mobilize now and resist, or we're going to die. The enemy differs depending on which side you're on, but it's all about the threat. The enemy feeds the fear. And you look at our news media and challenge people to say, Tell me, when was the last time you heard a good news story? It's all about the latest catastrophe. Somewhere in the world where people have died and more are going to die. And so I think that there are factors that are feeding the fear, unfortunately, and making it an even more challenging emotion to overcome.KEEN: John, you spoke at DLD in 2016, and the focus of your talk was on storytelling, on the narrative of fear, on telling a good story. Is that the key to addressing so much of the fear in the world today, is telling a different story?HAGEL: Well, I have to be careful because I use words with different meanings than most people do. When I when I say narrative, most people say, you're talking about stories. Yeah, we know about stories. No, I believe there's an important distinction between stories and narratives. So for me, stories are self-contained. They have a beginning, a middle and an end to them. The end, the stories over. And the story is about me, the storyteller, or it's about some other people, real or imagined. It's not about you. In contrast, for me, a narrative is open ended. There's some big threat or opportunity out in the future. Not clear whether it's going to be achieved or not. And the resolution of the narrative hinges on you. It's a call to action to say, your choices, your actions are going to help determine how this narrative plays out. And again, I believe we've become increasingly dominated around the world by threat-based narratives. When we look into the future, there are huge threats, big challenges. Who's focused on the really big opportunities, inspiring opportunities, that could bring us all together? And what amazing things we could accomplish. So, I have become a strong believer that what I call opportunity-based narratives can become a powerful catalyst to help us move beyond the fear and start to cultivate an emotion that I call the passion of the explorer, that will help people to really have much more impact in a rapidly changing world.KEEN: In thinking about this alternative narrative, I'm thinking about it perhaps in architectural terms. Might we imagine this to be storytelling from the edge, or at least an architecture, a narrative architecture, which is built around the edge rather than some imaginary center?HAGEL: Well, again, I want to make the distinction between stories and narratives. I'm talking about narratives.KEEN: Right. Your idea of a narrative is more profound. It's deeper than the way most of us think about narratives. I take your point.HAGEL: Yes, I want to be explicit about that because—and not to dismiss the power of stories, I think stories can be very useful as well. But in making The Journey Beyond Fear—one of the things I should mention is, I've studied, throughout history, movements for social change in different parts of the world, different periods of history. And one of the things that I think is interesting is, the most successful movements for social change around the world throughout history, have been driven by what I describe as an opportunity-based narrative. The leaders were focused on a really inspiring opportunity that could bring people together and excite them. Just one small example that many people here in the U.S., at least, are familiar with is Martin Luther King's speech in Washington, D.C., "I Have a Dream." Amazing things we could accomplish. And yes, there are obstacles and barriers, absolutely. But the focus was on the opportunity of coming together and achieving amazing things.KEEN: John, you and I have talked about this before. Perhaps the most influential modern philosopher is Thomas Hobbes, 17th-century author of Leviathan. He made fear, and I think in many ways his theory of the world was built around his life, he was a very fearful man, and he didn't think fear was a bad thing. He actually thought it was a good thing for humans to recognize the value of fear. I don't want to revisit Hobbes. I know you're not a political philosopher, but at the same time, is there value to fear? Does it have any value at all, or your view, do we really need to simply overcome it and move beyond it?HAGEL: No. No. I am not in any way suggesting we will eliminate it. I believe fear is something that's intrinsic. And an example I give—and this ties to another emotion I mentioned briefly, passion of the explorer. I've come to believe that if we're really going to achieve significant impact in a rapidly changing world, we need to cultivate a very specific form of passion, the passion of the explorer. And I've studied this in many different domains, but one interesting domain is extreme sports. I've spent a lot of time with big wave surfers. Interesting thing, if you talk to a big wave surfer as they're paddling out to ride the next big wave, they're afraid. They know that people have not only fallen off their board, but have died riding those waves. So they're afraid, and they're using the fear to focus on what are the risks, how can I manage the risks? But they are paddling with Excitement. To get out, to ride that wave. They're not letting the fear dominate them. And so I think that's the interesting dynamic and relationship that needs to be established, to use the fear to focus on the risks. But don't let it stop you from making significant change.KEEN: You've clearly learned a great deal over the last 20 years, John. Do you have any regrets, though? Have you made mistakes? Are there things you wish you'd done that you haven't?HAGEL: You know, I think that it's complicated. I do believe that the big mistake in the early days was really focusing so much on the opportunities that were being, created and not recognizing the role of emotions in preventing us from addressing those opportunities. And so it's led to a significant shift in my life and my thinking and my work around...and I'm not ignoring the opportunities, I'm continuing to explore the opportunities. But at the same time, I'm really focused on how we address the obstacles and barriers that are preventing us from getting to those opportunities. And that's where I'm spending more and more of my time.KEEN: When we think back to 2005, most of the same big tech companies were around. Amazon, Google, Microsoft. Facebook was just beginning. There was a very positive, broadly, outlook on tech those days. Today, in 2025, things have changed dramatically. Is that fair, do you think?HAGEL: Well, again, it's complicated. I think that this is one of the areas where fear is really demonstrating itself, anything large and big. One of the big issues that I see, it's not just tech, by the way, I mean, there are surveys around the world that...our trust in large institutions around the world is eroding at a very rapid rate. And when I say this to people that they nod their heads. They've all seen the surveys. Very few people that I know of have asked the question, why? What's driving that erosion of trust? And I believe I've come to believe, based on the research I've done, that a big factor is fear, the emotion of fear, which leads to erosion of trust. And so we need to really understand, why are we so fearful and what can we do to address it? And I don't want to dismiss, I think there are issues, too, in terms of, and I'll just mention quickly, in technology, one of the big issues with the large tech companies is they tend to be supported by advertising models and commission-based models, where they're being paid by the advertiser and the vendors, and the user of the technology, you're the product. And so I think more and more people are beginning to realize that a tech company's primary loyalty is not to you as the user, it's to the people who are paying all the bills. So, I think there are reasons for erosion of trust. But I do think that we need to recognize that fear is a significant factor as well.KEEN: Have you changed your own view of the potential of technology over the last 20 years? You've been in Silicon Valley for a long time, John. You're one of the most distinguished, respected people. You're not a billionaire type, so you're not just a drum beater. But at the same time, you're a man who's not just naturally negative and skeptical. Do you think you're more or less optimistic and positive about the impact of tech, particularly big tech, on the world today in 2025 than you were in 2005?HAGEL: Good question. I think that I'm by nature an optimist, so I'm always looking at opportunities in the future. And I think that technology can still produce amazing new opportunities. One of the interesting things to me—it's not getting as much attention as I think it should is the role of technology innovation in biology and health and wellness. Helping us to live longer, healthier, better lives. And I think we're just in the earliest stages of that technology being developed. But rather than technology being outside us, technology is increasingly going to be inside us and helping us to lead much fuller lives. And so I'm very optimistic about that. And I do believe that the world is changing at a rapid rate, and I'm a believer that we're going to see major new technology companies emerge. And a lot of the current technology leaders will be disrupted and cast to the side. So, more change to come.KEEN: Are there individuals over the last 20 years who have, in your mind, captured the spirit of the age? When one thinks of Elon Musk, for example, he seems to be someone immune from fear. For better or worse—he's not always the most popular man in the world, certainly the richest man in the world. But are there men—and they tend to be men, perhaps women—over the last 20 years, who, for you, have captured all the best and, perhaps some of the worst, of world history in this first quarter of the 21st century?HAGEL: Wow. Well, in that context, I want to answer the question I get from a lot of people since I've been in Silicon Valley for so long is: how do you explain the continued success of Silicon Valley for so many decades? And most people, when confronted with that question, will say, well, it's the venture capitalists, it's the universities, it's the infrastructure. No, I believe that the success of Silicon Valley is being driven by an opportunity-base narrative, which is fundamentally—we have exponentially expanding digital technology that can enable us to change the world for the better. But it's not going to happen automatically. You need to come to Silicon Valley. Will you come? It's the reason why the majority of successful entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley—most people don't know this—the majority of successful entrepreneurs were not born in the United States, much less in Silicon Valley. They were drawn here from all over the world. And it's because they were driven by, again, a very specific passion that I call the passion of the explorer. And that's where they're excited about new territory and are excited about venturing out on the edges, excited about finding ways to have more and more impact that's meaningful to people. And I think that's really been a continuing driver of success in the Valley. KEEN: John, you live in the North Bay, just north of San Francisco, over the iconic Golden Gate Bridge. This part of the world was discovered by one of the great explorers in world history, Francis Drake. And there's a wonderful bay not too far from where you live called the Drake Bay. I've walked around there. Is this concept that you introduced called the "explorer," is it a feature of Western civilization? Is Sir Francis Drake, or was Sir Francis Drake, an early example of this?HAGEL: You know, I wouldn't say Western civilization. I would say of humanity in general. I mean, again, I think that one of the things that I continually hear from people is fear is what helped us stay alive and made us human. And my response to that is, well, if we were completely driven by fear, we would still be living in the jungle, hiding from the tigers and the lions. What happened? We had a desire to explore and to see new things and to try new things. And it led to the emergence of agriculture civilizations around the world. And it was a process of exploration, but it really motivated a number of people so that they would move out and make progress. And I think we're just still exploring.KEEN: I mentioned, John, you talked about DLD in 2016. I know you're a big fan of the event, Europe's top innovation—I wouldn't call it a summit, it's a gathering of influencers like yourself. Over this last 20 years, the American economy has, for better or worse, marched ahead, and Europe has become increasingly stagnant. The German economy, the EU's economy, the United Kingdom's economy...In your view, is an important development over the last 20 years...has Europe—broadly, I know you can't talk about all individuals—but has Europe lost the inspiration of exploring that you're such a believer in?HAGEL: You know, I'm not sure I would generalize about Europe as a region in that regard. I think there are interesting parts of Europe that are doing some very interesting and innovative things. And so I think the challenge is that, again, we live in a world, a global economy, where competition is intensifying on a global scale. And Europe in general has failed to really respond effectively to that and maintain ways of of creating more and more value in that kind of world. So again, I'm an optimist, and I'm hopeful that people will see that potential. But right now, what I'm seeing in Europe and the rest of the world is the emotion of fear holding people back and saying, no, no, let's just hold on to what we have and find ways to make it through. And unfortunately, I think that's the wrong the wrong response.KEEN: I know it's easy to return to 2005, and it's impossible in practice. But had you gone back to John Hagel in 2005, do you think you'd be surprised by the power of the American innovation economy and the relative weakness of the European one?HAGEL: That's a good question. I'm not sure. I wasn't really forecasting particular geographies as areas that would grow and areas that wouldn't grow. I did see, again, an expanding global economy wherein there is increasing competition from other parts of the world, non-European, non-U.S., and so the challenge was how do we respond to that? And that's the issue that we're facing.KEEN: That's the issue indeed, we are facing, John. You and I are talking in November of 2024 in anticipation of the DLD 20-year anniversary of their event in January 2025. Where are we in late 2024 in the world? How would you summarize our situation?HAGEL: Well, again, I think it's a paradox. I think at one level, the situation is very unfortunate in the sense that the emotion of fear is dominating every country in the world. I don't see any countries where it's really the excitement and passion that's driving people. But on the other side, I also see the technology and trends in the world are creating more and more opportunity to to create value at exponential levels. And so I'm, again, an optimist and I'm hopeful that we can find ways to move beyond the fear and see the opportunities and pursue them and create the value that's there to be created.KEEN: I didn't see that fear, certainly in Silicon Valley, John, with the billions of dollars now going into the AI economy, to the booming biotech sector and the other technology sectors that you've talked about. Is there fear, in Silicon Valley, do you see it?HAGEL: Well, again, I think Silicon Valley stands out because many, if not all, the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were drawn here by passion and excitement to create more and more value. And yes, they have fear. If you talk to them, they're afraid the startup could collapse next month. Their customers could go away. But they're driven by that excitement of having that kind of impact. And I think that's what explains the continued success of Silicon Valley. But it stands out as one of those few areas where passion, and specifically, again, the passion of the explorer—and I haven't gone into detailed definition of what I mean by that, but it's based on research—that passion of the explorer that will help people to move beyond the fear and achieve impact that's much more meaningful to them.KEEN: John if we'd been talking in 2005, I don't suppose you, or most analysts of the Future of the Edge, whatever you want to describe it, would have brought up AI as being central. Today, of course, it's all anyone talks about in late 2024, early 2025. If you put your futurist on, and you've mentioned biotech...there are other technologies which have the potential to take off, quantum, for example. What technology do you think is most underrated in terms of imagining the next 20 years?HAGEL: Well, again, I would probably go to biotech as the area that is not getting as much attention as it should, because I believe it has the potential. There is an expression in Silicon Valley, "the longevity escape velocity." It's this notion that with this technology, we will be able, ultimately, to basically live forever. We won't have to worry about dying. And not just living forever, but being healthy and more vibrant and flourishing more than we've ever flourished in the past. And I think that's being underestimated as a potential driver of significant change in our lives and in our society.KEEN: Some people will hear that, John, and be very fearful of that. And lots of novels and stories and music have been made suggesting that if we live forever, life will become a nightmare. We'll be bored by everything and everyone. Should we, in any way, be fearful of that world you're describing?HAGEL: And again, you know, sure, if we're going to live our lives in fear for an eternity, yes, we should be afraid of living our lives in fear. But I believe as human beings, we all have within us the potential for that passion that I described, the passion of the explorer, which is never ending. No matter how much impact you achieve, if you're pursuing that passion, you're driven to have even more impact. What can I do to have even more impact? And excited about it and fulfilled by it. This is nourishing. I think people who have this passion will want to live forever. They will be excited to live forever. And we all have the potential to find that passion within us. By the way, I would just say we I get a lot of pushback. Yes, John, come on. Some of us are capable of this passion, but most of us just want to be told what to do and have the security of an income. My response is, let's go to a playground and look at children 5 or 6 years old. Show me one that doesn't have that kind of excitement about exploring and coming together and trying new things, seeing the things. We all had it as children. What happened to us? We went to school and we were taught by the teacher, "Just listen to the teacher. Memorize what the teacher has to say and show on the exam. So you've memorized it." I've studied the US public school system. It was explicitly designed to prepare us for work environments where the key was just to read the manual, follow the manual, do what's assigned. Passion is suspect, passionate people ask too many questions. Passionate people deviate from the script, they take too many risks. Why would you want passionate people? Just get people who will do their job. And so I think, back to your question about AI, again, I think there is obviously a lot of fear about AI. And one of the reasons for the fear is when I talk to executives, senior executives, about AI, I get two questions. First, how quickly can I automate with AI? And secondly, how many jobs can I eliminate with AI? It's all about scalable efficiency, faster and cheaper. I believe the role of AI is to help us become human again. To take away all of that work, the routine tasks, highly standardized, routine tasks that most of us do on a daily basis, and free us up to actually explore and find ways to create new value and have impact that's meaningful to us. That's exciting.KEEN: If you're right, John, if the next 20 years are ones where there is a profound biotech revolution—and we may not live forever, but certainly will live longer and longer lives—what do we need to address? Seems to me as if one area would be inequality, given that already in America, the difference between how long people live in on the coasts, in California or New York, are quite different from the hinterland. Does this concern you, if indeed you're right? What are the the biggest threats and challenges in a world where longevity is the central reality?HAGEL: Now, again, you talk about threats and challenges. I would talk about opportunities. The opportunities are to help everyone achieve more, to help them all find their passion, help them all find ways to earn income from their passion and achieve more impact that's meaningful to them and to others. And yes, there are issues like inequality, climate change, all the rest, limited resources in the world. But I believe with technology and innovation, we can overcome all those obstacles and achieve amazing results for everyone.KEEN: Finally, John, you're naturally an optimist. So, for me to ask you to put on your rose-tinted glasses might be slightly inappropriate, but if you were to think most positively about the future, in 20 years’ time in 2045, if DLD celebrates its 40th anniversary, what kind of world could this be? Imagine the best kind of world. Would it be like a giant kindergarten? Like people are running around and excited all the time before the teachers got their hands on it?HAGEL: You know, my belief is that if we can really unleash this passion and excitement about driving change and creating more value, that we can create a world where every living thing flourishes. Not just human beings, not just animals, plants, every living being flourishing in ways that would have been unimaginable 20 years earlier, because we're all creating an environment that helps us to flourish. And to me, that's what's really the potential and exciting.KEEN: Do you think the next 20 years will bring more change than the previous 20 years?HAGEL: It's going to bring a lot of change. I suspect it's going to be even more change, because we're talking about exponential change and change exponentially increases over time.KEEN: Well, John Hagel, who spoke at DLD in 2016, a great friend of the conference, a real honor, John, and a pleasure. And I hope we will meet again in 2045 to see whether or not you were right. Thank you so much.HAGEL: Excellent. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

The endless culture wars rage on. In his new book, The War Against the Past, the sociologist Frank Furedi believes that unless what he calls “the West” fights for its history, the “grievance entrepreneurs” will take over and undermine all our hard won intellectual freedoms. It’s the convention conservative argument, of course, but what’s interesting about Furedi is that he used to be a revolutionary communist. So I wonder if Furedi’s rightward shift is the standard intellectual fate of old leftists. Alternatively, perhaps, the woke crowd has become so corrosive that even former communists like Furedi are now manning the barricades in defense of western civilization.Frank Furedi is a sociologist and social commentator. He is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Since the late 1990s, Frank has been widely cited about his views on why Western societies find it so difficult to engage with risk and uncertainty. He has published widely about controversies relating to issues such as health, parenting children, food and new technology. His book Invitation To Terror; Expanding the Empire of the Unknown (2007) explores the way in which the threat of terrorism has become amplified through the ascendancy of precautionary thinking. It develops the arguments contained in two previous books, Culture of Fear (2002) and Paranoid Parenting (2001). Both of these works investigate the interaction between risk consciousness and perceptions of fear, trust relations and social capital in contemporary society.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

As the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle was one of first people to recognize the collapse of neoliberalism. But today, the real question is not about the death of neoliberalism, but what comes after it. And, of course, when I sat down with Gerstle, I began by asking him what the Trump victory tells us about what comes after neoliberalism.Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Gerstle received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of more than ten books.  He is currently the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, where he is working on a new book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty-First Century.  He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Named as one of the "100 most pivoted men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's most pivotal broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the pivotal author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two cats, both called Pivot.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. TRANSCRIPT“It's important to recognize that the neoliberal triumph carried within it not just the triumph of capitalism, but the triumph of freedom. And I think the that image of the wall coming down captures both. It's people wanting to claim their freedom, but it also paves the way for an unregulated form of capitalism to spread to every corner of the world.” -Gary GerstleAK: Hello everybody. As we try to make sense of the aftermath of the US election this week, there was an interesting headline today in the Financial Times. Donald Trump apparently has asked, and I'm quoting the F.T. here, the arch-protectionist Robert Lighthizer, to run U.S. trade policy. You never know with Trump, he may change his mind tomorrow. But nonetheless, it suggests, and it's not a great surprise, that protectionism will define the Trump, presidency or certainly the second Trump presidency. And it speaks of the structural shift in the nature of politics and economics in the United States, particularly given this Trump victory. One man who got this, I think before anyone else, is the Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle. He's been on the show a couple of times before. He's the author of a wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. It's a profound book. It's had an enormous impact on everybody. And I'm thrilled and honored that Gary is back on the show. This is the third time he's been on the show. Gary, is that important news? Have we formally come to the end now of the neoliberal order? GARY GERSTLE: I think we have, although there's an element of neoliberalism which may revive in the Trump administration. But if we think of a political order as ordering political life so that all participants in that order have to accept its ideological principles, we have moved out of that order. I think we've been out of it for some time. The critical election in this case was 2016, and the critical move that both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders made in 2016, the two most dynamic presidential candidates in that year, was to break with the orthodoxy of free markets, the orthodoxy of globalization, the orthodoxy of a world without borders where everything was free to move and the market was supreme. And the only role of government in the state was to ensure as full access to markets as was possible in the belief that if governments got out of the way of a private capitalist economy, this would spur the greatest growth for the greatest number of people everywhere in the world. This was governing orthodoxy, really from the time of Reagan until 2016. Trump broke it. Sanders broke it. Very significant in this regard that when Biden came into office, he moderated some of the Trump tariffs but kept the tariffs on China substantially in place. So there's been continuity for some time, and now we're going to see an intensification of the protectionist regime. Protectionism used to be a dirty word in American politics. If you uttered that word, you were excluded from serious political discourse. There will be other terms that are used, fair trade, not just because protectionism has a negative connotation to it, but we are living in an era where governments assert the right to shape markets as they wish to in the interests of their nation. So, yes, we are living in a different era, although it must be said, and we may get into a discussion of this at some point, there are sectors of the Trump coalition that want to intensify deregulation in the domestic market, that want to rollback government. And so I expect in the new Trump administration, there is going to be tussles between the protectionists on the one hand and those who want to, at least domestically, restore free trade. And by that I mean the free operation of private capital without government regulation. That's an issue that bears watching.AK: Is that a contradiction though, Gary? Can one, in this post-neoliberal order, can governments be hostile to regulation, a la Elon Musk and his association with Trump, and also be in favor of tariffs? I mean, do the two—can the to go together, and is that the outline of this foggy new order coming into place in the second quarter of the 21st century?GARY GERSTLE: They can go together in the sense that they have historically in the past gone together in the United States. In the late 19th century, the US had very high tariffs against foreign goods. And domestically, it was trying to create as free a domestic market as possible. What was known as the period of laissez-faire domestically went along with a commitment to high tariffs and protection of American laissez-faire against what we might call global laissez-faire. So it has been tried. It did work at that time. But I think the Republican party and the constituencies behind Donald Trump are divided on this question. As you noted, Elon Musk represents one pole of this. He certainly wants protection against Chinese imports of electric cars and is probably going to get that because of all the assistance he gave Trump in this election. But domestically, he wants no government interfering with his right to conduct his capitalist enterprises as he sees fit. So that's going to be one wing. But there's another wing of the Republican Party under Trump that is much more serious about industrial policy that says we cannot leave the market to its own devices. It produces too many human casualties. It produces too many regions of America left behind, and that we must use the government to help those people left behind. We must structure free enterprise industry in a way that helps the ordinary working-class man. And I use the word “man” deliberately in this context. Interestingly, JD Vance, the vice president, embodies both these tendencies, sees, on the one hand, a creature of venture capital, Silicon Valley, close to the Musks and Peter Thiels of the world. On the other hand, he has talked explicitly, as in his vice-presidential acceptance speech, about putting Main Street over Wall Street. And if he's serious about putting Main Street over Wall Street, that's going to involve a lot of government intervention to displace the privileged position that finance and venture capital now has in the American economy.AK: Gary, you're a historian, one of the best around, you're deeply versed in the past, you bring up Vance. He presents himself as being original, even has a beard. But I wonder whether his—I don't know what you would call it—a Catholic or Christian socialism, or at least a concern with the working class. Is it in any way new, for you, historically? I mean, it certainly exists in Europe, and there must be analogies also in American history with him.GARY GERSTLE: Well, if he is a convert to Catholicism, I don't know how well-versed he is in the papal doctrines of years past. Or decades. Or even centuries passed. But there was a serious movement within the Catholic Church in the late 19th and early 20th century to humanize capitalism, to declare that free market capitalism produced too many human casualties. Too many ordinary Catholic workers and workers who are not Catholic were hurt by unemployment, poverty, being thrown out of work in the troughs of business cycles, having no social welfare to fall back on, as a result of injury or misfortune in life. And so there was a profound movement within Catholic churches, in the United States, and in Europe and other parts of the world as well, to humanize capitalism. Whether this very once important Catholic tradition is an active influence on Vance, I don't know, because he's a recent convert to Catholicism, and I don't know how deeply has imbibed its history or its doctrine. But there is a rich tradition there. And it's possible that this is one of the sources that he is drawing on to shape his contemporary politics.AK: We were talking before we ran live, Gary, I said to you, and I think you agreed, that this use of the word "fascism" to describe Trump isn't always particularly helpful. It reflects a general hysteria amongst progressives. But I wonder in this context, given the way in which European Catholicism flirted, sometimes quite openly, with fascism, whether the F-word actually makes a little more sense. Because after all, fascism, after the First World War, was a movement in the name of the people, which was very critical of the capitalism of that age and of the international market. So, when we use the word fascism now, could it have some value in that context as a kind of a socioeconomic critique of capitalism?GARY GERSTLE: You mean fascism offering a socioeconomic critique of U.S. capitalism?AK: Yes. For better or worse.GARY GERSTLE: I'm reluctant to deploy the term fascism, since I think most people who enter the conversation or who hear that word in the United States don't really know what it means, and that's partly the consequence of historians debating its meaning as long as they have, and also suggesting that fascism takes different forms at different times and in different places. I prefer the term authoritarianism. I think that tendency is clearly there and one can connect that to certain traditions within the church. The United States once had a intense anti-Catholic political tradition. It was unimaginable in the 19th century. AK: Yeah, it drove the KKK. I mean, that was the Klan hated the Catholics probably more than they hated the Jews.GARY GERSTLE: It drove the Klan. And the notion in the 19th century—I'm not remembering now whether there are 5 or 6 Catholics who sit on the Supreme Court—but the notion in the 19th century that 5 or 6 Catholics would be the chief custodians and interpreters of America's most sacred doctrine and document the Constitution was simply unthinkable. It could never have happened. There was a Catholic seat. As for a long time, there was a Jewish seat on the Supreme Court, but understood that this would be carefully cordoned off and limited and that, when push came to shove, Protestants had to be in charge of interpreting America's most sacred doctrine. And the charge against Catholics was that they were not democratic, that they vested ultimate power in God and through an honest messenger on Earth, who was the pope. John F. Kennedy, in 1960, became the first Catholic president of the United States. Biden is only the second. Vance is the first Catholic vice president. Before in the campaign that Kennedy was running in 1960, he had to go in front of thousands of Protestant ministers who had gathered in Houston so he could persuade them that if he became president, he would not be handing America over to the pope, who was seen as an authoritarian figure. So for a long time, Catholicism was seen as a carrier of authoritarianism, of a kind of executive power that should not be limited by a human or secular force. And this promoted, in the United States, intense anti-Catholic feeling, which took the country probably 200 years to conquer. Conquered it was, so the issue of so many Catholics on the Supreme Court is not an issue. Biden's Catholicism is not an issue. Vance's Catholicism is not an issue. But Vance himself has said, talking about his conversion, that of his granny—I forget the term he uses to describe his granny—were alive today, she would not be able to accept his conversion because she was so deeply Protestant, so evangelical, so—AK: A classic West Virginian evangelical. So for me, the other contradiction here is that Vance is unashamedly nationalist, unashamedly critical of globalization. And yet, by embracing Catholicism, which is the most international of face, I don't quite understand what that suggests about him, or Catholicism, or even history, that that these odd things happen.GARY GERSTLE: Well, one thing one can say in history is that odd things happen and odd couples get together. I don't know myself how fully Vance understands his Catholicism. I believe Peter Thiel led him to this. Vance is still a young man and has gone through a lot of conversions for a young man. He was—AK: Well, he's a conversion expert. That's the narrative of his life, isn't it?GARY GERSTLE: Yes. Yes. And he began as being a severe anti-Trumper, almost a Never-Trumper. Then he converted to Trumpism. Then he converted from Protestant to Catholicism. So a lot of major changes in his life. So, the question you just posed is a fascinating one. Does he understand that the church is a catholic church, meaning small c catholic in this case, that it's open to everyone in the world? Does he really understand that? But I would extend my puzzle about religion beyond Catholicism to ask, for all the evangelical supporters of Trump: where is Jesus's message of peace and love? Where did that go? So there are puzzles about the shape of Christian religion in America. And there's no doubt that for its most devout supporters in the United States that has taken a very hard nationalist turn. And this is true among Protestants, and it is true among many Catholics. And so, I think the question that you posed may be one that no one has really confronted Vance with.“What we have to think about in regard to Trump is, will they take on projects that will threaten the constitutional foundation of the United States in order to achieve their aims? What does Musk represent, and what does part of Trump represent? It represents unbounded executive power, unconstrained by Congress, to promote conditions of maximum freedom. And the freedom they have in mind is not necessarily your personal freedom or mine.” -Gary GerstleAK: And I would extend that, Gary. I think that the most persistent and credible critics of Trump also come from the religious community. Peter Wehner, for example, former—I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He writes a lot for the Times and The Atlantic. Very religious man, is horrified—worked in the Bush and the Reagan administrations. Let's go back to—I was looking at the cover of the book, and obviously authors don't pick the covers of their books—GARY GERSTLE: I did. I picked this.AK: Okay. Well, when you look at the—GARY GERSTLE: This is this is not the original cover.AK: Right, so, the book I'm looking at, and for people just listening, I'm going to describe. The dominant picture is of the Berlin Wall being knocked down in the evening of November 1989. It's odd, Gary, isn't it, that...for the rise and fall of the neoliberal order, which is an economic order in a free market era, you should have chosen the image of a political event, which, of course, Fukuyama so famously described as the end of history. And I guess, for you as an economic historian who is also deeply interested and aware of politics, is the challenge and opportunity to always try to disentangle the economics and politics of all this? Or are they so entangled that they're actually impossible to disentangle, to separate?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I think sometimes you need to disentangle them, sometimes they move in different directions, and sometimes they move in the same direction. I think to understand the triumph of the neoliberal order, we have to see that politics and economics move in tandem with each other. What makes possible the neoliberal triumph of the 90s is the fall of communism between 1989 and 1991. And no picture embodies that better than the taking down of the Berlin Wall. And that connotes a message of freedom and escape from Soviet and communist tyranny. But the other message there is that tearing down of those walls opens the world to capitalist penetration to a degree that had not been available to the capitalist world since prior to World War One, prior to the war, and most importantly, to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. And where communists came to power everywhere, they either completely excluded or sharply curtailed the ability of capitalist business to operate within their borders. Their message was expropriate private property, which meant expropriate all corporate property. Give it over to the state, let the state manage it in the interest of the proletariat. This was an extraordinary dream that turned into an awful tyrannical outcome. But it animated the world, as few other ideas did in the 20th century, and proposed a very, very serious challenge to capitalist prerogative, to capitalist industry, to free markets. And so the collapse of communism, which is both the collapse of a state—a communist state, the Soviet Union—but perhaps more importantly, the collapse of the belief that any governments could structure the private economy in ways that would be beneficial to humankind. It's what opened the way in the 1990s to the neoliberal triumph. And it's important to recognize that the neoliberal triumph carried within it not just the triumph of capitalism, but the triumph of freedom. And I think the that image of the wall coming down captures both. It's people wanting to claim their freedom, but it also paves the way for an unregulated form of capitalism to spread to every corner of the world. And in the long term—we're in the mid-term—that was going to create inequalities, vulnerabilities to the global financial and economic systems, that were going to bring the global economy down and set off a radically different form of politics than the world had seen for some time. And we're still living through that radically different form of politics set off by the financial crash of 2008/2009, which, in my way of thinking, was a product of untrammeled capitalism conquering the world in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's and communism's collapse.AK: Yeah, and that's the other thing, isn't it, Garry? I mean, it goes without saying that the bringing down of the war fundamentally changed the old Soviet economy, the East European economies, Poland, Hungary, eastern part of Germany. But what no one—I think very, very few people imagined in '89 was that perhaps the biggest consequence of this capitalist penetration wasn't in Warsaw or Moscow or the eastern part of Berlin, but back in West Virginia with guys like JD Vance. How did the bringing down of the wall change America, or at least the American economy? I've never really quite understood that.GARY GERSTLE: Through the mass exporting of manufacturing to other countries that—AK: Wasn't that before? Wasn't that also taking place before '89, or did it happen particularly in the '90s?GARY GERSTLE: It began before 1989. It began during the Great Recession of the 1970s, where the first districts of manufacturing in the U.S., places like Buffalo, New York steelmaking center, began to get hollowed out. But it dramatically intensified in the 1990s, and this had to do with China permitting itself to be a part of this global free market. And China was opened to capitalist penetration from the United States and Europe. And what you saw in that decade was a massive shift of manufacturing to China, a shift that even intensified in the first decade of the 21st century with the admission of China in 2001 to the World Trade Organization. So China was a big factor. Also, the passage of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which rendered the northern half of the Western Hemisphere one common market, like the European Common Market. So, enormous flight of jobs to places like Mexico. And the labor costs in places like China and Mexico, and then East Asia already leaving Japan for Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, parts of the South Asian subcontinent. The flight of jobs there became so massive, and the labor costs there were so cheap, that American industry couldn't compete. And what you begin to see is the hollowing out of American industry, American manufacturing, and whole districts of America just beginning to rot. And no new industries or no new economies taking the place of the industries and the jobs that had left. And this America was being ignored, largely in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, in part because the ideology of neoliberalism said, we understand that this global free market is going to increase inequality in the world, it's going to increase the distance between rich and poor, but the distance between rich and poor is okay because all boats will rise. All people will benefit. This is not just an American story, this is also the story of other parts of the North Atlantic economy. Britain certainly, Germany was a partial exception, France, other places, and this was the ideology...growth would benefit everyone, and this was not the case. It was a fallacy. But the ideology was so strong that it held together until the financial crash of 2008/2009. After that crash, it became impossible to make the point that all boats were rising under the neoliberal regime. And this is when the forgotten Americans and the forgotten Brits of the northern part of the of Great Britain. This is when they began to make their voices heard. This is when they began to strike a very different note in politics. And this is where Donald Trump had his beginnings with these forgotten, angry people who felt ignored, left behind, and were suffering greatly, because by the early decades of the 21st century, it wasn't just jobs that were gone, but it was healthy marital life, divorce rates rising, rampant drug use. Two Cambridge economists wrote a book called Depths of Despair.AK: Yeah, that book comes up in almost every conversation. I once went down to Princeton to interview Angus Deaton. Like your book, it's become a classic. So let's fast forward, Gary, to the last election. I know you're writing a book now about politics in our time of authoritarianism, and you're scratching your head and asking whether the election last week was a normal or an apocryphal one, one that's just different or historical. And I wonder, in that sense, correct me if I'm wrong, there seems to have been two elections simultaneously. On the one hand, it was very normal, from the Democrats' point of view, who treated America as if it was normal. Harris behaves as if she was just another Democratic candidate. And, of course, Trump, who didn't. My interpretation, maybe it's a bit unfair, is that it's the progressives. It's certainly the coastal elites who have become, implicitly at least, the defenders of the old neoliberal order. For them, it kind of works. It's not ideal, but it works and they can't imagine anything else. And it's the conservatives who have attacked it, the so-called conservatives. Is there any truth to that in the last election?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I think the Democrats are certainly seen by vast sectors of the population as being the defenders of an old order, of established institutions controlling the media, although I think that's less and less true because the legacy media has less and less influence and shows like yours, podcasting and rogue Fox Television and all kinds of other outlets, are increasingly influential. But yes, the Democrats are seen as a party of the establishment. They are seen as the party of the educated elite. And one of the factors that determines who votes for who now is now deeply educational in the sense of, what is your level of educational achievement? If you are college educated, you're much more likely to vote Democratic, regardless of your income. And if you're high school educated or less, you're much more likely to vote Republican. I don't think it's fair to say that the Democrats are the last protectors of the neoliberal order, because Biden broke with the neoliberal order in major, consequential ways. If the defining characteristic of the neoliberal order is to free the market from constraints and to use the state only to free up market forces—this was true, to a large extent, of Obama and of Clinton—Biden broke with that, and he did it in alliance with Bernie Sanders, set of task forces they set up in 2020 to design a new administration. And his major pieces of legislation, reshoring CHIPS manufacture, the biggest investment in clean energy in the country's history. $1 trillion infrastructure bill, the biggest infrastructure project since the interstate highway system of the '50s, and arguably since Roosevelt's fabled New Deal. These are all about industrial policy. These are all about the government using its power and resources to direct industry in a certain way so that it will increase general happiness, general welfare, general employment. So this represents a profound change from what had come before. And in that way, the Biden administration can't be seen as the last defenders.“The question is, will they be able to get further than past generations of Republicans have by their willingness to break things? And will they go so far as to break the Constitution in the pursuit of these aims?”AK: And let me jump in here, Gary, there's another really important question. There was a very interesting piece, I'm sure you saw it, by Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker about Bidenomics and its achievements. You talked about the New Deal, the massive amount of investments—it was post COVID, they took advantage of the historical crisis. Trillions of dollars have been invested in new technologies. Is Bidenomics new in any way? Or is it basically just a return to the economics, or the political economy, of FDR?GARY GERSTLE: Well, it certainly draws inspiration from FDR, because at the core of the New Deal was the conviction that you could use government to direct industry to positive uses that would benefit not just the corporations, but the population as a whole. But there was nothing like the Green Energy Project in the New Deal. The New Deal, except for hydroelectric projects, was primarily about prospering on a cheap fossil fuel economy. The New Deal also was very comfortable with accepting prevailing gender and race conceptions of the proper place of women and African Americans in American life in a way that is unacceptable to Bidenomics. So there are redirections under Bidenomics in ways that modify the New Deal inspiration. But at its core, Bidenomics is modeled on the New Deal conviction that you need a strong federal government to point industry in the right direction. And so in that sense, there's a fundamental similarity in those two progressive projects. And I think people in the Biden administration have been quite conscious about that. Now, the particular challenges are different. The world economy is different. The climate crisis is upon us. So, it is going to take different forms, have different outcomes. But the inspiration clearly comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal.AK: Well, let's go over to the other side and Trump. You scratching your head and figuring out whether this is unusual. And of course, it's the second time he's won an election. This time around, he seems to be overtly hostile to the state. He's associated with Musk, who's promised to essentially decimate the state. In historical terms, Gary, is there anything unusual about this? I mean, certainly the opponents of FDR were also very hostile to this emergent American state. As a historian, do you see this as something new, the pleasure in essentially blowing the state up, or at least the promise of blowing the state up?GARY GERSTLE: That impulse is not new. There have been members of the Republican party who have been talking this language since the New Deal arrived in America in the 1930s and '40s during the '50s and '60s and early '70s, they were marginal in American politics. And then with the neoliberal order coming into being in the '70s and with Reagan as president, their voice has gained enormous traction. One of Reagan's key advisors in the 1980s and 1990s, one of his favorite lines was, “I want to shrink the size of the federal government until we can drown it in the bathtub.” It's a wonderful image and metaphor, and captures the intensity with which conservative Republicans have wanted to eliminate the strong centralized state. But they have not been able to do it to a degree that makes that have satisfied them. It turns out that Americans, for all their possible ideological opposition to big government like big parts of it, like Social Security, like Medicare, like a strong military establishment that's gonna protect the country, like clean air, clean water. So it's proved much more difficult for this edifice to be taken down than the Reaganites had imagined it would be. So, the advocates have become more radical because of decades of frustration. And what we have to think about in regard to Trump is, will they take on projects that will threaten the constitutional foundation of the United States in order to achieve their aims? What does Musk represent, and what does part of Trump represent? It represents unbounded executive power, unconstrained by Congress, to promote conditions of maximum freedom. And the freedom they have in mind is not necessarily your personal freedom or mine, as the abortion issue signifies. What they have in mind is corporate freedom. The freedom of Elon Musk's companies to do whatever they want to do. The freedom of the social media companies to do whatever they want to do. The question is, will they be able to get further than past generations of Republicans have by their willingness to break things? And will they go so far as to break the Constitution in the pursuit of these aims? Peter Thiel has said, very forthrightly, that democracy no longer works as a system, and that America has to consider other systems in order to have the kind of prosperity and freedom it wants. And one thing that bears watching with this new Trump administration is how many supporters the Peter Thiel's and the Elon Musk's are going to have to be free to tear down the edifice and the institutions of the federal government and pursuit of a goal of a reconfigured, and what I would call rogue, laissez-faire. This is something to watch.AK: But Gary, I take your point. I mean, Thiel's been, on the West Coast, always been a convenient punchbag for the left for years now, I punched him many times myself. I wanted to. But all this seems to be just the wet dream of neoliberals. So you have Musk and Thiel doing away with government. Huge corporations, no laws. This is the neoliberal wet dream, isn't it?GARY GERSTLE: Well, partly it is. But neoliberalism always depended on a structure of law enforced by government that was necessary to allow free markets to operate in a truly free and transparent manner. In other words, you needed elements of a strong government to perfect markets, that markets were not perfect if they were left to their own devices. And one of the dangers of the Elon Musk phase of the Trump administration is that this edifice of law on which corporations and capitalism thrives will be damaged in the pursuit of a radical libertarianism. Now, there may very well be a sense that cooler heads prevail in the Trump administration, and that this scenario will not come to fruition. But one certainly has to be aware that this is one of the possible outcomes of a Trump administration. I should also say that there's another very important constituency in the Republican party that wants to continue, not dismantle, what Biden has done with industrial policies. This is the other half of JD Vance's brain. This is Tom Cotton. This is Marco Rubio, this is Josh Hawley, senator from Missouri. And they want to actively use the government to regulate industry in the public interest. And there's a very interesting intellectual convergence going on between left of center and right of center intellectuals and policymakers who are converging on the importance of having an industrial policy, because if Elon Musk is given his way, how is the abandoned heartland going to come back?AK: It's cheering me up, Gary, because what you're suggesting is that this is a fairly normal moment. You've got different wings of the Republican Party. You've got the Cottons and the Rubios, who were certainly not revolutionary. Why should we believe that this is a special moment then?GARY GERSTLE: January 6th, 2021. That's the reason. Trump remains the only president in American history to authorize an attack on the very seat of American democracy. That being: Congress sitting in the Capitol. And once he authorized the attack, he waited for three hours hoping that his attackers and his mob would conquer this building and compel the legislators inside to do—AK: And I take your perspective. I'm the last person to defend that. But we're talking about 2024 and not 2021. He won the election fairly. No one's debating that. So, why is 2024 a special election?GARY GERSTLE: Well, here's the key. Well, maybe it's a special election in two ways. It may signify the reconfiguration of a genuinely populist Republican party around the needs of ordinary working-class Americans. And we should say, in this regard, that Trump has brought into his coalition significant numbers of Latinos, young blacks. It has the beginning of a look of a multiracial coalition that the Democrats once had, but now appear to be losing. So it may be an epochal moment in that regard. The other way in which it may be an epochal moment is: what if Trump does not get his way in his term in office for something he really wants? Will he accept that he is bound by the Constitution, that he is bound by the courts? Or will he once again say, when he really wants something, no constitution, no law, will stand in my way? That's how January 6th, 2021, still matters. I'm not saying he's going to do that, but I think we have to understand that that is a possibility, especially since he has shown no remorse for the outcome of the last election. If I read into your comments, I hear you saying: he won this time. He doesn't have to worry about losing. But Trump is always worried about losing. And he is a man who doesn't really know the Constitution, and the parts that he knows and understands he doesn't especially like, because his dream, along with Elon Musk's dream, and this is one reason why I think they are melding so tightly, at the apex of American government should be unbounded executive power. This is not how the country was set up. And as Congress and as the courts begin to push back, will he accept those limits, that there must be bounds on executive power? Or will he try and break through them? I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's something that we have to be concerned about.AK: I wonder, again, wearing your historical cap you're always doing, the more you talk, the more Trump and Trump's Republican party is Nixonian. This obsession with not being responsible for the law. The broadening of the Republican party. Certainly the Republican party under Nixon was less singularly white than it became later. Isn't, in some ways, Trump just a return to Nixon? And secondly, you're talking about the law and Trump ransacking the law. But on the other hand, everything he always does is always backed up by the law. So, he has a love hate relationship with the law himself. He could never have accomplished anything he's done without hiring all these expensive lawyers. I don't know if you saw the movie this year, The Apprentice, which is built on his relationship with what's with Roy Cohn, of course, who schooled him in American politics, who was McCarthy's lawyer. So, again, I'm not trying to defend Trump, but my point is: what's different here?GARY GERSTLE: Well, a key difference from Nixon is that when push came to shove, Nixon submitted to the rule of law, and Trump did not. Nixon did not unleash his people on Congress when a group of senators came to him and said you're going to be impeached if you stay in office, you should resign. He resigned. So the '70s was a moment of enormous assertion of the power of Congress, and assertion of the power and authority of the Constitution. That is not the story of Donald Trump. The story of Donald Trump is the story of the Constitution being pushed to the side. If you ask, is there anything new about Americans and politicians trying to manipulate the law in their favor? There's nothing new about that. And Trump, having made his fortune in New York real estate, knows there's no such thing as perfect markets, knows that judges can be bought and corrupted. And so, he has very little regard for the authority of courts. Everything's a transaction. Everything can be bought and sold. So, he understands that, and he has used the law to his advantage when he can. But let me bring you back to his first inauguration speech. There was no mention of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in what he had to say that day. I think we'd be hard pressed to find another inaugural speech that makes no reference to the sacred documents having to do with the founding of the American Republic. And so I think in that way, he is something new and represents, potentially, a different kind of threat. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly possible. And let me add one other element that we have to consider, because I'm suggesting that he has a fondness for forms of authoritarian rule, and we have to recognize that hard rights are on the march everywhere in the world right now. The social democratic government of Germany has just fallen. Britain may soon be alone in terms of having a left-center party in control and upholding the values of liberal democracy. The world is in a grip of an authoritarian surge. That is not an American phenomenon. It is an international phenomenon. It is not a phenomenon I understand well enough, but if we're to understand the kind of strongman tendencies that Trump is exhibiting, the appeal of the strongman tendencies to so many Americans, we have to understand the international context in which this is occurring. And these movements in these different countries are fully aware of each other. They draw strength from each other's victories, and they get despairing from each other's defeats. So this is an international movement and an international project, and it's important, in that regard, to set Trump in that historical context.AK: Final question, Gary, there's so much here, we'll have to get you back on the show again in the new year. There's certainly, as you suggested, a great deal of vitality to conservatives, to the Cottons, the JD Vances, the Steve Bannons of the world. But what about on the left? We talked earlier, you sort of pushed back a little bit on the idea that the progressive elites aren't defenders of the neoliberal order, but you kind of acknowledged there may be a little bit of truth in that. In response to this new conservatism, which, as you suggested, is in some ways quite old, what can and should progressives do, rather than just falling back on Bidenomics and reliance on a new deal—which isn't going to happen now given that they had the opportunity in the COVID crisis to spend lots of money, which didn't have any impact on this election, for better or worse. Is there a need to re-architect the progressive politics in our new age, the age of AI, a high-tech age? Or do we simply allow the Bernie Sanders of the world to fall back on 20th-century progressive ideas?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I'm not sure where AI is taking us. AI may be taking us out of democracy altogether. I think one of—AK: You're not giving it any chance, if that's the case.“What if Trump does not get his way in his term in office for something he really wants? Will he accept that he is bound by the Constitution, that he is bound by the courts? Or will he once again say, when he really wants something, no constitution, no law, will stand in my way?”GARY GERSTLE: Well, there are different versions of AI that will be coming. But the state of the world right now suggests that democracy is on the defensive, and authoritarianism is is on the march. Those who predict the death of democracy have been wrong in the past. So I'm not predicting it here, but we have to understand that there are elements of life, technology, power in in private hands today, that make democracy much harder to do effectively. And so, this is a period of reflection that groups who care about democracy at all points on the political spectrum have to be thinking very seriously about. As for the here and now, and politicians don't think in terms of 10 or 20 years—or you have to be a leader in China, where you can think in terms of 10 or 20-year projects, because you never have to face any election and being tossed out of office—but in the here and now, I think what Democrats have to be very aware of, that the party that they thought they were is the party that the Republican Party has become, or is becoming: a multiracial, working-class party. And if the Democrats are to flourish—and in that regard, it's very significant—AK: It's astonishing, really.GARY GERSTLE: It is astonishing. And it's important to to note that Trump is the first Republican nominee for president since George W. Bush in 2004 to get a majority of votes. And the only person to do it before him in the last 30 years was his father, George H.W. Bush, in 1988. Kamala Harris came within 200,000 votes of becoming president of the United States. That's not well enough understood yet. But if 200,000 votes had changed in three states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, she would be the president elect of the United States. However, she would have been the president elect while losing the popular vote. And one has to go very far back in history to find the Democrats being the beneficiaries of the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. And I think the fact that they lost the popular vote for only the third time in the last 50 years, maybe? I mean, when they elected someone...has to suggest that they have to do some serious thinking about how to reclaim this. Now, Bernie Sanders is coming out and saying, they should have gotten me on the public stage rather than Liz Cheney, that going after suburban Republican women was the wrong route. You should have stuck with me. We had a left/center alliance that worked in 2020. We could have done it again. But that's not my reading of the situation. My reading of the situation is that Bernie-style politics is distinctly less popular in 2024 than it was in 2020. The Democrats have to figure that out, and they have to figure out what they have to do in order to reclaim majorities in American life. And in order to do that, I think their economic programs are actually on the right track, in that respect, under the Biden administration. I think they probably have to rethink some of their cultural policies. There were three issues in this election. The economy was number one. The immigration issue was number two. And then, the trans issue was number three. The Republicans ran an estimated 30,000 ads declaring that the Democratic party was going to take your children away by turning them from boys to girls or girls to boys. The Democratic party has to do some hard thinking about how to have a progressive policy on immigration and how to have a progressive policy on issues of trans matters without losing a majority of the American people, who clearly are, at this moment, not with them on those important issues.AK: It's an astonishing moment, Gary. And I'm not sure whether it's a revolutionary moment or just surreal.GARY GERSTLE: Well, you've been pressing me, on a number of occasions, as to whether this is just the normal course of American politics, and if we look in that direction, the place to look for normality is...incumbents always do badly in high-inflationary times. And Ford and Carter lost in the 1970s. Every incumbent during COVID and during the inflationary period in Europe seems to have lost a recent election. The most normal course of politics is to say, this is an exceptional moment having to do with the enormity of COVID and what was required to shut down the economy, saved people, and then getting started up again, and we will see something more normal, the Democrats will be back to what they normally do, in 2028. That's a possibility. I think the more plausible possibility is that we are in the midst of some pretty profound electoral realignment that is giving rise to a different kind of political order. And the Democrats have to figure out if that political order is going to be under their direction, what they have to do to pull that off. AK: And maybe rather than the neoliberal order, we're talking about, what, a neo-authoritarian order? Is that—GARY GERSTLE: Well, the Trump forces are maybe neo-authoritarian, but we don't have a name for it. Pete Buttigieg—AK: Well, that's why we got you on the show, Gary. Don't you have a name for it?GARY GERSTLE: No. You know—AK: We're relying on you. I hope it's going to be in your next book.GARY GERSTLE: Well, I have till January 20th, 2025, to come up with the name. Pete Buttigieg called it the Big Deal rather than the New Deal. I don't think that cuts it. And there's some other pundits who are arguing about building from the middle out. That doesn't cut it.AK: That sounds terrible. That sounds like—GARY GERSTLE: This is part of Biden's—AK: Designing political parties by committee. It's like an American car.GARY GERSTLE: This is part of Biden's problem. You can't name, effectively, in a positive way, what he's done. One thing that's going to happen—and this may be a sign that things will continue from Biden to Trump, in terms of industrial policy. Do you have any doubt that Trump is going to plaster his name on every computer chips plant, every battery factory? Trump brought this to you, he's got to be there for every opening. He's not going to miss a beat. He'll see this as a grand publicity tour. I think there's a good chance he will take credit for what Biden has started, and that's going to upset a lot of us. But it may also signify that he may be loath to abandon many of these industrial policies that Biden has put in place, especially since the Biden administration was very clever in putting most of these plants, and chip plants, and battery plants, in deep red Republican districts.AK: Well, Gary, I know you're not particularly cheerful. I don't suppose most of our audience are, but you actually cheered me up. I think things are a little bit more normal than some people think. But we will get you back on the show after January—what did you say—January 25th, when you'll have a word to describe the New World Order?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I said after January 20th, 2025, you can expect me to have a name. I probably should—AK: Gary, now, we'll have you back on the show. If you don't have a name, I'm going to report you to Trump.GARY GERSTLE: You'll have to bury me.AK: Yeah. Okay. Well, we're not burying you. We need you, Gary Gerstle, author of Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, a man who makes sense of our present with historical perspective. Gary, as always, a pleasure. Keep well and keep safe. And we'll talk again in the not-too-distant future. Thank you so much.GERSTLE: Thank you. A pleasure talking with you. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe