Keen On America

“The United States and America are not the same thing. The United States is a government, an administration. America is an idea — and that idea is still there, even when the government is not.” — Konstanty Gebert What is the best thing about America? At least when viewed from Warsaw. For Konstanty Gebert — Polish-Jewish journalist, Solidarity activist, co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza, and one of his country’s most celebrated public intellectuals — the answer is the interlibrary loan system. The ability to order any book from any library in the United States and have it delivered to your local branch within days, for free. To Gebert, it represents something irreducibly American: access to knowledge as a public good. What the internet once was. What America once represented to freedom-loving Poles like Gebert. And the worst? Yalta. Gebert’s narrative is damning. In February 1945, FDR and Churchill caved into Stalin’s demands and agreed to Soviet colonisation of Eastern Europe in exchange for Russia’s entry into the Pacific War. Poland was once again bartered by the great powers. “We were sold,” Gebert describes a perfidy that resulted in a forty-year Soviet occupation of Poland. Between the interlibrary loan and Yalta lies a more complex Polish-American history: Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points enabling an independent Poland; Herbert Hoover feeding a starving Europe after WW1; Reagan’s support for Solidarity. Now, however, Konstanty Gebert warns, Trump’s America isn’t just failing Poland, but all of Europe in its disdain for freedom, especially in Ukraine. That’s the view from Warsaw. And it’s closer to Yalta than the interlibrary loan system. Five Takeaways • The Interlibrary Loan System: The Peak of American Civilisation: Gebert’s opening answer to Andrew’s question about what the United States means to him: the interlibrary loan system. The ability to order any book from any library in the country and have it delivered to your local branch within days, for free. It represents something specific about the American idea: that access to knowledge is a public good, that no individual library can hold everything, and that the solution is to share rather than compete. It is, he says, the most civilised thing any country has ever done. He is not entirely joking. • The United States and America Are Not the Same Thing: Gebert’s structural distinction: the United States is a government, a foreign policy, a set of institutions that can be well or badly run. America is an idea — a myth of liberty, opportunity, and democratic self-governance — that has shaped the world’s imagination since 1776. When the United States fails, as it has under Trump, that is serious and damaging. But it does not destroy America. The idea persists independently of what any administration does to it. Poland’s relationship is with America, not just the United States. That is what survived Yalta. That is what survived Trump’s first term. He is less sure it will survive the second. • Wilson Square, Hoover, and Yalta: America’s Polish History: The arc of American-Polish relations is extraordinary. Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points gave Poland its independence after 123 years of partition — which is why Wilson Square in Warsaw exists. Herbert Hoover fed Europe after the First World War — a gesture of generosity that Poles still remember. But at Yalta in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt traded Eastern Europe to Stalin in exchange for Soviet entry into the Pacific War — or so the Polish reading goes. “We were sold,” Gebert says flatly. Reagan’s support for Solidarity rehabilitated the American image. Trump’s presidency has damaged it again. The cycle is long but the memory is longer. • Solidarity and America: Personal History: Gebert was a Solidarity activist and underground journalist — writing under the pseudonym Dawid Warszawski — during the 1980s. The movement was sustained, in part, by American moral and material support: the Reagan administration, the CIA, Western unions, the Catholic Church in America. For Gebert’s generation, America meant: someone in the world cares about us. Someone knows what is happening in Warsaw. We are not alone. That is the emotional core of the Poland-America relationship. Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine — not just Ukraine but the principle that democracies defend each other — tears at that core. • Gaza, Genocide, and the Precision of Language: The conversation’s most unexpected and bravest section. Gebert — as a prominent Polish Jew, Solidarity activist, and scholar of comparative genocide — refuses the word “genocide” for Gaza, and explains why. The legal and historical definition, established at Srebrenica and Nuremberg, requires evidence of systematic intent to destroy a people as such. What is happening in Gaza is, he says, horrifying, criminal, and a moral catastrophe for Israel. But the precision of the word “genocide” is what gives it its power to prevent future atrocities. Diluting it into a synonym for mass killing weakens the concept at the moment we most need it. The Nazis’ General Plan Ost would have turned to Slavs next. That is the context in which the word was forged. About the Guest Konstanty Gebert (also known as Dawid Warszawski) is a journalist, author, and Jewish activist, and one of Poland’s most celebrated public intellectuals. He was a democratic opposition activist in the 1970s, an underground journalist during martial law in the 1980s, a co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza in 1989, a war correspondent in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and co-founder of Midrasz, Poland’s leading Jewish intellectual monthly. He is an Associate Fellow of the European Council on Foreign Relations and has taught at Hebrew University, UC Berkeley, and Grinnell College. He is the author of more than a dozen books in Polish, covering Poland’s Round Table negotiations of 1989, the Yugoslav wars, Israeli history, comparative genocide, and commentaries on the Torah. References: • Wilson Square, Warsaw — named for President Woodrow Wilson, whose 14 Points included Polish independence; renamed Paris Commune Square under communism, restored in 1989. • Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points (1918) — Point 13 called for an independent Poland with access to the sea. • Herbert Hoover’s post-WWI European relief programme — referenced as an act of American generosity Poles still remember. • The Yalta Conference (1945) — where Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to Soviet influence over Eastern Europe, which Poles describe as a betrayal. • Srebrenica — referenced as the legal touchstone for the definition of genocide in international law. • Andrew Keen’s forthcoming book: Where Have You Gone, Bobby Kennedy? My Search for a Lost America — the conversation is part of Andrew’s European research trip for the book. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer a...

“If your opening position is: your views are beyond the pale, you are deplorable, there is no space for you in democracy — then how on earth do we expect anything other than revolutionary conservatism as a response?” — Maciej Kisilowski For Americans concerned about the fragility of their democracy, Poland offers some reassuring news. Having experienced its own illiberal blip, democracy in Poland now seems amongst the healthiest in Eastern Europe. So what does a democracy only created in 1989 teach America as the old republic braces for its surreal semiquincentennial celebration? The Vienna-based constitutional scholar Maciej Kisilowski is the author of Let’s Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design. In this bestselling 2025 book, Kisilowski argues that Poland is a map of where other Western democracies could go. If they choose to. Poland elected its first illiberal conservative government in 2005. Hungary followed in 2010. Both explicitly served as models for Donald Trump — relatively tamed in his first term, unshackled in his second. Like the United States, Poland is a relatively rich country with per capita GDP growing an astonishing 650% in a single generation. So, Kisilowski argues, the conventional argument that Poland embraced illiberalism in response to economic hardship is mostly wrong. Instead, what triggered illiberalism in Poland was culture, particularly the compressed, accelerated challenge to traditional identity — national, male, religious — that EU accession triggered in Central Europe. Kisilowski, who teaches at Central European University, might have entitled his book Let’s Agree to Disagree. Poland’s solution to this cultural crisis of identity is what Kisilowski calls “subsidiarity” — genuine decentralisation that allows both conservative communities to remain traditional and liberal cities to become progressive, all within a common democratic framework. He warns both the left and the right that if you tell people their views are somehow foreign, it’s entirely rational for them to want to smash their “foreign” democracy. This is the Polish model of a viable 21st century democracy. Ironically, it’s a Madisonian warning about the dangers of faction. The “deplorable” gambit always backfires. Péter Magyar’s remarkable victory in Hungary — a staunch conservative ending Orbán’s 16-year mafia-style illiberal chapter — offers the Hungarian model of Kisilowski’s argument. So this July 4, worried Americans might read Let’s Agree on Poland. Or reread James Madison. Five Takeaways • Central Europe as the Leading Indicator: Poland and Hungary Before Trump: Poland elected its first revolutionary conservative government in 2005 — sixteen years before the January 6 insurrection. Hungary followed in 2010. Both were explicitly cited as models by the architects of Trump’s political project. Kisilowski’s argument: what happened in Central Europe is not a regional anomaly but a leading indicator of what happens when open society’s challenge to traditional identity is concentrated and rapid rather than gradual. The walls of liberal democratic institutions were weaker in Warsaw and Budapest. They will not hold indefinitely in Washington or London either. • It’s Not the Economy, Stupid: The Case Against Materialist Explanations: Poland and Hungary are economic opposites. Hungary was the “happiest barrack” of the Soviet bloc but fared poorly after 1989. Poland was among the poorer countries of the bloc and grew 650% in per capita GDP in one generation, with a Gini coefficient below France’s. Same revolutionary conservative politics. Opposite economic trajectories. Kisilowski’s conclusion: the materialist explanation — people turn right because of economic hardship — is flatly wrong. The driver is identity: the compressed, accelerated challenge to national, male, and religious identity imposed by EU accession conditionality in a decade. • The Deplorable Problem: Why Exclusion Rationally Produces Authoritarianism: Kisilowski’s most politically pointed argument: if your opening position to conservatives is that their views are beyond the pale, they are deplorable, there is no space for them in democracy — then it is entirely rational for them to break democracy. Not irrational. Not manipulated. Rational. If there is no space for me inside the system, I must break the system. That is what revolutionary conservatism is: a rational response to liberal exclusion. The solution is not to validate the views. The solution is to demonstrate that there is a place for those people and their communities within a democratic framework. That is the Madisonian insight. • Subsidiarity as the Solution: Conservative Communities, Liberal Cities, Common Framework: Kisilowski’s constitutional proposal, worked out with co-authors from the full ideological spectrum, is subsidiarity: genuine decentralization that allows conservative rural communities to be conservative and liberal cities to be liberal, within a common democratic framework. Budapest, in Magyar’s Hungary, should get strong autonomy to pursue the more liberal policies its electorate wants. Warsaw and Kraków should be able to differ. The European Union is, in this reading, the model: different countries, different cultures, one framework. The alternative is winner-takes-all, which always produces a revolutionary reaction from the losers. • Peter Magyar and Hungary: Proof of Concept for the Compromise Strategy: Magyar’s extraordinary victory in Hungary — winning a constitutional majority against a 16-year right-wing regime rightly called a mafia state, in elections skewed heavily toward the government — is, in Kisilowski’s reading, direct evidence that the compromise strategy works. Magyar is a staunch conservative and former member of the Orbán government. He won because he demonstrated to far-right voters that there was a place for them and their views within democratic Europe. The 2 million liberal Budapest voters who voted for him did so not because they like his conservatism but because he was unquestionably preferable to Orbán. Kisilowski made sure Magyar got the book. About the Guest Maciej Kisilowski is Associate Professor of Law and Strategy at Central European University (CEU) in Vienna. He is co-editor (with Anna Wojciuk) of Let’s Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design (Oxford University Press, 2025). He is a Europe’s Futures Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School. He writes frequently for Project Syndicate, Politico, and The EU Observer. References: • Let’s Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design by Maciej Kisilowski and Anna Wojciuk (Oxford University Press, 202...

“Just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. The agent is the unacknowledged legislator of the literary field.” — Laura McGrath We think of publishers and editors as the ultimate tastemakers. As those godlike gatekeepers controlling what we read. But if you’re looking for literary gods, Laura McGrath argues, then you need to look at literary agents rather than publishers or editors. Her ten-year project, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, is the first serious scholarly account of the literary agent’s astonishingly powerful role in shaping what America reads. Except, of course, the Middlemen are actually Middlewomen — since 80% of literary agents are women. The numbers are striking. Just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. McGrath interviewed 75 of them over ten years. Shelley called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world. McGrath’s agents are the unacknowledged legislators of the literary field. They shaped postmodernism (Candida Donadio and Pynchon, Heller, Gaddis). They launched the debut novel as a literary form. They made the short story collection viable. And 25 of them control more than half of the prizes. So will AI replace the agent? In operations, perhaps, McGrath acknowledges — the slush pile is overwhelming and smart machine assistance is welcome. But in creative work — in the business of writing, editing, translation, cover design, and above all taste — she thinks not. No algorithm will ever learn the Catch-22 of publishing — separating the Thomas Pynchon or Joseph Heller from all the dross. And no bot (male or female) is ever going to host a three-martini lunch in Manhattan. Five Takeaways • The Literary Agent as the New Gatekeeper: Replacing the Publisher: In the early 20th century, publishing was shaped by the taste of individual publishers: Bennett Cerf at Random House, Alfred and Blanche Knopf at their imprint, Max Perkins at Scribner’s. Those days are over. Publishers are now conglomerates where individual editors may have excellent taste but no single figure shapes the house. Into that vacuum has come the literary agent — who now operates, McGrath argues, exactly as the great publishers once did: as the primary tastemaker, the person whose aesthetic and commercial judgment shapes what America reads. • 25 Agents, Half the Prizes, 80% Women: The Numbers: McGrath’s most striking statistical finding: just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. Twenty-five people. The field is 80% women — hence the tongue-in-cheek title — and 73% white. Agents tend, McGrath found, to represent authors who resemble themselves. One answer to the question “why is contemporary literary fiction so white?” is: because agents are. And agents, because they work on contingency fees rather than salaries, face severe financial pressures that concentrate power at the top of the profession. • The Unacknowledged Legislators: Agents Shaped American Literary History: McGrath’s book is full of literary history rewritten from the agent’s perspective. Sterling Lord persisted past dozens of rejections to place On the Road for Kerouac. Candida Donadio — Pynchon’s, Heller’s, Gaddis’s, and early Philip Roth’s agent — championed maximalist, experimental writers whom no one was interested in, and built the social network of editor relationships that made postmodernism possible. The debut novel as a cultural form, the persistence of the short story collection despite poor sales, the rise of the New York novel — all are, in McGrath’s account, partly agent-made. • Can White Male Writers Not Get Published? No: Andrew raises the complaint he hears from white male writers: that they can no longer get published because of diversity initiatives. McGrath’s answer is flat. No. She thinks it’s silly. The number of books published each week is staggering. Being able to see some success on the part of writers of colour does not diminish the work white men are doing. The complaint, she notes, circulates every ten years, typically after a boom in support for writers of colour. We are in another round of this cycle. There will be another one in a decade. • Will AI Replace the Literary Agent? In Operations, Maybe. In Taste, No: Andrew’s closing question: will AI replace the middlemen? McGrath draws the distinction she heard at the US Book Show: AI in operations (slush pile management, contract tracking), yes, possibly. AI in creative work — writing, editing, translation, cover design, and above all taste — she hopes not. An algorithm is built on priors. It narrows the window of possibility endlessly, replicating itself. That is not what a good literary agent does. A good literary agent is looking for books that surprise, frustrate, and thrill. No algorithm has learned to take an author out for a three-martini lunch. About the Guest Laura McGrath is an assistant professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. She was formerly the associate director of the Literary Lab at Stanford University. She is the author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Princeton University Press, April 28, 2026). She writes the textCrunch Substack on literary and publishing culture. References: • Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction by Laura McGrath (Princeton University Press, April 28, 2026). • Earlier on KOA: Gayle Feldman on Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built — the companion episode referenced at the opening. • Sterling Lord (agent for Kerouac), Candida Donadio (Pynchon, Heller, Gaddis, Roth), Andrew Wylie — agents profiled in the book. • Andrew Keen, Cult of the Amateur (2007) — referenced as Andrew’s own defence of gatekeepers. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. 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“I considered it elder abuse. She put him through the paces, not only before the debate, but after. She should have gotten him out of there immediately.” — Sally Quinn on Jill Biden and the debate Today’s guest is amongst America’s most verbal octogenarians. No, not you-know-who. Sally Quinn is the illustrious Washington DC hostess, writer and commentator. The almost 85-year-old does improv comedy every Sunday, ballroom dancing every week and Zen Buddhist meditation every Monday night. Her novel, Silent Retreat, is now out in paperback. And she’s working on her memoir, tentatively entitled Never Invite Sally Quinn. Certainly Jill Biden won’t be inviting Sally Quinn any time soon to one of her tête-à-têtes. Quinn’s account of what went wrong with the Biden presidency is sharply personal. Her late husband, legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, had dementia. She watched his cognitive decline from inside, and the parallels with what she observed in Biden were, she tells me, too close for comfort. Jill Biden’s decision to keep Joe running after the debate, when she privately suspected he’d suffered a stroke, was, in Quinn’s word, “elder abuse.” Silent Retreat, set at a monastery in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is about the sexiness of silence. A prize-winning reporter and the venerable Archbishop of Dublin fall in love in enforced silence. Anything but elder abuse. But autobiographical? Probably not. As Ben Bradlee used to tease her over breakfast, it’s always been hard for not-silent-Sally to keep her mouth shut. Five Takeaways • The Army Brat Who Became Washington’s Most Powerful Hostess: Quinn grew up as an army brat, moving from posting to posting with her military father. She arrived in Washington after college, did a stint as social secretary to the Algerian ambassador, and was then hired by Ben Bradlee to write for the Washington Post’s new Style section — the first style section in the history of American journalism. She and Bradlee eventually married. Their home in Georgetown became the hub of Washington’s social and political life for decades. She describes herself not as a powerhouse but as someone who “really lucked out.” An army brat who knew how to work a room. • Gerontocracy Is Real — But People Who Keep Going Are Different: Quinn agrees with Samuel Moyn that American gerontocracy is a genuine problem: people who lose their cognitive sharpness should not be running organizations or countries, and the tragedy is that no one can know in advance who will lose it and who won’t. But she draws a distinction: the problem is not old people, it’s old people who have stopped growing. She surrounds herself with younger people, particularly younger journalists, because of their energy, idealism, and optimism. She is still working full time. The issue is not age. It’s vitality. • Biden and Jill: Elder Abuse: Quinn’s account of the Biden presidency is the most personal Andrew has heard. Her husband Ben Bradlee had dementia. She knows the signs. She watched Biden lose it, got a knot in her stomach every time he spoke publicly. The debate was her worst nightmare. Everyone in the White House knew what was happening and wasn’t telling the truth. And Jill Biden — who now admits she thought he had had a stroke after the debate — raised his arm in a victory salute the next day and took him off to campaign in North Carolina. Quinn’s verdict: “I considered it elder abuse.” • Silent Retreat: A New Yorker Writer and an Archbishop Fall in Love in Enforced Silence: The novel grew from Quinn’s own annual visits to a Trappist monastery in Virginia’s Berryville. She is a woman who once failed to stay quiet for three days — or so her husband thought — and who found to her surprise that she loved it. The novel: a prize-winning reporter whose marriage is falling apart, and an Archbishop of Dublin whose faith is in crisis, check into the same monastery for a silent retreat. They can’t speak to each other. They speak to the monk instead. The novel is told through those confessions. Kirkus: “an unholy brew of lust and faith.” Airmail: “a bodice ripper with a fillip of Roman Catholic ritual.” • Improv, Ballroom Dancing, Zen Buddhism, and Dinner by Candlelight: Quinn’s account of how she stays alive at 84 is the most energetic thing in this conversation. Improv comedy every Sunday for two and a half hours — performances after the class, with people half her age. Ballroom dancing every week. Zen Buddhist meditation every Monday night for two hours. Working out every day. Writing her Washington memoir. And hosting small dinner parties — six or eight people, candlelight, good food, a lot of wine — as a form of community-building in what she calls the toxic environment of today’s Washington. The memoir’s title: Never Invite Sally Quinn. Andrew has already secured an invitation to the next dinner party. About the Guest Sally Quinn is a longtime Washington Post journalist, columnist, television commentator, Washington insider, and one of Washington’s legendary social hostesses. She is the author of Silent Retreat (Simon & Schuster), Finding Magic, The Party, Happy Endings, Regrets Only, and We’re Going to Make You a Star. She was the founder and moderator of On Faith, the Washington Post’s religion website. She lives in Georgetown, Washington DC. References: • Silent Retreat by Sally Quinn (Simon & Schuster). In paperback. • Episode 2945: Samuel Moyn on Gerontocracy in America — referenced at the opening. • Ben Bradlee — Quinn’s late husband, executive editor of the Washington Post during Watergate, referenced throughout. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:...

“Between 1980 and 2019, the billionaires gained $25 trillion. By today it’s probably $35 trillion. The question is who will pay for reform? You go where the money is.” — Mordecai Kurz Keynes observed that in the long run, we are all dead. The nonagenarian Stanford economist Mordecai Kurz agrees. Which is why he has no patience for the tech utopians’ promise of abundance for all of us in the long run. And his new book, Private Power and Democracy’s Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy, is amongst the most urgent cases yet made for a fundamental reform of American capitalism. Kurz compares our billionaire-infested times with the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, which eventually ended with sharp progressive reform. We are now in a second Gilded Age, he argues. Between 1980 and 2019, the top billionaires gained $25 trillion. By today, he estimates it’s $35 trillion. Meanwhile, workers without college education gained essentially nothing in income between 1980 and 2010. The result is both Trumpism and the world’s first trillionaire. Kurz lays out a three-fronted reform strategy. First, reduce market power through patent and antitrust reform. Second, redistribute the gains from technology through a 65% top marginal income tax rate and a 45% corporate rate. Third, guarantee the livelihood of every worker displaced by policy-supported technological change with retraining, full wage support, tuition, healthcare, and even relocation. Wouldn’t the billionaires simply leave? The spirited Kurz, who has taught economics at Stanford for sixty years, isn’t worried. “Others will come instead of them,” he says. And in response to Sam Altman’s argument that AI will free humanity from labour, Mordecai Kurz retorts with Keynes’s remark about death in the long run. And this particular long run, he says, could be many millennia. Five Takeaways • The Second Gilded Age: Same Dynamic, Different Technology: Kurz’s central historical argument: the first Gilded Age — 1864 to 1914 — produced extreme inequality, rising economic monopolists who became centres of political power, and democratic decline. It ended with progressive reform. The second Gilded Age, beginning in 1980, follows the same logic: technology used as a weapon of market power, market power converting into political power, political power undermining democratic institutions. The difference is scale and speed. Between 1980 and 2019, the top billionaires accumulated $25 trillion. By 2026, Kurz estimates $35 trillion. The reform that ended the first Gilded Age took fifty years. He is not sure we have that long. • The Three-Pronged Reform: Market Power, Distribution, Livelihoods: Kurz’s proposed reform has three components. First: reduce market power through patent reform, antitrust reform, and reform of acquisition law — the legal structures that allow technology firms to entrench monopoly positions. Second: redistribute the gains from technology through a 65% top marginal income tax rate, a compulsory minimum 15% tax on incomes above $400,000, and a 45% corporate tax rate. Third: guarantee the livelihood of every worker displaced by policy-supported technological change — retraining, full wage support, tuition for children, healthcare, and relocation assistance. • The 1980 Mistake: Where It All Went Wrong: Kurz is precise about the origin of the problem: 1980. The turn to unregulated free-market capitalism under Reagan, combined with the information technology revolution, created what he calls a techno-winner-takes-all economy. Workers without college education gained essentially nothing in income between 1980 and 2010. Millions lost their jobs to automation and import competition and received no government support. Kurz’s diagnosis of Trumpism: it fed on the despair of those abandoned workers. This is not a cultural or demographic explanation. It is a structural economic one. • Would the Billionaires Leave? Let Them: Andrew raises the obvious objection: if you tax them at 65%, won’t the Elon Musks and Larry Pages and Sam Altmans simply leave? Kurz’s response is blunt: he doesn’t think they would, because the system called America — its universities, infrastructure, market, human capital, and institutional environment — is what made their billions possible. Their billions are not the product of their individual genius alone. But if they do leave, he says, others will come instead. He adds that he would prefer coordinated taxation across all Western advanced economies, not the US alone. • In the Long Run, We Are All Dead: The Keynesian Punchline on Tech Utopianism: Andrew asks about Elon Musk’s claim that money will eventually disappear and technology will free humanity from labour — the Keynesian/Marxist long-run abundance argument. Kurz paraphrases Keynes’ most famous line: “In the long run, we are all dead.” And then he adds: the long run could be a very long time. He is ninety years old, has taught at Stanford since 1961, and from his office window he can see the $1 billion mansions in the hills above Palo Alto and the workers below who cannot afford to live there. He is, he says, not prepared to wait for Musk’s utopia. About the Guest Mordecai Kurz is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1961. He is the author of Private Power and Democracy’s Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy (MIT Press, May 19, 2026) and The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age (Columbia University Press, 2023). He was born in Tel Aviv and received his doctorate from MIT. References: • Private Power and Democracy’s Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy by Mordecai Kurz (MIT Press, May 19, 2026). • The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age by Mordecai Kurz (Columbia University Press, 2023) — the preceding volume, referenced throughout. • Thomas Piketty — blurbed the book: “A great book, a must-read.” Also referenced in the conversation. • Dani Rodrik and Gabriel Zucman — referenced as fellow economists in Kurz’s camp. • Marc Andreessen — referenced for his counter-argument that high taxation destroys innovation. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes s...

“As early as 1805, you had orators getting up there — barely twenty years after American independence was recognised by Great Britain — saying: the Republic is over. We’ve had it. So there is a tradition of calling it the end times.” — Nathan Perl-Rosenthal It’s less than three weeks until America’s big birthday bash. But what exactly will be celebrated this 250th Independence Day? In The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776, the historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal read some 2,500 July 4 orations delivered in the hundred years after independence. And what he found is that most Americans didn’t believe that the revolution was really over. Orators often unfavourably compared the American Revolution to the French, Spanish American, and European revolutions of 1830 and 1848. They argued bitterly about slavery. As late as the 1870s, leading orators were insisting that the revolution was unfinished because the truths of the Declaration of Independence had not yet been fully worked out. Fast forward to 2026 and Perl-Rosenthal suggests a return to the kind of sustained public dialogue that the oratorical tradition once represented. So put down your smartphones on July 4 and tell the world where America currently is and where it should go. The act of oration, Perl-Rosenthal suggests, is not just a civic act, but essential to the country’s long revolutionary tradition. So happy birthday America. And many many more. Five Takeaways • 100,000 Orations: The Archive Nobody Knew About: In the first century after independence, an estimated 100,000 July 4 orations were delivered across the United States — roughly a thousand towns and villages, each holding an annual address for a hundred years. Of those, 2,500 survive in published form as pamphlets, now collected in a digital database at fourthofjulyorations.org. These are not peripheral documents. They were delivered by the most prominent public figures of their day — lawyers, clergymen, politicians — before large audiences. They are among the richest sources we have for what ordinary Americans actually thought about their revolution and their republic. • The Revolution Was Ongoing: Most Orators Believed This Well Into the 1870s: The single most striking finding of Perl-Rosenthal’s research: most orators, deep into the nineteenth century, did not regard the revolution as a completed historical event. They saw themselves not as commemorating it but as participating in it. As late as the 1870s, leading orators were insisting the revolution remained unfinished. One orator in Boston in 1870, in a debate about immigration policy and Chinese exclusion, argued that the revolution could not be over because the inalienable rights proclaimed in the Declaration had not yet been universally extended. The parallel to the immigration debates of 2026 is, Perl-Rosenthal suggests, striking. • The Orations Were Critical, Not Triumphalist: Perl-Rosenthal went into the archive expecting, as he puts it, “rah America.” He found something quite different. Many orators compared the American Revolution unfavourably to other revolutions: to the French in the 1790s, to Spanish American revolutions in the 1810s and 1820s, to the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848. The comparisons often did not flatter America. Wealthy Bostonians giving the prestigious Boston oration — one of the oldest and most prominent in the country — would argue explicitly that the founders had failed to deal with slavery. The critical tradition was mainstream, not marginal. • 1876 as the Turning Point: When the Tradition Died: The July 4 oration tradition effectively ended after 1876. That year, Congress for the first time asked towns and cities to deliver historical rather than political orations — accounts of local history rather than arguments about the present. A tenfold increase in orations was followed by a rapid collapse of the tradition. The shift was significant: from argument to commemoration, from an ongoing political conversation to a museum piece. The practice of serious sustained public political dialogue — an hour or more, in public, about the state of the republic — has not recovered. • A Low, Dishonest Period: What the Tradition Offers Now: Mark Lilla’s blurb: “a low, dishonest period in our history. This surprisingly timely book reminds us of our responsibilities.” Perl-Rosenthal is not catastrophist about the current moment — he notes that orators were calling it the end times as early as 1805. But he is clear about what is missing: a forum for sustained public argument about where America is and where it should go. The smartphone generation, he acknowledges, is unlikely to sit through an hour-long oration. That, he suggests, is precisely the problem. About the Guest Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a professor of history, French and Italian, and law at the University of Southern California. He has been a fellow at Harvard and Cambridge. He is the author of The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776 (Basic Books, June 2, 2026), Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Belknap/Harvard), and The Age of Revolutions. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Los Angeles and Cambridge, Massachusetts. References: • The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776 by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (Basic Books, June 2, 2026). • fourthofjulyorations.org — the digital database of 2,500 published July 4 orations referenced throughout. • Eric Foner — Perl-Rosenthal’s dissertation adviser at Columbia, referenced as still giving July 4 orations in his Connecticut town. • Mark Lilla — referenced for his blurb: “a low, dishonest period in our history. This surprisingly timely book reminds us of our responsibilities.” About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. Website

“Power trumps money fundamentally. And I think we’ve seen the extent to which these companies are very subservient to the US government. Because the US government can break them in an instant.” — Jack Watling on whether Anthropic and OpenAI can become geopolitical players In Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, an ageing Texas sheriff finds himself outmatched by a killer operating by a logic the old rules can’t contain. It’s the story of a man shaped by one world, and then trying to operate in an entirely different system. That’s also the situation facing many statesmen today who are having to operate in an international system where the old rules no longer apply. The British military strategist Jack Watling argues in his new book Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World that we have moved from a monopolar world to one of intensely multipolar competition where adversaries can subvert all the premises of another state’s strategy. These disruptive rules of the 21st century multipolar international system aren’t entirely new. There are, for example, eerie similarities with the chaotically multipolar system that led to the First World War. But they are new to the leaders who have to apply them. So, for example, they are having to deal with Vladimir Putin who is locked into an eighth-century Orthodox Holy Russian Empire fantasy. Or with the impulsive and disruptive Donald Trump whose only goal, it sometimes seems, is to subvert all the rules of the old world. These are Jack Watling’s new rules of power in a divided world. New statecraft for old men. Or maybe old statecraft for new men. Five Takeaways • The Rules Are New to the Leaders, Not the World: Watling’s thesis: many of the principles in his book are old, as a historian he knows that. But they are new to the current crop of political leaders because they were formed in a monopolar world where America had primacy, crises were resolved, and the status quo was restored. We are now in a period of intense interstate competition where changes are permanent — the interventions that are being made fundamentally shift the trend. That does require a new way of thinking. The tragedy is that the leaders who most need to think in new ways — Putin and Trump in particular — are the least capable of it. • Putin vs Trump: Two Different Kinds of Fallibility: Putin has locked himself into a rubric of looking at the world through the lens of the Orthodox Holy Russian Empire — a framework that doesn’t align with how anyone else reads the map. He’s not a pragmatic dealmaker; when you get him to the table, as Trump found in Alaska, he starts referring back to the eighth century. Trump is very different: much less cautious, much more impulsive, skilled at making the conversation happen on his terms by disrupting everything around him. The problem with impulsive rather than deliberate is that he has no clear idea of where he wants to get to. Both fallible. Neither predictable. • The WWI Parallel: Over By Christmas: Watling’s most sobering analogy: when we look at 1914, nobody thought it would become what it became. The assumption was over by Christmas. It grew out of any capacity to control it. Today, the rules between the great powers don’t reflect where power actually sits. The capacity for a conflagration — Taiwan being the obvious tipping point — to suddenly trigger a series of escalations around the world is very real. We have to be cognisant that risk is latent in the system. The outcome we most wish to avoid is also the most mutually calamitous one. That’s not a guarantee it won’t happen. • Power Trumps Money — Even Trumpian Power Trumps Trumpian Money: Andrew asks whether Anthropic and OpenAI could become geopolitical players — more powerful than middle powers like Brazil or Japan. Watling’s answer: no. Russian oligarchs made this mistake in the 1990s. They thought that because they had huge amounts of money and controlled valuable resources they could play geopolitically. They were very quickly subsumed by the state. These tech companies are very subservient to the US government, which can break them in an instant. The pun lands perfectly: even Trumpian power trumps Trumpian money. • How Smaller States Build Leverage: Stay Off the Menu: One of the book’s central arguments: how do smaller states shape world events when dwarfed by superpowers? Watling’s answer: leverage is not just military. It is economic, informational, reputational. The UK spends billions on aircraft carriers it struggles to support at sea — a good illustration of how a state can mistake the form of power for its substance. Smaller states that build genuine leverage — through control of chokepoints, indispensable relationships, asymmetric capabilities — can stay off the menu even in a world dominated by great powers. That requires statecraft. Not just military spending. About the Guest Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London. He works closely with the British, Ukrainian, and American military and advises governments on security and strategy. He was formerly a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World (Pan Macmillan, 2026) and The Arms of the Future: Technology and Close Combat in the Twenty-First Century. Originally a journalist, he has contributed to Reuters, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The Guardian. References: • Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World by Jack Watling (Pan Macmillan, 2026). • Episode 2935: Michael Mandelbaum on The American Way of Foreign Policy — referenced in the conversation. • RUSI (Royal United Services Institute), Whitehall, London — Watling’s institutional base. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple Podcasts