Keen On America

As a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin, the Chapman University economist Mark Skousen might be a bit biased. That said, Skousen makes an entertaining case in his new book, The Greatest American , for Franklin as being the most innovative and versatile of the Founding Fathers. Skousen acknowledges Franklin's contradictions: his transition from slave owner to abolitionist, his notoriety as a la...

Much has been made of the hallucinatory qualities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT product. But as the Wall Street Journal ’s resident authority on OpenAI, Keach Hagey notes, perhaps the most hallucinatory feature the $300 billion start-up co-founded by the deadly duo of Sam Altman and Elon Musk is its attempt to be simultaneously a for-profit and non-profit company. As Hagey notes, the double life of this dou...

What is the ideological alternative to Trumpism? In The Purposeful Warrior , Michigan’s Democratic candidate for Governor, Jocelyn Benson , offers “a road map for shattering the status quo and standing up for ourselves, our communities, and our country”. Benson’s book, with its focus on common decency, could certainly be read as an ideological alternative to transactional Trumpism. But The Purpose...

There are few more respected economic analysts in the world than the Financial Times Chief Economic Commentator Martin Wolf . Yesterday, we ran a conversation with Wolf about the survival of American democracy. Today, we talk Trumpian economics, particularly tariff policy. Wolf characterizes Trump's trade policies as historically unprecedented in their scale, comprehensive nature, and unpredictabi...

I’ve been in London this week talking to America watchers about the current situation in the United States. First up is Edmund Fawcett , the longtime Economist correspondent in DC and historian of both liberalism and conservatism . Fawcett argues that Trump’s MAGA movement represents a kind of third way between liberalism and conservatism - a version of American populism resurrected for our anti-g...

What’s it like to have to work physically hard to make a living in America today? In A Living , the writer and physician Michael Stein shares conversations with his working-class patients. He explores how work shapes identity, provides meaning beyond income, and impacts upon physical and mental health. Stein promotes the dignity of physical labor, noting that many workers find deep satisfaction in...

Does the United States of America still have anything going for it? According to the Arizona based Larry Aldrich , co-author of the upcoming What’s Right About America , there remains much to celebrate about his country’s foundational strengths, its resilience in the face of sometimes daunting challenges, and its continued innovation. He argues that America's focus on individual empowerment and th...

Is any criticism of Israel, by definition, anti-semitic? Not according to Uri Kaufman who, in his new book American Intifada , examines what he calls the "new antisemitism" following the Gaza war. That said, Kaufman nonetheless believes that progressive institutions and figures like Obama and the New York Times manifest a form of antisemitism by holding Israel to different moral standards than oth...

In today’s discussion with David Masciotra about the first hundred days of Trump 2.0 I made the (Freudian) error of referring to it as a “hundred years”. It certainly feels like a hundred years . So how should the Democrats respond to Trump’s avalanche of illiberalism? Masciotra argues they should emulate Ted Kennedy's forceful 1987 rhetoric against Robert Bork, focusing on the existential threats...

Few analysts are more familiar with the politics of both contemporary Turkey and the United States than my old friend , the distinguished Turkish political scientist Soli Ozel . Drawing on his decades of experience in both countries, Ozel, currently a senior fellow at the Institut Montaigne, explains how democratic institutions are similarly being challenged in Trump’s America and Erdogan's Turkey...

Americans, it’s time to move to Europe! The American geo-strategist Jason Pack anticipated last week’s advice from Simon Kuper and moved to London a few years ago during the first Trump Presidency. Pack, the host of the excellent Disorde r podcast, confesses to be thrilled to have escaped MAGA America. He describes the esthetics of contemporary Washington DC as "post-apocalyptic" and criticizes wh...

Don’t say we weren’t warned. Project 2025, the 2022 Heritage Foundation’s 900-page policy blueprint, unambiguously plotted out the strategy of the second Trump administration. As Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham makes clear in his refreshingly brief The Project , the Heritage Foundation document is an verbose summary of Trump 2.0’s ambition to reshape government by strengthening executive pow...

We are all Waymo Democrats now. That Was the Week ’s Keith Teare and I appropriate Thomas Friedman’s controversial new term to dream of an American high tech future. Keith and I also talk about last week’s interview with Peter Leyden, a founding member of the Waymo Democracy club. Keith might not be altogether convinced by Leyden’s thesis about the inevitability of America’s 80 year historical cyc...

A year ago , the great American historian Adam Hochschild came on KEEN ON AMERICA to discuss American Midnight , his best selling account of the crisis of American democracy after World War One. A year later, is history really repeating itself in today’s crisis of American democracy? For Hochschild, there are certainly parallels between the current political situation in the US and post WW1 Americ...

Adam Becker ’s new critique of Silicon Valley More Everything Forever should probably be entitled Less Nothing Never . The science journalist accuses Silicon Valley overlords like Elon Musk and Sam Altman of promoting exaggerated dangers and promises about AI. Becker argues that these apocalyptic fears of superintelligent AI are science fictional fantasies rather than scientifically reasoned argum...

In contrast with yesterday’s guest, the Paris based Financial Times writer Simon Kuper , the newspaper’s London based c olumnist J emima Kelly hasn’t quite given up on the United States of America. Trump, she suggests, might be the end of the line for the MAGA movement. Indeed, like another recent guest on the show, former Wired editor Peter Leyden , Kelly suggests that the Republicans might be fl...

It’s official. The American Dream is dead. And it’s been resurrected in Europe where, according to the FT columnist Simon Kuper , disillusioned Americans should relocate. Compared with the United States, Kuper argues , Europe offers the three key metrics of a 21st century good life: “four years more longevity, higher self-reported happiness and less than half the carbon emissions per person”. So w...

So what, exactly, was “The Enlightenment”? According to the Princeton historian David A. Bell , it was an intellectual movement roughly spanning the early 18th century through to the French Revolution. In his Spring 2025 Liberties Quarterly piece “The Enlightenment, Then and Now”, Bell charts the Enlightenment as a complex intellectual movement centered in Paris but with hubs across Europe and Ame...

Why is America so over-medicated? According to Harvard Medical School professor Jerry Avorn , author of Rethinking Medications, everything begins and ends with the unaccountable power of Big Pharma. While acknowledging the tremendous benefits of modern medications, Avorn critiques the American healthcare system's pricing structures, pharmaceutical patent abuse, and profit incentives that drives th...

Is America screwed? Not according to the former managing editor of Wired , Peter Leyden . The creator of the Substack newsletter The Great Progression , Leyden believes that U.S. history operates in 80 year cycles and that America, empowered by Northern Californian technology, is gearing up for another remarkable period of innovation. Leyden is no MAGA fanboy, but argues that Trump is enabling the...

Are Google and Facebook screwed? That’s the question which Keith Teare asks in today’s That Was The Week tech newsletter. In our age of nationalist globalization, Teare argues, Facebook and Google, the original darlings of the Web 2.0 revolution are, so-to-speak, half-fucked. On the one hand, they are the victims of a legal witch hunt by a nationalist U.S. government intent on punishing Big Tech i...

Few Americans have been as explicit in their warnings about Donald Trump than the St. Louis based writer Sarah Kendzior . Her latest book, The Last American Road Trip , is a memoir chronicling Kendzior’s journey down Route 66 to show her children America before it is destroyed. Borrowing from her research of post Soviet Central Asia, Kendzior argues that Trump is establishing a kleptocratic “mafia...

In yesterday’s show, the neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod explained how radical ideology is infecting our brains. Today, Unite America executive director Nick Troiano explains how the American democratic system is empowering radicals in both parties. In The Primary Solution , Troiano argues that party primaries give disproportionate influence to political extremes, with 90% of elections being decided i...

Our brains are delicate things. That, at least, is the view of the neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod , whose new book, The Ideological Brain , is a warning about how radical ideologies of both left and right can infect our brains. She argues that, in contrast with flexible thinking, ideological discourse involves rigid adherence to doctrines and anti-scientific dismissal of factual evidence. She notes t...

To celebrate our 2500th show, long time KEEN ON friend David Masciotra interviewed me about the current perilous situation in America. We discuss why I’ve renamed the show KEEN ON AMERICA and my thoughts on the U.S’s increasingly pivotal role in 21st century history. We discuss America's changing "operating system" as it struggles to reinvent its 20th century industrial identity. We explore Americ...