“His intent is getting worse, but his capacity is diminishing. The next two years will be some kind of mad race to figure out which of these two things will prevail.” — Jonathan Rauch

 

As the nights get shorter, we are drifting into the autumn of the patriarch. That, at least, is the view of two old friends of the show, Jonathan Rauch [https://keenon.substack.com/p/postmodern-patrimonialism-trumps?r=ktr9] and Peter Wehner [https://x.com/Peter_Wehner], who argued in The New York Times that Trump has finally [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/19/opinion/trump-vance-turning-point-minneapolis.html] lost the plot. So will this really go down as the fall that Trump failed?

 

Rauch and Wehner note what’s failed and what hasn’t. MAGA’s revolutionary project — the regime change, the campaign against the universities, the idea that America had become Flight 93 — was an attempt to rout liberals from the commanding heights of American culture. At first this conservative Leninism succeeded, with universities and law firms folding in the face of a bullying state. But then civil society reorganized, fought back on the streets and in the courts, and district judges mostly held the line. But while the atmosphere of fear has evaporated, Rauch notes, what Trump has won is the transformation of the American state into a patrimonial form of government. With the complicity of Congress, it’s hard to untangle the state as personal property and as a family business.

 

Wehner’s ethical diagnosis is starker. Coining it as the autumn of the sociopath, he observes sociopathy fused with visible cognitive decline, an old fool with enormous power and fewer people willing to check him. Rather than Trump losing the plot, the plot has lost the doddering patriarch. Forget Venezuela and Cuba. The concluding series in this North American version of The Autumn of the Patriarch will be aired live from La Casa Blanca.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Losing the Plot. The New York Times piece is, Rauch says, consistent with his earlier Atlantic essay on fascism rather than a retreat from it: that piece argued Trump was a fascist type of leader who would probably fail, and this one says the failure has happened. The plot in question is the revolutionary one — the attempt by the people around Trump to rewire American culture from the White House. Wehner’s account of the man is bleaker than the politics. There were guardrails in the first term, Kelly and Mattis among them, and there are far fewer now; what has changed is a fusion of sociopathic tendencies that were always there with a cognitive decline that is obvious to anyone watching. He would update García Márquez’s title to the autumn of the sociopath. And the image that lands: a doddering old fool wandering out of meetings to opine about the ballroom and the White House grass — except that he is a doddering old fool with a tremendous amount of power, surrounded by advisers who in some cases want to go further than he does.

•       The Part He Won. Rauch is careful not to declare victory: the article spends its first third on what succeeded, and the most important of those elements to Trump personally is patrimonialism — the organization of government in which the state is the personal property and family business of the leader. That is how he runs the presidency, the Justice Department, trade policy, the Pentagon and the architecture of Washington, with a great deal of complicity from Congress. Why did the Republicans fold? Three reasons, in Rauch’s account: members who defied him were primaried and often beaten; they swim in a media and political environment where ninety per cent of the people they meet judge them by their fidelity to Trump; and they are physically afraid — death threats follow a social-media finge

Trump Has Finally Lost the Plot: Jonathan Rauch & Peter Wehner on the Autumn of the American Patriarch

“A good divorce is better than a bad marriage, and this is a good divorce.” — Alan Dershowitz

 

The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz [https://dersh.substack.com/] says he’s been voting Democrat since John F. Kennedy. He even defended Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Alan Cranston in court. But, at 88 years old, Dershowitz has now left — or, as he puts it, been forced out of the Dems, in the same way Ronald Reagan was sixty years ago. His new book Why I Quit the Dems and So Should You [https://bookshop.org/p/books/why-i-quit-the-dems-and-so-should-you-confessions-of-a-reluctant-republican-alan-dershowitz/630047951fec7903] is both a history of his souring relations with the Democrats and a confessional of a reluctant Republican.

 

A good divorce, the twice-married Dershowitz promises, is better than a bad marriage. Like many angry spouses, he says he’s been forced into the split. Today’s Democratic Party, he claims, is closer than any political party in modern American history to what the Nazi Party was in 1932 before it came to power. He names Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani as antisemites, calls Bernie Sanders a self-hating Jew, and insists Kamala Harris passed over Josh Shapiro because Shapiro is a Jew who wouldn’t renounce Zionism.

 

What’s his proof on the Harris claim? What other reason could there be? Dershowitz claims. Besides, even if Israel vanished as an issue tomorrow, he says he still couldn’t go back to the failed marriage, because the Dems have abandoned what he calls “meritocracy.”

 

At 88, Dershowitz is perhaps a little more self-reflective than he was in his legal pomp. In conclusion, I ask him to summarize himself in a word. “Proudly-Jewish,” he says, before adding “never-boring.” We can all agree on that, if perhaps little else.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       A Good Divorce. Dershowitz frames his departure as liberation rather than loss: a good divorce is better than a bad marriage, and he was thrown out, he says, much as Ronald Reagan was. The loyalty he is breaking runs deep — he first voted for John F. Kennedy, defended Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Senator Alan Cranston, and campaigned for Democrats for most of his adult life. He describes himself now as a convert, and converts, he notes, are the most fervent. What he wants is not the suffering of Democrats — his wife, children and much of his family remain in the party — but their defeat: he does not want them running the House or the Senate, and names AOC and Abdul El-Sayed as people he does not want chairing committees. He first went independent, then concluded that independence wasn’t enough, which is how a lifelong liberal became, in the book’s subtitle, a reluctant Republican — or, as Andrew put it, an angry spouse who says he was forced into the split. President Trump, he notes, endorsed the book.

•       The Charge. The hour’s most incendiary material, and it should be read as his claims rather than as established fact. Dershowitz argues the Democratic Party is closer than any political party in modern American history to what the Nazi Party was in 1932 — specifically 1932, he stresses, not 1935: Jews feeling unsafe at universities, Jews losing jobs, an obsession with the nation-state of the Jewish people. He names El-Sayed and Mamdani as antisemites, says he does not believe Mamdani or his family like Jews, calls Bernie Sanders a self-hating Jew and a hypocrite, and says Elizabeth Warren doesn’t like Jews. His central political claim: no Jew perceived as pro-Israel can now win a Democratic primary, and no Jew will be nominated for president — which is why, in his telling, Kamala Harris passed over Josh Shapiro, a choice he says cost her Pennsylvania and possibly the election. Andrew asked how he could know that. “What other reason could there be?” was the answer, and Andre

Proudly-Jewish & Never-Boring: Alan Dershowitz on His Divorce from the Democratic Party

“There’s no realistic scenario where AI wipes out all of humanity. It’s like a mix of sci-fi.” — Richard Socher

 

Eighteen months ago, when he last came on the show, the German-born but San Francisco-based AI whizz kid Richard Socher [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-socher/the-eureka-machine/9781541705708/] was running You.com. He’s now also the co-founder of Recursive, a $4 billion start-up with fewer than thirty employees, focused on self-improving superintelligence that automates the scientific method. As if that isn’t enough, he has a new book out this week, The Eureka Machine [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-socher/the-eureka-machine/9781541705708/], which argues that AI is the key to unlocking an era of scientific discoveries equal to a combination of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

 

The tech entrepreneur sleeps, he confesses, about seven hours a night and works up to a hundred hours a week. Not a lot of time, I suspect, for fun. But then for Socher, his real fun seems to lie in the AI Eureka Machine that will, he promises, generate such magical products as plastic-eating bacteria, fusion reactors, and cures for cancer.

 

So what about the imminent apocalypse feared by the AI pessimists? Socher patiently dismantles the doom scenarios — everything from the paperclip machine that somehow never notices nobody is buying paperclips, to the engineered virus that would need a Wi-Fi switch inside a protein, to the robot factory with magical supply chains. Rather than an AI doomsday, he promises, we are only a few years away from the most profound scientific revolution in human history. Richard Socher better get some sleep now. Apocalypse or Renaissance, the AI maven is going to be seriously busy in the future.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       A Century in a Decade. Socher’s thesis is that the AI era will rhyme with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution together, compressing a century of scientific breakthroughs into the next ten years. His analogy for how: AI is to biology what calculus was to physics — we understand one neuron and one synapse well, and lose the thread when billions act together, which is exactly the kind of complex system AI can model. The examples are concrete rather than visionary: bacteria engineered to eat plastics and then die when the plastic runs out; new battery materials already being discovered; plasma balanced inside tokamak fusion reactors; more efficient solar panels; and the precursors, he says, of cures for particular cancers. He also makes an equality argument that he thinks philosophers and politicians have missed — the multibillionaire and the middle-class teenager carry the same phone, and most goods still bottlenecked on intelligence will follow. And science, he notes, is one of the rare industries where everyone agrees the goal is to maximize output rather than employment: nobody ever marched for more jobs in cancer research.

•       Recursive. The new company, fewer than thirty people and valued at more than $4 billion, exists to automate the scientific method itself — ideation, implementation, validation — starting with the science of AI, hence the name. Andrew’s response: “Couldn’t you be a bit more ambitious, Richard?” Socher’s framing is a history of abstraction layers: computing has climbed from assembler to C++ to Java to Python and now to English, so everyone can program — and the next layer up is the scientific method. It works best where results can be formally verified, in software and mathematics, and gets harder in large physical systems with long time horizons. His pitch to scientists is that every researcher has a long list of experiments they will never get to: this is, in his phrase, a cheat code for science. On the n

Eureka in Silicon Valley! Richard Socher on Why AI Will Unlock a New Scientific Renaissance

“Democracies don’t die silently, sleepwalking. Democracies die by going through periods of pretty serious political violence.” — Robert Pape

 

Forget all the long-term civil war scenarios of everyone from Kurt Andersen [https://keenon.substack.com/p/when-america-broke-up?r=ktr9] to Stephen Marche [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-2036-stephen-marche-author-of-the-next-civil/id1448694012?i=1000652886464]. Today’s guest Robert Pape [https://thenewpress.org/books/our-own-worst-enemies/] has spent the last thirty years at the University of Chicago studying political violence, and his warning is about the next six weeks rather than the next ten years. In his new book, Our Own Worst Enemies [https://thenewpress.org/books/our-own-worst-enemies/], Pape argues that tens of millions of Americans, on both left and right, now support political violence.

 

When it comes to an American age of violent populism, his comparison is 1968 rather than 1861. What produced that era of assassinations, violent protest, and state violence, Pape argues, was rapid social change outpacing the political system. Back then, it was fueled by the gap between the Great Migration of African-Americans and the absence of political representation, and a military draft falling hardest on the unrepresented. And it only ended in the early Seventies, with the end of the draft in 1973 and the arrival of Black mayors and the Congressional Black Caucus.

 

Today, rapid social change is once again outpacing the political and economic system. On the one hand, America is a country moving from white-majority to white-minority — with its non-Hispanic white population dropping from 76% in 1990 to 57% today. On the other, America is experiencing a dramatic economic transformation that has moved something like a tenth of American wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

 

The details of Pape’s observations are unsettling. Only one in ten of the 1,575 people prosecuted for the January 6 insurrection belonged to a militia, with 45% being doctors, lawyers, CEOs or government employees. While five to seven per cent of the George Floyd protests turned violent. But social media, he insists, is the gasoline, not the fire, of this crisis. So at least we can’t blame the internet for everything.

 

Pape does, however, offer a couple of glimmers of hope. Firstly, he reminds us that 70% of Americans still abhor political violence. Secondly, he notes that all gaps eventually close, and that we should expect American government to eventually address economic inequality. But that won’t happen before the November 2026 midterms which, he warns, might be a return of the political violence of 1968.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Democracies Don’t Sleepwalk. Pape’s opening correction: the danger isn’t a civil war five or ten years out, it’s the next few months. Democracies don’t die silently — they die through periods of serious political violence, and America is in one now. He calls it the era of violent populism, and what makes it different from the familiar extremism of recent decades is that political violence has moved from the fringe to the mainstream: tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the aisle now support it. His image is a layer cake — bottom-up violence from the left in the George Floyd protests, bottom-up violence from the right on January 6, and violence by the state, with a whole chapter on ICE and the two protesters killed in Minneapolis. Conversations about this era usually seize on one layer as though it were the whole thing. And the state violence isn’t a few rogue agents: tens of millions of Americans support the president using force against Democratic protesters.

•       The 1960s Rhyme. Not since the 1960s, Pape says, has political violence ru

Our Own Worst Enemies: Robert Pape on America’s Age of Violent Populism

“I think patrimonialism is exactly the right phrase to describe the way in which the current administration is governing.” — Peter Hall

 

Neoliberalism is dead. So what comes next? Peter Hall [https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691284934/governing-growth], a Harvard political economist for the last four decades, says the capitalist locomotive left the neoliberal station years ago. His new book, Governing Growth [https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691284934/governing-growth], names the next stop: the “knowledge economy,” the digital, globalized capitalism of the 21st century.

 

The knowledge economy made San Francisco, New York and Boston very rich. It left almost everyone else behind. Out of that came a new political cleavage — college degree versus no college degree — and, on both sides of the Atlantic, the populist wake-up call.

 

But as Jonathan Rauch [https://keenon.substack.com/p/postmodern-patrimonialism-trumps?r=ktr9] and Jeff Kopstein [https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2254-why-trump-wants-to-be?r=ktr9] have argued on this show, populism has since curdled into something worse: patrimonial capitalism, government on behalf of pitchfork-wielding oligarchs like Orbán and Trump. Ironically, it only deepens the inequalities that produced it. And it’s going to get worse. In the AI age, I suspect, we may end up looking back with nostalgia at good old late twentieth century neoliberalism.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Three Growth Regimes. Hall’s framework is simpler than it sounds. A growth regime is the combination of what governments do and what firms do, reinforcing each other. The postwar era of modernization ran from 1945 to the mid-1970s, as Europe rebuilt to compete with American industry. Then came liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s — Thatcher and Reagan, shareholder value, companies shedding everything but their core competencies and outsourcing the rest. And around 2000 a third regime began: knowledge-based growth, driven by digital technology, investment in intangibles such as research, marketing and organization rather than plant and machinery, and the explosive growth of global value chains. His distinctive move is to treat corporations as agents of change on a par with governments — his own life, he notes, is shaped as much by Harvard’s practices as by Washington’s.

•       Thirty Cities. The knowledge economy has a geography. Skill-biased technological change rewards people with college degrees, and it concentrates: about half of US GDP growth over the past twenty-five years, Hall says, has taken place in some thirty large metropolitan areas. His example is Kendall Square next to MIT, which when he arrived in the late 1970s was auto body shops and small machine tool shops and is now a centre of pharmaceutical engineering. Andrew’s is Central Square down the road, where he bought his first place in the early nineties — “you should have held on to that place,” Hall told him. The effect of all this is that many people feel left behind, and most Americans and Europeans now expect their children’s lives to be worse than their own.

•       The Populist Cleavage. Politics follows economics through what Hall calls cleavages — systematic divisions between social groups. In the 1950s and ’60s the dominant one was class, blue-collar against white-collar, and it pushed working-class grievances to the top of the agenda; that, he argues, is what built the welfare state, in Europe after the war and in America in the 1930s under a Roosevelt who sounded, Hall says, like a raving leftist. Today the dominant cleavage is education. Its roots lie in the inequality of the 1980s and 1990s, supercharged by the knowledge economy and now by AI. Mainstream parties have responded by turning back

Patrimonial Capitalism: Peter Hall on Trump, Orbán & Other Pitchfork-Wielding Plutocrats

“I think our genetic makeup makes us miserable. We evolved to be miserable.” — George Loewenstein

 

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that one before. When Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he remixed Locke’s “life, liberty and estate,” replacing the idea of property with happiness. As we know from last week’s conversation with the historian Joshua Specht, America’s age-old love affair with real estate has been perpetually mortgaged [https://keenon.substack.com/p/mortgaging-the-american-dream?r=ktr9]. And our guest today, the behavioral economist George Loewenstein [https://parnassusbooks.net/book/9780063427068], who happens — probably not coincidentally — to be the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, offers a similar warning about the ideal of happiness.

 

Happiness’ antonym is misery. In his new book The Opposite of Happiness [https://parnassusbooks.net/book/9780063427068], Loewenstein explains that it’s misery, and not happiness, which has simultaneously broken humans and built humankind. We evolved to be miserable, the behavioral economist argues, explaining that English has four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths we can sink to are incomparably deeper and more interesting than the heights we can reach, Freud’s great-grandson reassures us. Happiness is a Disneyfied mush while misery is infinitely variegated, he tells us, building a twelve-part taxonomy from envy and regret to loneliness and anxiety. The behavioral economist even invents a “Misery Survey” and cites an experiment he conducted with married couples which found that doubling their sexual frequency left them less happy.

 

So much for sex. Loewenstein spent a lifetime escaping Freud and has ended up desexualizing him for modern America. I’ve always found behavioral economics to be a particularly miserable subject (ideology dressed up as science). But maybe that’s the point. Life, liberty and the pursuit of misery. A Loewensteinian redraft of the Declaration, anyone?

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       We Evolved to Be Miserable. Loewenstein’s starting point contradicts the entire happiness industry: misery is the human constant, and happiness the occasional exception. Not because society ruins us — he takes exception to Rousseau’s idea that we are born happy and civilized into unhappiness — but because our genetic makeup makes us so. Every negative emotion evolved to push us toward behavior that served our fitness; that is precisely why they are unavoidable. His evidence is asymmetry. English has, by his count, four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths of misery are incomparably deeper than the heights of joy. And happiness is “a big mush,” while unhappiness is infinitely variegated — twelve specific miseries in the book’s second half, each with its own facial expression, its own pattern of brain activity, and its own behavior. Novelists, he says, have always known this; they are better psychologists than the academics, and misery is simply more interesting.

•       Envy Is Local. Andrew’s cheekiest question: does Loewenstein, part of what he calls the second shift of behavioral economics, envy Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler, the field’s Nobel-garlanded founders? He didn’t deny it. We don’t envy billionaires and trillionaires, he explains; we envy people close to us and just ahead, and those three are the textbook case. Then the move that makes the book humane rather than cynical: meta-emotions. You’re not supposed to envy your friends, so when you inevitably do, you feel guilty about feeling envious — misery about misery. Understanding your own negative emotions, he argues, works like understanding another person: you forgive what you und

The Pursuit of Unhappiness: George Loewenstein on Why We're Wired for Misery

Last week we were panicking about a supposedly imminent AI apocalypse. Seven days later, Keith Teare [https://thatwastheweek.com/] argues, government oversight is about as far away as it could possibly be. That’s because Musk, Altman and Amodei agreed to police themselves and test each other’s models. The doomers, says the publisher of That Was The Week [https://thatwastheweek.com/], have lost not just this week’s battle but probably the whole war.

 

So who will then write the AI rules? The people building the models, Keith says — as with California’s building codes, government sanctions the standards but engineers write them. And trust doesn’t come from authority, it comes from use. The real check on our new AI overlords, he promises, will come in court, with the American legal system holding OpenAI and Anthropic financially accountable for all damage. That should doom the doomers. If we survive the apocalypse, of course.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Week Regulation Went Away. Seven days, and the conversation reversed. Last week: the whistleblower, the headlines about AI killing everyone within a decade, the calls for global regulation. This week: Trump calling Jensen Huang live from an AI conference to make policy on the fly, Vance at All-In, and — as early as Monday — Musk, Altman and Amodei all agreeing that they are responsible for their own development, that they will slow model-building to match their control systems, and that they will begin testing each other’s models. Keith’s reading: the call for government oversight is going to fade. The New York Times map of the fight — accelerationists (Huang, Sacks, Andreessen), regulators, and a middle of Hassabis, Nadella, Pichai and Zuckerberg — holds at the edges but not the centre, which he calls shifting sands: Hassabis and Amodei made a proposal to the White House that was rejected this week; Zuckerberg then came out against government stepping in. And you cannot disambiguate self-interest from philosophy in that group: they have hearts, but they are paid to represent shareholders, and right now the rise of open source suits Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

•       Who Writes the Rules. Cohere’s Aidan Gomez asked whether a handful of market-dominant Silicon Valley companies should get to define the safety standards of a generational technology. Keith’s answer is an unembarrassed yes — and his analogy is the building code: government sanctions the rules, but the tolerances come from the architects and civil engineers who do the building, not from a committee of legislators. Which is why he thinks the Washington hearings shouldn’t be happening at all: time-wasting, pulling important people away from their work to talk to politicians whose primary interest is reelection. Government, he says, has no role yet — it is too early in the life of AI for anyone in Congress to understand it well enough to legislate. Andrew pressed the obvious objection: so we simply trust Sam, Dario and Elon to police themselves?

•       It Is You, Not the AI. The hour’s best answer, and the one that moves the argument on. It isn’t about trust, Keith says — it’s about accountability, and the machinery already exists. It would not be okay for their software to break into a bank and steal money, or into a rival and steal intellectual property; the legal system covers that today. “Up until now they’ve been saying, hey, it’s not us, it’s the AI. Well, actually, no. It is you.” And the nice thing about liability is that it makes recklessness expensive. Palantir’s CEO pushed the same logic to its conclusion on CNBC: the liabilities facing Anthropic and OpenAI are so enormous that only a government could carry them, so nationalize. Keith’s own caveat is the honest one: when he uses agents he is happy with the outcomes but cannot see the steps, and

Are the Doomers Now Doomed? A Bad Week for the AI Apocalypse.

My hometown of San Francisco has the unholy problem of a mansion shortage and mass homelessness. AI money is driving house prices to record highs, our mayor has declared a rent emergency, while in New York City housing affordability has become so acute as to become a rare bipartisan concern. This unreality of the real-estate market has heated up both local and national politics. But as Joshua Specht [https://press.princeton.edu/isbn/9780691238197] argues in his new book, Property Values [https://press.princeton.edu/isbn/9780691238197], a history that runs from the rent wars of the 1840s to the crash of 2008, the rise (and fall) of the American homeowner has always been the hottest of political potatoes.

 

The American ideal of land ownership originated in John Locke’s promise of individual self-realization through hard work. Hence the Homestead Act of 1862 and its 160 acres as both the carrot and stick of American citizenship. But as with most things Lockean, it was better in theory than in practice. The ups and particularly the downs of American history are, indeed, entangled with the crises in real-estate — from the collapse of the small farmer in the 1890s to the subprime 2008 crash. Today, that crisis can be seen on the streets of San Francisco and New York City. And for all the supposed abundant intelligence of AI, even Silicon Valley doesn’t have the magical tech to fix either my hometown problem of mansion shortages or mass homelessness.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Lockean Laboratory. The theory that widespread land ownership is the precondition for a functioning democracy is not American in origin — it runs back through Locke to a Europe where it could never be tested, because there was no land to go round unless you were already an aristocrat. America was where the experiment could actually be run — though, as Andrew notes, like most things Lockean it sounded better in theory than in practice — and the Homestead Act of 1862 was its boldest instrument: 160 acres, for little more than a title fee, against rival visions of what the country might be — the southern plantation, and a northern model of vast estates with quasi-feudal tenants. Specht sides with the historians who have lately rehabilitated the Act: yes, there was fraud, but people cheated to hold on to farms; yes, many went bankrupt, but often decades later. What it locked in was a language of ownership that has shaped American politics ever since. The beneficiaries were largely German and Scandinavian immigrants settling the Northern Plains; for native peoples it was, in his word, apocalyptic — and reservations were later broken up under the same logic, that 160 acres would make their occupants “like Americans.” Black homesteaders existed, including the town of Nicodemus in northwestern Kansas, but the land was only nominally free: you had to pay to get there and survive a year before your first crop.

•       Awake! Arouse! The book’s opening story, and the one Andrew hadn’t heard of. Between 1839 and 1845, the tenants of the great Hudson Valley estates — the Van Rensselaers, the Livingstons, holdings with thousands of tenant families — rose against a landlord class whose vision was frankly aristocratic: gentlemen farmers introducing scientific agriculture to quasi-feudal renters, iterated across the continent. The tenants issued their own declaration of independence on July 4, 1839, under handbills reading “Attention, anti-renters! Awake! Arouse!” They stopped paying, resisted the sheriffs, assembled mobs, tarred and feathered rent collectors; a man was killed. And they won — not in court but in politics, once New York’s office-seekers worked out there were votes in it, after which the manors simply stopped being a viable model. Is this Jacksonian populism or the Mamdani kind? Specht’s answer: Jacksonian, and specificall

Mortgaging the American Dream: Joshua Specht on the Rise & Fall of US Homeownership

“Today’s fascists don’t look at all like those from the past. What is similar is how they act. You’ll recognize the fascist by what they do.” — Rosan Smits

 

Fascism is a reality in both America and Europe. At least according to Rosan Smits [https://theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/fall-2026/this-is-fascism/], the Dutch political scientist whose This Is Fascism: A Wake-Up Call to Resist [https://theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/fall-2026/this-is-fascism/] is already a bestseller in Europe. Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here in 1935 as a warning about the possibility of fascism in Great Depression America. Not only does Smits argue that it can happen, but she suggests that it is happening right now.

 

Rather than unearthing swastikas and jackboots, she suggests that we identify what she calls the fascist methods which connect the Thirties with today. From Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to MAGA in America, that’s where history is repeating itself. What she sees is grievance manipulated into atavistic populist cults by insecure elites. If the original fascist movements were coping strategies for modernity, today’s fascism is a coping mechanism for postmodernity. Thus both its Christian nostalgia for the idea of truth and its attack on the scientific method. Thus today’s simultaneous embrace of digital tech and its attack on the promise of technological progress. So fascism is a kind of riddle. Which is why it appears both ubiquitous and invisible. It’s happening here, then, is a paradoxical reality. Which may be why some (like myself) are so skeptical.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Not the 1930s. Smits opens by refusing the analogy that everyone reaches for: it isn’t the 1930s, it’s 2026, and every era gets its own varieties. What she offers instead of a definition is a description — a cult of grievances turned into mass politics, manipulated by elites who feel threatened because the systems underpinning their privileges have stopped delivering for the masses. Not a disease, she insists when Andrew offers the word, but a coping strategy: rather than address root causes, point at scapegoats. It isn’t AI taking your job, it’s the migrants; it isn’t private capital wrecking the housing market, it’s the migrants. The core ideas stay constant — xenophobia, racism, violence, authoritarianism, hierarchy — but the aesthetics shape-shift, which is why the recognition test is behavioural. Hence the book’s focus on the playbook: how power is won within a democracy and then used to hollow it out. And no, she says flatly when Andrew raises Maduro: there is no fascism of the left. Andrew’s framing: if the original fascist movements were coping strategies for modernity, today’s is a coping mechanism for postmodernity — hence the Christian nostalgia for the idea of truth alongside the attack on the scientific method. Other authoritarianisms exist and the playbooks overlap, but fascism is a right-wing form.

•       The Dutch Warning. The most alarming stretch of the hour, and the part Andrew couldn’t argue with, because Smits is reporting from home. The international story after the Dutch election was Wilders’ setback — he came second by a margin. The domestic story is that the far-right bloc as a whole grew to its largest ever presence in parliament, polling around 40%, and is radicalizing: Wilders is now the moderate one. The party to his right, with open Nazi sympathies and around eighteen seats in a hundred-and-fifty-seat chamber, holds rallies with neo-fascist groups, argues the great replacement in parliament, says the Netherlands should be for white people only, and wants mass deportation of second- and third-generation citizens. It is polling as one of the largest parties. Its base is not the elderly: it is strongest among students and among schoolchildren too

It's Happening Here: Rosan Smits on Fascism in America & Europe

“Since Trump’s second election we’ve been in a wave of cowardice, where people have decided — partly by observing what others like them are doing — that there’s no viability to standing up on principle.” — Jacob Weisberg

 

Michelle Goldberg devoted her Monday New York Times column to two new books shaming the elites who caved to Trump. Both of them have appeared on the show this week: Susan Neiman’s Call It Evil [https://keenon.substack.com/p/she-calls-it-evil?r=ktr9] on Monday, and now Jacob Weisberg [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/818503/profiles-in-cowardice-by-jacob-weisberg/]’s Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/818503/profiles-in-cowardice-by-jacob-weisberg/].

 

Reversing JFK’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, Weisberg inducts eight powerful Americans who didn’t stand up to Trump into his hall of shame. It’s quite a list. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Wall Street’s Stephen Schwarzman, big law’s Brad Karp, Senator Mitch McConnell, Dartmouth College president Sian Beilock, Chief Justice John Roberts, media influencer Megyn Kelly, and — perhaps most controversially — former President George W. Bush.

 

Rather than MAGA flunkeys, Weisberg wanted figures who had stood up to Trump in the first term and then folded in the second. People with, as he puts it, interior drama. Bezos gave up a $10 billion Pentagon contract rather than soften the Post, then he threw in the moral towel by going to Mar-a-Lago and paying Melania $40 million to make an Amazon documentary. What changed? According to Weisberg, Bezos was fearful that his space startup, Blue Origin, would lose out to SpaceX on government contracts. No, not exactly Eichmann. But nonetheless sad if true. Especially since Bezos has the billions to do whatever he wants.

 

His eight and their ilk aren’t monsters, Weisberg suggests. It’s just that their fear, ambition and self-preservation are contagious, and such pathetic behaviour is herd-like. That’s their soap operatic interior drama. The banality of cowardice. More grist for Susan Neiman’s thesis about the nature of evil in the Trump epoch.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Not Kennedy’s Book. The title is a departure point, not a homage — and Weisberg is quick to note the irony beneath it. JFK’s Profiles in Courage was written at the height of the McCarthy era by a senator who was conspicuously uncourageous about McCarthy, ducking even the censure vote, and no better on civil rights; Weisberg’s reading is that Kennedy wrote the book to give himself courage by studying senators who had sacrificed their careers for principle. (It won the only Pulitzer ever awarded to a president, with the help of a ghostwriter.) What he kept was the structure: eight representative figures, each standing in for a part of the problem. What he added was the inversion, and a working definition — not physical cowardice but moral cowardice, the rarer failure. His epigraph is Twain: why is physical courage so common, and moral courage so rare?

•       Cowardice Is Contagious. The book’s explanatory heart, and the reason it isn’t a gallery of villains. Fear, greed and ambition motivate most people most of the time, Weisberg argues, and political behaviour is herd-like: people copy their peer groups. Courage is contagious — and so is cowardice. His cleanest illustration is the tech elite, who acted almost as one after January 6 to throw Trump off every platform and swear off donations to Republicans who voted against certification, and who now, again almost as one, think the opposite. Their defence is competitive necessity: standing up would hand an advantage to rivals. Andrew’s challenge — the wildebeest crossing the river, where the first ones in are the brave

Eight Profiles in Cowardice: Jacob Weisberg on Bezos, Bush & the Other Collaborators of the MAGA Age

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