“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

“You should fight against tyranny in any form it takes. You’re not betraying the founding by standing up to tyranny — you’re following in their footsteps.” — Dennis Rasmussen

 

After Lincoln, he was the best known man in nineteenth century America. And the most photographed too, some 160 portraits of the ex-slave’s unmistakable face still surviving. So there was nothing hidden about Frederick Douglass. And yet the more we know about this most remarkable American, the more enigmatic he becomes.

 

At first, he was America’s fiercest critic. In the early 1840s he accused the founders of being “little better than a band of pirates” and described the Constitution as a “wicked compact.” By 1851, however, he radically revised his view of that same Constitution, eulogizing it as “a glorious liberty document” that outlawed slavery outright. So why did Douglass change his mind so radically? Is it really possible that he was simultaneously America’s fiercest critic and its greatest fan? That’s the riddle at the heart of Dennis Rasmussen [https://press.princeton.edu/isbn/9780691294070]’s new book Frederick Douglass’s American Founding [https://press.princeton.edu/isbn/9780691294070].

 

Rasmussen reminds us that Douglass got his political education from William Lloyd Garrison, the unbending New Englander who burned a copy of the Constitution and ground its ashes under his intolerant heel. Then Douglass — having moved to Rochester, started his own newspaper, and fallen in with Gerrit Smith’s political abolitionists — spent two years changing his mind about the Constitution. His logic was startlingly modern. Scalia before Antonin Scalia. Studying the historic document like a biblical scholar, Douglass argued that it never mentions slavery nor race. So the rights it confers, he argued, belong to all Americans. This exegesis made him more militant than Lincoln, because he argued that such a careful reading of the Constitution demanded immediate emancipation.

 

Was Douglass bought or paid off by Gerrit Smith? Naturally the bitter Garrisonians said he was. But Dennis Rasmussen disputes this, arguing that the timing doesn’t work. What Douglass earned instead, Rasmussen argues, was the right to call himself and his fellow abolitionists the founders’ true heirs, more American than even Lincoln and the Republicans. So no mystery, then. The most familiar face in America confessing, in public, that he had been wrong for a decade. If only we had such political enigmas today.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Band of Pirates. Where Douglass started. Escaping slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore at twenty, he entered the abolitionist movement under William Lloyd Garrison — editor of The Liberator, organizer of the largest antislavery society, and the man who called the Constitution “an agreement with death and a covenant with hell,” once burning a copy at a rally and grinding its ashes under his heel. Through the 1840s Douglass held the Garrisonian line: the founders were hypocrites who complained about a three-penny tax while kidnapping and enslaving a huge share of the population; the Constitution was not merely flawed but evil, with its three-fifths clause, fugitive slave clause and slave trade clause. And these were not respectable opinions. Rasmussen’s reminder: even in the North, abolitionists were the tiniest and most despised minority in American politics — Garrison was tarred, feathered and dragged around Boston by a rope.

•       The Two Years That Changed Him. The conversion ran from roughly 1849 to 1851, and it had a geography. Douglass left the East Coast for Rochester and started a newspaper against Garrison’s wishes, landing in the heartland of the political abolitionists — the Liberty Party, the Radical Abolition Party — who believed slavery should be fought through

The Enigmatic Mr Douglass: Dennis Rasmussen on America's Fiercest Critic & its Greatest Fan.

“Add up all of their wealth — it’s more than ten times the Forbes 400 combined.” — Eric Zwick

 

Yesterday, the democratic socialist Susan Neiman blamed [https://keenon.substack.com/p/she-calls-it-evil?r=ktr9] free market economics for all the evils of our age. But the market gives and the market takes. And in America it has minted three million millionaires whose collective wealth radically outstrips Silicon Valley’s billionaires. This human backbone of American capitalism is described in Eric Zwick [https://everywheremillionaire.substack.com/]’s and Owen Zidar’s The Everywhere Millionaire [https://everywheremillionaire.substack.com/], a book about who is really rich in America and how they got there.

 

Forget Musk and Bezos, Zwick says. The real money is a hot dog man from suburban Chicago with a superyacht called Top Dog. Three million Americans own private businesses worth $5 million or more — dentists, beer distributors, HVAC contractors, Wendy’s franchisees — averaging $25 million each. Their combined wealth, Zwick says, is more than ten times the Forbes 400. And they are everywhere in America, from Walker County, Alabama to the Lake of the Ozarks.

 

Are these millionaires evil? They are certainly obsessed, relentless, bad at hobbies and mostly Republican. But evil? Only perhaps to ideologues resentful of other people’s success. In The Everywhere Millionaire, Zwick and Zidar show — in spite of growing inequality and shrinking opportunity — that the American Dream is still alive. Democrats might take note. Especially if they want to win back power in an America still dependent on Main Street for its prosperity.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Three Million of Them. The book’s central fact, and it reorders the American wealth debate: the everywhere millionaires are private business owners with a net worth of at least $5 million, averaging around $25 million, and Zwick and Zidar count roughly three million of them. Add their wealth together and it comes to more than ten times the Forbes 400 combined — not ten times Musk, ten times all four hundred. The market gives and the market takes, as Andrew put it — and here it has minted a class whose collective wealth radically outstrips Silicon Valley’s billionaires. They are also, unlike the coastal fortunes, geographically everywhere: the map lights up rather than clustering in four cities, with the highest average in Walker County, Alabama, and pockets around the Lake of the Ozarks, Aspen and less famous mountain towns. Why haven’t we heard of them? They don’t sell clicks. They run unglamorous businesses — a beer distributor, a dentist with a regional network, an HVAC contractor with trucks around town — and they aren’t buying media companies to be noticed.

•       Top Dog. The characters are the book’s pleasure. Dick Portillo started a hot dog stand in suburban Chicago fifty years ago with $1,100, the son of immigrants raised in a housing project; he sold the business decades later and now owns, as Andrew put it, a different kind of housing project in Naples, Florida — the authors found him via yacht registration data, because his superyacht is called Top Dog. Was he moral? Ask Mike Ditka, whose competing Ditka Dogs Portillo set about crushing. “Probably not super moral,” Zwick conceded — which is rather the point: these are not heroes or villains, just people obsessed with growing a business. Larry Miller went from auto parts distributor to dealer to owner of the Utah Jazz (and is pictured giving Karl Malone advice on the pick-and-roll). Junior Bridgeman left the Milwaukee Bucks for the deeply unglamorous business of Wendy’s franchises and made hundreds of millions. Tracy Britt Cool left Berkshire Hathaway to build her own.

•       The Accident of 1986. Zwick thi

Three Million Millionaires: Eric Zwick Finds the American Dream on Main Street USA

“If we leave words like evil in the hands of people who are fanatical, who are demonizing, we are leaving the most powerful weapons we have in the hands of people who don’t know how to use them.” — Susan Neiman

 

Susan Neiman [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324131045] is cornering the market in books about evil. First there was her 2002 Evil in Modern Thought, an alternative history of philosophy. Then Learning from the Germans, her 2019 treatise about race and the memory of evil. And now Call It Evil [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324131045], an attempt to understand the Trump era which offers an alternative history of contemporary economics.

 

So what, exactly, is “evil”? Rather than defining what she describes as our most “explosive” word, she gracefully dances around it with all the elliptical subtlety of a clever philosopher. In spite of its Trumpian subtitle (“Understanding the Trump Era”), the book isn’t an inventory of Trump’s crimes. Instead, it investigates why half of America accepted a man whose (evil?) character was already blatantly self-evident.

 

Her answer focuses on economics rather than politics. The major source of evil in our age, she argues, is an ideology built on a falsified Adam Smith — self-interest as the whole of human nature — propped up by evolutionary psychologists misreading Darwin, and sold so effectively that we now mistake it for common sense. In a word: neo-liberalism. The (a)moral universe of the Heritage Foundation, Milton Friedman and Margaret “there is no alternative” Thatcher.

 

So is capitalism evil? Yes, the philosopher suggests, quoting Einstein and borrowing from contemporary economists like Amartya Sen. But rather than a return to Marx, she wants us to reimagine the 19th century Kantian socialist, Eduard Bernstein, in the context of the injustices of contemporary capitalism. Rather than evil, Neiman really is a philosopher of the good. She wants us to imagine that gap between the way the world is and the way it ought to be. Doing good means standing up to evil, she says. Like Henry Fonda’s performance as the morally defiant juror in the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Why She Won’t Define It. Evil is “the most explosive word we have,” and Neiman refuses to reduce it to a sentence — as, she notes, Kant refused before her. It is not a theological concept (the Bible itself shows moral concepts precede theological ones); it is the point at which the gap between the world as it is and as it ought to be becomes so large “that we don’t know how to live in a world where that abyss opens up.” Children spot the gap first, though they call it unfair: the bully in the sandbox is the first lesson in a world that contains injustice. Her real argument is strategic. We have become afraid of moral concepts because we cannot give necessary and sufficient conditions for them — and the cost of that squeamishness is that the word passes to the polemical and the demonizing. Andrew pressed her twice on the dodge; her answer, eventually, was sharp: she is not unwilling to use the word, she is simply more interested in analyzing it than defining it — which is why she has called both the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s response evil, two entirely different kinds, and why any single definition covering both would let one of them off.

•       The Falsified Adam Smith. The book’s core, and its surprise: a moral philosopher writing about economics. The major source of evil in our time, Neiman argues, is the ideology derived from a bad and simplistic reading of Adam Smith — that we are driven by self-interest and nothing else matters — a reading she calls not a simplification but a falsification, touted by Milton Friedman and still pumped out daily by the Heritage Founda

She Calls It Evil: Susan Neiman on Germany, Capitalism & the Banality of Trump

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