Keen On America

Recorded just before the midterms, the DC-based foreign policy guru Charles Kupchan predicted they weren’t going to be kind to the Republicans. He was right. So if he can predict the future of domestic politics, what about international relations? Can he tell us what is about to happen in our increasingly anarchic global system?
Kupchan’s new book Bringing Order to Anarchy is less predictive than prescriptive. He argues that the answer to our multipolar disorder is not the United Nations but something older and, frankly, less democratic. His model is the Concert of Europe, the club of five great powers that, in his view, maintained peace on the European continent for most of the nineteenth century.
His diagnosis of our current disorder is that two tectonic shifts have occurred simultaneously. Firstly, international power has moved west to east and north to south on a scale not seen in centuries. Secondly, the digital revolution, particularly the automation of work, has dismantled the social contract of the industrial era. The result is the international version of a Gramscian interregnum. The old is dying and the new cannot be born. And everywhere around us are the morbid symptoms of decay.
So should Trump sit down with Putin and Xi to (re)create a 21st-Century Concert of the World? Kupchan’s answer is not yet. A concert needs conservative powers practising restraint, and Putin is a revisionist who wants the status quo overturned. The concert, he says, will have to await the post-Putin era.
What he also says is that America needs a “national conversation” about both the digital revolution and its role in the world. This conversation, I suspect, is about to begin. But it will be increasingly a post-MAGA, post-Trump one. He’s waiting for a world after Putin. The rest of us are waiting for the one after MAGA. Post-Trump and post-Putin. That’s how the world can bring back order to the international system.

FURTHER READING

•   Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come (Yale University Press for the Council on Foreign Relations, October 2026, 328pp).
•   Kupchan’s Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World (2020) is the prehistory of the present mood, and the book he was on the show with in 2021.
•   The episodes AK cites along the way: Michael Dobbs on The Six Minute War, Eliot Cohen on The Strategist, and Anthony Badger on Prosperity Road.
•   Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks — the source of the interregnum and its morbid symptoms, which Kupchan has now used on this show twice.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Charles A. Kupchan is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. He served on the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and Obama, and is the author of Isolationism, No One’s World and How Enemies Become Friends.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“You don’t accidentally end up with five wives.” — Mark Binelli on Martin Scorsese

We are filming in New York today, which is appropriate for a show about Martin Scorsese. Mark Binelli’s Just a Shot Away is out today, the first substantial biography of the great New York City film director. Binelli got no cooperation from Scorsese with the book, which isn’t really surprising given the author’s interest in the Scorsese family’s connection with organized crime. Binelli himself is more generous about the refusal. A big book about his life that he wouldn’t have had control over, he says, offered Scorsese no obvious upside. Control, of course, being the key word. Binelli directs Just a Shot Away, not Marty.
The surprising thing is how close the mob actually was to a working-class Sicilian-American family like the Scorseses. Not as a recreation of Goodfellas or even Mean Streets, but more as the mechanism by which an Italian family in Little Italy got a job in the garment district or settled a dispute with a neighbor. Binelli suggests that Scorsese’s father was not a gangster. But his uncle worked for one, a bootlegger and hitman who let the young Scorsese film part of his first feature on his roof.
Then the two obsessions. Films, which Scorsese could recall with a memory his friends called freakish, in an era before Google, YouTube or Wikipedia. And the church, which came relatively late in his adolescence — his parents were barely observant, and he only found Catholicism when the family moved back to Elizabeth Street. For Scorsese, of course, the cinema became the church and both his life and work are always a shot away from God.
What all this cost is the other half of the Scorsese story. Five wives, two daughters he was barely a father to, and a rock ’n’ roll style decade of drugs. It’s an astonishing history of one of America’s greatest 20th-century artists. And Binelli tells it all with the loving grace of both a wide-eyed fan and a sophisticated cultural historian. “You talkin’ to me?” De Niro’s Travis Bickle asks in Taxi Driver. Binelli suggests that Martin Scorsese has been talking to all of us for the last sixty years.

FURTHER READING

•   Just a Shot Away: Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film (Metropolitan Books, 3 November 2026, 544pp). Binelli writes for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be.
•   The two documentaries Binelli wishes Scorsese had made more of: Italian American (1974), on his parents, and American Boy (1978), on his friend Steven Prince — drug procurer, bodyguard, roommate.
•   Jonathan Taplin produced both Mean Streets and The Last Waltz, and has been on this show several times.
•   Scorsese on Scorsese, from the other side: Italianamerican aside, the key primary sources Binelli drew on are archive recordings — including Scorsese and De Niro brainstorming the earliest version of Raging Bull.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be and the novel Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!. He grew up in a Catholic family outside Detroit and lived for years in Scorsese’s old neighborhood, on the corner of Spring and Mulberry.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

How to resist bad government? Become a dissident is the standard response. But what happens if you work in that government? And if that government tampers with or eliminates your job?
That’s the focus of Blockers, the new bestseller by Michael Lewis about the rebels in the deep state that resisted the second Trump administration. It takes its title from Elon Musk, who instructed the DOGE twenty-somethings he sent to Washington to find the “blockers” and eliminate them. On Musk, Lewis is withering. A man of incessant lies, he concludes. And worse. When Musk named a USIP contact as a Taliban ally on Fox News, the Taliban — who knew perfectly well he wasn’t one — rounded up his family for beatings. Lewis calls that “treason.” Perhaps the deep state should investigate.
Lewis features six blockers. They are mostly career civil servants who knew the law and declined to break it. Kathleen Walters, the chief privacy officer at the IRS, was asked to hand the Department of Homeland Security a database of seven million undocumented workers, including their home addresses, so that ICE could round them up. Walters said no, and it cost her her career. Others in the same building folded and, presumably, are still at their desks. One wonders how well they sleep at night now. Maybe, as I suggest to Lewis, his next book will be about them.
Michael Lewis is careful not to call any of his blockers dissidents, a mantle, he says, they wouldn’t accept. But he does say some of them are admirable in the same way as the people who resisted the Germans rolling into Paris. Dissidents or not, deep state rebels like Kathleen Walters are case studies in civic virtue. All Americans should recognize their quietly heroic work.

FURTHER READING

•   Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State (W. W. Norton, October 2026). The companion volume is The Fifth Risk, his 2018 book on the first Trump transition.
•   Jill Lepore, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State (Norton, August 2026) — the case against technologizing the state, which AK puts to him here.
•   Max Stier’s Partnership for Public Service — the organization Lewis calls the most worthy of your dollars, and the body behind the Sammies.
•   Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance — the argument about state capacity that this book joins from the other direction.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Michael Lewis is the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, The Fifth Risk and Going Infinite, among many others. He hosts the podcast Against the Rules and lives in Berkeley, California.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“People ask me if I think Helms was really offended by this stuff, and I think Helms was having the time of his fucking life.” — Isaac Butler

A few days ago, Katy Siegel and Elise Armani came on the show to assess the state of American culture in 1976. What was America? we asked. Today’s guest picks up the story immediately afterwards, when the health of this culture sharply declines. Isaac Butler’s The Perfect Moment is a history of the eighties and nineties, when America’s culture wars became political cudgels of the right. It’s the story of an increasingly imperfect America in the age of Jesse Helms and Robert Mapplethorpe.
The title is Mapplethorpe’s. It was the name of his retrospective that the Corcoran Gallery cancelled in 1989. The same show that later resulted in a Cincinnati museum director being indicted for obscenity — a first in American history.
Butler reminds us of the strangely consensual world that existed before the culture wars. It was an America in which the CIA covertly funded the artists that the FBI was investigating. An America where Louis Armstrong was sent abroad as a cultural ambassador while the agency plotted in the countries he was touring. An America in which a congressman was convinced that drip paintings were encrypted maps of American military assets. A liberal America where the culture and the state maintained a polite, albeit tangled, relationship.
And then, with the birth of the culture wars, God, sex and art all acquired instant political charge. Butler’s argument is about power, not taste. He reminds us that a giggly Jesse Helms kept the Mapplethorpe catalogue in his office and showed his favorite (ie: most vulgar) pages to visitors. Butler suggests that Helms was having the time of his life. Perhaps. Although this culture war wasn’t a lot of fun for the rest of us. Certainly not for the under-fire artists. Nor for an art-loving public caught in its hysterical crossfire. That, I’m afraid, is what America has become.

FURTHER READING

•   The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars (Bloomsbury, June 2026). Butler also wrote The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act and, with Dan Kois, The World Only Spins Forward, an oral history of Angels in America.
•   “Anything Could Become a Battleground” — the Los Angeles Review of Books on why the first culture war was fought over photographs.
•   The Washington Monthly on the galleries where it happened, and the Boston Globe on Butler, AIDS and New York.
•   James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (Basic Books, 1991) — the book that coined the phrase, a year before Pat Buchanan made it a slogan.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Isaac Butler is a writer, director and cultural historian based in Brooklyn. He is the author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act and the co-author, with Dan Kois, of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America. He co-created the stage work Real Enemies, on conspiracy theory and American paranoia, and writes on film, theatre and politics.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“The lynching itself was the explanation. The adults who were participating in a communal homicide are the curriculum.” — Stacey Patton

For Halloween, a true American horror story. Last week, Joseph Kelly came on the show to argue that racialized American fascism has a prehistory running back to 1818. But today’s guest goes much, much further — both in time and in criminality. Stacey Patton wrote her doctorate on the racialization of American childhood and her new book is entitled Strung Up. It’s the story of how white America learned to lynch Black children.
“Learned” is key. Patton writes about the people who turned up to watch the lynchings so endemic in American history. She traces the practice back across the Atlantic, to a Europe with centuries of history of public execution and the punishment of children as theater. And she sets out the two versions of 19th-century American childhood. The Lockean child to be nurtured and rewarded. The fallen child to be corrected and punished. White childhood and Black childhood. Trick or treat. No candy for guessing who got what in America.
Patton describes an image from Waco, Texas in 1916, then a supposedly modern and progressive town. The first people to reach the lynching of Jesse Washington were children, running as though to a parade. Small boys were paid to gather kindling. A reporter asked a father why he had a toddler on his shoulders and was told the child could not learn the “proper way” too young.
There will be those who say that Patton exaggerates in order to vilify American history. But last night I saw Once Upon a Time in Harlem, the excellent documentary by David Greaves, built from his father William’s 1972 footage. It’s not really about racial crimes, but there’s one scene in the movie featuring photos of White kids at the lynching of Black people. Stacey Patton’s Strung Up is already a USA Today best-seller. It’s not hard to understand why. Happy Halloween.

FURTHER READING

•   Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children (Beacon Press, October 2026). Patton also wrote Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America and the memoir That Mean Old Yesterday.
•   Kohen Wiley was shot by an officer in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia, Mississippi in June. The state attorney general ruled the shooting justified on 19 October; the officer has since resigned and the family is seeking a federal investigation.
•   Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights — the scholarship Patton builds on about who was allowed to be innocent.
•   Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, is the thesis Patton pushes back on: childhood as a modern invention, a claim later historians have narrowed.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Stacey Patton is a journalist and academic in the School of Communications at Howard University. Her doctorate in African American history examined the racialization of childhood in America between 1880 and 1954. She is the author of That Mean Old Yesterday and Spare the Kids, and writes a widely read newsletter on race, childhood and violence.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.