Keen On America

• The Case for American Power: Why Hypocrisy is the Price of Idealism

  America is not only a good country, but it can also make the world a better place. That’s the somewhat surprising conclusion of the progressive Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, whose new book, The Case for American Power, argues that America remains the one great power that can improve the world. Hamid, once a militant anti-Iraq War campus activist, has undergone a striking ideological journey in the quarter-century since 9/11. The moral arc of his life now bends towards a practical, imperfect morality. This son of Egyptian immigrants champions American dominance over Chinese and Russian dictatorships—while insisting that hypocrisy, far from being a fatal flaw, is actually the homage that vice pays to virtue. The gap between American ideals and reality, he argues, is where moral progress happens. He even has a word for this: asymptote. Meaning that American idealism, while it can never fully be reached, is still of great value. 1. The Left Has Lost Faith in America—And the Numbers Prove ItIn the early 2000s, 85% of Democrats were extremely or very proud to be American. By 2025, that number has plummeted to just 36%—one of the most precipitous drops in modern polling history. Hamid argues this self-loathing among progressives is dangerous, leaving a vacuum that allows illiberal powers like China and Russia to fill. The alternative to American power isn’t no power—it’s worse power.2. Hypocrisy Isn’t a Bug, It’s a FeatureDrawing on French philosopher François de La Rochefoucauld, Hamid insists that “hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.” America is accused of hypocrisy precisely because it aspires to ideals it often fails to meet. China and Russia are rarely called hypocrites—not because they’re more honest, but because they make no pretense of moral purpose. The gap between American ideals and reality is uncomfortable, but it’s also where progress happens. Close the gap by abandoning ideals, and you get pure cynicism.3. George W. Bush Got Some Things Right (If You Take Out Iraq)This is Hamid’s most counterintuitive argument. While the Iraq War was an unjustified disaster, Bush’s Freedom Agenda—pressuring allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia to open their political systems—represented a fusion of power and moral purpose that Hamid admires. Bush spoke eloquently about universal human dignity and Arab aspirations for democracy. The problem wasn’t the idealism; it was the catastrophic application of military force where it wasn’t warranted.4. Conditional Aid Is the Answer—Even for IsraelHamid advocates suspending military aid to Egypt ($1.4 billion annually) and Saudi Arabia until they demonstrate meaningful reform: stopping journalist executions, allowing local elections, releasing dissidents. The same principle applies to Israel. Biden’s failure to condition aid during Gaza’s mass civilian casualties—what Hamid calls a genocide—represents an abdication of moral responsibility. These countries depend on American weapons. Washington should use that leverage to demand they share our values, not give them carte blanche.5. Asymptote: The Mathematical Concept That Explains American IdealismAn asymptote is a curve that approaches a line but never quite intersects with it. This, Hamid argues, is America—perpetually striving toward ideals we’ll never fully achieve, but getting closer through incremental progress. We’ll never be perfect, but we can curve toward perfection. The right under Trump has abandoned even the pretense of aspiring to higher ideals. The left’s job is to reclaim that progressive tradition: reminding Americans that moral progress is possible, even if completion isn’t.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

  --------  

  40:24

  --------

  40:24
• Obama as Gorbachev and Trump as Yeltsin: How America is Like the Soviet Union Before Its Collapse

  We’ve done shows before on how contemporary America resembles late-stage Soviet society. But none quite as intriguing as with the Russian-born, US-based journalist Mikhail Zygar. In The Dark Side of the Earth, his new history of the Soviet Union’s demise, Zygar underlines the moral exhaustion of its citizens. People no longer believed in anything, he reports on the collapse of this vast Euro-Asian empire. And that’s the analogy Zygar makes with contemporary America which, he suggests, is equally exhausted. From the Soviet Union to the United States, a descent into a morally bankrupt nihilism defines the end of empire. Zygar even identifies the idealistic Obama with Gorbachev and the pugnacious Trump with Yeltsin, implying that a self-styled Putin-like “savior” lurks in the dark shadow of the American future. 1. Putin’s Russia is worse than the Soviet Union The Soviet Union had dozens of political prisoners in the 1970s; Putin’s Russia has thousands. Putin threatens the West with nuclear weapons far more aggressively than Soviet leaders ever did. What we thought was a victory over totalitarianism proved short-lived—Putin has built something more oppressive than what collapsed.2. The 1991 coup failed because of one woman History turns on ordinary people, not just great men. Emma Yazov, wife of the Soviet Defense Minister, spent three days crying in her husband’s office, demanding he withdraw tanks from Moscow and resign from the junta. On the third day, he did. Her belief in democracy defeated the KGB and the Soviet military.3. Soviet citizens stopped believing after 1968 The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia killed whatever faith remained in communism. Afterward, Soviet people became perhaps the most cynical on earth, practicing “internal immigration”—pretending to participate in official life while living secret, clandestine private lives. When no one believes in an empire’s ideology, collapse becomes inevitable.4. Solzhenitsyn’s ideas shaped both Putin and the American New Right The author of The Gulag Archipelago evolved from Soviet dissident to fierce critic of liberal democracy. He wanted to preserve the Soviet empire by replacing communist ideology with Orthodox Christianity—precisely what Putin is attempting now. His attacks on Western liberalism’s “weakness” and “woke culture” have found new audiences among American conservatives.5. Dick Cheney’s approach to Soviet collapse enabled Putin George H.W. Bush and James Baker believed preserving a democratic Soviet Union would create a reliable partner. Dick Cheney disagreed, preferring “15 little dictatorships instead of one mighty Soviet Union.” Cheney’s view prevailed. Without a Marshall Plan for post-Soviet states, Russian nationalism flourished, and Putin portrayed the collapse as Western conspiracy—the foundation of his power today.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

  --------  

  46:12

  --------

  46:12
• Dr Stranglove 2.0: Silicon Valley as the New Trillion Dollar Military-Industrial Complex

  The world is a remake. Yesterday’s show featured the MAGA remake of The Handmaid’s Tale. Today it’s Dr Strangelove 2.0 and the remaking of the trillion-dollar military-industrial complex in Silicon Valley. As William Hartung, co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine, notes, Dwight Eisenhower’s old military-industrial complex has migrated west to Silicon Valley. It even has a Strangelovian anti-hero: mad Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the Curtis Le May character behind other Silicon Valley military start-ups. No wonder current American foreign policy—with its Monroe Doctrine meddling in Latin America—also appear to be a giant remake.1. Silicon Valley Has Become the New Military-Industrial Complex Dwight Eisenhower’s old guard defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman—are being displaced by tech companies like Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX. The “military-industrial-digital complex” represents a fundamental shift in how America builds and profits from its defense apparatus.2. The Defense Budget Is Out of Control—and Growing America spends roughly $1.5 trillion annually on military defense when you include the Pentagon budget, nuclear weapons, veterans’ care, and interest on past war debt. This dwarfs spending on social programs like nutrition assistance and represents a stark trade-off: F-35s or feeding children.3. Peter Thiel Is the Curtis LeMay of Silicon Valley Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel embodies the dangerous fusion of tech innovation and military hawkishness. His companies profit from government surveillance and defense contracts while he promotes an ideology that treats Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as a superior form of human being who should colonize space and reshape foreign policy.4. The “Rebels” Narrative Is Corporate Propaganda Silicon Valley defense contractors style themselves as disruptive rebels challenging Pentagon bureaucracy, but they’re simply a new generation of war profiteers. They’re not democratizing foreign policy—they’re making weapons more efficiently and lobbying for more aggressive military postures to justify their business models.5. America’s Foreign Policy Has Become a Dangerous Remake From Monroe Doctrine-style meddling in Latin America to increasingly bellicose rhetoric about China, American foreign policy is recycling Cold War playbooks with 21st-century technology. The merger of Silicon Valley’s move-fast-and-break-things ethos with Pentagon power creates genuinely Strangelovian risks.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

  --------  

  32:50

  --------

  32:50
• The Handmaid's Tale Is No Longer Fiction—Welcome to the Brave New MAGA World of Trad Wives and State Fecundity

  Back in 2021, Margaret Atwood came on the show to give her dark take on the American future. Four years later, Atwood’s prescience, particularly in her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale, is increasingly self-evident. As the journalist Irin Carmon notes, MAGA America has become an Atwoodian dystopia of trad wives and state fecundity. But it is also, Carmon warns in her new book Unbearable, a place that actively discriminates against pregnant women, especially those of color. American women are dying in childbirth at three times the rate of their peers in other wealthy nations. Even in liberal New York City, Black women are nine to twelve times likelier to die than white women. So MAGA America is simultaneously fetishizing and punishing fecundity—celebrating “Trump babies” while jailing pregnant women who test positive for drugs. Forget the trad wives. The problem lies with the trad men making pregnancy so unbearable in America today.1. America’s Maternal Mortality Crisis Is a National Disgrace American women die in childbirth at three times the rate of their peers in other wealthy nations. In New York City—one of the world’s wealthiest cities—Black women are nine to twelve times likelier to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. For every death, there are 60-70 cases of severe maternal morbidity, including hemorrhage, sepsis, and hysterectomy.2. MAGA’s Pronatalism Is Rooted in White Supremacy The natalist ideology espoused by RFK Jr., JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Trump himself is explicitly linked to eugenics and deportation. As Carmon notes, “We want our people to have babies” is something you hear openly from MAGA leaders. They celebrate “Trump babies” while considering children born to immigrants as not truly American—making fertility central to their white supremacist project.3. Pregnancy Has Been Criminalized in America Since Dobbs, there have been 412 pregnancy-related arrests in the United States, about half of them in Alabama alone. Women are being jailed for testing positive for drugs while pregnant—not offered addiction treatment, but arrested and held on impossible $10,000 cash bail. Some women don’t even know they’re pregnant until they’re tested upon admission to jail. Their pregnancies become evidence against them.4. The Handmaid’s Tale Was Always About American Slavery As Carmon points out, the dystopia Atwood portrayed was already the reality for enslaved Black women in America. The “father of obstetrics and gynecology,” J. Marion Sims, experimented on enslaved women—Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy—for years without anesthesia or consent. American pregnancy care was founded on the torture of Black women’s bodies, and that legacy continues today.5. The Trump Administration Is Erasing the Evidence Trump has effectively canceled PRMS (the pregnancy research monitoring service) that tracks maternal morbidity and mortality nationally. Research grants studying how to improve maternal health are being cut as “DEI violations.” CDC pregnancy data is being deleted from websites. As Carmon warns: you can’t solve a problem you’re not allowed to document or even count.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

  --------  

  35:36

  --------

  35:36
• From Pigeons to Polyamory: A New Yorker Cartoonist's Fix For American Loneliness

  How to fix today’s epidemic of loneliness? For the New Yorker cartoonist and author Sophie Lucido Johnson, the answer involves both pigeons and polyamory. As she argues in her brand new book, Kin: The Future of Family, Johnson provides the tools to forge kinship in everything from asking for help on a grocery run, to choosing to have roommates later in life to combat loneliness, to living in modern day “mommunes” of single mothers sharing bills and responsibilities. And the pigeons and polyamory? Johnson draws on pigeon behavior—how pair-bonded birds navigate home more successfully than solitary ones—as a metaphor for human interdependence. Her own polyamorous life, detailed in her popular 2018 memoir Many Love, exemplifies her broader argument: that intentional, non-traditional relationship structures can provide a much richer web of connectivity than the isolated nuclear family. So the future of family goes way beyond traditional family. It’s pigeons, polyamory and mommunes. * The nuclear family is historically recent and economically failing. Johnson argues the isolated two-parent household is a post-industrial phenomenon—barely 150 years old—that leaves people emotionally and financially overburdened.* Loneliness is deadlier than obesity or alcoholism. Research shows chronic loneliness increases mortality more than smoking 15 cigarettes daily, primarily because isolated people lack support networks to catch health crises early.* Small acts of connection matter as much as close relationships. “Loose ties”—knowing your neighbors’ names, chatting at the grocery store—provide significant mental health benefits. Johnson advocates borrowing a bundt pan from a neighbor instead of ordering from Amazon.* Polyamory isn’t just about sex—it’s about intentional kinship. Johnson’s polyamorous practice means cultivating multiple committed relationships with extensive communication, creating a web of support that nuclear families can’t provide alone.* We need new language for chosen family. Johnson proposes “kin” for people who are more than friends but outside traditional family structures—roommates, co-parents in “mommunes,” neighbors who share resources—arguing blood ties shouldn’t define our primary support networks.* Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

  --------  

  41:53

  --------

  41:53

More Business podcasts

Trending Business podcasts

About Keen On America

Keen On America: Podcasts in Family