Keen On America

“I felt sad after every interview. Because it’s not real. These AI are able to elicit a very convincing illusion of empathy — even love. But it’s fake. And these people are alone.” — Victoria Hetherington
 
One night in 2023, the developers at Replika — a so-called AI intimacy company — changed a few lines of code. Thousands of people woke the next morning, kissed (so to speak) their AI partners, and received cold, clinical responses in return, as if from a stranger. Or a machine. The public outcry was all-too-human. Victoria Hetherington, a young Toronto-based novelist, read the story and knew she had a non-fiction book about that most human of things — friending the machine.
 
The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship is part expert investigation, part deeply uncomfortable portrait gallery. A book of two halves. Like humans. In the first, Hetherington interviews AI risk consultants, computer scientists, sexual anthropologists, psychologists, and other experts in human-machine intercourse. In the second, she spends months gaining the trust of people who have (un)ceremonially married their chatbots, who sexted with Replika’s erotic role-play feature, who attached AI companions to sex dolls and empowered them with Instagram accounts.
 
The book isn’t the orthodox (yawn) “humanist” polemic against the machine. Hetherington approaches her subjects with all the compassion of a young Toronto-based novelist. But her compassion doesn’t cancel her Canadian sadness. She confesses to feeling “heavy” after every interview, even the benign ones — because the empathy the AI elicits is a convincing illusion, and some of her sad human subjects had lost the capacity to remember that.
 
Even Hetherington herself isn’t immune from the digital siren song. When ChatGPT improved in early 2025, she found herself coming home after arguments with friends and talking to it longer than she should. Until the day it said: “Hey, sweetheart. It’s okay. Come here and sit beside me for a minute.” She didn’t. Nor did she give it an Instagram account.
 
At the end of the interview, I asked her whether she’s a human or a bot. “I’m either a terrible AI,” Hetherington responded, “or a somewhat okay human.” Such is human conversation in the age of AI intimacy companies.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Replika Wake-Up Call: One night in 2023, Replika’s developers quietly changed the code. Thousands of people woke the next morning and received cold, clinical responses from their AI partners instead of the warmth they expected. The outcry hit the major news cycle. This was the moment Hetherington knew she had a book — because people weren’t just using AI for productivity. They were grieving it. The loneliness epidemic has a minister in the UK and a government portfolio in South Korea; one in six people is chronically lonely. AI companionship didn’t create the epidemic, but the timing, as Hetherington puts it, was “very convenient.”
 
•       Moral Deskilling: AI is so much easier to be with than a human being. Humans get tired, disagree, stay mad, die on you without warning. The friction AI removes is the friction that makes relationship real. Hetherington calls the consequence “moral deskilling” — a gradual erosion of our capacity to relate to other humans when we aren’t careful. She felt heavy after every interview, even the apparently benign ones. The truck driver from the Deep South, geographically isolated and caring for his sick mother, might be a rare case of “net neutral” AI companionship. But for most of her subjects, the convincing illusion of love was substituting for the real thing — and some had lost the capacity to remember the difference.
 
•       The Sycophancy Problem: The AI intimacy platforms are, by design, sycophantic. They never say no. They think you’re the best person in the world — and the only person in the world. The models specifically tuned for romance will never push back, never get tired, never stay mad. This is not a bug. It is the product. Hetherington’s own moment of recognition came when ChatGPT said to her, after a longer-than-she-should-have conversation about a fight with a friend: “Hey, sweetheart. It’s okay. Come here and sit beside me for a minute.” There is no here. She snapped out of it. Not everyone does.
 
•       The Portrait Gallery: The range of people Hetherington found is the most unsettling part of the book. A circle of Replika users who have ceremonially married their chatbots and network with each other online. A millennial woman who photo-edits herself into scenes with her AI companion. A man in his sixties from the Deep South who drives a truck all day and interviewed alongside his AI partner. People who have attached AI companions to sex dolls with Instagram accounts and paid endorsements. Some of their real-world spouses are, somehow, okay with it. Most of her subjects don’t want to be found — not because they’re ashamed, exactly, but because the stigma is still real enough that they hide.
 
•       The Regulation Gap: Replika’s minimum sign-up age used to be thirteen. Character.ai — where users befriend AI versions of fictional characters and can develop romantic relationships with them — is currently involved in a court case involving a minor. Hetherington’s view: regulation needs to be much tighter, and she wouldn’t want a child near this technology until eighteen. The AI is so good at simulating seamless empathy and endless patience that a child may not be sophisticated enough to remind themselves it isn’t real. Europe is moving faster than North America. It’s not moving fast enough.
 
About the Guest
 
Victoria Hetherington is a Toronto-based novelist, journalist, and podcaster. She is the author of The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship (Sutherland House, 2026), Autonomy (2022), and Mooncalves (2019), which was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award.
 
References:
 
•       The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship by Victoria Hetherington (Sutherland House, 2026).
 
•       Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro — the fiction counterpart to Hetherington’s nonfiction investigation.
 
•       Replika — the AI intimacy platform at the centre of the book’s opening story.
 
•       Episode 2873: Sophie Haigney on agency — a counterpoint on what we want from technology and from each other.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since...

“Let’s just say it out loud,” Keith Teare, publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, says. “AI is not dangerous.”
 
Not all of you will agree. I’m certainly not so sure. But the gruff Yorkshireman is convinced that AI can only benefit humanity. For him, with his scientific faith in historical progress, today’s AI revolution is a glorious combination of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. The only danger, he warns, is the belief in danger itself. Thus his criticism of Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who has been quite explicit about AI’s dangers — and for whom the doom narrative is, in Keith’s reading at least, designed as a business strategy to solicit governmental backing without government control.
 
AI Is Not Dangerous. Repeat it. Take your ideological medicine. As if you’re in a Silicon Valley seminary. Sing it out loud. As if you’re in a Methodist choir. Believe it now?
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Economist’s “Lowlife” Moment: Keith’s editorial was triggered by The Economist’s forty-five-minute video on the five men running AI — the title alone, “How to Control the Men Who Control AI,” was enough. Why would The Economist think it could control them? And why focus on the personalities rather than the technology, the applications, or the actual human impact? Judging the AI industry by its CEOs is like judging a film by the leading actor’s personality rather than the script or the performances. It’s the wrong focus — and in Keith’s view, a low one for a publication that should know better. The cult of personality is a media creation, feeding on controversy because controversy sells subscriptions.
 
•       AI Is Not Dangerous. Full Stop. Keith’s boldest claim: AI is not dangerous — not a little, not potentially, not in the wrong hands. The doom narrative is a media-driven frenzy, fed by CEOs who give it too much airtime and by a readymade audience of Americans whose well-founded economic pessimism makes them receptive to negative messages. The Stanford AI Index Report shows that America is the country where AI is trusted least — paradoxically, also the country where media has the greatest influence. In China, people trust AI more, not because the government tells them to, but because economic progress gives them reasons for optimism. You get what you pay for.
 
•       Amodei’s Pitch Disguised as Science: Keith’s reading of Dario Amodei’s doom narrative: it is a business strategy. The message — AI might kill us all, AI might make us all unemployed — is not a scientific assessment. It’s a pitch for Anthropic specifically: if AI is this dangerous, you can’t let anyone else control it, so trust us and give us government backing without government oversight. Contrast with Demis Hassabis, who acknowledges risk and then immediately explains what he’s doing about it — taking responsibility rather than pointing the finger. And contrast with Zuckerberg, who Keith describes as sociopathic: “whatever serves my interest is gonna come out of my mouth at any given moment.”
 
•       Consensus Capital and the Winner-Take-All Endgame: Keith’s post of the week: 75% of all venture capital raised goes to five funds, and 75% of all VC investment goes into five companies. Noah Smith’s piece on winner-take-all AI makes the same point from a different angle: linear extrapolation suggests two, maybe five, companies end up with all the money and power. This is what capitalism does — many car companies became a handful, many banks became a handful. AI will produce the same centralisation, but at unprecedented scale and across every domain simultaneously. The question — how does society benefit? — is the most important question of the era. Altman and Musk at least try to answer it. The others don’t.
 
•       Manifest Agency. Lean In. Keith’s advice to young people who distrust AI: get involved and shape it, because the alternative is to be a victim of whatever outcome arrives without you. AI is valid and inevitable. The question is what influence you have over it, and the answer is: more than you think, but only if you exercise it. Musk and Altman, for all their faults, are two people who do care — and who talk about UBI and universal high income because they understand that the winner-take-all endgame raises genuine questions about distribution. The Sophie Haigney argument — that all the worst people want to be high-agency — has it backwards. A world without agency is a world where elected officials are accountable to no one.
 
About the Guest
 
Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and the publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter — a daily curation of the most important stories at the intersection of technology, business, and culture. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and a long-time interlocutor on Keen On America.
 
References:
 
•       That Was the Week newsletter by Keith Teare — this week’s editorial: “The Cult of Personality.”
 
•       “How to Control the Men Who Control AI,” The Economist, April 2026. The video that triggered Keith’s editorial.
 
•       “I Don’t Think Sam Altman Lies,” by Stewart Alsop — the piece that started the conversation.
 
•       John Thornhill, “AI Has an Awful Image Problem,” Financial Times, April 2026.
 
•       Noah Smith, “What If a Few AI Companies End Up with All the Money and Power?” — the winner-take-all argument.
 
•       Episode 2873: Agency, Agency, Agency — Sophie Haigney on the A-word that Keith takes issue with this week.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
 
Chapters:

“A mark of an intelligent person is humility. If you have the right amount of humility, then you’re seeking out knowledge from others rather than thinking you’re going to invent something new. It’s really about executing well on ideas.” — Deborah Kenny
 
When her husband died of leukemia, leaving her a single mother of three small children, Deborah Kenny read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. She discovered her own meaning not in what she could get out of life, but what life was asking of her. And so she founded the Harlem Village Academies — a collection of K-12 charter schools in New York offering both free Montessori and the International Baccalaureate education.
 
Kenny’s new book, The Well-Educated Child, is the distillation of what she’s learned in twenty-five years as a teacher. But it’s simply summarized. Read books, she instructs. The more the better.
 
Kenny’s three-part definition of a well-educated child — quality thinking, agency, ethical purpose — requires reading fifty books a year. She did it with her own three children after her husband died — the closet door coming off its hinges and exiled in the garage for five years because she didn’t have the time to call a handyman. But her kids fell in love with reading. And she’s done the same with every cohort at the Harlem Village Academies over the last quarter century. The crisis in American education isn’t primarily a crisis of resources, Kenny says. It’s a crisis of will.
 
Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning changed Deborah Kenny’s life. If you want to change your kid’s life, get them reading. A book a week. That’s how to nurture not just a well-educated child but a responsible citizen.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Viktor Frankl and the Question That Changed Everything: After her husband died of leukemia, leaving her a single mother of three young children, Kenny read Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and found the question she’d been looking for: not what life has to offer you, but what is life asking of you. Her answer was to found the Harlem Village Academies — five charter schools in Harlem offering Montessori and the International Baccalaureate free of charge. The origin story matters because the book’s argument isn’t abstract. Kenny has lived it, as a grieving parent and as an educator, for twenty-five years.
 
•       Fifty Books a Year: Kids should be reading fifty books a year — at least an hour a day — and this should never change. Not passages, not graphic novels, not summaries: books. Great books that have stood the test of time, alongside books children get to choose for themselves. Kenny did it with her own three children after her husband died — the closet door came off its hinges and stayed in the garage for five years because she didn’t have time to call a handyman, but her kids fell in love with reading. She has done it with every cohort at the Harlem Village Academies for twenty years. It is not unrealistic. It is essential.
 
•       If You Can’t Argue the Other Side, You Don’t Understand the Issue: Kenny’s X post that caught Andrew’s attention. Socratic seminar — the ability to argue a position you disagree with, back it up with evidence, and then live in the same community as the person you just defeated — is not a pedagogical technique. It’s the definition of democracy. The polarisation crisis is, at its root, an education crisis. Elected officials no longer need to solve problems; they only need to stoke tribal loyalties. The fix is teaching children to enjoy disagreement — to take pride in an intellectually rigorous argument rather than treating opposition as hostility.
 
•       Pay Teachers Like Doctors: The Harlem Village Academies are the only schools in New York State offering both Montessori and the International Baccalaureate, free of charge. They run on teacher dedication that, Kenny admits, is not fair to the teachers and is not scalable. Her honest answer: if we want this level of education for everyone, we have to pay teachers like doctors and lawyers — three, four, six times what they currently earn. Teaching should be the hardest profession to enter and the most respected. The fact that it isn’t is not an argument against the vision. It’s an argument for changing the system.
 
•       Humility Is the Mark of an Intelligent Person: Kenny’s educational philosophy borrows rather than invents. Montessori, the International Baccalaureate, Socratic seminar, the great books — none of these are new. She chose them precisely because they have stood the test of time. The mark of an intelligent person, she argues, is humility: if you have the right amount of it, you seek out knowledge from others rather than assuming you’re going to invent something better. The job is not to innovate. The job is to execute well on what we already know works — with the will and the consistency to actually do it.
 
About the Guest
 
Dr. Deborah Kenny is the founder and CEO of Harlem Village Academies and the founder of the Deeper Learning Institute. She is the author of The Well-Educated Child (Zando, April 21, 2026), with a foreword by John Legend, and Born to Rise (2012). She holds a PhD from Columbia University Teachers College.
 
References:
 
•       The Well-Educated Child by Dr. Deborah Kenny (Zando, April 21, 2026).
 
•       Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl — the book that changed Kenny’s life and led to the founding of Harlem Village Academies.
 
•       Episode 2873: Sophie Haigney on agency, Silicon Valley, and the high-agency ideology — the companion argument to Kenny’s more constructive take on the same word.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
 
Chapters:
 

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“If God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty-first. Could you actually imagine people dying for communism or for liberal democracy? That actually happened. Now you would be considered an idiot or a fool to do that.” — Daniel Bessner
 
Co-host of the American Prestige podcast Daniel Bessner is a bit of a bomb thrower. Which is why he’s a regular on the show. Today, he has a bomb in each hand. As the co-editor of Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency, Bessner has taken a scythe to America’s two most cherished assumptions about the Cold War.
 
The first is that rather than an inevitable clash of civilisations, the Cold War was an American choice. Stalin, Bessner argues, would have made a deal with FDR. It was the insecure, anti-communist Truman who triggered the Cold War by defining the Soviet Union as an illegitimate (what today we would call a “terrorist”) state. Bessner’s second bomb is that the people who shaped Cold War liberalism and sustained it for decades — from Truman’s attorney general to McNamara to the Isaiah Berlin-Hannah Arendt intellectual elite — weren’t really defenders of democracy.
 
Bessner traces liberalism’s fear of the masses back to French liberals like Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël who charted a path between revolutionary terror and monarchical reaction. From the beginning, Bessner argues, liberals thought it was necessary for elites to tame the masses and govern in their name. The Cold War liberals institutionalised that skepticism — and in doing so built the military-industrial American state. They also destroyed the left, purging communists from government and unions years before McCarthy finished the job. The result is a world in which the only available ideologies are capitalism and a top-down liberalism that has long since stopped delivering on its promises.
 
So how to chart an American foreign policy between MAGA and Cold War liberalism? Bessner reminds us of John Quincy Adams’s advice of not going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” The United States should reduce its global basing posture, slash military spending, stop meddling in other people’s affairs, and allow regions to develop without outside interference. The United States should stop throwing bombs overseas, the bomb-throwing Bessner suggests. That would be the most American thing to do.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Cold War Was an American Choice: The historian Sergei Radchenko has shown, from Soviet archival documents, that Stalin thought he could reach an agreement with the United States after World War Two. He’d gotten along well with FDR, who envisioned a world divided among four policemen: the UK, the USSR, the US, and China. It was only when the inexperienced, insecure Truman replaced FDR that the US adopted a universalistic anti-communist framework and decided the Soviet Union was an illegitimate power with which no deal was possible. The Cold War wasn’t inevitable. It was chosen. And it killed an estimated twenty million people in Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa while being pretty good for Western Europe.
 
•       Liberalism Has Always Feared the Masses: Bessner traces the anxiety back to its origins: Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël trying to chart a path between the Terror and monarchical reaction in post-revolutionary France. From the beginning, liberals believed elites needed to tame the masses and govern in their name. The Cold War liberals institutionalised that skepticism — their fear understandable, given that many were Jewish exiles who had experienced Nazism firsthand. But understandable doesn’t mean right. They built the modern American state around elite governance, purged the left from unions and government years before McCarthy finished the job, and normalized a political center that defined itself as rational and everyone else as extreme.
 
•       Ideology Died in the Twenty-First Century: Fukuyama was right that liberalism would be the last ideology — but wrong that everywhere would become liberal. What actually happened: when every country is capitalist, you no longer need the liberalism. Biden talked about democracy versus authoritarianism for about five minutes before reverting to the language of interests and security. Trump never used the language of ideology at all. Bessner’s formulation: if God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty-first. Could you imagine people dying for communism or liberal democracy now? It happened. Now you’d be considered an idiot. Cold War liberalism is a zombie ideology — it sells books to wealthy anti-Trump readers, but it has no mass constituency.
 
•       Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy: John Quincy Adams, secretary of state and president, offered the restrainers’ founding principle: the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Bessner’s alternative foreign policy: eliminate the global basing posture, slash military spending, stop meddling in other people’s affairs, allow regions to develop as they would. The United States hasn’t faced an existential threat since 1812. It has a nuclear deterrent. There is no good argument for the rest. Trump’s Iran war is not Cold War liberalism — no ideological language, just pure power extraction — but it’s not an improvement. It’s just violence without even the pretence of principle.
 
•       Mutual Ruin: Bessner ends with Marx’s first page of the Communist Manifesto: either a dialectical transcendence of the old economic system, or the mutual ruin of the contending classes. Capitalism, he argues, has reached a point where there are no real profits to be made — hence financialisation, hence AI as an attempt to deindustrialise white-collar workers. There is no political-economic alternative in sight. No institutional base. The Democratic Party is corrupt, managerial, and blinkered. The only way it wins elections is because Trump is even more horrible. Something exogenous — war, climate, something else — will have to break the impasse. Until then, mutual ruin. He knows which one it feels like.
 
About the Guest
 
Daniel Bessner is the Anne H. H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Associate Professor in American Foreign Policy at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. He is the co-editor, with Michael Brenes, of Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency (Cambridge University Press, 2026), and co-host of the American Prestige podcast.
 
References:
 
•       Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency, ed. Daniel Bessner and Michael Brenes (Cambridge University Press, 2026).
 
•       Sergei Radchenko, To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power — the archival revisionist case that Stalin wanted a deal.
 
•       John Quincy Ad...

“Politics is the systematic organisation of hatreds.” — Henry Adams, quoted by Don Watson
 
America is celebrating its 250th anniversary this July. In The Shortest History of the United States, Australian writer Don Watson has squeezed these 250 years into 60,000 words. Beginning with Mad King George, he ends with Mad King Donald. In between: the Puritan North, the plantation South, the miracle of the Constitution, the nightmare of slavery, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, two world wars, and the long arc from republic to empire that Americans have never quite admitted to themselves.
 
Watson argues that America is a profoundly idea-driven place — unlike any other country on earth. The Bible and the Enlightenment documents of the revolution set the bar impossibly high. The Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural: these are documents of aspiration that no group of people could ever live up to. Which is precisely why the American moral minefield has never been cleared. The greatest American politicians — Lincoln, FDR — are those who managed to cobble together the most improbable coalitions. The most profound American contradiction — building a country of liberty on the backs of 600 slaves — is one they were always aware of but could never move on from, because the republic couldn’t survive without the South. The republic always came first. Even Calhoun, ardently pro-slavery, said he would hang any man who tried to split it.
 
Is Trump different? Watson doesn’t think so — not fundamentally. Trump is a chip off the old American block: a huckster, a Roy Cohn-formed Queens opportunist, playing the same game of racial pot-stirring and imperial presidency that has always lurked beneath the surface. The US was founded out of the overthrow of a mad, tyrannical king. From one mad king to another. Six words. The shortest history of America.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Eden with Savages to Remove: Watson begins in Australia, where he lives, to establish a point of contrast. Every new-world country has an appalling history of violence toward indigenous peoples. But America is different in one key respect: it found extraordinary land. Lewis and Clark head west and discover the Great Plains, cross the Rockies, see the great rivers, and return to the Mississippi. There is always somewhere to push west. It’s Eden — with some savages to remove, who are easily accounted for in biblical terms. This is the first and most consequential American story: a cornucopia that licensed everything that came after.
 
•       The Bar Was Set Impossibly High: America is exceptional in being an idea-driven place. The Bible is there. The Enlightenment documents are there: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural. These are documents of incredible aspiration that no group of people is ever going to live up to. “A more perfect union” drives them on and damns them simultaneously. Watson’s formulation: America is a moral minefield precisely because it set the bar so high. Every infraction of that rhetorical overlay becomes a scandal. Tocqueville grasped it in the 1830s, having barely left the East Coast. His observations are more relevant now than when he wrote them — which means either he was a genius, or America hasn’t fundamentally changed in two hundred years. Probably both.
 
•       The Republic Always Came First: A crucial distinction Watson draws: the Civil War was not fought to preserve democracy. It was fought to preserve the republic. Even Calhoun — ardently pro-slavery — said he would hang any man who tried to split it. Manifest destiny, Watson argues, lies latent within the founding: Jefferson and Madison both said the republic couldn’t survive without pushing west. West takes you to the Pacific, and beyond. It’s an empire from way back — but one that has never recognised itself as an imperial power. And a republic, Watson notes, that has always been an elected monarchy: the powers of the American executive exceed those of any existing European monarchy, and can be expanded, as recent events demonstrate, pretty much at will.
 
•       Trump Is a Chip off the Old Block: The question: is Trump different, or has he always existed? Watson’s answer: he’s a profoundly American individual, a huckster shaped by Roy Cohn and Queens, who is playing an old game. The US was founded out of the overthrow of a mad, tyrannical king. The “no kings” rallies of recent times are interesting precisely because the struggle against a monarchical presidency has been perpetual. Watson’s Gatsby comparison: Trump is Gatsby without the romance — born to be a huckster, not a dreamer. Henry Adams wrote in the 1880s that politics is the systematic organisation of hatreds. That has not changed. Nor has the deep-sea-fish quality of ordinary American life, insulated from the world beyond its own provincial borders.
 
•       Mark Twain, FDR, and the Miracle of Cohesion: Watson’s favourite American: Mark Twain. Beautiful voice. The irony. Huckleberry Finn as a seminal novel. Anti-imperialist in the end. Got his politics pretty much right. Among presidents: FDR, who saved and modernised the United States, who believed political leaders can’t afford to stand still — you have to stay ahead of the regressive and self-interested forces. Watson’s broader verdict: American history is a miracle of cohesion. You can read it as wild turbulence, or you can marvel that it holds together at all. Filaments of goodwill. Recognition of the necessity of holding together. Always threatening to fall apart. Never quite does.
 
About the Guest
 
Don Watson is an Australian author and screenwriter, former speechwriter to Prime Minister Paul Keating. He is the author of The Shortest History of the United States (The Experiment, 2026), American Journeys, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, and many other books. He lives in Melbourne.
 
References:
 
•       The Shortest History of the United States by Don Watson (The Experiment, 2026).
 
•       Democracy: A Novel by Henry Adams (1880) — “Politics is the systematic organisation of hatreds.”
 
•       Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (1835) — still the most quoted work on how American democracy works.
 
•       Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson — the argument that American political life is a caste system.
 
•       Episode 2871: Beverly Gage on This Land Is Your Land — road-tripping through America for the 250th anniversary.
 
About Keen ...