Keen On America

“It would be lovely to imagine that writing comes out of some instinct to compose works of great literature. It absolutely doesn’t. It’s a side effect of accountancy.” — Jonn Elledge

“Borders Are Back, Baby” we proclaimed last year to celebrate Jonn Elledge’s appearance on the show to talk about his 2025 work A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders. And now the prolific Elledge, currently residing in the bosom of London’s lower east side in Bethnal Green, is back to talk about his latest book A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions. In Blighty, by the way, it’s entitled 31 Inventions That Built Our World. America gets the extra (brief) invention. Not that we’re counting.
Elledge’s most prosaic invention isn’t exactly Archimedean. Writing was invented, he says, because somebody had to count the grain. Once ten thousand people live in one place you need not only a granary but a way of recording what’s in it. And of course, laws protecting grain owners from thieves.
Et voilà (rather than eureka!).
Thus came mathematics, literacy, politics, accountancy and eventually literature. So what we think of as civilization owes itself to urbane places like Bethnal Green. Without such hotspots, you wouldn’t be able to read this. No wonder some of our most glittering cultural figures — Mick Jagger, John Grisham, Robert Plant — studied accountancy. You can’t always count what you want. Not even a history of cities in 32 1/2 inventions.

FURTHER READING

•   Jonn Elledge, A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions (The Experiment, 13 October 2026). The UK edition is 31 Inventions That Built Our World.
•   The extra American chapter is on the Los Angeles streetcar conspiracy. The other cut chapters are free on his Substack.
•   Elledge created and ran CityMetric at the New Statesman, and also wrote A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders and Conspiracy, with Tom Phillips.
•   The theory he couldn’t name at 17:20 is urban scaling — Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt’s finding that productivity rises faster than population, building on Alfred Marshall on agglomeration.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. Why Ideas Cluster

There is no technical reason a bank or a tech firm needs to sit next to its rivals — and yet they always do. Elledge puts it down to the sheer density of interactions: more people having more conversations, so more chances for ideas to collide. It is also why Britain worries that Manchester and Birmingham underperform Lyon and Munich.

2. Napoleon Moved at Caesar’s Speed

In 1800 armies crossed Europe no faster than they had two thousand years earlier. You could cover twenty miles a day, so politics happened at twenty miles a day. Nation states are not really possible until the railways of the 1830s. It is the Roman Empire, Elledge notes, not the Italian one.

3. Gilgamesh Already Knew

The oldest surviving work of literature, from Uruk four thousand years ago, already splits the world between the walled city — comfortable, advanced, faintly decadent — and the wild country beyond, which is more dangerous and more authentic. Brexit and the Rust Belt are running on the same fault line.

4. The Empty State Building

Two architects raced to build the tallest tower, each secretly adding height beyond the published plans. Both topped out in the autumn of 1929, exactly as America discovered it had too much office space. The Empire State Building stood half empty for years and acquired the nickname.

5. The Tube Has Warmed the Ground

Edwardian posters invited Londoners to cool off on the Bakerloo line on hot days. A century of trains in unventilated tunnels has since raised the temperature of the earth around them, and nobody is sure how to undo it.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Jonn Elledge is a British journalist and author. He created and ran CityMetric, the New Statesman’s urbanism site, and was an assistant editor there; he has written for the Financial Times, the Guardian and the i. His books include A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders, The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything and, with Tom Phillips, Conspiracy. He writes The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything and lives in London.

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.

“If you have a space of democracy that is closing, you have infinitely more leverage to act before it closes than after.” — Paul Rogat Loeb

The Impossible Will Take a Little While is an anthology of essays, speeches, memoirs and poems about perseverance & hope in troubled times. Edited and introduced by Paul Rogat Loeb, the anthology came out in 2004, in the middle of the Bush years and the Iraq war, and now has 125,000 copies in print. Colleges assigned it across the curriculum. One of the founders of the Natural Resources Defense Council told Loeb he reached for it at the points where he had hit the wall and wasn’t sure he could keep going.
In 2026, many of us feel we’ve hit a wall and aren’t sure we can keep going. So it’s apt that Loeb has reworked his book to suit what seems to be our particularly troubled times. Classic essays from Havel, Mandela, Neruda and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail all remain in the anthology. But this edition has also been comprehensively rebuilt. New work includes Navalny’s prison journals, essays from Jesmyn Ward & Rutger Bregman and a chapter on the South Korean coup. What’s changed over the last couple of decades, Loeb says, is the routinization of surveillance, the attacks on democratic institutions, and the daily reality of climate disaster.
Hope, Loeb reminds us, isn’t blind optimism. His most hopeful stories in the new anthology are about people who weren’t heroes. In Seoul in December 2024, as troops moved to shut the parliament, one detachment stopped for ramen noodles. They had their orders, Loeb says, but food came before politics. In Norway in 1942, eleven thousand teachers simply declined to teach fascism. So history often isn’t made by Havel, MLK or Mandela-style heroes. Hope, then, lies in the action and sometimes inaction of ordinary people. In Seoul noodle restaurants or Norwegian classrooms or on the streets of Minneapolis.

FURTHER READING

•   Paul Rogat Loeb, ed., The Impossible Will Take a Little While (Basic Books, 13 October 2026). Full contents and excerpts.
•   Loeb also wrote Soul of a Citizen and Generation at the Crossroads, and founded the nonpartisan Campus Election Engagement Project. More.
•   The Korean chapter is Jungmin Choi’s “Lightsticks and K-Pop”. The Norwegian teachers are Loeb’s own essay, “Refusing to be Quislings”.
•   The Berlin story AK asks for is the Rosenstrasse protest of February 1943.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. He Doesn’t Believe the Arc Bends

Asked whether the arc of history bends toward justice, Loeb says no. It can bend, depending on how we act. What he has instead is Havel’s distinction, written in 1986 when the Czech dictatorship looked permanent: optimism expects things to turn out, hope is what lets you act when they might not.

2. Panels on the Ground in Pakistan

Solar output doubled in two years, then again in one. Pakistani farmers skip the permits and the installers and simply lay panels on the ground — a third of the grid displaced in a year, and panels now turning up in wedding dowries. But prices collapsed because the German Greens pushed through subsidies. Citizen action made the technology cheap.

3. Berlin, 1943: The Wives on Rosenstrasse

Pressed on whether readers might cast themselves as martyrs when Mandelstam’s Russia and the present are nothing alike, Loeb concedes it at once. Then the counter-example: the non-Jewish wives of Jewish men gathered outside a Berlin collection point until the men were released. He won’t claim it could have beaten the Nazis. Only that it happened.

4. King’s Letter Was About the Elites

Rereading Letter from Birmingham Jail, Loeb says it clicked. King’s target — the white man of goodwill whose silence does more damage than the Klansman — maps onto the elite law firms and university presidents. Ordinary people, he says, have come out of this year better than the elites.

5. Act Before the Space Closes

In Buenos Aires he met a young Russian couple. She protested when Navalny came home; then the protests shrank, the cost rose, and now none of them do. The lesson is leverage: a closing democracy gives you infinitely more of it than one that has closed.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Paul Rogat Loeb is an American writer and activist who has spent forty years on civic engagement and social change. He is the author of Soul of a Citizen, Generation at the Crossroads, Hope in Hard Times and Nuclear Culture, and the editor of The Impossible Will Take a Little While, now in a revised third edition from Basic Books. He founded the nonpartisan Campus Election Engagement Project and guides.vote, has lectured at more than 400 campuses, and lives in Seattle.

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.

“There are ways of being evil that are not fascist, but I don’t think there’s a way of being fascist without being evil.” — Joseph Kelly

INTRO

On yesterday’s show, Anthony Badger, author of Prosperity Road, told the story of America’s transformation into a global superpower between 1920 and 1945. Today is the prequel. Joseph Kelly, author of The Biggest Lie, narrates the story of America between 1818 and 1915. It’s what he calls the “prehistory of American fascism”. There’s no prosperity here. Nor nostalgia. It’s a miserable story.
The “biggest lie”, for Kelly, is the myth of white supremacy. He traces it back to a South Carolina congressman named William Smith who, in 1820, claimed that what the founders had meant by all men are created equal was that all men aren’t created equal. The convenient logic of Southern slave-owners. So America didn’t import fascism from Mussolini or Hitler, Kelly says. It’s actually a made-in-America product, the innovation of Southern racists. Thus the American white supremacist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race was the book that the pagan Hitler called his “bible”, and Jim Crow became, in all-too-many ways, a model for the Nazis.
“Nostalgia is a way of being modern”, Kelly says. Racialized American fascism took its romantic iconography from the Germanic knights and the Scottish lairds so mocked by Mark Twain. By reaching back into the European Dark Ages, the Confederates imagined they had invented the civilization of the future, one they sought to spread across the Western and Southern Hemispheres. So fascism, for all its fetishization of the volkish nation, is actually an early product of globalization. The biggest lie became the South’s “most successful export” — first shipped to the American North, and later, through Grant and the eugenicists, to Europe. A most unprosperous idea. And, Kelly warns, one that is returning to fashion. The prequel threatens to become the sequel.

FURTHER READING

•   Joseph Kelly, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915 (Bloomsbury, 21 July 2026). Kelly is professor of English at the College of Charleston and has also written Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin, America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward Civil War and Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon; he edits the Seagull Reader anthologies for Norton. Biography.
•   Anthony Badger, Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt — yesterday’s episode, and the book Kelly’s argument hands off to. Kelly dates the reversal of the American fascist experiment to 1932; Badger starts there.
•   Jonathan Rauch on Trump and the f word, and his six key moments. His The Constitution of Knowledge is the source of the phrase Kelly uses at 16:16 for the free press, academic tenure and peer review, and a reformed court system — institutions he argues were built in the 1920s and 1930s specifically to fight a politics founded on lying. Note that AK calls him John Rauch twice on the tape; it is Jonathan.
•   Susan Neiman, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (Norton), and Andrew Curran, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race, from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson (Other Press) — both previous guests. Curran’s argument that the Enlightenment produced the scientific idea of race is the one AK puts to Kelly at 27:38, and Kelly’s answer inverts it: the culture came first and the science was dressed up afterward.
•   Ida B. Wells is the figure Kelly builds his final chapter around. Her friend Thomas Moss was lynched after the People’s Grocery affair in Memphis in 1892; her editorial saying that white women slept with black men because they wanted to drew a published threat to castrate the editor, whom the white papers assumed was her male business partner. Her paper was the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, not the Free Press as said on the tape.
•   The Charleston insurrection of 1822 is the Denmark Vesey conspiracy; Nat Turner’s rebellion followed in Virginia in 1831. Together, in Kelly’s account, they turned William Smith’s crackpot 1820 speech into the South’s governing narrative.
•   Four things to check against the tape. Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism is usually cited as setting out seven mobilizing passions, not the nine Kelly counts; the two he says did not obtain in the South — the cult leader and the surrender of reason to him — sit in the middle of Paxton’s list rather than at the end. Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” was published in 1946, not 1945. “Seek truth and report it” is the Society of Professional Journalists’ wording, adopted 1996; the 1923 code was the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Canons of Journalism. And at 29:07 Kelly says the first generation told the story “in the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties” when he means the 1820s and 1830s — the transcript marks it.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The summer of 1835. Kelly puts a season on the closing of the Southern mind. After the summer of 1835 you could not stand up in the American South and proclaim that all men are created equal — not and mean it, not and advocate for it. A white person who tried risked violence, risked lynching, and would probably have to live in exile if he got out at all. What follows is almost two generations of white Southerners raised in a one-party state with a tradition of extrajudicial vigilante violence and no free speech, hearing white supremacy from the pulpit, in school and in the newspapers. Mark Twain said he grew up in Missouri and never once heard slavery arraigned by anybody until he left. Historians since the 1970s have called this a Herrenvolk democracy, but Kelly wants the scare quotes: a master-race democracy is a contradiction, because even the master race loses the Bill of Rights. The men who marched off to fight the Union were not lying. They believed it. That is what a lie does once it reaches a certain size.
2. They chose not to look. Asked whether the men who built the lie knew they were lying, Kelly separates the generations. William Smith knew — the founders were still alive and he could have asked them, and would not have liked the answer. But the first American anthropologists were amateurs in the way the first naturalists were amateurs, and their authority came from owning plantations: they were credited because they spent more time around black Americans than the learned societies of Philadelphia did. They took anecdotes and bogus notions, dressed them in scientific language and presented the result to the world as science. Anyone who cared to look hard would hav...

“Hoover is probably the most intelligent president the United States has ever had. That is not necessarily a guarantee of political success.” — Anthony Badger

Given our preoccupation with American decline, it’s nice to sometimes remind ourselves of the reasons for the country’s rise to superpowerdom. Anthony Badger, the former Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge, has dedicated his life to charting the rise of the United States as the world’s leading economic and military power. His new book is Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt. There is, thankfully, no mention of Trump or MAGA in it.
Badger’s interest in the United States came through Huey Long, who he read about as a schoolboy in gray nineteen-fifties Britain. What intrigued him was not Long’s showmanship but his delivery. Plenty of Southern populists made grand promises. But the Kingfish actually delivered on some.
In Prosperity Road, Badger reminds us of America’s astonishing domestic transformation in the first half of the 20th century. In 1920, he notes, most Americans’ entire experience of the federal government was the mailman and the occasional man in uniform, and almost nobody paid income tax. By 1945, all Americans had a social security number, worked under the Wagner Act or drew a price support, and lived within sight of a public works project. And they came to trust it. By 1958 some 73 percent told pollsters Washington could be relied on to do the right thing. That trust, Badger dryly notes, is not something that would go on forever.
On Herbert Hoover, Badger is a revisionist without being excessively sentimental. The most intelligent president America has ever had, he says of the Stanford-educated engineer. But, like Jimmy Carter, Hoover was a technocrat with little political touch and an excessively thin skin. Not exactly Huey Long.
Oddly enough, he is less effusive about Roosevelt. Badger describes him as no intellectual, an actor, a patrician who somehow persuaded working Americans he was on their side. “He’s the first president who understands that my boss is a son of a bitch,” Badger quotes a textile worker on FDR.
I asked what we, in 2026, should make of all this. Hoover and FDR were serious people, Badger notes. And they both had a concept of public service that has proved very difficult to recreate in recent years. That said, he reminds us that the New Deal grew out of the near collapse of the country in 1932. So perhaps Prosperity Road hasn’t quite run out of asphalt. Although Anthony Badger is certainly less optimistic about the United States than he was when he fell under the spell of the Kingfish seventy years ago.

FURTHER READING

•   Anthony J. Badger, Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt (Harper, 13 October 2026). Kirkus review. Note that Badger has reused his own title: his first book, in 1980, was Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina — so a search on the title alone will return the wrong book.
•   Badger was Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge from 1992 to 2014 and Master of Clare College from 2003 to 2014; he has been a professor at Northumbria since. Read at Sidney Sussex, took his doctorate at Hull in 1974. His Cambridge faculty page. The book on race AK raises at 44:00 is Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump (2022); he has also written The New Deal: The Depression Years, FDR: The First Hundred Days and Albert Gore, Sr.: A Political Life.
•   Huey Long, the figure who drew Badger into American history, was shot at the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge in September 1935 and died two days later — the building AK mentions visiting.
•   Greg Steinmetz on Roosevelt’s pursuit of Andrew Mellon through the Internal Revenue Service, which Badger calls one of the low points of the administration — that episode. His book is The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon, and the Triumph of Big Government.
•   The two episodes AK opens on: Janet Reitman on The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts, and Eliot Cohen on The Strategist.
•   Three details worth checking against the tape. J. Edgar Hoover became director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924; the Bureau was founded in 1908 and renamed the FBI in 1935. The trust figure Badger attributes to Pew comes from the American National Election Studies, which recorded 73 percent in 1958; Pew publishes the series but did not conduct those early surveys. And the “unsordid act” description of Lend-Lease is Churchill’s.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. They had been friends, and then there was the business with the crutches. Badger reconstructs the Hoover–Roosevelt feud as a personal story before it is ever a political one. The two lived near each other in Washington during the First World War and were close enough that Roosevelt praised Hoover privately and publicly, when Hoover was the star of American politics — the humanitarian who fed Belgium, the self-made millionaire engineer who looked like the man of the future. Then the snubs. Hoover denied the president-elect Secret Service protection on leaving office, and at a White House reception Roosevelt was made to stand in a very uncomfortable position while on crutches. Both men were thin-skinned; Hoover, Badger says, was particularly thin-skinned, and he answered the Democrats’ Depression attacks with real anger.
2. The line past which activism became fascism. The most interesting thing about Hoover is not that he did nothing but that he believed in activist government up to a point and could never explain where the point was. Past it, in his own word, intervention became fascistic — and nobody except Hoover was able to locate the line, which is why he looked to contemporaries like a man refusing to act. Badger’s counterfactual is the generous one: had Hoover served the two terms he fully expected, we would remember a reforming president who made government more efficient and the relationship between government and industry more rational. Instead he arrived at the one moment when things went badly, and discovered he could not bear people doubting his sincerity.
3. The welfare state was built by the people Roosevelt hired. Asked who actually built it, Badger does not say Roosevelt. He says Frances Perkins, and adds that it is very difficult to think about the American welfare state without noticing that the experts were women. Social Security brought almost no immediate benefit to anyone, and he finds it remarkable that they were willing to t...

“Nobody in the United States wants to call it that. But I write history, and I know what a coup d’état looks like.” — John Ralston Saul

As the leaves turn, it’s becoming Canada week. Yesterday we had the Newfoundland-based Paris Marx offering an incisive critique of American Big Tech. Today, it’s my old Canadian friend, John Ralston Saul — novelist, essayist, former president of PEN International — speaking to us from the top floor of his house in an autumnal Toronto.
Like another frequent Canadian guest, Stephen Marche, Saul offers a sharp critique of the United States which, he reminds us, is a geographically smaller country than Canada. Not that size matters, of course.
Saul thinks of America as Rome. Canada’s great achievement, he says, is surviving as Rome’s neighbor for over two hundred years. In contrast with Chile, Mexico or Guatemala, Canada hasn’t been invaded or subverted by its clumsy imperial neighbor. When America sneezes, the rest of the continent gets pneumonia. Except Canada. Even in autumn.
Is Trump an aberration? Not according to Saul who offers Grover Cleveland as the 19th century DJT. Like Stephen Marche, Saul thinks there will be a civil war in the United States within twenty-five years. But he doubts it will be a repeat of the 19th century Civil War of Shermanesque armies against armies. More likely a continuing breakdown of the legal system, and of the willingness of individuals, states and the federal government to obey the law. More like the chaos of Caligula than Caesar vs Pompey.
On the tariffs Saul is cheerful. Canada sent half its goods south before the 1988 free trade deal and three quarters after it, he reminds us. So Trump’s tariffs have frightened the Canadian provinces into dismantling the trade barriers they kept against each other. Duh.
“We thank him for his stupidity,” Saul says of Grover Trump.
John Ralston Saul once wrote a book about Canada entitled A Fair Country. So I suggest a book about America should be called An Unfair Country. He laughs. He’d call it The Great Drama. With perhaps the subtitle: Not As Big As Canada.

FURTHER READING

•   John Ralston Saul writes at his Substack, including the piece in French on a post-Trump America that AK raises at 05:11. He co-founded and co-chairs the Institute for Canadian Citizenship — the organization behind inclusion.ca — with Adrienne Clarkson, and served as International President of PEN from 2009 to 2015, the first Canadian elected to the role.
•   The books AK asks about: Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West was published in 1992, not 1993, and The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World in 2005, not 2018. A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada followed in 2008. Full bibliography.
•   Chrystia Freeland’s Unreliable Boyfriend (Simon & Schuster, June 2026), the account of Canada–US relations AK quotes twice. The phrase has a history: a British MP used it about Mark Carney when he governed the Bank of England.
•   Stephen Marche on the possibility of civil war — his episode of this show. His book is The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (2022); the phrase AK reaches for at the top is the title of the episode rather than the book.
•   Kurt Andersen on whether America should break up — that episode. His novel is The Breakup (Penguin Random House, 2026).
•   On Canada and Europe at 33:13: France’s foreign minister raised the possibility of eventual Canadian membership in March 2026, and an associate-member arrangement has since been floated. Saul thinks full membership is neither likely nor desirable, and expects a negotiated special relationship instead.
•   Andy Burnham became British prime minister in July 2026, which is the context for the exchange at 36:02 about the UK drifting back toward Europe.
•   Two numbers worth checking against the tape: Saul gives the EU’s population as 500 million, where it is closer to 450 million, and places Baffin Island as the next island over from Greenland. The narrowest crossing is actually Nares Strait, between Greenland and Ellesmere Island, about 26 kilometres across; Baffin lies farther south across Baffin Bay. Neither alters his argument.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. He is sitting where Lester Pearson’s bed used to be. Asked why Carney can take on Trump when other leaders cannot, Saul reaches back to the last prime minister he thinks comparable, and the answer turns out to be literal: Pearson rented the floor of the Toronto house Saul now works in, as a newly married young professor. The parallel is that both arrived with international standing already earned — Pearson the Nobel for Suez before he ever won an election, Carney the Bank of England through a crisis. Pearson had a lisp, wore bow ties, looked professorial, and was, in Saul’s phrase, tough as they come and a great drinker. He also brought in Medicare, which Saul makes concrete: a bone marrow transplant, five weeks in a private room, zero dollars and zero forms.
2. Canada never had its civil war, and he thinks he knows why. He calls Canada the oldest continuous democratic federation in the world, running from 1848 without the internal bloodletting that the United States, Latin America, France, Germany, Italy and Spain all went through. His explanation is not national virtue but national calculation: Canadians understood that if they indulged in that kind of violence, the only beneficiary would be the country across the border, because it would leave them weakened. Survival produced restraint. It is the sharpest thing he says about his own country, and it sits directly against his forecast for America.
3. A generation of Canadian executives were trained as branch managers. The part of the tariff story that is harder than tariffs. For a hundred and fifty years, he says, Canada worked at counterbalance — markets and relationships elsewhere so that no single partner could dictate terms. Canada was a serious player in Asia in the 1920s and 1930s. That habit was abandoned after 1988, and what replaced it was a business class that became, in effect, subsidiary management: people whose professional question was always what the Americans are doing. Opening doors in Europe and India is the prime minister’s work, and Saul is blunt that the executives who have to walk through them are the wrong people. His prescription is almost quaint: we have...