Keen On America

“Justice may have been served, but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up.” — James Lasdun
 
In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh — wealthy scion of a South Carolina prosecutorial dynasty — was found guilty of murdering his wife Maggie and his son Paul at their family estate. With its opioid addiction, fatal boat crash, staged suicide, and a cousin called Eddie, the case could have been invented for our true crime age. And who better to tell the story of the mysterious Mr Murdaugh than the literary crime writer James Lasdun whose 2023 New Yorker piece about the trial became the magazine’s most-read story of the year.
 
Lasdun’s new book, The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh, tries to answer the one question the trial never answered. Why would a father annihilate his son?
 
The prosecution claimed that Alex killed Maggie and Paul to distract from a web of financial crimes about to be exposed. While this is theoretically possible, Lasdun acknowledges, it is totally implausible psychologically. Coming from a family of prosecutors, Murdaugh would have known he would be the prime suspect. And this family annihilator, as the prosecutor described him, murdered not just his wife, but his boy. Who would annihilate their beloved child to muddy a prosaic embezzlement?
 
The Southern gothic case isn’t over. The court clerk who managed the Murdaugh trial resigned in disgrace after it emerged she had interfered with the jury — fabricating a Facebook post to remove a juror who was bending toward acquittal. Murdaugh has appealed to the South Carolina Supreme Court. A retrial isn’t inconceivable. But even if the murder conviction is overturned, Murdaugh faces forty years inside for his financial crimes. So he’s never going free. But James Lasdun’s core question remains unanswered. Why?
 
“Justice may have been served,” Lasdun concludes, “but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up.” Mr Murdaugh remains a mystery, perhaps even to himself.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Family Annihilator: A Psychological Category: The term “family annihilator” — first used at the Murdaugh trial — is not a well-developed criminological category. There isn’t much psychology behind it. What Lasdun found in his research: most family annihilators are men who kill their families when they believe everything is about to be taken from them — not out of hatred, but out of a grotesque form of ownership. The family is theirs. If their world is ending, the family ends with it. This pattern, Lasdun argues, begins to illuminate what happened at Moselle. Not excusing it. Illuminating it.
 
•       The Thirteen Minutes of Mystery: The murders took place in a thirteen-minute window at the kennel at Moselle. In thirteen minutes, Alex was supposed to have shot his wife with a shotgun and his son with a rifle, staged the scene, called 911, and composed himself sufficiently to appear on a video call immediately afterward showing no signs of distress. Lasdun’s question: was he capable of that? The prosecution said yes, and the jury agreed. Lasdun is not saying they were wrong. He is saying that the how and why of those thirteen minutes remain genuinely mysterious — and that the mystery is part of what makes the case important.
 
•       Cousin Eddie and the Staged Shooting: Three months after the murders, Alex arranged a meeting on a rural road with his cousin Eddie — a distant relative — and emerged with an entry and exit wound at the back of his head. Alex claimed he had asked Eddie to shoot him dead so that his surviving son Buster could collect his $10 million life insurance. Eddie denies this account entirely. The police concluded quickly that the “shooter” was not a stranger seeking vengeance for the boat crash, as Alex had initially claimed. Lasdun’s reading: Alex was trying to reinforce the vendetta narrative that would implicate Anthony and Connor Cook, the young men who had been on the boat when Mallory Beach was killed.
 
•       The Court Clerk and the Removed Juror: One juror was leaning toward acquittal in the final hours of deliberation. That juror was removed from the jury on the last day of the trial, after the clerk of court produced evidence that the juror had been indiscreet about the case on Facebook. It subsequently emerged that the clerk had fabricated the Facebook post. She resigned in disgrace. The Murdaugh appeal is partly based on this interference. The South Carolina Supreme Court has taken it seriously. A retrial is not inconceivable. The legal situation is still live.
 
•       Murdaugh as an American Story: Lasdun’s book, like Capote’s In Cold Blood, is not ultimately about a crime. It is about a society. The Murdaughs were prosecutors — the family that put people in prison, that sent people to death row. The corruption that enabled Alex’s embezzlement was not unusual in Hampton County; it was systemic. The opioids that fuelled his addiction were everywhere. The insularity and entitlement of the Lowcountry ruling class created the conditions in which Alex Murdaugh could operate for twenty years without exposure. The murders are a symptom. The disease is American.
 
About the Guest
 
James Lasdun is a poet, novelist, memoirist, and staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh (W. W. Norton, May 5, 2026), Afternoon of a Faun, Give Me Everything You Have, and many other works. He was born in London and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
 
References:
 
•       The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh by James Lasdun (W. W. Norton, May 5, 2026).
 
•       James Lasdun’s two New Yorker pieces on the Murdaugh case — the magazine’s most-read stories of the year.
 
•       Truman Capote, In Cold Blood — the comparison Lasdun’s reviewers have drawn and that the interview raises explicitly.
 
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

“Every single person that we meet was both the endpoint of thousands of years that brought them there, and the midpoint of some other process, and was the beginning of something else entirely. Think of yourselves as the middle and the beginning, not just the end.” — Patrick Wyman
 
History, we are often told, is a simple story of progress — from caves and villages to cities; from forests and farms to factories; from chieftains and kings to democracies. But, for Patrick Wyman, host of the enormously popular Tides of History and Fall of Rome podcasts, that’s far too linear a narrative. In his new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World, Wyman argues that rather than a teleological inevitability, civilization is a chaotic ten thousand year story of improvisation, experiment, failure, and unintended consequence. It is never ending. We are always in the middle of it.
 
Dramatic advances in archaeological technology triggered Wyman’s argument in Lost Worlds. Ancient DNA, isotope analysis, LiDAR, cutting-edge excavation are all opening up what Wyman calls “a golden age for popular historians.” We can now trace the lives of individuals in ways that were inconceivable just a generation ago. Wyman’s star is Ötzi the Iceman — a man murdered 5,300 years ago in the Alps, whose gut contents, DNA, last meal, and likely killers we now know. Rather than a symbol of prehistoric life, Ötzi the Iceman reveals why history keeps happening.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Prelapsarian Fallacy: Hunter-Gatherers Weren’t Paradise: The romantic idea — popular in the last decade as people read Graeber and Wengrow or Yuval Noah Harari — is that hunter-gatherers had it better. Farming made us smaller, sicker, more crowded, more unequal. Wyman’s counter: yes, on some metrics early farmers were less healthy than foragers. But farming also supported enormously larger populations. It expanded the possibilities of human life in ways that foraging never could. Looking back at the past and calling it paradise says more about the critique of the present than about the actual realities of past lives.
 
•       Civilization Was Not Inevitable: We have a story about how we got from foragers to cities: people settled, started farming, produced surplus, developed specialisation, built states. But Wyman’s new archaeology shows that this story is wrong at every step. Farming didn’t always replace foraging. Villages didn’t automatically spark agriculture. Cities didn’t necessitate rigid hierarchies. For every society that moved from one stage to the next, there are others that moved in different directions, collapsed, hybridised, or simply chose something else. The line of progress is a retrospective fiction.
 
•       Ötzi the Iceman: A Man With a Story: Wyman’s most vivid example of what the new archaeology makes possible: Ötzi, a man murdered 5,300 years ago in the Alps, whose mummified body was found in 1991. From isotope analysis of his teeth, we know where he grew up. From his gut contents, we know what he ate in his last meal — venison and ibex. From his DNA, we know his ancestry. From the arrow in his back, we know how he died. We don’t know his name, but we know enough to recognise him as fully human. That is what the new tools give us: not symbols of a lost world, but individual people with individual stories.
 
•       The Fall of Rome Was Not a Tragedy: Wyman spent fifteen years of his life thinking about the fall of the Roman Empire and hosting a podcast about it. Writing this book changed how he sees it. He used to view it as a tragedy — something lost. Now he views it as a natural part of the rhythms that pulse through human societies over long periods of time. The remarkable thing about Rome is not that it fell. All empires fall. All societies eventually reach the limits of their technologies, their environments, their ways of organising life. The remarkable thing is that it lasted as long as it did. Six hundred years. That’s the story.
 
•       Think of Yourself as the Middle, Not the End: Wyman’s message for the AI apocalypticists — and for everyone else who believes they’re living at the final chapter of human history. Every person at every point in the past believed the same thing. The Neolithic farmers Wyman studies. The Bronze Age city-dwellers. The Romans. Every one of them was both an endpoint and a beginning. The AI revolution may transform the world. But it will not end it. Stop thinking in terms of next quarter. Start thinking of yourself as part of something much, much bigger — that will extend long after your name has been forgotten.
 
About the Guest
 
Patrick Wyman is the host of the Tides of History, Fall of Rome, and Past Lives podcasts, and the author of Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World (Harper, May 5, 2026) and The Verge: Renaissance, Reformation, and Forty Years That Shook the World. He has a PhD in History from USC and lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
 
References:
 
•       Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World by Patrick Wyman (Harper, May 5, 2026).
 
•       Tides of History podcast by Patrick Wyman — currently covering the Iron Age.
 
•       Fall of Rome podcast by Patrick Wyman.
 
•       Episode 2891: John Steele Gordon on information technology and American unity — the companion piece on how technology changes history at the deep level.
 
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:
 

(00:31) - Introduction: from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age...

“The current crisis was far from inevitable. Politicians made consistently bad choices. In doing so, they fostered a crisis of confidence in political institutions, empowered anti-system candidates, and produced a new Cold War as dangerous as the last.” — Ian Shapiro
 
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was a moment of extraordinary euphoria. Fukuyama even described it as the end of history. But what seems to have really fallen in November ’89 was the vitality of democracy. Almost forty years later, we have Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and, perhaps most worrying of all, Keir Starmer. Callous and inept politicians are breaking our democratic world. Our job is to put it back together.
 
That’s the thesis of a new book by Ian Shapiro — Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale. In After the Fall, Shapiro argues that it’s politicians who have created today’s crisis of democracy. His pivotal moment is 2008 rather than 1989. The global financial crisis was the inflection point — the moment at which the corruption of the neoliberal order became self-evident, when elites bailed out the banks and we see the birth of left and right wing illiberal populism.
 
The roots go back before 2008. Clinton’s greatest failure, Shapiro argues, was not NAFTA or welfare reform. It was Russia. Yeltsin wanted to join NATO. Even Putin, in his early years in power, acknowledged that Russia considered itself European. George Kennan, Brent Scowcroft and Richard Nixon warned that expanding NATO eastward would create a new enemy. Clinton ignored them all. So history repeated itself in the form of Versailles rather than the Marshall Plan.
 
So how to raise ourselves up after this fall? What road to take? Maps, Shapiro suggests, aren’t always helpful. The New Deal had no GPS algorithm. FDR invented it on the fly. What democratic governments need now, he insists, is massive investment in physical, technological, and labor market infrastructure. Charismatic leaders matter. But the ideas matter more. We need politicians who take risks. Otherwise we’ll be saddled with Keir Starmer and our current crisis of extraordinary dysphoria.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       2008, Not 1989, Was the Inflection Point: The fall of the Wall in 1989 produced euphoria. The real break came nineteen years later. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the neoliberal model, undermined the supremacy of the US-led world system, and — crucially — left behind a large population that would subsequently be mobilizable by political entrepreneurs. Elites bailed out the banks and returned to business as usual. They didn’t realize that business as usual was over. From 2008 you can draw a straight line to 2016, to Brexit, to Trump, to every anti-system surge that followed.
 
•       We Repeated the Mistake of Versailles: After World War II, the Marshall Plan invested in the defeated powers — Germany, Japan — and folded them into the new security and economic architecture. After World War I, Versailles punished Germany, and Keynes predicted the results. After the Cold War, the victorious West chose Versailles over Marshall. Yeltsin wanted to join NATO and the EU. Even early Putin said Russia considered itself European. Kennan, Scowcroft, Nixon all warned that expanding NATO eastward would create a new enemy. Clinton ignored them. We created the enemy we warned ourselves about.
 
•       Politicians Broke the World — Not Capitalism, Not Culture: Shapiro’s subtitle is precise. The crisis of democracy was not caused by inevitable economic forces or cultural shifts. It was caused by specific bad decisions by specific politicians at specific moments of choice. Clinton on NATO expansion. Bush on the Iraq War and the refusal to build a genuine rules-based international order after 9/11. Obama on the financial crisis response. These were decisions, not fates. They could have been made differently. Which means the current situation is not irreversible — and that future decisions can be made better.
 
•       Starmer as Exhibit A: Having Power Without Ideas: Shapiro’s prescription for what democratic governments need: a policy agenda. His cautionary tale: Keir Starmer. Starmer came into office with a massive parliamentary majority — he could have passed legislation that attracted 50 or 60 backbench no votes and still won. He had nothing to pass. Tiny step left, tiny step right, reverse, repeat. His comparison: Trump’s main policies came out of Project 2025 — put together not by Trump himself but by people who created the ramp he ran on. Without a ramp, even a charismatic leader stumbles. Without ideas, power is squandered.
 
•       The New Deal Had No Blueprint: FDR Made It Up: The lesson for what comes next. The New Deal — the last great democratic reconstruction — was not designed in advance. Roosevelt made it up as he went along, trying things, abandoning what didn’t work, building a coalition of extraordinarily unlikely bedfellows. What democratic governments need now, Shapiro argues, is massive infrastructure investment: physical infrastructure, tech infrastructure, labor market infrastructure. The CHIPS Act model. Incentivize business to retrain the workforce for the tech revolution and the green transition. Chancellor Merz in Germany has just borrowed half a trillion euros for this. Without it, there will be another Trump. And another. And another.
 
About the Guest
 
Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy — How Politicians Broke Our World (Basic Books, May 5, 2026), Uncommon Sense, The Wolf at the Door (with Michael Graetz), and many other books. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
 
References:
 
•       After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy — How Politicians Broke Our World by Ian Shapiro (Basic Books, May 5, 2026).
 
•       Episode 2881: Adrian Wooldridge on The Revolutionary Center — the companion episode on the crisis of liberalism that Shapiro’s book diagnoses.
 
•       Episode 2895: Glyn Morgan on The Rise and Fall of American Europe — the international dimension of Shapiro’s argument about the post-Cold War missed opportunities.
 
•       Episode 2880: Gal Beckerman on How to Be a Dissident — on the tradition of resistance that Shapiro’s “roads not taken” argument implicitly invokes.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than th...

“Post-war Europe is essentially an American protectorate. Europeans don’t like to admit that. They only came to realize just how dependent they were on the United States in 2025, when Trump basically leveraged US security and forced Europe into a very disadvantageous trade deal.” — Glyn Morgan
 
Post Second World War Europe was always an American project. At least according to The Rise and Fall of American Europe by Glyn Morgan, the Director of the Moynihan Center of European Studies at Syracuse University and a proud Welshman. All that post-war civilizational jazz — the Marshall Plan, NATO, the EU — weren’t really European achievements. Instead, they were American-designed ideas and institutions that proud Europeans boasted they had built themselves. For Morgan, post-war Europe was, in fact, little more than a US protectorate. Gaul colonized by Rome. Wales as a backwater of Great Britain.
 
Europeans only discovered this unpalatable truth in 2025, when Trump leveraged their security dependence to force a ruinous trade deal. JD Vance made the official press announcement at the Munich Security Conference. Today’s crisis of NATO is its obit.
 
The original architects of American Europe were deeply Europeanized Americans — Bill Bullitt, who loved France; George Kennan, who spoke better German than most Germans; Ivy League Libs who cherished Europe as a café-rich sibling of New York City. That imaginary continent lasted eighty years. Morgan defines its MAGA replacement as “civilizational America.” It’s a United States that sees itself as a distinct civilization with distinct interests, willing to transact with Russia and China and leave an increasingly marginalized Europe to fend for itself.
 
Wales is the future of Europe, Morgan says. The Welsh lost the Darwinian struggle for world power very early — conquered, then absorbed and shrunken into a rainy museum for English romantics. Sheep, rugby and singing ex-miners. That’s the fate of 21st century Europe. Bon Voyage. And don’t forget your umbrella.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       American Europe Was a US Protectorate: The story Europeans like to tell is that they built post-war Europe themselves — the Marshall Plan, the Treaty of Paris, the Treaty of Rome, the EU. Morgan’s counter: the construction of post-war Europe was theorized by Americans and pushed through by American pressure. Europeans resisted and begrudgingly went along. NATO provided the security. The EU organized the trade. Democratic nation states were the units. Enlargement was the engine. Europeans got comfortable inside this structure and convinced themselves they were in charge. Trump’s arrival in 2025 revealed the truth they had been avoiding for eighty years.
 
•       The Architects: Bullitt, Kennan, and the Europeanized Americans: The Roosevelt Democrats who built American Europe were deeply European in origin and values. Bill Bullitt loved France. George Kennan spoke better German than most Germans. They were steeped in the idea that America and Europe were one civilization. They wanted to rescue Europe both from the Europeans themselves and from the Soviet threat they were among the first to identify clearly. Bullitt and Kennan broke with Roosevelt over the Soviets — Roosevelt thought a deal could be struck; they said no. A strong democratic Europe as a bulwark against Soviet communism was the founding logic of the whole enterprise.
 
•       Trump and Vance: The Return of Isolationism: American isolationism — powerful in the 1930s, defeated by Pearl Harbor, marginalized through the Cold War — has returned. It returned in JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2025, and in Trump’s leveraging of European security dependence to force a disadvantageous trade deal. Morgan’s framing: what has emerged is “civilizational America” — a United States that sees itself not as the guarantor of European democracy but as a distinct civilization with distinct interests, willing to transact with Russia and China and leave Europe to manage its own affairs.
 
•       Putin and Trump Are Playing the Same Playbook: Putin seeks a Europe of nation states — not the integrated EU — where he can deal transactionally, playing different European states against each other. Europeans were slow to realize that’s what they were facing. Then they faced the same thing from Trump. The beneficiary of the collapse of American Europe, Morgan argues, is China: investing in Eastern Europe, doing trade deals across the continent, acquiring economic leverage while Russia and America compete for security dominance. A Chinese Europe in fifty years is not inconceivable.
 
•       No Solution: Look to Wales: Europe faces an impossible dilemma. Rebuild the military and lose the welfare state. Or preserve the welfare state and rely on security that may no longer be provided. De Gaulle’s line: it is a fundamental error to think that to every problem there is a solution. At some moments there is no solution. We await a Bismarck; we have mediocre politicians who can only stop things from getting worse. The bleak future: a pleasant museum, highly dependent on American tech, visited by Chinese and American tourists. Morgan is from Wales. Wales lost the struggle for world power very early. He can see what’s coming.
 
About the Guest
 
Glyn Morgan is Director of the Moynihan Center of European Studies at Syracuse University and the author of The Rise and Fall of American Europe (Polity, August 2026) and The Idea of a European Superstate.
 
References:
 
•       The Rise and Fall of American Europe by Glyn Morgan (Polity, August 2026).
 
•       Episode 2875: Daniel Bessner on Cold War Liberalism — the companion episode on the Cold War liberal tradition that built American Europe.
 
•       Episode 2887: Steven J. Ross on The Secret War Against Hate — referenced in the interview; the American neo-Nazi tradition that ran alongside American Europe.
 
•       Episode 2881: Adrian Wooldridge on The Revolutionary Center — the crisis of liberalism that American Europe’s collapse is accelerating.
 
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 intervi...

“Orbán rigged the electoral system to highly benefit the winner. He thought he would never face the realistic possibility of losing. When someone actually threatened his plan, he just couldn’t imagine it. And that person got more than 55% — a two-thirds-plus majority. Orbán shot himself in the foot.” — Marc Loustau
 
On April 12, Viktor Orbán — the populist who invented the illiberal playbook — got booted out of office by the Hungarian electorate. His defeat, says Marc Loustau, Harvard PhD and fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, represents a playbook for defeating illiberalism. Orbán had rigged the electoral system so dramatically — giving the winner 1.5 votes for every vote the loser got — that when Péter Magyar got more than 55 percent of the vote, Orbán’s own system destroyed him. The gods must have their fun — Hungarian poetic justice.
 
Orbán’s cronies, Loustau reports, are fleeing to Dubai with their hot rod car collections and ill-gotten gains from sixteen years in power. But the mid- and upper-tier bureaucrats, Loustau warns, are still in office. Not having any other skills, they’re going to be difficult to dislodge. Making Hungary a functional democracy again won’t happen overnight.
 
The goal of Péter Magyar’s government, Loustau says, is to “make Hungary boring again.” That should be the lesson for the anti-Trumpists in his native America, Loustau says. Build the broadest possible coalition, never kick anyone out of it, and refuse to be drawn onto the deadly culture-war terrain. When Orbán banned the Budapest Pride parade to force Péter Magyar to take a stand on LGBTQ issues, Magyar flew to a Greek island. It was, Loustau says, the smartest move of the campaign. Make America boring again. The anti-Hollywood playbook for defeating illiberalism. Are you watching Gavin & Kamala?
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Poetic Justice: Orbán’s System Destroyed Him: Orbán rigged Hungary’s electoral system to massively benefit the winner: if you get more than 55 percent of the vote, you get roughly 70 percent of parliamentary seats, and effectively 1.5 votes for every vote your opponent receives. He did this because he never imagined anyone could get above 50 percent against him. When Péter Magyar did — comfortably — Orbán’s own system gave Magyar a supermajority. Loustau’s verdict: it is rare that there is genuine poetic justice in life. This is one of those moments.
 
•       The Cronies Are Heading for Dubai: Sixteen years of a two-thirds majority in parliament allowed Orbán to pack every institution in Hungary with loyalists — friends, family, friends of friends — from top to bottom. In the end, this became part of his undoing: when you bleed out talent and fill institutions with cronies, you end up with an inept government. The most visible Orbán figures are now heading to Dubai with their hot rod car collections. But the mid-level “authoritarian cadre circles” burrowed into every institution will be much harder to remove. It will take years to restore functional public services.
 
•       Make Hungary Boring Again: The incoming government’s agenda, in Loustau’s formulation, is to make Hungary boring again. No more brinkmanship between Russia, Brussels, and Washington. No more geopolitical risk-taking. Hungary belongs in the EU, and if the EU likes anything, it is stultifying bureaucracy. That, paradoxically, may be the best thing for ordinary Hungarians. It does not signal the end of the far-right threat globally. So long as Putin is alive, Loustau argues, we must remain vigilant.
 
•       Magyar Goes to Greece: The Culture War Lesson: One of Orbán’s favourite tactics was to force opposition politicians to take a stand on LGBTQ issues. He banned the Budapest Pride parade specifically to create a trap for Magyar — either come out against the ban and look soft on “family values,” or attend the parade and look radical. Magyar’s response: he went on holiday to Greece. He wasn’t even in the country. Loustau calls it one of the slyest moves of the campaign. The lesson for Trump’s opponents: never engage on the terrain your opponent has chosen.
 
•       Can Disaffected Trumpians Defeat Trumpism? Magyar came from within Orbán’s government and broke with him at a moment of genuine moral crisis — a scandal involving pardons for those who covered up sexual abuse at state-run orphanages. That moral authority gave him a platform. Loustau’s honest assessment: disaffected Trumpians who had any dealings with Trump are radioactive, perhaps permanently. But the broader lesson holds: when government inaction harms the innocent and powerless, someone who stands up and says “enough is enough” can build a majority. Magyar didn’t win on policy. He won on decency.
 
About the Guest
 
Marc Loustau is a Harvard PhD, Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest, and author of the At the Edges Substack. He writes on Central and Eastern European politics, religion, and society.
 
References:
 
•       At the Edges by Marc Loustau — his Substack on Central and Eastern European politics.
 
•       Episode 2880: Gal Beckerman on How to Be a Dissident — the companion episode on the theory of resistance that Magyar’s campaign enacted.
 
•       Episode 2881: Adrian Wooldridge on The Revolutionary Center — on the crisis of liberalism that Orbán exploited and Magyar may have reversed.
 
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:
 

(00:31) - How significant was the Hungarian election in historical terms?

(01:30) - Orbán’s authoritarianism: model for the world, now defeated

(02:56) - Was the left paranoid? How did Orbán actually lose?

(03:50) - Poetic justice: Orbán rigged the system and it destroyed him

(05:46) - Corruption uncovered: the regime unraveling

(06:38) - Sixteen years of cronyism: what remains?

(07:51) - Authoritarian cadre circles: how long to dislodge them?

(08:24) - The cronies heading for Dubai with their hot rod collections

(10:38) - Romania, Ceauşescu, and celebrat...