Keen On America

“A place that doesn’t have great philosophers will not have great technologists either.” — Mehran Gul on Europe’s inexplicable underperformance
 
The digital revolution, we were promised, would mean the end of geography. From Beijing to Birmingham to Berlin to Barcelona, anyone could invent anything anywhere, and so the geography of innovation would no longer matter. But that’s not the way it has worked out. At least according to the Geneva-based innovation geographer Mehran Gul.
 
Gul’s acclaimed The New Geography of Innovation is a travelogue of innovation. But what he finds on his journey around the world in search of innovation is the end of the end of geography. Yes, Gul reports, there’s innovation in Beijing and in Birmingham (USA) — but not in Birmingham (England), Berlin or Barcelona. All the important invention is in China and the US. There simply isn’t much radical stuff going on anywhere else.
 
Gul began his journey expecting to find ten or twelve countries able to innovate competitively with the United States and China. But what he discovered is either niche players or, in the case of South Korea, Israel, and India, just an extension of the US-centric system. Europe — as renters rather than owners of American technology — comes off worst. When PayPal went public, it minted 160 millionaires who went on to help build SpaceX, Tesla, LinkedIn and Palantir; when Skype exited at about the same value, it minted 11. And if you put London aside, the rest of the UK is now poorer per capita than Mississippi.
 
And the AI boom has only compounded all this, with half of last year’s key research papers coming from China, 40% from America, and just 4% from Europe. So really the new geography of innovation is the old geography. Only with China replacing Europe as the only serious competitor to American innovation. Oh lord, oh lord. As a Mississippi bluesman might summarize Europe’s predicament.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Golden Shares: The Two Systems Are Converging. OpenAI offering Washington a 5% stake, the US government owning Intel — these are Chinese moves, and Gul argues the two models are becoming more alike than either admits. But he pushes back on the lazy version of the China story: its tech sector rose despite the state, not because of it. Jack Ma exiled to Japan, Didi hit with a billion in fines, entire sectors decapitated overnight in 2021 under the banner of common prosperity. In a country with no independent media and no opposition parties, the only rival to centralized power is the tech sector — and the party knows it.
 
•       Two Countries — and Everyone Else. Gul started writing expecting to find ten or twelve countries punching at America’s level; the honest answer turned out to be two. Only China has broad-based competence across technologies and a genuinely competitive relationship with the US. The middle powers — South Korea, Israel, India — are extensions of the American system, not rivals to it. That finding surprised the author as much as anyone: it’s not the book he set out to write.
 
•       Europe: Renters, Not Owners. After the Fable 5 and Mythos bans, Europe woke up to being a renter of American technology — foundation models, NVIDIA GPUs, all of it. Its best companies keep leaving: DeepMind to Google, Arm to a New York listing, Hugging Face from Paris to Manhattan — while Volvo, Supercell, and KUKA sold to China. Gul’s diagnosis is institutional, not cultural: European employees own half as much of their startups as American ones, so there is no European PayPal mafia. His fixes: a European Nasdaq to replace 41 competing capital markets, and pension funds unleashed into venture capital.
 
•       The Question Nobody Is Asking. Since 1990, America’s share of global GDP has held at 25% while China’s multiplied tenfold — the loser is Europe. The top ten American tech companies are worth $27 trillion, more than the GDP of every country on earth except America itself. Tech is not one industry among many; it is the foundation of all of them — the new cars came from Tesla, not GM. Gul’s message to the skeptical Spaniard enjoying long lunches: the last sixty years of American platform dominance skewed power across the Atlantic, and the next sixty will add China to the bill.
 
•       The Rest of the Map: Anti Case Studies. Japan tops the freedom indexes, has the technical schools, and still never escaped the keiretsu — disproving Matt Ridley’s claim that innovation is simply the child of freedom. Taiwan’s relevance comes down to one company and Morris Chang’s missed promotion at Texas Instruments. Singapore is an inspiration, not a model — a one-party city-state that invoices NVIDIA’s chips and banks ASEAN’s venture capital. India underperforms while Indians excel — 56 notable American foundation models last year, 35 Chinese, barely one Indian. And Switzerland reminds us innovation isn’t only venture-backed: a train network running on renewables since the 1960s.
 
About the Guest
 
Mehran Gul writes about technology and business. He is the winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize, from which The New Geography of Innovation grew. He attended Yale as a Fulbright Scholar, Fox International Fellow, and Teaching Fellow, has been a Lead for the Digital Transformation of Industries at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, and served as an expert on entrepreneurship and industrial policy at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization in Vienna. Born in Pakistan, he lives in Switzerland. The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), a Financial Times Book of the Year, is his first book, out in paperback this month in the US and UK.
 
References:
 
•       The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies by Mehran Gul (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster). The Wall Street Journal: “An ambitious tour of technological innovation.”
 
•       Sebastian Mallaby — author of The Power Law, which argues China’s tech rise owes more to American-style risk capital arriving in Shanghai and Shenzhen than to the state; recently on the show discussing his biography of Demis Hassabis.
 
•       Kai-Fu Lee — author of AI Superpowers, cited by Gul as the classic account of tech written through a Chinese lens.
 
•       Matt Ridley — author of How Innovation Works, whose thesis that innovation is “the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity” Gul tests against the anti case study of Japan.
 
•       Andrew Keen — author of How t...

“I crack the tab open, and I feel the cold metal… I hear the tink and give of the aluminum. And maybe when I’m done, I crush it into a small patty.” — Ian Bogost on the everyday enchantment of a Diet Coke can
 
Don’t sweat the small stuff is one of the most persistent (and annoying) mantras of the self-help industry. But the counter-intuitive Atlantic columnist Ian Bogost advises the opposite. In his new book, The Small Stuff, Bogost suggests that gratification lies in our appreciation of small stuff like the crinkle of empty Diet Coke cans and the foldability of plane tickets.
 
Max Weber argued that disenchantment was the defining quality of modernity, but in The Small Stuff, Bogost maps a way back to it. What we need to get away from, he says, is “optimization” — metrics, feedback loops, money as a proxy for a place in heaven. Rather than the cult of delayed gratification, pick up that empty coke can and revel in its architectural glory. Or lick a tree. That’s how to be enchanted in postmodernity.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Sweat the Small Stuff. Bogost inverts three decades of self-help orthodoxy: the small stuff is precisely what we should be sweating. The crack of a Diet Coke tab, the cold metal warming in your hand, the can crushed into a patty before the recycling bin — these sensory encounters are not where deep purpose lives, and Bogost never claims they are. But they recur every day, sometimes several times a day, and accepting them as meaningful rather than as noise to get through delivers what he calls a surprising payload of engagement and enchantment. For some it’s Diet Coke; for others, woodworking, gardening, or the gear shift of a manual transmission.
 
•       Dematerialization: How We Lost the World. The book’s central diagnosis is what Bogost calls dematerialization — the slow disconnection from the physical world driven by convenience technologies. The QR code that replaced the concert ticket you might have pinned to a bulletin board. The automatic faucet you wave at awkwardly in the public restroom — which never works, and doesn’t even save water; it just makes buildings easier to manage. The process is decades old, hardly limited to computers, and it stripped the texture from everyday life so gradually that nobody noticed what was being given up.
 
•       It’s Sensory, Not Physical — and Not Anti-Tech. This is not a go-touch-grass book. Bogost insists the small stuff is sensory rather than physical, and that smartphones are compelling precisely because they are delightful — the smooth glass that demands to be touched, the thunderstorm animation in the weather app. Everything is technology, including the clothes on your body and the language in your mouth. He gave his twelve-year-old a smartwatch rather than banning screens, because parenting means living in the same world as your kids — and kids must live a contemporary life to become the adults who invent the next one.
 
•       We Already Got Rid of God — So Meaning Had to Move. Pressed on Weber and the Protestant ethic, Bogost argues that secularization emptied out the place where meaning used to live — good works justified by an infinite time in heaven — and replaced it with happiness, purpose, and wealth as proxies. The result is a hyper-optimized, future-oriented culture in which everything worth doing is worth doing for some later payoff. Bogost admits he struggles with this himself: the health wearable he wears while writing a book against quantification. What he loves about his morning walk isn’t the step count. It’s the twigs crunching underfoot.
 
•       The Quietism Charge — and the AI Twist. Isn’t this stoicism for the age of Trump, the same charge leveled at Heidegger’s silence before the Nazis? Bogost anticipates the critique: we are and must be both political creatures and creatures who live moment to moment in our bodies — he asks no one to abandon the fight, only to stop missing the life underneath it. And the timing is no accident. As AI takes over the big stuff, Bogost suspects it may push us back into the sensory world — he consults ChatGPT about fixing his range thermostat, then goes and fixes it with his hands.
 
About the Guest
 
Ian Bogost is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of eleven books, including The Small Stuff and Play Anything. He is the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches computer science and engineering, film and media studies, and art and design. He is also an award-winning game designer whose work is held in collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He is the author of The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026).
 
References:
 
•       The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026). The New Yorker: “Bogost’s joy is infectious.”
 
•       Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (2016) — Bogost’s earlier book, the subject of his June 2020 appearance on the show.
 
•       Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (2012) — Bogost’s “straight up philosophy book” where he first explored the idea of wonder.
 
•       Max Weber — the German sociologist who identified disenchantment as the defining quality of modernity, and whose The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism frames the discussion of delayed gratification and the afterlife.
 
•       Matthew Crawford — mutual friend of host and guest, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head, earlier explorers of the same terrain.
 
•       Martin Heidegger — the philosopher whose ideas of thrownness and being-in-the-world haunt the book, though his name never appears in it, and whose Nazi-era quietism frames the political critique.
 
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 3,000 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
 
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“America has a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance.” — the message Tad Devine and Ben Tulchin developed for Bernie Sanders, which tested highest in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2015
 
How the Democrats Screwed Bernie. It could have been coined by Donald Trump. That was Tad Devine’s first objection when his editor floated it. But as Devine, Bernie Sanders’ chief strategist on his 2016 Presidential campaign, worked on the book about the 2016 campaign, he realised it most accurately expressed how he felt about what actually happened. And so the new tell-all — the inside account of the historic Sanders campaign — is, indeed, entitled How the Democrats Screwed Bernie.
 
Devine was never an outsider. He worked on Al Gore’s 2000 and John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaigns. He first met Bernie Sanders in 1996, when Peter DeFazio — the Oregon congressman for whom Devine and his partner Mike Donilon had just run a near-miraculous campaign — suggested they meet. Sanders had almost lost his House seat in 1994. Devine’s campaign won it back by 26 points. Ten years later, Devine ran Sanders’ successful Senate campaign against a free-spending billionaire. They won by 30 points. Devine schooled Bernie in the insider-politics of the Democratic party. But he didn’t transform him into an insider. Bernie was and is always Bernie. The consummate outsider.
 
So how, exactly, did the Dems screw Bernie? According to Devine, it was a coordinated campaign by the Clinton Machine, the DNC, and a network of Super PACs to stop a wildly popular outsider through dark money, dirty tricks, and deliberately structured primary rules. The unHillary candidate who, Devine argues, may well have been the people’s choice — and could have beaten Donald Trump in November 2016.
 
But Bernie’s real legacy, Devine insists, is not what was done to him. It’s his campaign message. “America has a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance.” That outsider language — which Devine developed with pollster Ben Tulchin — captures how America is screwing itself. The consummate insider Trump stole Bernie’s language. And if the Democrats want to screw the MAGA crowd in 2028, they need to seize back this outsider message.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Title That Sounded Like Trump: Devine’s first reaction when his Simon & Schuster editor proposed the title: I don’t want to be anything like Trump. But as he worked through the process of writing the book, he came to see that the title most accurately expressed how he felt about what happened in 2016. The Democratic establishment — the Clinton Machine, the DNC, the network of Super PACs and media allies — used dark money, dirty tricks, opposition research, and deliberately structured primary rules to stop a wildly popular outsider candidate. A candidate who, the book argues, may well have been the people’s choice and may well have defeated Donald Trump.
 
•       How Devine Met Bernie: 1996, Peter DeFazio, and 26 Points: Devine was already a Democratic establishment figure when Peter DeFazio — a progressive Oregon congressman — introduced him to Sanders in early 1996. Sanders had almost lost his House seat in 1994; Devine’s firm came in a month before the 1996 election and reversed the trajectory. Sanders won by 26 points. Ten years later, Devine ran Sanders’ Senate campaign against a billionaire who spent the equivalent of $350 million in California, and they won by 30 points. A bond of trust formed between the establishment consultant and the independent socialist, though it was a relationship in which the label-defying aspect went both ways: Bernie, you’re a United States senator, Devine told him. That is the establishment.
 
•       The Rigged Economy Message: What Bernie Actually Contributed: The most important moment in the 2016 campaign was not a debate or a rally. It was a polling session in 2015 in which Devine and pollster Ben Tulchin combined two separate arguments — a rigged economy and a corrupt system of campaign finance — into a single sentence: “America has a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance.” It tested as the highest message in Iowa and New Hampshire. That, Devine argues, is Bernie’s real legacy: the identification of the structural problem. Until that problem is fixed — until the campaign finance system that rigs the economy is reformed — the economy will continue to crush the middle class and make it impossible for people to afford groceries, gas, and healthcare.
 
•       The Real Populist vs the Phony One: Trump saw the same diagnosis Bernie had identified and grabbed it — infusing it with his xenophobia, racism, pathological lying, and contempt for democratic norms. The populist message was the same; the bundle around it was entirely different. Bernie represents a belief that government has a role in serving people. Trump represents a belief that government should serve rich people and punish everyone else, wrapped in the language of the working class. That, Devine argues, is the distinction that matters for 2028. The fight is not between left and right. It is between the real and the phony.
 
•       AOC, Ro Khanna, and the 2028 Democratic Race: Bernie won’t run in 2028. But Devine is certain that one or more Bernie-style candidates will. AOC and Ro Khanna are the most obvious — both have toured with Bernie, both share his core principles, both are committed to Medicare for All. But Devine adds: at this point in the calendar going into 2006, Barack Obama was a state senator from Illinois. The candidate who actually wins the 2028 nomination may not yet be on the radar. What is on the radar: a Democratic base that is desperate for new leadership and a new direction. And a president, Trump, who Devine believes is capable of doing anything to hold power, including worse than January 6. The only way to stop him is to beat him in elections.
 
About the Guest
 
Tad Devine is a Democratic political strategist with over thirty years of campaign experience. He served as chief strategist for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and as a senior adviser in Al Gore’s 2000 and John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaigns. He has held academic positions at Boston University, the Harvard Kennedy School, and George Washington University. He is the author of How the Democrats Screwed Bernie (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026).
 
References:
 
•       How the Democrats Screwed Bernie by Tad Devine (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026). Publishers Weekly: “An enraging account… a keen cautionary tale.”
 
•       Mike Donilon — Devine’s former partner; later became Joe Biden’s top strategist in the White House.

“For all the paperwork of democracy — government by and for the people — we have become a citizenry of spectators who simply want to be entertained. And we are accustomed to the realization that we can’t do anything about what’s on the screen.” — David Thomson
 
Has the prolific film critic David Thomson fallen out of love with the movies? That’s the question I began my conversation with Thomson, arguably the greatest living writer on film. My question was triggered by his revisionist movie history (out today), A Sudden Flicker of Light, which, while still glorifying film, nonetheless recognizes the damage that the medium has done to us.
 
No, he hasn’t fallen out of love with the movies, Thomson responded. But he did acknowledge a new kind of wariness about his beloved medium — a suspicion of auteur worship, that tradition which concentrates on the great artistry of individual directors like Welles, Hitchcock, and Scorsese while ignoring what the motion picture medium as a whole has done to society.
 
“What has God wrought?” Samuel Morse asked about the telegraph. David Thomson is asking the same question about the consequence of movies.
 
Cinema, particularly Hollywood, Thomson argues, has spent a century disempowering audiences. Sitting in the dark, gazing at the screen, people have lost their agency. This passivity, Thomson argues, has invaded our political life, transforming us from citizens into spectators. No, Mr Smith hasn’t gone to Washington. Instead, America has become a theater of gawkers addicted to screen entertainment, unable to discriminate between a sudden flicker of light and reality.
 
Thus the degeneration of America into a violent Coppola movie. Thus The Joker who has crawled out of primeval darkness and now monopolizes all our screens. You could make a movie about it. Call it “Being There” or “Network.” Or perhaps “The Truman Show.”
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Cinema Has Trained Us to Be Spectators — and That Has Destroyed Our Agency: Thomson’s central argument: sitting in the dark watching a bright light in front of them, audiences learned that the thing on the screen is not their responsibility. People are not really hurt on screen, no matter their bodies are torn apart. They are not really happy, no matter what they say in the film. And whatever happens, the audience remains a spectator. Extrapolate that out into a broader world and you have a society in which, for all the paperwork of democracy and government by and for the people, people have become a citizenry of spectators who simply want to be entertained. America, Thomson believes, is in that state.
 
•       Every Cut Is Violent — and Every Cut Is a Marriage: Thomson’s most original observation is the smallest: the cut. A cut is where the stream of imagery you are watching goes from one shot to another. It is a separation — but it is also a marriage. Every cut says: join them up. The way we measure the effectiveness of directors from D.W. Griffith onward is that they found ways to put shots together so that film had sequence and order, like the order of sentences in writing. And every cut has an element of violence in it, because you are seeing one thing and then, bang, you are watching something quite different. We have never taught our children what a cut is — even though they have spent far more of their lives watching moving imagery than reading. That neglect, Thomson argues, is consequential.
 
•       The Culture of Manhood and the Systematic Neglect of Women: Thomson’s most politically charged observation: the culture of manhood and the serious neglect of women was going on in virtually every film he saw until at least the 1980s, and you could argue well beyond that. That is, he says, a kind of tacit advertising — a way of saying, look, this is really a very good way for how the world should be. It is something that has become harder and harder for him to endure as an idea. And he thinks that the war in Iran would not have been as likely if America had had enough women running the country — because women feel and think together in concert in different ways, with more room for compassion, sentiment, and plain rationality.
 
•       Cinema Is Deeply Educational — and We Have Ignored That: Thomson’s answer to Andrew’s challenge: what does any of this have to do with movies? Everything. You cannot have a mass medium without the mass being affected, without the ways in which they think being shaped. The movies have given us examples of how to live that have been intensely persuasive. They are deeply educational. And yet we have permitted them, and like every technology humans have ever invented, we have let the technology take control of us rather than the other way around. Children spend far more time watching moving imagery than reading — and yet we do not teach them what a cut is, what a camera angle means, how the medium constructs its reality. That neglect has been, Thomson believes, catastrophic.
 
•       Citizen Kane Is the Definitive American Film — Not The Godfather: Andrew’s final question: what is the definitive movie about America? Not The Godfather, Thomson says, because the Godfather films cannot overcome their attraction to authority. There is a reverence for dark power in the Godfather films. Whereas in Citizen Kane, there is all through the film a terrible ruefulness about what happens to people who seek power. Welles absolutely understood and was intensely critical of the personality that needed power and authority — and he was afraid of it. For that reason, it is still for Thomson the definitive American film. Thomson has been known to doze off watching it, because he knows it too well. On July 4, he plans to watch something different. Ideally, The Odyssey.
 
About the Guest
 
David Thomson is the author of more than twenty books on film, including A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026), The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (six editions, 1975–2014), Orson Welles, The Big Screen, Have You Seen…?, and biographies of David O. Selznick, Marlon Brando, and Nicole Kidman. Michael Ondaatje has called him “the best writer on film in our time.” He lives in San Francisco, where he is Andrew Keen’s neighbour.
 
References:
 
•       A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies by David Thomson (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026).
 
•       Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) — Thomson’s definitive American film; discussed extensively in the conversation.
 
•       The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) — referenced as ...

“White Americans considered themselves chosen by God to possess the continent and lord it over others — and they saw Native people as indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction.” — David J. Silverman
 
Was the colonization of North America a genocidal project? That is the delicate question David J. Silverman confronts in his powerful new book, The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States.
 
Yes, Silverman concludes, there was an American genocide. But with a crucial distinction. Rather than a top-down government-organised “Final Solution,” the fate of Native Americans was what Silverman calls a “structural genocide.” It reflected a complete indifference to Native American life, grounded in a religious and racial ideology that gave white Americans the right to possess the continent and viewed Native Americans as indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction.
 
The Spanish colonization of Latin America, Silverman notes, intended to subjugate the Native population and keep them as tributaries. The English, and their American successors, in contrast, intended to replace them. It’s the same structural genocide that occurred in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa.
 
For all Silverman’s dark take, there is good news. He argues that this structural genocide came to an end in the late 1960s. In an extraordinary and underappreciated transformation, Native American activists convinced a broad majority of Americans that tribes as tribes should be a permanent part of the United States. White supremacy, Silverman concludes, has been a feature of North American history since its colonization. But so has pluralism. American genocide vs American pluralism. Is history once again repeating itself in Trump’s America?
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Structural Genocide: Society-Wide Indifference, Not Just Government Policy: Silverman’s central concept: structural genocide. Not the top-down, government-directed campaign to exterminate a people — though there were moments of exactly that across the centuries, when the government decided certain groups of Native people should be exterminated for resisting American rule. What he’s describing is a society-wide and culture-wide indifference to Native American life, grounded in a racial ideology in which white Americans considered themselves chosen by God to possess the continent and Native Americans indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction. That ideology, combined with the imperative to seize Native American land, led white Americans from the seventeenth century through the twentieth to destroy Native American life through dozens of different forms.
 
•       Anglo vs Spanish Colonialism: Replacement vs Subjugation: The Spanish in Latin America and the Caribbean were violent and horrific — but their purpose was to subjugate the Native population and have them subservient, not to replace them. Once the Spanish had defeated Native people, they took their foot off the gas and kept the surviving population as tributaries. The English colonies, and their American successors, intended to replace Native people — to displace them from the land and install new settler societies of men, women, and children. That pattern is also visible in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. It is not unique to the United States, but it is particular to English-origin settler colonialism.
 
•       White Americans as “Chosen”: The Theological Foundation of Racial Ideology: Silverman’s most striking argument is the theological one. White Americans did not merely believe they were racially superior — they believed they were chosen by God to possess the North American continent and lord it over others, and that Native people were equally fated by God to extinction in the name of white Christian civilisation. Native people countered with their own theology: the Great Spirit had created Indians and Whites separately and intended America to belong to Indians alone. This was not just a political dispute. It was a cosmic one. The racial ideology of white election — the sense of being chosen — is, Silverman argues, inseparable from the structural genocide that followed.
 
•       The Good News: Structural Genocide Came to an End in the Late 1960s: An extraordinary and largely unacknowledged transformation. Native American activists and their non-Native allies convinced a broad American majority — Democrats and Republicans — that Native tribes as tribes, not just individuals, should be a permanent part of the United States, and that the treaties signed by the republic should be honoured as the supreme law of the land. For most of American history, the government’s programme was to exterminate Native people physically or as cultural, social, and political units. That is no longer the case. Native Americans are rising: in numbers, in well-being, in political power. Light years to go. But it is a stunning transformation.
 
•       Honoring Treaties Is Not Reparations — It Is the Constitution: On the question of Native land rights and casino rights, Silverman is precise: what you are seeing is not special privileges granted out of white guilt. It is the United States honouring the treaties it signed with Native tribes in the nineteenth century — treaties that under the United States Constitution are the supreme law of the land. The United States has not honoured those treaties for most of its history. It has begun to do so since the 1960s. This is not reparations. It is the republic living up to its word and its constitutional duties. The distinction matters, and Silverman draws it carefully.
 
About the Guest
 
David J. Silverman is Professor of History at George Washington University. He is the author of The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States (Bloomsbury, February 10, 2026), This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (Bloomsbury, 2019; winner of multiple awards), Thundersticks, Ninigret, Red Brethren, and Faith and Boundaries. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, National Geographic, and The Daily Beast. He is based in Washington DC.
 
References:
 
•       The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States by David J. Silverman (Bloomsbury, February 10, 2026).
 
•       Konstanty Gebert (Warsaw, Episode 2952) — referenced at the opening for his discussion of the definition of genocide.
 
•       Isabel Wilkerson, Caste — referenced in the closing section on racial hierarchy as caste.
 
About Keen On America