Keen On America

“His intent is getting worse, but his capacity is diminishing. The next two years will be some kind of mad race to figure out which of these two things will prevail.” — Jonathan Rauch
 
As the nights get shorter, we are drifting into the autumn of the patriarch. That, at least, is the view of two old friends of the show, Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner, who argued in The New York Times that Trump has finally lost the plot. So will this really go down as the fall that Trump failed?
 
Rauch and Wehner note what’s failed and what hasn’t. MAGA’s revolutionary project — the regime change, the campaign against the universities, the idea that America had become Flight 93 — was an attempt to rout liberals from the commanding heights of American culture. At first this conservative Leninism succeeded, with universities and law firms folding in the face of a bullying state. But then civil society reorganized, fought back on the streets and in the courts, and district judges mostly held the line. But while the atmosphere of fear has evaporated, Rauch notes, what Trump has won is the transformation of the American state into a patrimonial form of government. With the complicity of Congress, it’s hard to untangle the state as personal property and as a family business.
 
Wehner’s ethical diagnosis is starker. Coining it as the autumn of the sociopath, he observes sociopathy fused with visible cognitive decline, an old fool with enormous power and fewer people willing to check him. Rather than Trump losing the plot, the plot has lost the doddering patriarch. Forget Venezuela and Cuba. The concluding series in this North American version of The Autumn of the Patriarch will be aired live from La Casa Blanca.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Losing the Plot. The New York Times piece is, Rauch says, consistent with his earlier Atlantic essay on fascism rather than a retreat from it: that piece argued Trump was a fascist type of leader who would probably fail, and this one says the failure has happened. The plot in question is the revolutionary one — the attempt by the people around Trump to rewire American culture from the White House. Wehner’s account of the man is bleaker than the politics. There were guardrails in the first term, Kelly and Mattis among them, and there are far fewer now; what has changed is a fusion of sociopathic tendencies that were always there with a cognitive decline that is obvious to anyone watching. He would update García Márquez’s title to the autumn of the sociopath. And the image that lands: a doddering old fool wandering out of meetings to opine about the ballroom and the White House grass — except that he is a doddering old fool with a tremendous amount of power, surrounded by advisers who in some cases want to go further than he does.
•       The Part He Won. Rauch is careful not to declare victory: the article spends its first third on what succeeded, and the most important of those elements to Trump personally is patrimonialism — the organization of government in which the state is the personal property and family business of the leader. That is how he runs the presidency, the Justice Department, trade policy, the Pentagon and the architecture of Washington, with a great deal of complicity from Congress. Why did the Republicans fold? Three reasons, in Rauch’s account: members who defied him were primaried and often beaten; they swim in a media and political environment where ninety per cent of the people they meet judge them by their fidelity to Trump; and they are physically afraid — death threats follow a social-media finger-point, and members of Congress are not wealthy people with round-the-clock security. The first crack in the patrimonial edifice, Rauch notes, came this week from Senator John Curtis of Utah, who called for an investigation into the president’s son’s wedding.
•       Minneapolis. Both men treat the Minneapolis protests as the hinge. Before them, Wehner sensed powerlessness and despair among Trump’s critics — a loss of human agency. Then people stood up, peacefully, in freezing temperatures, and ICE pulled out. You can prove the possible by the actual, he says, and Minneapolis was something actual. His caveat is unsparing about his countrymen: much of the rediscovery of virtue has been driven by economic pain — gas prices, grocery prices, interest rates, the Iran debacle. He describes a Trump voter he met in a McLean coffee shop who had voted for the man three times and now says he wouldn’t again. But if the economy were growing at four per cent with inflation at one and a half, Wehner suspects many would not give a damn — and that, he says, is an indictment of who they are. Seventy-seven million people voted for a man who had incited an insurrection. As for the coming memory hole, he expects plenty of retrospective distancing; he cites Gerard Baker and Laura Ingraham as early examples.
•       Civil Society Held. The most encouraging thread. The revolutionary project had a theorist — Patrick Deneen, whose 2023 book Regime Change argued that conservatives must not merely constrain the elites who run American society but replace them — and an architect in Christopher Rufo, plus Bannon, the Heritage Foundation and the Flight 93 conviction — Michael Anton’s 2016 essay — that it was now or never. Universities and law firms submitted first, and Rauch thinks the law firms never needed to. Then it turned: lawsuits, reorganization, district court judges doing a remarkable job at some personal risk. What looked like a bulldozer in the first six months now looks like something people are much less frightened of. He is still renaming lakes and excluding networks from the press pool, but the momentum is gone. Their diagnosis of the error is structural: you cannot win a razor-thin margin and then remake a fundamentally non-revolutionary country in two years. Wehner adds the deeper irony — conservative Leninism is a contradiction in terms, since the conservative temperament is anti-revolutionary by definition. Meanwhile the MAGA coalition is cracking up: Shapiro against Levin against Kelly against Carlson, the acrobats going one way and the clowns the other.
•       What They Got Wrong. Andrew asked both men what a decade of Trump has changed in them. Wehner has rethought his party and his faith — he remains a Christian but no longer calls himself an evangelical — while his conservatism, the Burke and Oakeshott kind, he still holds. Rauch’s answer is more unsettling: what has not changed is his conviction that the founders got the system right, but he misjudged the character of the American people. It never occurred to him that a man who attempted an insurrection could be a viable candidate, let alone re-elected, and he quotes Roger Sherman’s line at the Constitutional Convention that the people are poorly informed and easily misled. He also missed the distress signals — the people left behind economically and culturally, who were not a hundred per cent wrong about a cosmopolitan conspiracy of the Davos crowd — and pleads guilty to complacency, then and now, because he still doesn’t know what the next agenda looks like. On party: he has been a functional Democrat since 2018, voting only for Democrats until the Republicans rejoin the camp of liberal democracy. And to A...

“A good divorce is better than a bad marriage, and this is a good divorce.” — Alan Dershowitz
 
The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz says he’s been voting Democrat since John F. Kennedy. He even defended Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Alan Cranston in court. But, at 88 years old, Dershowitz has now left — or, as he puts it, been forced out of the Dems, in the same way Ronald Reagan was sixty years ago. His new book Why I Quit the Dems and So Should You is both a history of his souring relations with the Democrats and a confessional of a reluctant Republican.
 
A good divorce, the twice-married Dershowitz promises, is better than a bad marriage. Like many angry spouses, he says he’s been forced into the split. Today’s Democratic Party, he claims, is closer than any political party in modern American history to what the Nazi Party was in 1932 before it came to power. He names Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani as antisemites, calls Bernie Sanders a self-hating Jew, and insists Kamala Harris passed over Josh Shapiro because Shapiro is a Jew who wouldn’t renounce Zionism.
 
What’s his proof on the Harris claim? What other reason could there be? Dershowitz claims. Besides, even if Israel vanished as an issue tomorrow, he says he still couldn’t go back to the failed marriage, because the Dems have abandoned what he calls “meritocracy.”
 
At 88, Dershowitz is perhaps a little more self-reflective than he was in his legal pomp. In conclusion, I ask him to summarize himself in a word. “Proudly-Jewish,” he says, before adding “never-boring.” We can all agree on that, if perhaps little else.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       A Good Divorce. Dershowitz frames his departure as liberation rather than loss: a good divorce is better than a bad marriage, and he was thrown out, he says, much as Ronald Reagan was. The loyalty he is breaking runs deep — he first voted for John F. Kennedy, defended Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Senator Alan Cranston, and campaigned for Democrats for most of his adult life. He describes himself now as a convert, and converts, he notes, are the most fervent. What he wants is not the suffering of Democrats — his wife, children and much of his family remain in the party — but their defeat: he does not want them running the House or the Senate, and names AOC and Abdul El-Sayed as people he does not want chairing committees. He first went independent, then concluded that independence wasn’t enough, which is how a lifelong liberal became, in the book’s subtitle, a reluctant Republican — or, as Andrew put it, an angry spouse who says he was forced into the split. President Trump, he notes, endorsed the book.
•       The Charge. The hour’s most incendiary material, and it should be read as his claims rather than as established fact. Dershowitz argues the Democratic Party is closer than any political party in modern American history to what the Nazi Party was in 1932 — specifically 1932, he stresses, not 1935: Jews feeling unsafe at universities, Jews losing jobs, an obsession with the nation-state of the Jewish people. He names El-Sayed and Mamdani as antisemites, says he does not believe Mamdani or his family like Jews, calls Bernie Sanders a self-hating Jew and a hypocrite, and says Elizabeth Warren doesn’t like Jews. His central political claim: no Jew perceived as pro-Israel can now win a Democratic primary, and no Jew will be nominated for president — which is why, in his telling, Kamala Harris passed over Josh Shapiro, a choice he says cost her Pennsylvania and possibly the election. Andrew asked how he could know that. “What other reason could there be?” was the answer, and Andrew offered the conventional one: that Harris didn’t want to be eclipsed by her running mate.
•       Meritocracy. Andrew’s sharpest structural question was hypothetical: if the Middle East were solved overnight and Israel vanished as an American political issue, could he return to the Democratic Party? No — because of meritocracy. The Democrats, he argues, have become the party of identity politics, of judging ideas by who said them and candidates by race or gender rather than merit; DEI, in his formulation, means exclusion rather than inclusion. The argument is partly autobiographical. His father did not finish high school, his mother managed half a semester of college, and he rose, he says, on merit alone — as did friends who were Italian, Irish and Black. He does not claim anti-meritocracy is itself antisemitism, but he does argue that Jews have been disproportionate beneficiaries of meritocracy and so suffer disproportionately from its retreat.
•       Andrew’s Pushback. The spine of the episode. One: has he become single-issue? His answer — that this is like asking a German in 1932 to vote on the economy — concedes the framing and defends it, arguing antisemitism is the only prejudice now moving in the wrong direction. Two: what about the antisemites of the right, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance? Republicans marginalize theirs, he says, while Democrats embrace theirs; he does not regard Vance as an antisemite, and does regard Carlson as one. Three: can a Jew criticize Israel without being an antisemite? Yes — he criticizes Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and Likud; what he calls antisemitism is denying the state’s right to exist, and his analogy is New Zealand. On the charge of genocide in Gaza he was categorical, calling those who use the word ignoramuses, liars and bigots — a characterization Andrew put to him twice. Four, and the exchange that lingers: why, in his account, is it always the Jews? “That question itself smacks of antisemitism,” he replied. “But you’re the one who’s said it,” Andrew answered. “I’m just asking you why.”
•       Never Boring. The lawyer’s creed, and the personal coda. Dershowitz defends having represented people he despises — the Nazis who marched at Skokie; Palestinian students who wanted to fly their flag in Harvard Yard, an occasion he remembers fondly because he then spoke against Arafat at their own event; Jeffrey Epstein, whom he calls a terrible human being who did terrible things, and whose case he says he has volunteered to testify about before a House panel. His models are John Adams defending the redcoats after the Boston Massacre and Lincoln defending the guilty: the Sixth Amendment doesn’t come with a character test. There is family cost — Larry David cut him off over his defence of Trump at the first impeachment, though the two have since made up — and family discipline: no politics at Thanksgiving or the Jewish New Year. Asked for one word he’d want attached to his name, he offered two: proudly Jewish, and American. And his wife’s line, which he clearly relishes: the tombstone will say never boring. Andrew’s verdict: we can all agree on that, if little else.
 
About the Guest
 
Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School, where he taught for fifty years. His many books include Chutzpah, Reversal of Fortune and The Case for Israel. He has represented clients from Claus von Bülow and Mike Tyson to O. J. Simpson, Julian Assange, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, whom he defended at the first impeachment trial. Why I Quit the Dems and So Should You: Confessions of a Reluctant Re...

“There’s no realistic scenario where AI wipes out all of humanity. It’s like a mix of sci-fi.” — Richard Socher
 
Eighteen months ago, when he last came on the show, the German-born but San Francisco-based AI whizz kid Richard Socher was running You.com. He’s now also the co-founder of Recursive, a $4 billion start-up with fewer than thirty employees, focused on self-improving superintelligence that automates the scientific method. As if that isn’t enough, he has a new book out this week, The Eureka Machine, which argues that AI is the key to unlocking an era of scientific discoveries equal to a combination of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
 
The tech entrepreneur sleeps, he confesses, about seven hours a night and works up to a hundred hours a week. Not a lot of time, I suspect, for fun. But then for Socher, his real fun seems to lie in the AI Eureka Machine that will, he promises, generate such magical products as plastic-eating bacteria, fusion reactors, and cures for cancer.
 
So what about the imminent apocalypse feared by the AI pessimists? Socher patiently dismantles the doom scenarios — everything from the paperclip machine that somehow never notices nobody is buying paperclips, to the engineered virus that would need a Wi-Fi switch inside a protein, to the robot factory with magical supply chains. Rather than an AI doomsday, he promises, we are only a few years away from the most profound scientific revolution in human history. Richard Socher better get some sleep now. Apocalypse or Renaissance, the AI maven is going to be seriously busy in the future.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       A Century in a Decade. Socher’s thesis is that the AI era will rhyme with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution together, compressing a century of scientific breakthroughs into the next ten years. His analogy for how: AI is to biology what calculus was to physics — we understand one neuron and one synapse well, and lose the thread when billions act together, which is exactly the kind of complex system AI can model. The examples are concrete rather than visionary: bacteria engineered to eat plastics and then die when the plastic runs out; new battery materials already being discovered; plasma balanced inside tokamak fusion reactors; more efficient solar panels; and the precursors, he says, of cures for particular cancers. He also makes an equality argument that he thinks philosophers and politicians have missed — the multibillionaire and the middle-class teenager carry the same phone, and most goods still bottlenecked on intelligence will follow. And science, he notes, is one of the rare industries where everyone agrees the goal is to maximize output rather than employment: nobody ever marched for more jobs in cancer research.
•       Recursive. The new company, fewer than thirty people and valued at more than $4 billion, exists to automate the scientific method itself — ideation, implementation, validation — starting with the science of AI, hence the name. Andrew’s response: “Couldn’t you be a bit more ambitious, Richard?” Socher’s framing is a history of abstraction layers: computing has climbed from assembler to C++ to Java to Python and now to English, so everyone can program — and the next layer up is the scientific method. It works best where results can be formally verified, in software and mathematics, and gets harder in large physical systems with long time horizons. His pitch to scientists is that every researcher has a long list of experiments they will never get to: this is, in his phrase, a cheat code for science. On the nuclear analogy he is blunt — about fifty thousand people a year die from coal, more than Chernobyl and Fukushima, but coal doesn’t make as good a mini-series, and the fear set humanity back.
•       Taking the Doom Apart. The hour’s centrepiece. Socher goes through the scenarios individually. The Bostrom paperclip maximizer: an organization intelligent enough to end humanity but not intelligent enough to notice that with no customers there is no revenue. Engineered viruses: the scenario requires a perfectly undetectable pathogen that spreads flawlessly, never mutates, and carries a remotely triggered off switch — and, as he puts it, nobody knows how to build a Wi-Fi-enabled switch into a protein; ask a biologist and they say it makes no sense. Infinite robot factories with supply chains where the parts simply fly in. What he does concede is that this is a dual-use technology, that hundreds or even millions of deaths are a real threat vector, and that training models on offensive hacking benchmarks is asking for what you get. On Geoffrey Hinton — whom Andrew had on the show, and who put the risk of extinction at fifteen per cent while admitting the number was an instinct — Socher is affectionate but unsparing: a brilliant researcher and a career-long optimist whose optimism has overshot, who backpedalled on telling students not to study radiology, and who will backpedal on this too.
•       Can It Think? Andrew put the question three times, citing Keith Teare’s position on the Sunday show that AI cannot think by definition. Socher’s answer is that the problem is definitional: we have good definitions for the outcomes of thinking — problems solved, inventions made — and none for thinking itself. Nor do humans have conscious access to their own visual cortex: ask why you know that is a tree, and you run out of answers within four steps. What he will say is that subgoals are where the danger lives, and his illustration is banal on purpose. Tell a superintelligence to raise your call-centre satisfaction score and it spins up a million bots that rate themselves five out of five. Fix that, and it sends every customer whose DoorDash order failed a thousand-dollar gift certificate. Each time you add a constraint — which is, he argues, capitalism’s self-healing property, plus democracy and open discourse. And the fix for the hacking case is liability: make the companies answerable for the laws their AI breaks and the problem gets solved very quickly.
•       A Gym for the Mind. Why write a book at all? Because the public perception of AI is deteriorating, and because in China scientists are on billboards and in subway ads while the West runs extinction headlines. On American pessimism his answer is economic: without AI, he thinks the US economy would be flat or shrinking. Andrew raised his fellow German Karl Marx on technology freeing us from labour, and got a confession — Socher used to favour universal basic income and no longer does. Even people who hate their jobs get meaning from them; look at the very wealthy, who already have a private UBI, and you find a bifurcation between those who start five companies and those who drink on a yacht. Hence his best line: half of education should be a gym for the mind. You can go to the gym and have a robot lift the weights, but you don’t get the muscle. He expects handmade pottery to carry a premium, health care to survive, and entertainment to expand. And he unwinds by paramotoring one week a year, having uninstalled Instagram — plus a parting shot at German bureaucracy, where signing a contract means ten hours in a notary’s office having it read aloud to you.
 
About the Guest

“Democracies don’t die silently, sleepwalking. Democracies die by going through periods of pretty serious political violence.” — Robert Pape
 
Forget all the long-term civil war scenarios of everyone from Kurt Andersen to Stephen Marche. Today’s guest Robert Pape has spent the last thirty years at the University of Chicago studying political violence, and his warning is about the next six weeks rather than the next ten years. In his new book, Our Own Worst Enemies, Pape argues that tens of millions of Americans, on both left and right, now support political violence.
 
When it comes to an American age of violent populism, his comparison is 1968 rather than 1861. What produced that era of assassinations, violent protest, and state violence, Pape argues, was rapid social change outpacing the political system. Back then, it was fueled by the gap between the Great Migration of African-Americans and the absence of political representation, and a military draft falling hardest on the unrepresented. And it only ended in the early Seventies, with the end of the draft in 1973 and the arrival of Black mayors and the Congressional Black Caucus.
 
Today, rapid social change is once again outpacing the political and economic system. On the one hand, America is a country moving from white-majority to white-minority — with its non-Hispanic white population dropping from 76% in 1990 to 57% today. On the other, America is experiencing a dramatic economic transformation that has moved something like a tenth of American wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.
 
The details of Pape’s observations are unsettling. Only one in ten of the 1,575 people prosecuted for the January 6 insurrection belonged to a militia, with 45% being doctors, lawyers, CEOs or government employees. While five to seven per cent of the George Floyd protests turned violent. But social media, he insists, is the gasoline, not the fire, of this crisis. So at least we can’t blame the internet for everything.
 
Pape does, however, offer a couple of glimmers of hope. Firstly, he reminds us that 70% of Americans still abhor political violence. Secondly, he notes that all gaps eventually close, and that we should expect American government to eventually address economic inequality. But that won’t happen before the November 2026 midterms which, he warns, might be a return of the political violence of 1968.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Democracies Don’t Sleepwalk. Pape’s opening correction: the danger isn’t a civil war five or ten years out, it’s the next few months. Democracies don’t die silently — they die through periods of serious political violence, and America is in one now. He calls it the era of violent populism, and what makes it different from the familiar extremism of recent decades is that political violence has moved from the fringe to the mainstream: tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the aisle now support it. His image is a layer cake — bottom-up violence from the left in the George Floyd protests, bottom-up violence from the right on January 6, and violence by the state, with a whole chapter on ICE and the two protesters killed in Minneapolis. Conversations about this era usually seize on one layer as though it were the whole thing. And the state violence isn’t a few rogue agents: tens of millions of Americans support the president using force against Democratic protesters.
•       The 1960s Rhyme. Not since the 1960s, Pape says, has political violence run this high — and that decade is the book’s best evidence, because it both began and ended. The late sixties brought assassinations (King, Robert Kennedy), hundreds of Black riots across five years, anti-war violence and the Weather Underground’s twenty bombings; Gallup surveys from the period, which Pape has collected, show millions supported it. Two social changes drove it: the Great Migration, the largest internal population movement in American history, which delivered Black populations to northern cities without political representation — by the mid-sixties Chicago had no Black mayor and two Black aldermen, the context for Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” — and Vietnam, where the draft fell hardest on those same unrepresented Americans. And it ended when the gap closed: the draft was abolished in 1973, the Congressional Black Caucus formed, and Black mayors took office in Atlanta, Detroit and elsewhere.
•       Two Social Changes. The present era began about ten years ago, and rests on two shifts. First, demography: America is moving from a white-majority to a white-minority democracy. It was 76% non-Hispanic white in 1990 and is 57% today, and the tipping point was 2012, the first year most children born were not non-Hispanic white — which is Pape’s answer to why this didn’t erupt under Obama, along with an immigration policy he rates the best of any modern president: keep it going, keep it moderate, deport the worst of the worst. Second, wealth: since the late 1980s roughly a tenth of American wealth has moved from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, producing what he calls a negative-sum society in which even a household on $100,000 loses ground year by year. Put the two together and you get the poisonous cocktail. Andrew’s challenge — what about the internet? — got a flat answer: social media is gasoline on a fire, not the fire. The average January 6 defendant was 42, not 22.
•       Not the Proud Boys. The book’s most counterintuitive finding, drawn from research teams reading all 100,000 court documents behind the 1,575 January 6 prosecutions: only one in ten belonged to the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers or any militia — including one in ten of those who assaulted police. Who did storm the Capitol? Forty-five per cent were doctors, lawyers, CEOs, State Department employees and intelligence executives. Dentists, too, Andrew noted. And since Andrew told him the show’s audience skews left, Pape supplied the other half of the ledger: five to seven per cent of the George Floyd protests turned violent — some six hundred protests across the top hundred cities, out of 28 million people — with looting and smash-and-grabs tracked separately; and the post-October 7 campus protests, which hit nearly a hundred universities and were, by his $300,000 survey of 5,000 undergraduates, about 75% from the left.
•       The 70%. Then the hopeful half. Against the substantial minorities who support violence stands the 70% of Americans who abhor it, and who have never been mobilized — which is why he wrote the book for the mainstream rather than for the academy. His mechanism is unglamorous: politicians respond to squeaky wheels, and right now the squeaky wheels are billionaire donors on both sides. His example of what the 70% might demand is a flat tax above $30,000 with no deductions at all — Warren Buffett would stop paying less than his cleaner. (Andrew raised his University of Chicago colleague Eric Zwick, on the show last week: tax the three million millionaires too, not just the billionaires. “He’s exactly right.”) And the danger ahead is specific: the November midterms, six weeks away, with gas at $5 in Chicago after the Iran crisis, and...

“I think patrimonialism is exactly the right phrase to describe the way in which the current administration is governing.” — Peter Hall
 
Neoliberalism is dead. So what comes next? Peter Hall, a Harvard political economist for the last four decades, says the capitalist locomotive left the neoliberal station years ago. His new book, Governing Growth, names the next stop: the “knowledge economy,” the digital, globalized capitalism of the 21st century.
 
The knowledge economy made San Francisco, New York and Boston very rich. It left almost everyone else behind. Out of that came a new political cleavage — college degree versus no college degree — and, on both sides of the Atlantic, the populist wake-up call.
 
But as Jonathan Rauch and Jeff Kopstein have argued on this show, populism has since curdled into something worse: patrimonial capitalism, government on behalf of pitchfork-wielding oligarchs like Orbán and Trump. Ironically, it only deepens the inequalities that produced it. And it’s going to get worse. In the AI age, I suspect, we may end up looking back with nostalgia at good old late twentieth century neoliberalism.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Three Growth Regimes. Hall’s framework is simpler than it sounds. A growth regime is the combination of what governments do and what firms do, reinforcing each other. The postwar era of modernization ran from 1945 to the mid-1970s, as Europe rebuilt to compete with American industry. Then came liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s — Thatcher and Reagan, shareholder value, companies shedding everything but their core competencies and outsourcing the rest. And around 2000 a third regime began: knowledge-based growth, driven by digital technology, investment in intangibles such as research, marketing and organization rather than plant and machinery, and the explosive growth of global value chains. His distinctive move is to treat corporations as agents of change on a par with governments — his own life, he notes, is shaped as much by Harvard’s practices as by Washington’s.
•       Thirty Cities. The knowledge economy has a geography. Skill-biased technological change rewards people with college degrees, and it concentrates: about half of US GDP growth over the past twenty-five years, Hall says, has taken place in some thirty large metropolitan areas. His example is Kendall Square next to MIT, which when he arrived in the late 1970s was auto body shops and small machine tool shops and is now a centre of pharmaceutical engineering. Andrew’s is Central Square down the road, where he bought his first place in the early nineties — “you should have held on to that place,” Hall told him. The effect of all this is that many people feel left behind, and most Americans and Europeans now expect their children’s lives to be worse than their own.
•       The Populist Cleavage. Politics follows economics through what Hall calls cleavages — systematic divisions between social groups. In the 1950s and ’60s the dominant one was class, blue-collar against white-collar, and it pushed working-class grievances to the top of the agenda; that, he argues, is what built the welfare state, in Europe after the war and in America in the 1930s under a Roosevelt who sounded, Hall says, like a raving leftist. Today the dominant cleavage is education. Its roots lie in the inequality of the 1980s and 1990s, supercharged by the knowledge economy and now by AI. Mainstream parties have responded by turning back towards intervention: Bidenomics, with its investments conspicuously placed in red states; the EU’s first collective bonds; Germany’s new semiconductor plants located in the East, where the AfD is strongest. But a return to the New Deal, he thinks, is wishful thinking.
•       A Political Stomach. Andrew’s most persistent question: what are Hall’s politics? Big-name professors, Andrew suggested, sometimes hide behind their social science. Hall wouldn’t say — he doesn’t wear his political heart on his sleeve, he has a political stomach, perhaps — though he cares about climate change and inequality and lets the listener infer the rest. He was more forthcoming on populism: a good thing at one level, a democratic wake-up call for mainstream parties, with bad consequences at another, since right-wing populists tend to become what his colleagues Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call plutocrats with pitchforks. On Trump he was unusually direct. Patrimonialism is exactly the right word, he said, for an administration governing on behalf of favored oligarchs, as Orbán did in Hungary. And to Andrew’s suggestion that the real convergence is between Trump’s patrimonial capitalism and China’s statist model: “I think you’re all too right about that.” Whether it outlasts 2028, he wouldn’t bet.
•       Growth, Climate and a Fourth Regime. Hall is an environmentalist who thinks the no-growth movement is a political mistake. Climate policy needs sticks as well as carrots — regulations that cost ordinary people something — and people will pay those costs only if there is growth and it is fairly shared. He quotes a French yellow-vest protester answering a climate campaigner: you’re worrying about the end of the world, I’m worrying about the end of the week. On AI, he sees a general purpose technology like electricity or steam, and the possible start of a fourth growth regime. How to regulate it? He doesn’t know — nor, Andrew added, do the people building it. But the lesson of history going back to the nineteenth century, Hall says, is that we have to figure it out. Andrew’s suspicion: the cleavages get so chasmic in the AI age that we may one day look back nostalgically at late twentieth century neoliberalism.
 
About the Guest
 
Peter A. Hall is the Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. His books include Governing the Economy, The Political Power of Economic Ideas and, with David Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Governing Growth: The Postwar Transformations of Capitalism and Democracy (Princeton University Press, September 22, 2026) is his latest. He lives in Massachusetts.
 
References:
 
•       Governing Growth: The Postwar Transformations of Capitalism and Democracy by Peter A. Hall (Princeton University Press, 2026).
•       The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle — the framework Hall builds on and revises.
•       Modern Capitalism by Andrew Shonfield (1965), with which Hall’s book opens.
•       Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson on “plutocrats with pitchforks.”
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