Keen On America

“We have to be willing to lose elections. That is the very essence of a democracy.” — Michael G. Miller

Will the midterms be free and fair? With only six days to go, these are now the questions about American democracy that we most fear. But much of this nervousness might be misplaced. Rather than militiamen in balaclavas, the real damage to American democracy was done quietly, thirteen years ago, by five Supreme Court justices.
That, at least, is the view of Michael G. Miller, a Barnard political science professor. With the Brennan Center’s Kevin T. Morris, Miller has written An American Problem, a book accusing John Roberts’ 2013 Supreme Court of breaking Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Act. The book title is LBJ’s, from the speech he gave a week after Selma, when he told Congress that denying the vote was neither a Northern problem nor a Southern one. The law Johnson got is, according to Miller, the most effective Congress has ever passed. Its sword was section two, which let citizens sue if their voting rights were compromised. Its shield was something called “preclearance,” which meant that local authorities required the Federal government’s explicit permission before tampering with any kind of electoral logistics.
The 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder took away this shield. Without preclearance, Miller argues, local authorities started tampering again — closing polling places, redrawing wards, purging rolls. Often there was no evil intent — but it impacted Black voters anyway. He and Morris built a national voter file running back to 2008 and found that in the counties that lost preclearance, the gap between white and Black turnout widened sharply after the ruling. That means hundreds of thousands of Black votes were never cast. John Roberts’ Supreme Court broke LBJ’s Voting Rights Act, Michael Miller says. Forget martial law. With Shelby County v. Holder, five Supreme Court justices created the most existential threat to American democracy.

FURTHER READING

•   An American Problem: How the Country Built — and the Supreme Court Broke — the Voting Rights Act (Princeton University Press, October 2026), by Michael G. Miller and Kevin T. Morris.
•   Shelby County v. Holder (2013) — the 5–4 ruling that ended preclearance, with Roberts’s majority and Ginsburg’s dissent.
•   Johnson’s “American Problem” address to Congress, 15 March 1965, delivered a week after Selma and the source of the book’s title.
•   Kevin T. Morris is a senior research fellow at the Brennan Center, where much of the underlying voter-file work lives.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Michael G. Miller is associate professor of political science at Barnard College, where he has taught since 2014, and works on election law, election administration and political behavior. An American Problem is written with Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“Why would you want the guy who is good at coding to decide what we all do? Why would you want the guy who built the pyramids to actually run Egypt?” — Noam Cohen

The war movie is back in vogue. Only this time it’s Hollywood turning its guns on Silicon Valley. There’s the four-hour Musk doc, an upcoming Sam Altman satire entitled Artificial, Nathan Fielder’s love/hate Elizabeth Holmes picture, and now The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s assault on the Facebook-Zuckerberg complex. The Sorkin movie is, of course, a follow-up to the 2010 biopic, The Social Network, which he wrote. Sorkin both writes and directs the sequel. If he turns it into a trilogy, Sorkin should probably star as Zuck.
Brooklyn-based Noam Cohen, former New York Times tech writer and author of The Know-It-Alls, has seen both Sorkin movies. His critique is that The Social Reckoning is a passive-aggressive legal brief with the wrong defendant. He notes that Zuckerberg is barely in it. The movie’s heroes are a Wall Street Journal journalist and an internal Facebook whistleblower. But the drama, Cohen argues, is about whether anyone can reach a man who built the attention economy, but pays attention to nobody. The problem is that Zuckerberg is played by Jeremy Strong as a robot. So it’s an AI movie without the bots. The only drama in Strong’s Zuck is his absence of drama.
Noam Cohen thinks that Sorkin’s The Social Network got the origin story wrong, which he explains more fully in a recent Harvard Magazine piece. Cohen, who also went to Harvard, argues that Facemash didn’t represent Zuck’s wounded masculinity. Instead, it was a test of how to lure an audience, and those first weeks of TheFacebook were spent tuning the thing for addictiveness. So there’s nothing accidental about the accidental billionaire.
My own take on Sorkin’s two movies is that in the first, Zuck comes across as the randy son of a NY dentist, while in this latest one, he matures into that dentist. The kind who barely talks, pulls out all your teeth, and then charges you a fortune. All for your own good, of course. As if he’s doing you a favor. Just as Hollywood is doing all of us a favor by turning a NY dentist’s son into the Antichrist. Do we really need this kind of altruistic war movie? I think not.

FURTHER READING

•   The Social Reckoning (Sony/Columbia, 9 October 2026), written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg, Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz, from Horwitz’s Facebook Files reporting.
•   “How Facebook Escaped Harvard” — Noam Cohen’s Harvard Magazine piece, and the source of the argument he makes here.
•   Cohen is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball (The New Press, 2017).
•   Richard Cooke, The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia (Norton), which Cohen reviewed; his Bloomberg piece is “Wikipedia Taught Us How to Trust AI”.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Noam Cohen wrote about technology for the New York Times for many years and is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball. He writes for Harvard Magazine, Bloomberg and others, and lives in Brooklyn.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

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

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

FURTHER READING

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

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. Why Ideas Cluster

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

2. Napoleon Moved at Caesar’s Speed

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

3. Gilgamesh Already Knew

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

4. The Empty State Building

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

5. The Tube Has Warmed the Ground

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

ABOUT THE GUEST

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

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

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

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

FURTHER READING

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

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. He Doesn’t Believe the Arc Bends

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

2. Panels on the Ground in Pakistan

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

3. Berlin, 1943: The Wives on Rosenstrasse

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

4. King’s Letter Was About the Elites

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

5. Act Before the Space Closes

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

ABOUT THE GUEST

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

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

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

INTRO

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

FURTHER READING

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

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

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