Keen On America

“Misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win.” — Curtis White’s motto for resistance
 
How to say no to fascism? Curtis White, the literary thinker dubbed “the splendidly cranky utopian,” has published what he calls a “manifesto” of “resistance.” On Resistance, the 75-year-old White told me, is his last work of non-fiction. He still has worlds to invent, novels to write. Enough with the manifestos.
 
But don’t expect a program. On Resistance is more of an anti-manifesto. “That’s not for me to say,” White responds when asked what, exactly, we’re supposed to do to resist fascism. His resistance is cultural. It’s an attitude. Borrowing from Ted Gioia’s subversive history of music, White likes the idea of “psychic treason.” Its patron saints are the first dropouts, romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge who rejected the military, clergy and family to write poetry in the countryside. But On Resistance isn’t simply sixties nostalgia. White, a veteran of Berkeley and the Haight, prefers the Nietzschean imperative to forget the past and move on to the next joyful deed.
 
So the only good manifesto is the anti-manifesto. If you want to say no to fascism, become a cranky utopian. Or at least pick up On Resistance.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Psychic Treason. White’s resistance is not conventionally political — Trump appears once or twice, party politics not at all. Borrowing “psychic treason” from Ted Gioia’s Music: A Subversive History, he argues that the arts are subversive by nature: sometimes formally, sometimes by allying with social movements. His founding example is the Romantics, the first dropouts — Wordsworth and Coleridge refusing the military, the clergy, and the family estate to write poetry in the countryside, declaring cultural war once the church was out of the way. The treason White wants is the one the arts commit constantly, whether or not anyone calls it politics.
•       Not Nostalgia — Nietzsche. The sixties made White: Berkeley in high school, San Francisco after, and the formative discovery that his country “had lied to me” and was indifferent to whether he lived or died. But On Resistance opens with the confession “I am living in a world that no longer exists” — and refuses to make anyone else live there. One chapter is bluntly titled “Forget The Beatles.” His position is Nietzschean: move on to the next joyful deed. And the rot, he insists, didn’t start with Trump but with Reagan — the decades-long withdrawal of public money from public goods, education above all.
•       The Three False Resistances. The book’s first half is ideology critique: our culture says resistance is unnecessary because it has already been provided — by philanthropy, virtuous corporations, and liberalism. White’s exhibits: Steve Jobs Buddha-branding the counterculture to sell machines to people who thought they were subverting something; the “big green” foundations (via Mark Dowie) taking over grassroots fights and defanging them; the Gates Foundation vaccinating children against polio downwind of a polluter it was invested in. Philanthropy, he argues, self-limits to protect the source of its own wealth. Patagonia may be the quiet exception that proves the rule.
•       Dropping Out, Together. White’s alternative is dropping out — plural: doing something else, and doing it with other people. The organic farms and farmers markets that have created communal well-being in most American cities; FC2, the author-run press he co-founded with Ronald Sukenick, past its fiftieth anniversary; the thriving-but-invisible independent presses — Graywolf, Coffee House, Rochester’s Open Letter — for which he’s now plotting a group Substack. The obstacle is the money jail: everyone’s struggle for money limits what it is possible to do. The goal isn’t overturning the status quo. “What we need right now is companions.”
•       Misbehave, Make Something Beautiful, Try to Win. White’s motto since The Middle Mind — the making beautiful needn’t be art; the trying to win is where misbehavior gets socialized. His lineage runs Thoreau, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and above all John Berger: Marxist, art critic, poet, writer of lively living books. His Marxism, such as it is, is the humanist 1844 Manuscripts — alienation, not expropriation — via Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. And the book itself is the argument: playful and fierce, a performance that moves like a novel, reinvigorating worthy old ideas rather than hunting new ones. At 75, it’s his last nonfiction — written in a spirit of play, to be left in one.
 
About the Guest
 
Curtis White is a novelist and social critic whose books include Memories of My Father Watching TV, The Middle Mind, The Science Delusion, and Living in a World That Can’t Be Fixed. Called by Elle “the most inspiringly wicked social critic of the moment,” he is co-founder, with Ronald Sukenick, of FC2, the publisher of innovative fiction run collectively by its authors, and taught English for many years at Illinois State University. His new and, he says, final work of nonfiction is On Resistance: A Manifesto (Melville House, August 11, 2026). He lives in Port Townsend, Washington.
 
References:
 
•       On Resistance: A Manifesto by Curtis White (Melville House, August 11, 2026). Jeffrey St. Clair: “a trail guide through our disorienting and perilous political landscape.”
•       Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia — the source of “psychic treason” and the argument that the arts subvert by nature.
•       The Middle Mind by Curtis White — where the motto was coined: misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win.
•       Jon Taplin in Rolling Stone — the recent essay asking whether the counterculture can rise again, and a recent Keen On conversation in the same key.
•       One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse — the Western Marxist tradition, via the 1844 Manuscripts, that taught White to worry about alienation rather than expropriation.
•       FC2 — the author-run press of innovative fiction White co-founded with Ronald Sukenick, now past its fiftieth year.
 
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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“The human part is 99 percent. The AI part is maybe 1 percent — even if 100 percent of the manuscript was dumped onto the page by AI.” — Keith Teare on writing with AI
 
What is “real” authorship in our AI age? For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, all authorship, even the most AI-enabled, is real. It’s the cave-dwelling Luddites who are the sloppy ones. For Keith, true creativity, in our age of Claude and Gemini, almost requires the use of AI.
 
A couple of weeks ago Keith confessed, or perhaps boasted, that he is writing an AI-assisted book entitled Who Owns Intelligence. This week, publishing discovered what happens when others play the same game without public acknowledgement. So we have the case of the “red-hot” debut novel, fought over by fourteen publishers, dropped overnight when the agent found AI in the mix.
 
“It’s a fantastic book,” the book’s agent acknowledged, before firing its less than transparent author. Which, for Keith, is precisely the scandal.
 
His position, argued in this week’s editorial “AI Detected,” is pretty absolute. Nothing is written by AI, Keith argues, because AI has no will. It doesn’t produce a single word unless asked. The human part is 99 percent, he says, even when 100 percent of the manuscript is spat out by the machine. So the real sin isn’t using AI but not acknowledging its use. So, on Who Owns Intelligence, Keith makes it crystal clear that “AI was heavily used in the writing of this book.”
 
I’m not so sure. Amazon is now infested with AI slop that requires no authorship. Besides, Keith clearly has no love of reading books. He admits to reading only a single volume in the last couple of years. And he’s still smarting from being, in his mind at least, ripped off by the publishing industry for his last published book some 40 years ago. He no longer needs to read books, he pronounces, because his world-view is already set. For a man who thinks he knows everything, AI isn’t scary. Maybe we should rename him Claude.
 
Postscript. Full Keith-style disclosure: these shownotes were produced with the help of Anthropic. When I fed Claude my draft, it responded: “‘Maybe we should rename him Claude’ is a closer I’m contractually obliged to enjoy.” Nothing, as Keith says, is written by AI. Although some algorithms seem to have cheeky opinions of their own. Maybe Anthropic should rename it Keith.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Nothing Is Written by AI. Keith’s absolutism starts from the machine’s lack of will: AI won’t produce a word unless a human asks. His Who Owns Intelligence — fifteen chapters, arguments, and references — was structured in ninety minutes from years of thinking; the AI produced a manuscript he then shaped, like a color grader working sliders in Photoshop. The human part is 99 percent even when the machine types every word. And authorship was never solitary anyway: Plato’s contemporaries thought writing itself degraded ideas, and no publisher will touch a book that hasn’t passed through an editor and a subeditor. If editing doesn’t change authorship, Keith asks, why would AI?
•       Transparency, Not Technology. The week’s cautionary tale: a debut novel fought over by fourteen publishers, dropped when the agent discovered AI — while conceding, in the same breath, “it’s a fantastic book.” For Keith the scandal is concealment, not composition: own the tool, as he now does with a strapline under his byline. The detection regime, meanwhile, is collapsing on its own inaccuracy — universities dropped their AI detectors this week, and Substack’s new detection partner scored Keith’s human-shaped editorial as 100 percent AI when a fair reading was 40. Cheating exists only against obsolete rules: the question is moving from did you use AI to how well did you use it.
•       “The Publishing Industry Is Basically a Scam.” Keith’s response to Andy Hunter’s ban on AI-generated books — from last week’s Keen On interview — was one word: outrageous. There is no such thing as an AI-written book, only good and bad ones; and the true victim of publishing is not the bookstore but the author. Exhibit A: his own 1988 book sold 50,000 copies at £3.99 and earned him roughly £10,000 — about 5p a copy — while Penguin took the rest. The future he wants is direct, author-to-reader, without the middlemen. As for “organic” artisanal literature: real, elite, and tiny — the new vinyl, which is itself cut these days from digital masters.
•       Sharks, Playing Their Own Book. Leopold Aschenbrenner — fired young from OpenAI, transfigured by one prophetic essay into the “Nostradamus of AI” — saw his $45 billion, heavily leveraged Situational Awareness fund lose $600 million, get margin-called, and sell to Ken Griffin’s Citadel. (He is, Keith suspects, still super rich.) Zuckerberg’s sudden conversion to open source as “the distribution of wealth to the people” struck us both as a bit rich; Amodei’s “I’m not against open source as long as it’s safe” — from a man on record that no AI is safe — translates as: against. Keith’s deeper complaint, from an admiring Claude user: you can’t trust Dario. And China, hardware-constrained, has made open source its national strategy — undermining American foundation-model revenue one cheap routed prompt at a time.
•       Money Won’t Matter by 2036? Elon Musk predicts money becomes irrelevant within a decade; Vinod Khosla — our post of the week — thinks he might just have a point. Keith, ever the economics tutor, reaches for tendency and ceteris paribus: money is a means of exchange and a store of value, and if abundance drives the labor-value of things toward zero, its irrelevance is not illogical — though between tendency and reality lies a whole ton of variables. I bet the opposite: that by 2036 money will matter more than ever. The problem, we discovered, is the stake — you can’t bet money on money not mattering. Wives and children were proposed and hastily withdrawn (“We’d be losing, Andrew”). Loser buys dinner — at a free restaurant.
 
About the Co-Host
 
Keith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, the essential weekly tech newsletter, and founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. A serial entrepreneur — co-founder of, among others, EasyNet and RealNames — he was present at the creation of the UK internet and has spent four decades at the intersection of technology, capital, and ideas. He joins Keen On America every Sunday to make sense of the week in tech. His AI-assisted book in progress is titled Who Owns Intelligence.
 
References:
 
•       That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter, including this week’s editorial, “AI Detected.”
•       The Wall Street Journal — on the red-hot debut novel at the center of publishing’s AI mystery: fourteen publishers, one discovery, one dropped author.
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“Not everybody needs therapy. I’m a therapist and I’ll tell you first.” — Amy Morin
 
Is an epidemic of mental weakness sweeping America? Readers of the Wall Street Journal certainly might think so, given a couple of recent articles. In one, it reports on burnt-out singles who are using spreadsheets to evaluate their dates. In the other, young adults are taking their phones to social events and letting AI do their talking. Sad. So I invited Ms Mental Strength herself, Amy Morin — host of the Mentally Stronger podcast and author of The Mental Strength Playbook — to ask what’s happened to American self-confidence in our AI age.
 
Morin sees it daily in her own therapy office with patients relying on ChatGPT to set boundaries with their mothers-in-law. In a world of information overload, she argues, we’ve come to believe there must be a medical solution to all our complexities — forgetting that relationships are an art, not a science, and that conflict and awkward silences are features of human life rather than bugs.
 
So the dinner-party guests who sneak off with their pocket supercomputers to the bathroom to ask ChatGPT for five “interesting” questions come back with canned questions that make them sound even less interesting. In contrast, Morin argues, real social confidence is built by taking risks.
 
And it’s no longer a risk, she suggests, to go to a therapist. It’s become the equivalent of slinking into the bathroom with your phone to prompt conversation. Yes, this therapist worries we live in an overly therapeutic culture. Anxiety is normal, Morin says. But ADHD diagnoses and even autism have become a kind of moral passport in America. It’s almost as if people should be anxious if they’re not anxious.
 
Her prescription is free. Not even the cost of a therapy session. Ask yourself, at the end of every day, what did I do today to grow mentally stronger? It’s like going to the gym. Build up your mental strength. Become self-reliant. The standard American fix. That will kick your therapy habit. That will end the epidemic of mental weakness now engulfing the United States.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       AI Is Doing Our Talking. The Wall Street Journal reports singles running spreadsheets on their dates and young adults letting AI script their conversations in person — and Morin sees the same thing in her therapy office, where clients ask ChatGPT how to set boundaries with their in-laws. The root, she argues, is information overload: because we can look up how to fix a sink, we assume there’s a scientific way to reject a suitor or confront a friend. But relationships are an art, not a science. There is supposed to be tension; conflict isn’t horrible; real human conversations — with questions, uncertainty, and lulls — are essential. What could be more important than managing your own relationships yourself?
•       Avoidance Never Builds Confidence. The dinner-party guest who hides in the bathroom asking ChatGPT for five interesting questions comes out asking canned questions and listening to no one — panicking about what was next on the list. Relying on technology for what makes us insecure, Morin argues, is avoidance dressed as help: skills we don’t practice diminish, so the app makes us worse, not better. Nor is the polished online persona sustainable — like fake photos on a dating profile, the eloquence collapses at the second coffee. Connection comes from vulnerability, not perfection: “I really struggle with X” bonds people; the perfect question does not.
•       Thirteen Things, Fifty Million Readers. Morin’s authority is autobiographical. Her mother died when she was 23; on the third anniversary of that death, her 26-year-old husband died of a heart attack; later her father-in-law received a terminal cancer diagnosis. On one of the worst days of her life she wrote herself a letter — 13 things mentally strong people don’t do — and read it over and over. Published online for what she assumed would be five readers, it reached fifty million and became seven books in more than 45 languages. Mental strength, she learned, isn’t resilience-as-bracing: it’s getting the most out of life on the emotional roller coaster — good times included.
•       Not Everybody Needs Therapy. Asked whether we live in an overly therapeutic culture, this therapist says yes. Anxiety is a normal emotion — without it you wouldn’t look both ways — but pandemic-era applause for disclosure watered down the difference between sadness and clinical depression, awkwardness and social anxiety disorder. TikTok quizzes hand out ADHD; “burnout” now means tired; autism risks becoming a passport; and self-diagnosis becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile 96 percent of college students say they arrived academically prepared — and most say they arrived emotionally unprepared. As editor-in-chief of Verywell Mind, Morin went undercover on the online-therapy platforms: some therapists were excellent; others gave canned advice that frightened her. And the worried well, she warns, clog the six-month waiting lists the seriously ill cannot afford.
•       Your Body Believes What Your Brain Tells It. The Guardian’s Emma Beddington recently asked whether Morin’s “power phrases” could turn a self-described spineless worm into a go-getter. Answer: yes — walk into a room thinking nobody likes me and your body language obliges; walk in resolved to do your best and it obliges again. Nobody changes their life by sitting on the couch thinking positive — action is required — but thought is the first step. Her daily practice: ask, what did I do today to grow mentally stronger? And the anger all around us? How we treat others reflects how we feel about ourselves — the troll’s cruelty is a quick boost for a self he can’t stand. Technology, finally, cuts both ways: never has expert advice been this free. Feed your mind well or feed it junk. Up to you.
 
About the Guest
 
Amy Morin is a psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and internationally bestselling author whose books — including 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do — have sold more than a million copies in over 45 languages. She has practiced therapy for more than twenty years, served as editor-in-chief of Verywell Mind, and hosts the award-winning Mentally Stronger podcast; her TEDx talk, “The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong,” is among the most viewed of all time with more than 25 million views. Her new book is The Mental Strength Playbook: 50 Tools to Cope with Stress, Thrive Under Pressure, and Gain a Competitive Edge in the Workplace (Rodale, April 2026). She lives on a sailboat in the Florida Keys.
 
References:
 
•       The Mental Strength Playbook by Amy Morin (Rodale, April 2026). Lori Gottlieb: “Amy Morin shows you how to feel better and do better — starting right...

“Evil is reductive. But the impact of the business is evil, even if the intent isn’t.” — Andy Hunter on Amazon
 
Network effects transformed Amazon from a startup internet bookshop into today’s $2.44 trillion everything store. The more ubiquitous its affiliate program became, the more powerful Amazon became. But, in today’s digital economy, winner-take-all might not be winner-always-take-all. These network effects, you see, can be subverted. They might even be used as weapons against a seemingly dominant player like Amazon.
 
Take, for example, Bookshop.org. Founded by Andy Hunter in 2020, this online bookstore has aggregated 3,000 independent bookstores, these affiliates contributing to a counter-Amazon network that already does 2% of Amazon’s book business and will, within the next thirty days, pass $50 million distributed to local bookstores.
 
When Hunter originally pitched the idea to Silicon Valley investors, they asked him if he could beat Amazon on price or speed. No. Then you don’t have a chance, they told him, because Americans only care about price and speed. But they were wrong. Since Bookshop.org launched in 2020, American bookstores have grown from 1,900 to 3,300, with 90% of these independents joining Bookshop.org and 98% of booksellers polling the company as a positive force. His is a winner-share-all marketplace where stores keep the full profit of their own sales, while a $4.5 million annual profit pool flows to any real brick-and-mortar ABA bookstore. Nobody gets rich, Hunter says, but everybody does okay.
 
Hunter suspects that if Bookshop.org grows to take 5% of Amazon’s book market, things might turn nasty. Could Amazon just buy Bookshop.org, I asked. No, Hunter responded, all his investors signed a clause barring a sale to any major US retailer. So even if I got hit by an Amazon delivery truck, he explained, his mission couldn’t be undone.
 
So is Amazon evil? Not exactly evil, he explains, since evil requires malignant intent. But Amazon is more like fishermen who overfish until the stock collapses and wrecks their ecosystem beyond repair. That classic tragedy of the commons. Hence Bookshop.org’s anti-Prime campaigns, which used Amazon’s “discount” holiday as a way of generating an extra $1.2 million for its affiliate bookstores.
 
Hunter wants to replace Amazon’s seemingly infinite scalability with a more moral kind of scale. He imagines a Bookshop.org for everything from hardware stores and art supplies to bikes and toys. Silicon Valley’s conventional winner-take-all economics would be replaced by a Robin Hood style winner-share-all model. Except for our tech bro friends, I suspect we would all be wealthier for it.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       “Americans Only Care About Price and Speed.” That was the verdict of a 2019 conference call with twenty Silicon Valley angel investors: if Bookshop couldn’t beat Amazon on price or speed, it had no chance. Hunter’s counter-pitch: enough people care about their values when they shop — if supporting a local bookstore is made just as easy. His sharpest insight was the affiliate economy: by 2019 the internet had become one giant funnel pushing every reader toward Amazon, with the New York Times, NPR, BuzzFeed, and celebrity book clubs all earning Amazon kickbacks on their book coverage. Bookshop’s universal link gave them an alternative that pays local bookstores instead. Nine months of rejection later, he had cobbled together $750,000 — with the publisher Morgan Entrekin introducing five of the original seven investors.
•       Winner-Share-All. Bookshop is a marketplace, like Etsy: over 3,000 bookstores plus affiliates from Literary Hub to The Atlantic to Dakota Johnson’s book club. Stores keep the full profit on their own sales; direct sales feed a profit pool — 33 percent of profits, about $4.5 million a year — shared with any real brick-and-mortar bookstore in the American Booksellers Association. Within thirty days, total distributions will pass $50 million. Hunter kept the raise tiny and refused venture capital to protect the mission: a $10 million check would have demanded a 10x return and a sale, and Bookshop’s shareholder agreement bars any sale to Amazon, Walmart, or Target. The company runs on a 12.5 percent expense ratio and twelve engineers. Nobody gets rich; everybody does okay.
•       The Comeback Numbers. Amazon put over half of America’s bookstores out of business in two decades. Since Bookshop launched in 2020, the country has gone from 1,900 bookstores to 3,300 — seventy percent growth — and 73 percent of member stores grew in 2025. The rising tide lifts all boats: Bookshop grew 55 percent last year while stores’ own websites grew 25 percent. Ninety percent of American independents have joined, and a poll of 3,000 booksellers found 98 percent view the company positively. Meanwhile Amazon’s share of the book market is flat for the first time in twenty-three years. Bookshop has taken about 2 percent of Amazon’s book customers — small enough to be useful anti-monopoly evidence, Hunter jokes, but a social movement in the making.
•       Not Evil — Worse? Hunter refuses the word “evil”: evil requires malignant intent, and Amazon’s managers are merely told to grow profits every quarter. The better analogy is overfishing — blind growth that destroys the ecosystem beyond repair. But the stakes are not merely commercial: bookstores bring authors to communities, raise new generations of readers, and — as the arrest of five Hong Kong booksellers reminds us — stand as the vanguard of free expression. No single company, good or evil, should control a market so essential to human consciousness. As for Bezos, once so interested in climate change: now it’s rockets and data centers. “Evil is reductive. But the impact of the business is evil, even if the intent isn’t.”
•       The AI Flood. Did OpenAI and Anthropic steal from authors? “They were,” Hunter says — a conscious choice that stealing was faster than dealing, and now they’re paying up because they got caught, in a race to be first that cuts regulatory, legal, and ethical corners. Meanwhile three times as many books are being added to Amazon each year than before AI — overwhelmingly scam books generated from search trends, uncopyedited, designed to defraud buyers rather than inform them. Bookshop tells its suppliers to keep AI books off the site entirely, with a tiny asterisk for serious poets making artistic investigations of AI. Hunter’s standard is simple: these aren’t books, they’re scams — and no retailer who cares about customers should sell them. Including Amazon.
 
About the Guest
 
Andy Hunter is the founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, the online bookstore that supports local independent bookstores, launched in January 2020 and named by Time one of the year’s most influential social-good companies. A longtime literary publisher and entrepreneur, he previously co-founded Electric Literature and Literary Hub. He lives in Brooklyn.
 
References:
 
•       Bookshop.org — the marketplace itself: shop any of 3,000+ independent bookstores, or let your purchase feed the profit pool.
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Should the American Pope debate the American president about good and evil? The shameless Trump, one suspects, would relish a noisy cage match with a rival American celebrity. But Leo XIV has quietly declined the invitation — a refusal that the Catholic scholar Jack Hanson insists is neither cowardice nor convenience. Rather, as Hanson argues in this month’s Harper’s cover story, “Radical Reformation,” it’s because the church has become the last global institution able to provide a coherent moral compass for our rootless times.
 
The great irony, Hanson notes, is that the church was the first victim of the legitimacy conflagration now engulfing every other institution. His history begins in 1870, when Rome lost the Papal States and, for the first time in a millennium, had no earthly kingdom to defend. Ever since, the church has been reorienting itself — lately, against political, economic and military power.
 
That opposition to worldly power was always a strand within the apostolic tradition, Hanson reminds us. Thus the Gospel’s “antinomian communists” who stayed behind in plague cities, Thomas More’s attack on private property, the 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day, liberation theology. What’s new is that the Vatican itself has embraced this political tradition of questioning Caesar.
 
Then came 9/11. In the war on terror, Hanson argues, the secular West redefined its enemy not as a rival religion but as religion itself — and the church stopped being Western civilization’s moral crown jewel. John Paul II’s opposition to the Iraq War was a preview. Leo XIV’s 40,000-word encyclical on AI — Magnifica Humanitas, complete with an apology for the church’s role in slavery — is a more mature realization of this radical reformation.
 
No wonder, then, that Leo has no interest in a cage match with Trump. “A direct debate with a president who’s going to be out of office in a couple of years isn’t in his interest. It’s too small a task,” Hanson explains. As the latest in a very long line of God’s representatives on earth, Leo is playing the long game. He can afford to wait out a noisy Caesar or two.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Last Moral Voice. Institutional legitimacy — of churches, states, the organs of governance and community — is in free fall, and the great historical irony, Hanson argues, is that the Catholic Church was the first institution to face that crisis. When Rome lost the Papal States in 1870, it lost a thousand years of political centrality and has been reorienting itself ever since. Over the last twenty years, the church has ceased to see the West as its spiritual home and reconfigured itself as a genuinely global institution — positioned, almost paradoxically, against power as such. Which is how the paragon of institutional crisis has returned as maybe the last moral voice on the global stage.
•       The Radical Tradition Was Always There. The subversive strain Hanson traces runs from the Gospel itself — the early Christians as “antinomian communists” who held everything in common and stayed behind in plague cities — through Thomas More’s attack on the enclosures (the first great critique of private property in Western history), Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, and Latin American liberation theology. Hanson doesn’t flinch from the two Thomas Mores problem — the property radical was also a persecutor of heretics — because the church is full of sinners; you wouldn’t need one otherwise. What’s new is that the Vatican itself now orients toward the radical tradition rather than serving as the avatar of institutional power.
•       9/11 Drove the Wedge. For most of the twentieth century the secular West treated the church as a civilizational feather in its cap. The war on terror changed that: the enemy was recast not as a rival religion but as religion as such — the new atheism was its rhetorical arm — and John Paul II’s vociferous opposition to the Iraq War marked the rupture. Beneath it all, the secularization thesis (societies modernize, therefore secularize) had collapsed, its death usually dated to Iran in 1979. Reason and faith, Hanson argues, are far more intertwined than the twentieth century assumed — and, not coincidentally, the church and the left hit their historical nadirs together and are now showing signs of life together.
•       Magnifica Humanitas: Arguing with the Machines. Leo XIV’s 40,000-word encyclical on AI and humanity is remarkable, Hanson suggests, less for its conclusions than for its method: reasoned, humane argument addressed to people of all goodwill, in an age of universal bombast — from a leader with no personal stake in the outcome. It includes an apology for the church’s involvement in slavery, an acknowledgment that the church itself once practiced the exclusionary humanism it now warns against. While subway billboards advise companies to “stop hiring human beings,” the church’s real power, Hanson argues, is the legitimation of popular dissent: since Vatican II redefined the church as the People of God, the pope’s voice works by inspiring people to find their own.
•       Too Small a Task. Was the American pope elected to counter the American president? “His name wasn’t mentioned once,” a conclave cardinal insisted — a denial Andrew files next to Casablanca’s “shocked, shocked.” Either way, Leo refuses a direct debate with Trump, and Hanson insists this is the harder path, not the easier one: the pope aims to beat Trump on a higher register, shaping consciences in America and across the globe rather than winning a news cycle against a president who’ll be gone in a couple of years. As for the evangelical prosperity gospel wing of MAGA: essentially in schism, Hanson says — not much to do with historical Christianity, politically or theologically.
 
About the Guest
 
Jack Hanson received his PhD in religious studies from Yale in 2024 and has taught there. His essays and criticism on religion, politics, and literature have appeared in Harper’s and elsewhere. His cover essay, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival,” appears in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, the oldest continuously published monthly in America. He lives in upstate New York.
 
References:
 
•       “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival” by Jack Hanson — the cover essay of the current Harper’s Magazine.
•       On Statesmanship by Steven B. Smith — yesterday’s Keen On conversation on the crisis of secular authority, which opens this one.
•       Rerum Novarum (1891) — Leo XIII’s encyclical on capital and labor, the founding document of modern Catholic social teaching.
•       Magnifica Humanitas — Leo XIV’s 40,000-word encyclical on AI, technology, and the human person, including its apology for the church’s involvement in slavery.
•       Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker — the American wing of the radical tradition Hanson traces.
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