Keen On America

“People ask me if I think Helms was really offended by this stuff, and I think Helms was having the time of his fucking life.” — Isaac Butler

A few days ago, Katy Siegel and Elise Armani came on the show to assess the state of American culture in 1976. What was America? we asked. Today’s guest picks up the story immediately afterwards, when the health of this culture sharply declines. Isaac Butler’s The Perfect Moment is a history of the eighties and nineties, when America’s culture wars became political cudgels of the right. It’s the story of an increasingly imperfect America in the age of Jesse Helms and Robert Mapplethorpe.
The title is Mapplethorpe’s. It was the name of his retrospective that the Corcoran Gallery cancelled in 1989. The same show that later resulted in a Cincinnati museum director being indicted for obscenity — a first in American history.
Butler reminds us of the strangely consensual world that existed before the culture wars. It was an America in which the CIA covertly funded the artists that the FBI was investigating. An America where Louis Armstrong was sent abroad as a cultural ambassador while the agency plotted in the countries he was touring. An America in which a congressman was convinced that drip paintings were encrypted maps of American military assets. A liberal America where the culture and the state maintained a polite, albeit tangled, relationship.
And then, with the birth of the culture wars, God, sex and art all acquired instant political charge. Butler’s argument is about power, not taste. He reminds us that a giggly Jesse Helms kept the Mapplethorpe catalogue in his office and showed his favorite (ie: most vulgar) pages to visitors. Butler suggests that Helms was having the time of his life. Perhaps. Although this culture war wasn’t a lot of fun for the rest of us. Certainly not for the under-fire artists. Nor for an art-loving public caught in its hysterical crossfire. That, I’m afraid, is what America has become.

FURTHER READING

•   The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars (Bloomsbury, June 2026). Butler also wrote The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act and, with Dan Kois, The World Only Spins Forward, an oral history of Angels in America.
•   “Anything Could Become a Battleground” — the Los Angeles Review of Books on why the first culture war was fought over photographs.
•   The Washington Monthly on the galleries where it happened, and the Boston Globe on Butler, AIDS and New York.
•   James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (Basic Books, 1991) — the book that coined the phrase, a year before Pat Buchanan made it a slogan.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Isaac Butler is a writer, director and cultural historian based in Brooklyn. He is the author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act and the co-author, with Dan Kois, of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America. He co-created the stage work Real Enemies, on conspiracy theory and American paranoia, and writes on film, theatre and politics.

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.

“The lynching itself was the explanation. The adults who were participating in a communal homicide are the curriculum.” — Stacey Patton

For Halloween, a true American horror story. Last week, Joseph Kelly came on the show to argue that racialized American fascism has a prehistory running back to 1818. But today’s guest goes much, much further — both in time and in criminality. Stacey Patton wrote her doctorate on the racialization of American childhood and her new book is entitled Strung Up. It’s the story of how white America learned to lynch Black children.
“Learned” is key. Patton writes about the people who turned up to watch the lynchings so endemic in American history. She traces the practice back across the Atlantic, to a Europe with centuries of history of public execution and the punishment of children as theater. And she sets out the two versions of 19th-century American childhood. The Lockean child to be nurtured and rewarded. The fallen child to be corrected and punished. White childhood and Black childhood. Trick or treat. No candy for guessing who got what in America.
Patton describes an image from Waco, Texas in 1916, then a supposedly modern and progressive town. The first people to reach the lynching of Jesse Washington were children, running as though to a parade. Small boys were paid to gather kindling. A reporter asked a father why he had a toddler on his shoulders and was told the child could not learn the “proper way” too young.
There will be those who say that Patton exaggerates in order to vilify American history. But last night I saw Once Upon a Time in Harlem, the excellent documentary by David Greaves, built from his father William’s 1972 footage. It’s not really about racial crimes, but there’s one scene in the movie featuring photos of White kids at the lynching of Black people. Stacey Patton’s Strung Up is already a USA Today best-seller. It’s not hard to understand why. Happy Halloween.

FURTHER READING

•   Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children (Beacon Press, October 2026). Patton also wrote Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America and the memoir That Mean Old Yesterday.
•   Kohen Wiley was shot by an officer in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia, Mississippi in June. The state attorney general ruled the shooting justified on 19 October; the officer has since resigned and the family is seeking a federal investigation.
•   Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights — the scholarship Patton builds on about who was allowed to be innocent.
•   Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, is the thesis Patton pushes back on: childhood as a modern invention, a claim later historians have narrowed.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Stacey Patton is a journalist and academic in the School of Communications at Howard University. Her doctorate in African American history examined the racialization of childhood in America between 1880 and 1954. She is the author of That Mean Old Yesterday and Spare the Kids, and writes a widely read newsletter on race, childhood and violence.

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.

“They didn’t really ever create value for the company. They shifted value. They extracted value from the workers and communities and gave it to the shareholders.” — Chris Marquis

INTRO

You would expect the man publicly calling for the abolition of business schools to be a Bolshevik. But he is, in fact, the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School. It’s a little like an angry cleric proposing the demolition of the traditional church. As the Martin Luther of the Business School world, Chris Marquis pinned his argument in the New York Times on 18 October. Its headline proclaims that “it’s time to shut them down”. But he means abolish. Kill the B-School, Marquis says.
His charge isn’t that MBAs are useless. It is that they are playing the game of bait and switch. Students arrive at B-School saying they want to change the world and, fourteen weeks later, their altruistic ambitions have narrowed to getting a corporate job and making money. Nobody lied to them. The system simply has its own indestructible logic. Faculty won’t change what they teach, and even if they did, the recruiting office is paid to slot people into the highest-salaried job it can find, because that is what the rankings reward.
And so, Marquis argues, we have created an economic culture of B-School-trained chief executives focusing on dividends and so cutting labor benefits and community investment. Rather than being created, value is moved from the workforce and community into the share price. It’s an MBA world and we are all poorer for it.
His fix is constitutional rather than curricular. He would replace the business school with what he calls a school for organizing. But what to organize? He’d like to see a new kind of economy mirroring companies like Patagonia (owned by a trust) or Mondragon (owned by its eighty thousand workers). A quarter of Denmark’s biggest firms are owned by foundations, he reminds us, and in Europe a public-interest director with a veto is unremarkable. So maybe we should just replace the MBA with a trip to Denmark. A bloodless way to kill the B-School.

FURTHER READING

•   “I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down,” New York Times, 18 October 2026. The headline is the paper’s; Marquis wrote “abolish.”
•   Marquis tells Poets&Quants what he would build instead — and the trade press rounds up the reaction, which is less hostile than you would guess.
•   His books: The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs and Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise.
•   Eric Ries, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great — the governance argument Marquis leans on here.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Chris Marquis is the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School, on sabbatical this term and moving to a chaired professorship in international business at Cornell in January. He spent a decade at Harvard Business School and a year and a half at the Kennedy School. He is the author of The Profiteers and Mao and Markets.

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.

“President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were, in fact, working with the CIA to kill Castro. The CIA wasn’t plotting behind the Kennedys’ back.” — Mark Allen

A few days ago we had the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs on the show talking about the thirteen days in 1962 when John F. Kennedy saved the world from nuclear annihilation. That was him at his best, the Kennedy we want to remember. Today we have the JFK we want to forget. The one who was passing envelopes to the Chicago Outfit via Judith Exner, a twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, while his brother was busy putting mobsters in prison.
Mark Allen, a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney, knew Exner. He flew out to California in 1991 to get the rest of the JFK story from her. She told him that she carried not only messages but money between Kennedy and the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, beginning before the 1960 election.
All this is in A Dangerous Beauty, a new book Allen has written with the Los Angeles writer Tricia Aurand. Frank Sinatra introduced Exner to both Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana — JFK at the Sands in February 1960, Giancana at the Fontainebleau a few weeks later. Nobody disputes Exner’s familiarity with either man. It’s the envelopes that historians have spent fifty years trying to decipher. Especially given all the conspiracy theories about the interconnectedness of the Kennedys, the mob, the CIA, Castro and Dallas.
The twist in A Dangerous Beauty is not what we expect from a book about JFK’s tangled relations with a beautiful young woman. If Exner was telling the truth, Allen and Aurand argue, then the Kennedys knew exactly what the CIA was doing to Castro, because they themselves were running the operation. Which destroys the premise underneath every rogue-agency theory of Dallas. So Allen and Aurand are anti-conspiracy theorists. The CIA, they suggest, probably wasn’t behind the 1963 assassination.
Allen is agnostic on who shot the president. What he wants to demolish is the idea that JFK was betrayed and even murdered by his own government. A conspiracy theory that, he warns, is being peddled today by, of all people, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

FURTHER READING

•   A Dangerous Beauty: The Kennedys, the Mob, the FBI, and Judith Exner, the Woman Who Linked Them All (Post Hill Press), with a foreword by Patt Morrison.
•   The Church Committee investigated CIA assassination plots in 1975. Exner testified that September, three months after Giancana was shot dead in his basement.
•   Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), gave Exner’s courier account a chapter and broad acceptance. It changed few minds.
•   Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, is the recent bestseller on the wider pattern.
•   Mark Allen, “RFK Jr.’s conspiracy theories do a disservice to his father,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 7 July 2023 — his dismantling of the three stories RFK Jr. tells about his father and the CIA.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Mark Allen is a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney and a longtime student of the Kennedy presidency. He came to the subject through the JFK assassination and interviewed Judith Exner in the last years of her life, after Anthony Summers made the introduction. He lives in Sarasota, Florida. Tricia Aurand is a writer and screenwriter in Los Angeles. A Dangerous Beauty is published by Post Hill Press, with a foreword by Patt Morrison.

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.

“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.