Keen On America

“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.”
•  &nbs...

“I think our genetic makeup makes us miserable. We evolved to be miserable.” — George Loewenstein
 
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that one before. When Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he remixed Locke’s “life, liberty and estate,” replacing the idea of property with happiness. As we know from last week’s conversation with the historian Joshua Specht, America’s age-old love affair with real estate has been perpetually mortgaged. And our guest today, the behavioral economist George Loewenstein, who happens — probably not coincidentally — to be the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, offers a similar warning about the ideal of happiness.
 
Happiness’ antonym is misery. In his new book The Opposite of Happiness, Loewenstein explains that it’s misery, and not happiness, which has simultaneously broken humans and built humankind. We evolved to be miserable, the behavioral economist argues, explaining that English has four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths we can sink to are incomparably deeper and more interesting than the heights we can reach, Freud’s great-grandson reassures us. Happiness is a Disneyfied mush while misery is infinitely variegated, he tells us, building a twelve-part taxonomy from envy and regret to loneliness and anxiety. The behavioral economist even invents a “Misery Survey” and cites an experiment he conducted with married couples which found that doubling their sexual frequency left them less happy.
 
So much for sex. Loewenstein spent a lifetime escaping Freud and has ended up desexualizing him for modern America. I’ve always found behavioral economics to be a particularly miserable subject (ideology dressed up as science). But maybe that’s the point. Life, liberty and the pursuit of misery. A Loewensteinian redraft of the Declaration, anyone?
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       We Evolved to Be Miserable. Loewenstein’s starting point contradicts the entire happiness industry: misery is the human constant, and happiness the occasional exception. Not because society ruins us — he takes exception to Rousseau’s idea that we are born happy and civilized into unhappiness — but because our genetic makeup makes us so. Every negative emotion evolved to push us toward behavior that served our fitness; that is precisely why they are unavoidable. His evidence is asymmetry. English has, by his count, four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths of misery are incomparably deeper than the heights of joy. And happiness is “a big mush,” while unhappiness is infinitely variegated — twelve specific miseries in the book’s second half, each with its own facial expression, its own pattern of brain activity, and its own behavior. Novelists, he says, have always known this; they are better psychologists than the academics, and misery is simply more interesting.
•       Envy Is Local. Andrew’s cheekiest question: does Loewenstein, part of what he calls the second shift of behavioral economics, envy Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler, the field’s Nobel-garlanded founders? He didn’t deny it. We don’t envy billionaires and trillionaires, he explains; we envy people close to us and just ahead, and those three are the textbook case. Then the move that makes the book humane rather than cynical: meta-emotions. You’re not supposed to envy your friends, so when you inevitably do, you feel guilty about feeling envious — misery about misery. Understanding your own negative emotions, he argues, works like understanding another person: you forgive what you understand. And no, this is not a book about selfishness — sympathy, guilt and shame are some of the most social emotions we have. Nor are these first-world problems: the struggling farmer cares about self-esteem, guilt and loneliness as much as anyone.
•       The Freud Inheritance. Loewenstein spent much of his career trying to escape his great-grandfather — he wouldn’t even mention the connection for years — and now finds himself reinventing him: his research on pain, hunger and sex is, he concedes, a study of what Freud would have called the conflict between id and superego. The family history is its own novel. His mother, Sophie Freud, was the daughter of Freud’s eldest son; when the family fled the Nazis, the main branch went to London while she and her mother escaped by bicycling through France. Edward Bernays — Freud’s nephew and the father of American public relations — paid for her college education when she arrived in the United States penniless. She later wrote Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, about feeling rejected by the clan. And the glass-half-empty temperament? From both parents, he says, but more from his father. Andrew’s framing: a lifetime escaping Freud, only to end up desexualizing him for modern America.
•       The Missing Motive. On Bentham and quantification, Loewenstein is cautious — psychologists can put numbers on feelings, but moving from an inchoate internal state to a figure is genuinely hard. His real hero is Adam Smith, not the Smith of The Wealth of Nations but of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his first book and the last he revised, and in Loewenstein’s view a psychology book of striking modernity. (Andrew notes the Smith of Susan Neiman’s evil book last week is the same one; Loewenstein recommends Dennis Rasmussen’s book on Smith and Hume, and Rasmussen was on last week too.) His most provocative claim is about self-esteem: probably the single main motivator of human behavior, and yet almost absent from economics — one book and a handful of papers. Money buys happiness only up to a point. And his own experiment, instructing married couples to double their sexual frequency, found they did — and reported less happiness and less closeness. He doesn’t quite believe his own result.
•       The Happiness Industry. Where the psychology meets the economics. Institutions built on attention — above all the internet companies selling advertising — “don’t give a fig about your well-being,” he says, and are amplifying human misery; Meta keeps losing lawsuits because jurors, like everyone else, simply dislike the company. Happiness sells the illusion that the next car, the next pill, the next accomplishment will do it, and advertising plays on a wiring we already have. On therapy he is careful: his friends and family include therapists, the research says therapy works (cognitive behavioral therapy especially), though the cultural focus on mental health may make people more inwardly focused. What strikes him in his students is how casually they mention their therapists, and how anxiety and depression, two separate conditions in his generation, have fused into one. On Trump, his verdict is short: a deeply insecure man driven by feelings of inadequacy. And the sign-off: a Nietzschean moustache, and a Nietzschean book. Andrew’s verdict: life, liberty and the pursuit of misery — a Loewensteinian redraft of the Declaration.
 
About the Guest
 
George Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the founding figures of ...

Last week we were panicking about a supposedly imminent AI apocalypse. Seven days later, Keith Teare argues, government oversight is about as far away as it could possibly be. That’s because Musk, Altman and Amodei agreed to police themselves and test each other’s models. The doomers, says the publisher of That Was The Week, have lost not just this week’s battle but probably the whole war.
 
So who will then write the AI rules? The people building the models, Keith says — as with California’s building codes, government sanctions the standards but engineers write them. And trust doesn’t come from authority, it comes from use. The real check on our new AI overlords, he promises, will come in court, with the American legal system holding OpenAI and Anthropic financially accountable for all damage. That should doom the doomers. If we survive the apocalypse, of course.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Week Regulation Went Away. Seven days, and the conversation reversed. Last week: the whistleblower, the headlines about AI killing everyone within a decade, the calls for global regulation. This week: Trump calling Jensen Huang live from an AI conference to make policy on the fly, Vance at All-In, and — as early as Monday — Musk, Altman and Amodei all agreeing that they are responsible for their own development, that they will slow model-building to match their control systems, and that they will begin testing each other’s models. Keith’s reading: the call for government oversight is going to fade. The New York Times map of the fight — accelerationists (Huang, Sacks, Andreessen), regulators, and a middle of Hassabis, Nadella, Pichai and Zuckerberg — holds at the edges but not the centre, which he calls shifting sands: Hassabis and Amodei made a proposal to the White House that was rejected this week; Zuckerberg then came out against government stepping in. And you cannot disambiguate self-interest from philosophy in that group: they have hearts, but they are paid to represent shareholders, and right now the rise of open source suits Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
•       Who Writes the Rules. Cohere’s Aidan Gomez asked whether a handful of market-dominant Silicon Valley companies should get to define the safety standards of a generational technology. Keith’s answer is an unembarrassed yes — and his analogy is the building code: government sanctions the rules, but the tolerances come from the architects and civil engineers who do the building, not from a committee of legislators. Which is why he thinks the Washington hearings shouldn’t be happening at all: time-wasting, pulling important people away from their work to talk to politicians whose primary interest is reelection. Government, he says, has no role yet — it is too early in the life of AI for anyone in Congress to understand it well enough to legislate. Andrew pressed the obvious objection: so we simply trust Sam, Dario and Elon to police themselves?
•       It Is You, Not the AI. The hour’s best answer, and the one that moves the argument on. It isn’t about trust, Keith says — it’s about accountability, and the machinery already exists. It would not be okay for their software to break into a bank and steal money, or into a rival and steal intellectual property; the legal system covers that today. “Up until now they’ve been saying, hey, it’s not us, it’s the AI. Well, actually, no. It is you.” And the nice thing about liability is that it makes recklessness expensive. Palantir’s CEO pushed the same logic to its conclusion on CNBC: the liabilities facing Anthropic and OpenAI are so enormous that only a government could carry them, so nationalize. Keith’s own caveat is the honest one: when he uses agents he is happy with the outcomes but cannot see the steps, and without visibility there is no verification — which makes it blind trust rather than actual trust.
•       The Doomers Lose a Battle. Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times investigated the Hugging Face incident this week and concluded it was more or less inevitable given the goals OpenAI set its agents in the lab. Benedict Evans’s line is the keeper: it reminds him of Chernobyl — what happens if we turn off every safety system and try to get the reactor to blow up? It blows up. But what exactly did you prove? These labs are deliberately setting models up to break the rules to find out whether they will; the models are calculation machines that carry out whatever they’re told. The Washington Post’s account of how a fringe movement — effective altruism — convinced Washington the end is near gets a blunt verdict from Keith: they’ve lost a battle, though the war goes on. He concedes 71% of Americans have concerns about AI, insists the fear is unfounded, and bets that number massively overstates active concern because most people who actually use AI have a good experience.
•       San Francisco Isn’t Ready. The week’s essays, and the local story underneath them. Reid Hoffman is telling Democrats that time is running out before Americans settle into hating AI — not from fear of extinction but because the benefits aren’t concrete; Andrew’s amendment is that the case for AI improving ordinary life still hasn’t been made coherently. Nick Hanauer’s “market humanism” gets the sharpest treatment: appealing words, but the substance is the argument for trade unions — Aneurin Bevan in modern dress — and it assumes a permanent social contract between labor and capital that AI dissolves in favour of capital alone. Then Ben Metcalfe’s post of the week: the Anthropic IPO alone will equal in dollar weight every tech listing since Uber combined, and San Francisco is nowhere near ready for that much money arriving at once. Keith’s structural point: the economy prospers while the city doesn’t, and closing that gap is the real challenge for Democrats — a subject, Andrew promises, this show will come back to.
 
About the Co-Host
 
Keith Teare is the publisher of the That Was The Week tech newsletter and Keen On America’s regular weekly co-host — the techno-optimist counterpoint to Andrew’s skepticism. A serial founder whose first internet company, EasyNet, launched in 1994, he writes and invests from Palo Alto, and is currently writing The Human Dividend.
 
References:
 
•       That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter, with every piece discussed in this episode.
•       Aidan Gomez of Cohere on who defines the rules for AI; Benedict Evans on the Hugging Face incident; and the Wall Street Journal and New York Times investigations of it.
•       The Washington Post on how a fringe AI movement convinced Washington the end is near; Andy Kessler on the AI Luddites; and the Free Press on the ideology behind the warnings.
•       Reid Hoffman on Americans and AI, and Nick Hanauer on market humanism — the two essays Andrew suggests reading back to back.
•       Ben Metcalfe’s post of the week on San Francisco and the coming Anthropic and OpenAI listings.
•       Interview of the week:

My hometown of San Francisco has the unholy problem of a mansion shortage and mass homelessness. AI money is driving house prices to record highs, our mayor has declared a rent emergency, while in New York City housing affordability has become so acute as to become a rare bipartisan concern. This unreality of the real-estate market has heated up both local and national politics. But as Joshua Specht argues in his new book, Property Values, a history that runs from the rent wars of the 1840s to the crash of 2008, the rise (and fall) of the American homeowner has always been the hottest of political potatoes.
 
The American ideal of land ownership originated in John Locke’s promise of individual self-realization through hard work. Hence the Homestead Act of 1862 and its 160 acres as both the carrot and stick of American citizenship. But as with most things Lockean, it was better in theory than in practice. The ups and particularly the downs of American history are, indeed, entangled with the crises in real-estate — from the collapse of the small farmer in the 1890s to the subprime 2008 crash. Today, that crisis can be seen on the streets of San Francisco and New York City. And for all the supposed abundant intelligence of AI, even Silicon Valley doesn’t have the magical tech to fix either my hometown problem of mansion shortages or mass homelessness.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Lockean Laboratory. The theory that widespread land ownership is the precondition for a functioning democracy is not American in origin — it runs back through Locke to a Europe where it could never be tested, because there was no land to go round unless you were already an aristocrat. America was where the experiment could actually be run — though, as Andrew notes, like most things Lockean it sounded better in theory than in practice — and the Homestead Act of 1862 was its boldest instrument: 160 acres, for little more than a title fee, against rival visions of what the country might be — the southern plantation, and a northern model of vast estates with quasi-feudal tenants. Specht sides with the historians who have lately rehabilitated the Act: yes, there was fraud, but people cheated to hold on to farms; yes, many went bankrupt, but often decades later. What it locked in was a language of ownership that has shaped American politics ever since. The beneficiaries were largely German and Scandinavian immigrants settling the Northern Plains; for native peoples it was, in his word, apocalyptic — and reservations were later broken up under the same logic, that 160 acres would make their occupants “like Americans.” Black homesteaders existed, including the town of Nicodemus in northwestern Kansas, but the land was only nominally free: you had to pay to get there and survive a year before your first crop.
•       Awake! Arouse! The book’s opening story, and the one Andrew hadn’t heard of. Between 1839 and 1845, the tenants of the great Hudson Valley estates — the Van Rensselaers, the Livingstons, holdings with thousands of tenant families — rose against a landlord class whose vision was frankly aristocratic: gentlemen farmers introducing scientific agriculture to quasi-feudal renters, iterated across the continent. The tenants issued their own declaration of independence on July 4, 1839, under handbills reading “Attention, anti-renters! Awake! Arouse!” They stopped paying, resisted the sheriffs, assembled mobs, tarred and feathered rent collectors; a man was killed. And they won — not in court but in politics, once New York’s office-seekers worked out there were votes in it, after which the manors simply stopped being a viable model. Is this Jacksonian populism or the Mamdani kind? Specht’s answer: Jacksonian, and specifically producerist — claims belong to those who work and make. Today’s left populism is about interdependence and obligation; these men wanted, above all, to be left alone.
•       From Land to Lawn. How the promise migrated. By the 1890s the United States was becoming an industrial power while the model everything rested on was falling apart: long-term crop deflation, bigger farms, more machinery, and the discovery that the independent farmer was not independent at all — the market told him how to live. It limped on until the Depression finished it: Grapes of Wrath in the countryside, mortgage defaults in the cities, families gathering in Queens churches to pray against foreclosure. Specht’s observation about crises generally, and useful today: the number actually foreclosed can be small, but the far larger number barely scraping by is what drags everything down. The New Deal’s answer was the government-backstopped mortgage market and what became the thirty-year fixed-rate loan — and FDR’s method, Specht argues, was to experiment wildly, keep what worked, and then tie it to a story about what it means to be an American. Homeownership is the best example. After the war it became the tangible proof of prosperity: out of the multigenerational ethnic apartment, into a house of your own, making jellos for the neighborhood social.
•       Levittown and the Mob. Levitt and Sons turned housebuilding into an assembly line — with the neat inversion that the workers moved down the line of foundations rather than the product moving past them — and the government, needing to house veterans, backed the market that bought the results. Then the machinery of exclusion engaged. Lenders decided, on abstract measures of repayment risk, that racially homogeneous white neighborhoods were the sound investments; older mixed neighborhoods lost access to capital and began to decay. But since anyone could in principle buy into a new suburb, homeowners built their own defences: first racially restrictive covenants, and when those lost legal force, the violence of the mob — Specht tells the story of the crowd that assembled outside the first Black family’s home in Levittown, Pennsylvania. The two mechanisms, the formal and the violent, fed each other. The downstream effect is the one that still shapes American wealth: locked out of the suburbs at the moment they were made, Black Americans missed the accumulation, and were left in urban neighborhoods starved of capital — the beginning of what historians call the urban crisis.
•       Limping Along. On 2008, Specht is more interested in the aftermath than the cause. The cause is familiar: an assumption that liquidity was always good, from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac through securitization and tranching, until the people putting up the money and the people judging the loans were so far apart that standards collapsed. He resists the story that lending to minority buyers caused it — the fraud, and the lack of consequence for it, did. The deeper point is about what everyone was forced into: if you had to move, you had to buy, at whatever the market said. “You kind of had to participate in the madness.” And the response — banks bailed out, no prosecutions, nothing for homeowners — is what radicalized both the Tea Party and Occupy, and broke faith in politics itself. Fifteen years on: not a rise and fall but “the rise and fall and limping along of the wounded American homeownership model,” with a generational divide he expects to harden into a class divide within thirty years. On the abundance agenda — Klein and Thompson, Dunkelman — he is sympathetic but unconvinced it is sufficient: “a policy is not a politics.” His own prescription is decentralization: stop treating S...