Dear America — Happy Fucking Birthday: Christopher Hooks on an Exhausted United States at 250

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's an old question on the show. How to write about America? It's such a strange place that it really requires a kind of hyper realistic, framing. A few weeks ago, we had the novelist Ben Fountain on. He had a he has a new novel out. It's a absurdist novel about contemporary America called Rasputin Swims the Potomac, the Potomac, which imagines Washington, DC, as a totally absurd place. Although, of course, if one was trying to imagine Trump's Washington, DC, a few years ago, most people wouldn't have believed it. But in spite of, Fountain's efforts, fictional efforts, there is a real Washington, DC, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. The cover of the venerable Harper's Magazine has, a rather vulgar a rather vulgar, article, shall we say, on the cover or any a vulgarly entitled, article, although the article itself isn't very vulgar. It's called happy fucking birthday, an exhausted America turns 250, and it's by my guest, Christopher, Christopher, Hooks, not Hicks, Hooks. Chris, happy 200.

00:01:59 Christopher Hooks: Well, right back to you. Maybe your country can come back and swallow mine up again.

00:02:05 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Unfortunately, it's no longer my country. I'm I'm in I'm I'm in it with you. Chris, I'm not sure if you've had a chance to see the, the Fountain novel about Rasputin Swims the Potomac, but how much of a struggle is it to write a realistic journalistic a journalistic piece about America in July, 2026?

00:02:35 Christopher Hooks: Oh, well, it's it's, it's it's difficult. As you say, you know, you need a kind of, satirical or surreal edge, I think, to get it what it feels to, live in America right now. At the same time, the sort of the thing that we're writing about in Donald Trump's America is at this point ten years old, and it can feel like there's not that much to new to say about that either. It's sort of living the same cycle of pathologies, over and over again. So it's it's, it's difficult. I think the kind of the tension that I was working through in this piece was sort of, how to try to make myself feel something new, about America or to work through the difficult feelings I've had about it over the last, decade or so, which, I know a lot of Americans are struggling to do, right now, have been struggling to do.

00:03:35 Andrew Keen: Tell me about the title. I know your day job is with a Texas magazine. You divide your time between Austin and Brooklyn, New York. But the, the Texas magazine that you write for doesn't usually use swear words in its titles. Who came up with that title? Happy fucking birthday.

00:03:54 Christopher Hooks: Oh, that was that was my editor, at Harper's. They came up with that, but it does sort of match, you know, how I how I feel. I thought it was, there's just a feeling of kind of exhaustion and resentment of kind of may sometimes maybe feeling a little bit, foolish about still feeling attached to some idea of this country that seems like it's maybe not, holding that strong or that healthy anymore. So Yeah.

00:04:27 Andrew Keen: You're putting it politely. You're allowed to swear, Chris, on this show. A couple of days ago, we did, we had a conversation with my old friend Peter Wehner. He writes through The Atlantic and The New York Times. His most recent piece is The Apotheosis of Donald Trump. I don't wanna turn this into just another conversation about Trump, but, of course, that's my prelude to asking a Trump question. How much of this exhaustion is bound up with Trump in your view?

00:04:57 Christopher Hooks: Well, of course, a lot of it. You know, in an alternate world where, Ted Cruz or DeSantis was president today, I imagine, center and left of center people might be feeling conflicting feelings about the country, but there's a kind of unique indignity, to the Trump era. And, you know, with the UFC fight at the White House, there's kind of a there's a delight, I think, that he and his people have at kind of taking, the noses of liberals and rubbing it in his kind of abuse of, American symbols. And I think part of what's embarrassing about dealing offense to that a little bit is that you have to admit that the symbols meant something to you in the first place. Maybe you feel a little foolish for doing so. Nobody likes to be fooled. And I, you know, my father is in his eighties. He was a Republican for most of his life until 2016, and, there's a kind of, I think he and I share this kind of despite being politically different in many respects, still kind of share this feeling of, it's a humiliation. He wakes up, and he has to deal with the fact that America is maybe not the thing he thought it was. And, he feels embarrassed. I feel embarrassed.

00:06:11 Andrew Keen: Yeah. He should have been with me, or both of you should have been with me. I just come back from Europe. I spent you some time in Poland, Austria, Germany, but particularly in Poland, has also this sense of embarrassment. Poland being, of course, one of America's closest allies in Europe, and yet a deep sadness and regret and bewilderment about what's happening. I don't wanna as I said, I don't wanna turn this into just another Trump conversation. So your remit for Harper's was to write about America as it as it celebrated its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. As I said, you divide your time between Austin, Texas and Brooklyn, New York, but you show up in Washington, DC. Tell me about this and the experience of being in Washington, DC and the year of, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary.

00:07:06 Christopher Hooks: Well, my original remit for the piece was to write something, a little shorter probably about, America two fifty, this bipartisan organization that was set up in 2015, 2016, kind of at the end of the Obama era at a time when maybe you could see signs of something strange happening on the wall, although a lot of people were still in, in denial about that. And America two fifty was this bipartisan commission, Republicans and Democrats, who were supposed to organize a big, set of celebrations, for 2026. And, they had a really rough go of it. They had a rough go of it. They had a lot of kind of internal bureaucratic dysfunction and disagreement about the purpose of the organization that was exacerbated when Donald Trump came in and kind of appointed his own people to run it. And, for the Donald Trump's people brought in some kind of, people from Washington NGO world who were a little bit more to the left, and there was a lot of fighting. There were some lawsuits. There's a lot of public criticism. And the idea that Harper's had was that I would go and look at the history of this organization and see if maybe it was kind of a proxy for the very loud debates, that we've been having, that America's been having over the last ten years. I, had a more difficult time reporting on this organization than I was hoping to. By the time I got to them, you know, a few months away from when the celebration was supposed to start, they were a little bit more buttoned up than they used to be. The people that were involved in the lawsuits, maybe had settled and said that they assigned NDAs and that kind of thing. And, my original plan for reporting didn't work out. But I went to some of the events that this organization held. I have never liked DC much. I mostly write about politics. It's not a helpful thing to have the stronger version to DC that I do, but I just have never really liked the city, what it represents, and how it feels to be there. I went to, America two fifty briefing where it was for press. They were trying to explain all of the things that they had done and that they were going to do and all the successes that they'd had. And, I just found it a pretty demoralizing experience. I write about this in the piece that, one of the things that they're very proud of is that they've set up this fund, to try to repair the lack of patriotism that they perceive in younger generations, that polling says exist in younger generations. And the way one of the ways that they're going to about trying to fix that is by making, venture capital funding available for seed funding available for, college students, American college students to try to start their own start ups. And it just felt like, it came from a kind of a past political moment and, and a set of tendencies that now feels very distant and discredited, I would say. And sitting in on the briefing and listening to this and kind of other meager programs that they had set up to celebrate the quarter millennium birthday of, The United States. I just felt dispirited in a way that felt like it was important to try to examine and mine and figure out where that dispirited feeling was coming from and, to try to try to get some useful observation and perspective out of that.

00:10:36 Andrew Keen: Right. There's a sadness to your piece. You compare the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary to the two hundredth where there was still some energy and optimism. Is there any is there anyone in America, do you think, Chris, who isn't exhausted on either political spectrums?

00:10:55 Christopher Hooks: Well, it's interesting. I mean, there are, you know, polls would suggest that there are a lot of, you know, people who still, the diminishing number, but it's still back to president and feel somewhat good about the things that are happening now. Of course, as you have probably sensed also, it's there's a little bit of people are on that side are getting a little quieter, and, they maybe seem like there are some questions about the direction of the country that even if they're not always willing to voice, they are they're feeling some internal doubts too about the war, about the economy, about everything else. You know, I will say, more often than not, these kind of milestone commemorations have been emotionally complicated and kind of, an opportunity for Americans to wallow in their own private doubts about the country. There was some energy in 1976, and a lot of people remember those commemorations fondly. But, of course, I don't need to tell you. It came at the end of Vietnam and after Watergate. And, there were these kind of, there were these private doubts that Americans had been feeling for a long time. And, the 1976 commemoration had its own problems. 1926 was kind of a disaster. I just briefly touched on this in the piece, but the one kind of milestone commemoration that The US has had of, the, declaration of independence that kinda had some juice or some vitality was, the 1876, commemorations in Philadelphia, which was, kind of a world's fair. And that was a major moment in America.

00:12:41 Andrew Keen: Right. Right. I take your point, Chris. But, I mean, some people might be listening to this and thinking, well, this is all very well, and one can always be critical. But in the period from 1876 through a hundred fifty years later, America has emerged as not just the world's only superpower or dominant superpower, but a remarkable economic engine, cultural engine, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the Internet. So it's not as if American America has had an unsuccessful hundred and fifty or two hundred and fifty years.

00:13:17 Christopher Hooks: Oh, sure. I mean, you know, I yeah. I that's that's correct. I mean, 1976, I think people felt was a bit of a low point. But looking back, it's, hard to see what they, felt that way about a few years later when the Reagan revolution came. And, you know, I think that the disappointment I have is not and that some people other people may feel is not that America's material condition is terrible. It's that, there is a set of ideas about what America represented. Maybe those ideas were ill founded, but that there was something important in this country that we thought was the case. And it's now harder to connect with those ideas.

00:14:08 Andrew Keen: So you went on the road. You as you said, your original remit of covering the two hundred and fiftieth committee didn't really work out. Although you write in an interesting way about Rosa Rios [as spoken: Rosie Rios], who, was the Mexican American business leader who was appointed by Biden as the chairwoman of the semiquincentennial, commission. So it's interesting. So where did you go? I mean, where did you look for energy? I know you end up in Pennsylvania.

00:14:44 Christopher Hooks: Yeah. So I started out in DC and with this sort of bicentennial, or, bipartisan commemoration organization, and, I spent a little bit of time with their with them and meditated on how much I don't like the Washington DC. And, the strange feature of the commemorations this year is that there is this sort of bipartisan congressional organization. And then, as soon as Trump came in the second time, he had previously tried to kind of take over or redirect this America two fifty in his first term. In the second term, he just decided I'll set up my own, called freedom two fifty. And those are the guys that, you know, are organizing, stuff like the, the UFC fight on the White House Lawn. Later this summer, I think there's gonna be an IndyCar race in DC. And, this other organization, Task Force two fifty, did a, an army parade a year ago. So I went to go look I went to see what freedom two fifty was having. And part of freedom two fifty's remit is they're waging a war on woke, and, you know, trying to redirect Americans toward patriotic values. And part of the way that they're doing that is they have this fleet of, freedom trucks, which is just like a trailer that they've turned into kind of a mobile museum. And there's no artifacts or anything like that. It's just sort of text about American history. But you can go to a Freedom two fifty truck and get kind of the approved version of the story of America's founding from, this body connected to the administration. There happened to be one in a town called Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, which is a state college town about an hour north of, Pittsburgh, half an hour maybe.

00:16:28 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Butler County, Pennsylvania. Small place. Its population's not much more than 3,000 people.

00:16:35 Christopher Hooks: And Butler County, of course, is, the place where, Donald Trump the first major assassination attempt to happen against, Donald Trump and his campaign. And so I went up there to, take a look at the freedom truck. There

00:16:51 Andrew Keen: Was

00:16:51 Christopher Hooks: Not a lot to see really, the Freedom Truck. It was interesting, but not, you know, nothing to write home about. But, I stayed in town for a while, and I talked to people and, they Yeah.

00:17:03 Andrew Keen: You came across a character called Mare John David Longo. Sounds like quite a character.

00:17:10 Christopher Hooks: Yeah. I think, you know, he was he was, he's he's a young republican mayor of this kind of traditionally purple area, who was very well connected with the Trump administration and this think tank called the America First Policy Institute, which is kind of a rival of heritage. This is like the Trump think tank. And he had, you know, he's at the start of what could be a longer political career, in as a sort of local representative of MAGA. And, I, I went on his social media a little bit. It seemed like a very interesting subject. Talked a lot about the kind of the there are plots by leftists to who want to, you know, persecute your sons and see your daughters sexually assaulted and that kind of thing. And, and, yeah, I sat down with him for a while and went to the freedom truck with him. His project while in office has been to, you know, greatly increase the number of patriotic symbols in slippery rock, including, putting up what he says is the tallest American flag, largest American flag in, and what he says is a 130 square miles in a big park at the highest point in town. And, you're somebody who had, like, still has, like, a perfect, faith in the country and its patriotic symbols.

00:18:43 Andrew Keen: So this, though, longer contrasts quite sharply, I think, with the tone and the tenor of your piece.

00:18:53 Christopher Hooks: Yes. Which is partly wanted to talk to him. He was a very, very likable figure, I would say. I mean, he's he's very, punchy online, but, we got along well and, talked for a while. And, you know, I think he, when we were at the Freedom Track, his constituents kept coming up to tell him what a good job he had been doing and all of those things. I also liked that he was, you know, he was a child of, of immigrants. He was a recent a second generation immigrant, I guess, like Rosie Rios. And, I think, you know, his relationship to The United States was, colored by that.

00:19:37 Andrew Keen: So were you in any way I mean, you sound a little jaded. I mean, just as America is exhausted, you sound, Chris, a little exhausted. Did this energize you at all? I mean, did any of the things that you see or did on this tour? We did a show a few months ago with the Yale historian, very distinguished historian, Beverly Gage. She has a new book out called This Land is Your Land, a road trip through US history. It's in a way a kind of condensed version, I guess, of what you've written, a long a much longer version of what you've written, except that, she seems a little more optimistic than you.

00:20:17 Christopher Hooks: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I think that I have come away, from the last five or ten years of debates about the nature of American history and all of that stuff with, sincere belief that, you know, Americans need who have kind of non MAGA values need a kind of story about America to, cling to a positive story of America, what it's done, and what it represents even if that story is a little bit false. Actually, I think I feel it more strongly than I did five years ago. And I but it's, I also can't, lie to myself. So I it's it's work sometimes, I think, to find the things in American history and American identity that I do relate to and I think are defensible and worth preserving. Sometimes I feel like I can connect to those things quite strongly. On this assignment, you know, dealing with freedom February and America February and, and seeing what other people were saying we should celebrate, was kind of a low point, I would say. I'm probably not as pessimistic as, I am in the piece all the time.

00:21:38 Andrew Keen: Right. I mean, your website has a picture of Big Bend National Park. So you're clearly a lover of the land too and the open spaces that Beverly Gage also embraces in her book, This Land is Your Land. So you have an affinity to the land and maybe to America. In a way, this is a piece in which you're longing perhaps for another America or an alternative America, or you're looking for something that no longer exists.

00:22:05 Christopher Hooks: Sure. I mean, I think to feel disappointed by something, you have to have had expectations for it. You know, rejection is a form of an attachment. And there I've there is, you know, there is, you know, there's there's a lot there's a lot that I still do value in the country's history and the American story and all of that stuff. It's, you know, it's a little bit of a shame that the two hundred fiftieth has to happen at this particular moment in time. The Yeah.

00:22:38 Andrew Keen: I mean, it's tragic in a way. I mean, Harpis is not some marginal magazine. I think it's America's oldest publication. So to have a cover story on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary exhausted America turns 250, is rather depressing, I mean.

00:23:00 Christopher Hooks: Yeah. I've gotten that a lot. I mean, I would say, though, I think I think there is, you know, there is there is there is value in expressing anger about where the country is right now, and there's anger in, telling other people that they're entitled to feel angry, that there's something to feel angry about. You know, the I'm sure you felt, you know, the major difference between the second Trump term and the first Trump term is that, people just feel kind of defeated now. And, I guess there was part of me that was hoping in this, this milestone commemoration would be an opportunity for a lot of people to step up and articulate the ways that they feel angry and kind of reclaim something about the country. I don't think we're there yet, but I would not be surprised at all if the next, Democratic candidate in 2028 is trying to tap into this kind of repressed civic nationalism that Barack Obama also tapped into in his day and that, you see a kind of center left, patriotism emerge as a major political force in America. I mean, that's that's sort of what put Ronald Reagan into office in 1980 and in a different way, Jimmy Fallon.

00:24:20 Andrew Keen: Could be, Chris. Still could be morning in America?

00:24:25 Christopher Hooks: Well, I don't know. We feel we may be a little too cynical to do the morning in America thing again, but there is, I do think there is something that is possible to reclaim about, the kind of, center left or liberal tradition in America that, has been at times in American history a uniting and powerful force. It feels dormant right now, but, I'm not, it's probably not going to be it's probably not dead.

00:24:56 Andrew Keen: Oddly enough, the one person who comes out of this piece, this rather dark piece, without looking too cynical, is, a nineteenth century congressman, Firdaus Stevens. Tell me about him and why you're more optimistic about some dead nineteenth century congressman than you are about the current crop of American politician.

00:25:23 Christopher Hooks: Well, I think, you know, this ending is a little bit of a reach. I'll I'll acknowledge that. But, I had just spent, you know, a week dealing with, contemporary my contemporary Americans and feeling very kind of out to sea and unable to connect with them in a in a meaningful way or in some way unable to feel like they were my countrymen. And so that the discussion that we were having about, like, digging out a usable past, that, is helps strengthen the values that we wanna see in the country. There's an earlier point in the piece, where I talked about, in the summer where Biden, had the debate and eventually dropped from the democratic ticket. I felt, just profoundly demoralized, about the state of American politics, and I could feel Trump coming back. And I and so I just sort of dropped out of following current events in the news and, and reading about American history, parts of American history that I didn't know as much as I would like to, and, and trying to fish out characters from these times that I could relate to or could be, you know, proud to come from the same national tradition, of. And, yeah, it was twofold. Reading about history in that way, it's, it's comforting in the sense that, America has always been a very fucked up and violent and chaotic and strange place, Much stranger than I think we often remember. Much more chaotic and violent than we often remember. And so the times that you're living through maybe are not as bad as you thought they were. And the other thing is that there are these, like, very colorful characters throughout every period of American history, the darker periods and the better periods, who, you know, are kind of offering a little bit of a light. And

00:27:25 Andrew Keen: But tell me about this guy, Stevens. What's the big deal about him?

00:27:29 Christopher Hooks: Sorry. Well, he was, he was, he comes from, Thaddeus Stevens was, a radical Republican, civil war era lawmaker. Radical Republican, obviously, these are the people who are were most likely to be abolitionists, or they were sort of left wing coded as left wing at the time. But Thaddeus Stevens is this cranky, club footed. His contemporaries agreed that he was kind of an ugly and rude man, most of the time. He was born a few years after, the constitution was ratified. And, he is somebody who manifested seemingly from nowhere, like, this intense conviction that, what America should be is a place in which America is a place should be a place of perfect racial and, and ethnic and other equality, and that the work of, the government and, Congress, was to ameliorate the conditions faced by the poor, the ostracized, those of other faiths, and, racial minorities. This is an extremely minority position at the time. Probably in the way that he believed it, it's an extremely minority position now. It just got a little bit better. But, his, he was somebody who felt profound anger about the country that he lived in. And, he lived at a time where very few other people seemed to agree with him for most of his life. Then at a critical moment during the Civil War, he ended up, one of the most powerful members of Congress. And in the sense that The United States sort of, drafted a second constitution and a second framework for government during the Civil War and immediately after, He was one of the people who framed that constitution, and, sort of a second founding father. And I, throughout the throughout the piece, I'm sort of looking for something to latch onto to connect to. And I think at the end, I'm sort of suggesting that, the most honest way that I can latch on to something, in America that I relate to today is by looking at these, historical figures like Thaddeus Stevens who, you know, have to he his life ended at a point where he was very disappointed about the progress that had been made during his life. But in some way, he laid the groundwork for, you know, a century, a century and a half of change to come after his death. And, maybe there's a touch of pessimism in that too in that, I'm talking about his legacy. I'm I'm not so sure about the next couple decades of American life. It feels like some things are going in a bad direction that I have a hard time imagining how they're going to come out.

00:30:27 Andrew Keen: There's still some hope for you. I mean, in spite of, you didn't come up with this title. I'm not gonna keep on repeating the f word, but we know what we're talking about. This happy birthday to America that seems in such a state of exhaustion, Trump's America. You still have a kernel of hope, Chris.

00:30:49 Christopher Hooks: Sure. I mean, you know, there are the gilded age is a pretty bleak time, and, in time, it was replaced by the progressive era and the New Deal, and there is American history kind of swings in these big, has these big pendulum swings. I, I, you know, I yes. I do have some hope. I wanna have some hope. Yeah. Day to day, it's it's, it can be hard. It doesn't seem, things don't seem particularly great. But, what level of hope would you say you're on right now today?

00:31:25 Andrew Keen: Well, I'm certainly more hopeful than you, which isn't hard. You divide your time between Texas and Brooklyn, very different sorts of places. Where are you gonna be on the fourth?

00:31:36 Christopher Hooks: Probably, I'll probably be in New York. Yeah. Probably, I'm probably not going to a sanctioned celebration zone, but, I'll probably be having a few beers with some friends.

00:31:48 Andrew Keen: And what about your father? He'll be in Texas?

00:31:51 Christopher Hooks: He'll be in Texas. Yeah. I he'll probably be doing the same.

00:31:55 Andrew Keen: He's not gonna celebrate at all?

00:31:58 Christopher Hooks: Well, I'll celebrate in the sense that I'll yeah. I'm probably going to go out with, with, with some friends. But, I probably am not setting off, fireworks.

00:32:09 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. Happy fucking birthday. That's, Christopher Hooks' birthday card to an exhausted America. It's depressing, but maybe very real, maybe the best way of describing the current situation. Chris, Have a happy fourth or not too miserable a fourth, and congratulations on the pieces. The cover the cover story of Harper's this month is gonna get a lot of attention, rather vulgar, but maybe appropriate. Best of luck, Chris, and congratulations on the piece.

00:32:40 Christopher Hooks: Thanks, Andrew.