How Politicians Broke Our World: Ian Shapiro on Raising Ourselves Up After the Fall

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Tuesday, 05/05/2026. It was almost forty years ago that the Berlin Wall came down. We were all exuberant. The world enjoyed a moment of euphoria. Francis Fukuyama, old friend of the show, wrote his famous book, although not sure he quite meant it in the way most of us now think about it, The End of History and the Last Man. And we expected the world was gonna be a much better place almost forty years later, of course. Things don't appear quite as bright, as exuberant, as euphoric. We have Donald Trump. We have characters like Marine Le Pen in Europe. Meanwhile, progressivism seems in crisis. We have Starmerism in the United Kingdom and Kamala Harris, failures on lots of fronts in the United States, seems as though everything has gone wrong between November 1989 and today in May 2026. We have fallen — or at least, according to my guest today, Ian Shapiro, distinguished historian, longtime professor at Yale University, and the author of an intriguing new book, After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy — How Politicians Broke Our World. Ian is joining us from his home in New Haven, Connecticut. Ian, congratulations on the new book.

00:02:04 Ian Shapiro: Thanks so much, and thanks for inviting me on.

00:02:07 Andrew Keen: Ian, why did it take you so long, not literally, to write this book, but everyone's been kind of touching on this crisis. What took you or your your profession so long to realize that things had gone so badly wrong?

00:02:28 Ian Shapiro: Well, that's a great place to start, actually. I think that a lot of the mainstream, commentators, political parties, and political leaders didn't really realize how pivotal the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath really was because, that was the inflection point even though a lot of people didn't realize it. It was the point at which the hegemony of the neoliberal model of political economy and the supremacy of the US model of running the world system were undermined by this huge crisis that blindsided so many governments and elites and forced major policy changes from what had become the consensus since the 1980s. And they bailed out the banks and saved the elites and all of that — but they didn't realize that many of the people who'd been left behind would subsequently be mobilizable by political entrepreneurs peddling very different wares within these countries. And internationally, I think they didn't realize how the sort of American moment was over because the notion that, you know, the US was riding the rules of the road for the whole world and everybody just needed to get aboard, you know, really fell onto much harder times. We stopped hearing so much about the Washington Consensus. We started hearing about the Beijing Consensus. We started seeing much more unstable global alliances. So I think this was really was the inflection point. But many of the elites didn't realize it. They thought, you know, once the initial crisis was managed, that they could go back to business as usual, and they didn't realize that they were going to become vulnerable in all the ways that we've seen playing out, particularly since 2016.

00:04:55 Andrew Keen: It's interesting. Maybe we can come back to your definition of elites. I assume you're part of that. You teach at one of the most prestigious universities. You teach new generations of political leaders, economic leaders, cultural leaders. Yep. The book, Ian is based on a series of lectures the DeVane Lectures that you gave at Yale. I think they're public lectures. You jump into the narrative at about the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. But, of course, that was 20 years after the fall of the wall. Correct. How would you begin the story then in '89? You don't begin in 2008. What's so significant about the 20 years between '89 and 2009?

00:05:54 Ian Shapiro: So I think that was somewhat different on the international front and on the domestic front. On the international front, you know, it was the end of the Cold War. It was really a moment where, traditional alliances were scrambled, where, existing institutions were up for grabs, the, you know, NATO, where we had won the Cold War, what was NATO there for. Ideologies were being scrambled because, you know, what was communism gonna mean now when even the nominally communist regimes were adopting capitalist practices? So it was a it was the spirit of great, you know, fluidity in the international system. And, I think that was part of the euphoria and the you know, my book is really an account of how what were the decisions made and foregone by political leaders that meant we didn't take advantage of the moment and instead, you know, wrestled ourselves back into a new Cold War, and, the, you know, the sort of zero-sum world that we've gotten ourselves into. Yeah.

00:07:09 Andrew Keen: I'm not sure everyone would necessarily agree that we wrestled ourselves back. I think that Vladimir Putin certainly played a role. Let's hold on. We'll come to that later. But, and I know you have a whole section on Yeltsin and, Putin, particularly interesting section in the book. The subtitle is particularly intriguing, Ian — From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World — not capitalism, not culture, but politicians. So should we begin with perhaps the two dominant western politicians of the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair? Are they the beginning of the fall?

00:07:56 Ian Shapiro: Well, certainly, Bill Clinton, I think, missed enormously big opportunities both in the geopolitics and in domestic politics. So, you know, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet threat went away, there were people, credible, serious people saying, you know, what the victorious powers should do after the Cold War was suggested by what the victorious powers did after World War Two, you know, when George Marshall came up with the Marshall Plan and said, what we really need to be doing is investing in the defeated powers in Germany and Japan, folding them into the security infrastructure and the new postwar economy and not make the mistake that was made after World War One when they, you know, basically treated Germany very punitively and many people thought did it in ways that led to the rise of Hitler. The people said no. I mean, even including, for example, Richard Nixon, of all people, wrote and testified before Congress saying, this is the moment to really invest in a new Russia, help create a diversified market economy, incorporate them into the new security arrangements, and so on. And, the George H.W. Bush and then Clinton administration pretty much brushed this aside even though, actually, all through the nineties, Yeltsin was pushing for the same thing. Wanted to join NATO, wanted to join the European Union. You know, at the time, Joe Biden said, you know, was in favor of this. And even when Putin came in 2000 for those first few years, Biden was saying this is the most pro-Western and pro-democratic leader Russia's ever had. Putin was saying, we consider ourselves Europeans. We wanna join we wanna integrate economically with the West. We wanna join NATO. People like Berlusconi were saying, yes. This is what we should be doing. And then there were people many people saying we shouldn't expand NATO in Eastern Europe. People like Brent Scowcroft, George Kennan, many others were saying, no. Focus on the new Russia just as we focused on Germany after the Cold War. Bill Clinton brushed all that aside and went ahead, expanding NATO into Eastern Europe with the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999 and dribbling out aid to Yeltsin to bail him out from, you know, a crisis in '96. A little bit. It sort of saved him from the communist resurgence and the hardliners, but still, you know, they were driven into getting an IMF bailout in '98. And so this was a huge, I think, missed opportunity that the Clinton administration had. And, of course, George W. Bush then, jumped on the bandwagon.

00:11:18 Andrew Keen: It's kind of an irony here, Ian. It seems to me that you mentioned the Marshall Plan, but, of course, it's hard to imagine that the Marshall Plan would have been conceivable without the Cold War. So did we get the horse before the cart, so to speak, here? Had we, and when I say we, the West, had a clear enemy at the time, Yeltsin certainly wasn't an enemy, and no one knew anything about Vladimir Putin. Might it have been easier to create a new Marshall Plan in the 1990s that it requires a perceived enemy?

00:11:58 Ian Shapiro: To some extent, but I, you know, I think that, there were certainly many people saying, you know I mean, Nixon, for example, was

00:12:08 Andrew Keen: Well, Nixon knows if anyone knows about right. Anyone knows about after the fall. Yeah.

00:12:13 Ian Shapiro: George Kennan was saying, if we don't do this, we will have a new enemy. You know? I mean, the point of the Marshall Plan was, to some extent, the Cold War — but the Cold War really didn't ramp up until the late 1940s. You know, the main motivation for the Marshall Plan was to not have a repeat of Versailles. You know? 1919, Keynes had written The Economic Consequences of the Peace saying, you know, if you don't invest, in rebuilding these devastated countries and instead make their recovery difficult, they're going to develop into a huge problem for the victorious powers, which is exactly what happened. And, you know, that was Marshall's motivation was to not repeat the mistakes of Versailles. And I think that, in fact, we exactly repeated the mistakes of Versailles. The, dominant power's response to, the end of the Cold War was much more like after World War One than after World War Two. And I think that was a huge missed opportunity in geopolitics, of the moment.

00:13:32 Andrew Keen: In terms of this narrative, Ian, going from the collapse of the wall to our current moment, how central then is Russia's slide into authoritarianism from Yeltsin, who you know we should have invested in, we being the West, to Putin's authoritarianism, anti-Western authoritarianism? I mean, isn't it conceivable that all the problems in the West, the crisis of democracy — they're not necessarily bound up in a problematic Russia. I mean —

00:14:14 Ian Shapiro: For sure.

00:14:15 Andrew Keen: You're nostalgic in some ways for the age of FDR and LBJ, great society, the New Deal when Russia was a totalitarian nightmare. So it's quite conceivable that Russia could have been off in the Asiatic tundra, ruining itself as it always seems to do, and the West could be doing fine. These two stories aren't intimately bound up with one another.

00:14:41 Ian Shapiro: Yes. So I think that's you know, that's exactly right. What I argue in the book is that the choices that were made in domestic politics, in the end, start to interact with these global things. But really, they are much more to do with what's going on within these countries. And I mean, I think the narrative there goes back to the eighties when, you know, Keynesian economics was on the defensive because apparently it hadn't dealt with stagflation of the 1970s, and that was what opened the way to mainstream the neoliberal agenda of privatization, deregulation, and free trade. And so you had Reagan and Thatcher, you know, mainstreaming those ideas that had been hanging around in think tanks for decades. And as you mentioned, Clinton and Blair they conclude because the sort of traditional Keynesian recipes were discredited, they conclude that they the only route to power is by converging on the same consensus. And so you get New Labour in the UK. You get Mitterrand's about-turn in France in the early 1980s. You get Bill Clinton's New Democrats. And, you know, Margaret Thatcher's famous line, there is no alternative, starts to look even more powerful at the end of the Cold War because suddenly communist economics goes away as well. And so you have this converging consensus of all the mainstream parties on the same economic model. And the problem with that model is that the benefits of it flow almost exclusively to the top. And so you get, you know, wage stagnation in the middle and the bottom. People, you know, the people say, well, you know, that people just have to get with the program because there is no alternative. And I think this is this is what starts to come unstuck with the financial crisis.

00:16:56 Andrew Keen: So are you, Ian, in a sense in the book after the fall, you're certainly not the first or the last person to be doing this. You're relitigating Thatcherism and Reaganism and arguing that was a fundamental mistake. I mean, after all, I was around at the time. You were too. I know you were educated in the UK. You were born in South Africa. There are all sorts of problems with Carter, with Old Labour in the UK, stagflation, blah blah blah. So it's always easy, and you don't need me to tell you this as a historian. It's always easy to forget about history and just assume that, that, we can imagine things better today. Hindsight is 20/20. I mean, weren't there fundamental problems? That's what explains the rise of Thatcher and Reagan and the fact that their ideas were became, for better or worse, a kind of consensus with people like Clinton and

00:17:55 Ian Shapiro: I think yeah. I think that's right. I mean — I take your point, up to a point at least. What I would say was that the, you know, Keynesianism was unfairly lambasted for the problems of the 1970s, which had a lot to do with the oil shocks of '73 and '79 and the US, you know, the end of Bretton Woods and a whole series of causes. Nonetheless, the you know, these economies, as you say, had a lot of problems. And in some ways, those problems were resolved by the switch to neoliberal economics, but it put new problems on the agenda. Namely, it was a growth model that didn't distribute its benefits very widely. You know, the vast majority of the benefits flowed to the top. And that could be viable politically so long as it was widely accepted that there was no alternative. Once, you know, once you know, what happens in the financial crisis is that they bail themselves out. They bail out the banks, you know, who's borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars to recapitalize the banks and to pay the bonuses. Nobody gets punished. Nobody goes to jail. On the contrary, we're using, you know, TARP money to pay bonuses. And that's what creates the opening because now we have Keynesianism for the elites and, you know, austerity for everyone else. And that's what creates the opening for the, you know, for Trump and for Modi and Orbán and, you know, Marine Le Pen to mobilize, voters by saying, you know, that these people are just self-dealing. They're protecting themselves, you know, and by 2012, 2013, the stock markets have come back. People's 401(k)s are all doing fine. But, you know, the euro crisis is rumbling on and, the, you know, Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Trichet were ramming austerity down the throats of all the European governments with their fiscal compact. And so it's this it's this sort of hypocrisy of the elites essentially, you know, what you know, the missed opportunity I described as in connection with Obama is, yes, of course, they had to bail out, Wall Street and recapitalize the banks and stop the world economy from collapsing. But that also gave him leverage. You know? He could have said, well, the condition for bailing out Wall Street is also bailing out Main Street, and we really have to invest in, you know, creating a new infrastructure for the 21st century.

00:20:53 Andrew Keen: A Marshall Plan not for Eastern Europe, but a Marshall Plan for Main Street. Before we get there, and I want a little bit more on that from you about what it would involve, of course, we've skipped over or I've skipped over 9/11, which was halfway between the fall of the wall and the financial crisis. What's the role of 9/11, Ian, in your narrative, in terms of the fall? Of course, the towers fell, so that is symbolic in many ways.

00:21:21 Ian Shapiro: Again, a huge missed opportunity in that case by George W. Bush because, you know, 9/11 didn't in any way harm America's sort of hegemonic position in the world system in the sense that there was huge support. You know? Putin was the first person to call and pledge Russian support. You know, almost every Muslim country in the world pledged support, for the US. And if Bush had not decided to use this to create his so called global war on terror and, you know, American unilateralism. If you're not with us, you're against us, and the invasion of Iraq, and all of these activities which essentially squandered the opportunity to build on the global support for the US in the wake of 9/11. Instead, we got a new era of unilateralism. This is when the neocons, who had been on the fringes of his administration, became the central players. And so America went down this path of unilateralism, taking NATO with it — expanding NATO, and cementing the new Cold War. I think that was a big part of what then cements the new Cold War with the former Soviet Union. So I think 9/11 was an inflection point, but it it was one in which the Bush administration made incredibly foolish decisions that took us, you know, headlong into the new Cold War.

00:23:16 Andrew Keen: What happened or what has happened to progressive politics? You mentioned Obama, his failure to re architect the American economy and the crisis. We've talked about Clinton as the guy who shepherded America for much of the 1990s, who, I guess, created the conditions for Trump for the fall. Is there an intellectual for you, Ian, in terms of you as a historian and intellectual historian? Is there a bankruptcy intellectually about characters like Clinton and Obama? Were they not developing progressiveism, or should they be more explicit in going back to historic figures like FDR and LBJ?

00:24:06 Ian Shapiro: Well, I think that they squandered the New Deal and Great Society legacy, for the reasons that you've just been alluding to and we've just already discussed. They basically sort of clambered aboard the neoliberal consensus. And so it was this it was the center-left parties as might you know, I mean, Blair, privatized more than Margaret Thatcher had done. And, you know, Clinton, well, you know, “the era of big government is over,” and all of that. And, you know so I think it's not that they that was one problem with these center-left parties. I think that the leaders of them basically, you know, embraced the terrain that had been defined by the right, and the right responded to that by moving the goalpost. But I think that the old progressive left has its own, you know, problems, which is they got hugely invested in identity politics and culture wars and things that alienate most voters, and I think became more and more consumed with fighting among themselves rather than thinking, you know, developing a national agenda for the future. And this is very reminiscent of the 1930s, by the way, when if you look in all the European countries as the as the, you know, hard right neo-fascist parties were emerging and gaining gaining ground, mostly the parties on the left were squabbling with each other, you know, without thinking about an an alternative agenda. And I see that again today. You know? You look at the Democrats that, you know, Trump's popularity is cratering on the issues that he came to power on, immigration, inflation, the economy. The Democrats are reveling in it. But where is Project 2029? Where is their agenda? You know, there's nothing to be seen, and so I worry that they could stumble back into power. And then six months later, it would look like Starmer's government because they're not getting behind any programmatic agenda. You know, they need to if they come into office, they need to have a program for rebuilding America for the 21st century.

00:26:44 Andrew Keen: I know, you have a final section in the book borrowing from Lenin, what is to be done. So we'll come to that. But, Ian, why is it the politicians on the right, whether it's Trump or Le Pen or Orbán or so many of the others, who have been more explicit in their critique of global capitalism. What is it? Why has this happened? How do you explain it in your history that Trump may not like him, but he certainly has political skills and his ability to jump on this message, which has won him a considerable amount of working class or post-working-class voters in the United States. You talked about the hypocrisy of the elites in the nineties and in the early part of the 21st century. Is that the reason that ordinary people, the working class or what was once known as the working class, have seen through the elites, whether it's Clinton or Blair or Starmer or Kamala Harris?

00:27:51 Ian Shapiro: I would say there are two pieces to it. One is the economic piece we've already talked about — that, you know, these political and economic elites really did bail out, themselves and their friends while imposing austerity on everyone else. I mean, you read the pop books on the financial crisis. You know, when Obama goes in to meet with the bankers, at the end of the meeting, they're completely stunned that he's demanded nothing of them. And, you know, so, this sort of preemptive capitulation to the financial elites while at the same time insisting on, you know, we've gotta, you know, we've gotta cut the deficits. So you get this irony. It's the Republicans who run up the deficits and the Democrats who cut them, you know, as a sort of inverse of the ideological story. So I think that's one part of it. But the other part that's central to the point you are making is, I think, that the right-wing populists are just so much better at identity politics. They're so much better at invoking blood and soil nationalism and, playing, you know, the card of cultural affiliation and identity than the left — groups that try to embrace, you know, multiculturalism and identity through, all of those mechanisms. And I think it's, they just had their clocks cleaned. And so, and I so I think it's the combination of the blood and soil ethnic nationalism and the sort of the mainstream elites leading with their chin on economic policy that creates this, perfect storm, if you like, for the mainstream parties. So in the book,

00:29:50 Andrew Keen: after the fall — from the end of history to the crisis of democracy, how politicians broke our world — suggests that there is an alternative narrative to the last forty years. I wanna talk about how you think we can rebuild that narrative, but maybe there's another way of thinking about it. Of course, the one character we haven't mentioned so far is Xi Jinping of China, who's championing — pioneering — an alternative system. Your Yale colleague Paul Kennedy wrote an iconic book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, which is an enormously influential book. Could one alternatively interpret this period, Ian, this forty years as being simply the twilight of the West and that this is the fall of the Western system, and we're seeing also not so much the rise of Putin, but the rise of a capitalist authoritarianism in China and Singapore and elsewhere?

00:30:48 Ian Shapiro: So it's interesting that you bring up Paul's book because while you're right that it was hugely influential, it also was hugely wrong, right, in that it was it was saying this is the beginning, the end of American hegemony. This was in, you know, in, in the late 1980s. Right. And what was his what was he saying? He said the Japanese are gonna take over the world economy. So he was, you know, doubly wrong, but I think it's a cautionary tale because, yes, the rise of China has been more rapid and much more dramatic than anybody predicted. You know, unlike the things talked about in my book where there were really people at the time saying, don't do this and do that. You know? With China, I think the rise of China was not foreseen or the extent and pace of it was not foreseen at the time of the end of the Cold War. But Paul's book is a cautionary tale because, you know, the Chinese have had their very successful decades, but, you know, they are confronting problems of their own due to choices that they have made. I mean, exhibit A being they're now experiencing the catastrophic downstream effects of their one-child policy. You know, all the old western capitalist democracies have a demographic problem because they have a shrinking working-age population supporting an expanding retired population, and that creates fiscal crises for them. You know, and it's been a kind of more or less natural evolution. The Chinese have accelerated this problem for themselves because they are now entering a massive, generational fiscal crunch, and they don't really have the tools to deal with it. And so, you know, the slowing of growth in China, and these kinds of challenges that they're having as the economy becomes more and more complex. So, you know, this narrative that there's this inexorable rise of China and it's going you know, it's gonna be it's gonna be that dominant power, I think, is probably as wrong-headed as Paul's book was about Japan in 1988 taking over the world economy and displacing the US. I think the world's gonna be much messier.

00:33:21 Andrew Keen: Of course, when we talk about lost generations in Japan, there seems to be the emergence of what some people are calling a lost generation in the US. You teach Yale students. They're usually not part of the lost generation, but it's a generation marked by anxiety, by unemployment, certainly by now the challenges of technology. Your book is mostly an economic and a political history, Ian. Is there a lost generation now in the West, in Western Europe and the United States, which is in many ways a consequence, perhaps in some ways also a cause of the fall of the last forty years?

00:34:07 Ian Shapiro: There's there is certainly a an insecure, anxious, fearful population that is easily mobilized by these populist parties. They are people who are facing, you know, changing jobs between twelve and fifteen times in their lifetime. They are people who are looking at either stagnant lifestyles or downward mobility. They're looking at going from full-time jobs with secure benefits to jobs with fewer benefits to part-time jobs to jobs with no benefits. They're looking at worse futures for their children than they have had for themselves. So there's a lot of fear and anxiety and resentment among these populations — that is the gasoline these populist parties can mobilize. I mean, for one thing, you talk about young people. You know, it used to be the case that young people were on the left, and then they turned to the right as they got older. You know? Churchill's famous line — that if you're not a socialist under the age of 30, you've got no heart, and if you are one over the age of 30, you've got no head. You know? That we sort of grow up and smell the coffee and shape up. But in fact, you know, it's in all over Europe and here. It's the young people that have been mobilized by these far-right parties. You know, if you see, you know, a the median age of a first-time home buyer in the US is 38. So, you know, a 20-year-old, a 21-year-old, they're still decades away from even being able to afford something as basic to the American dream as a home. And this problem of housing is even worse in Canada. It's terrible in many European countries. And this is what fuels the rage and you know, it's is it a lost generation? It's certainly a generation that the mainstream parties and institutions have lost. They have very little faith in either of them. And I think that, you know, when we start to think about what is to be done, they have to be front and center of our concerns.

00:36:34 Andrew Keen: One more question before we get to what is to be done. The conservatives, the neoliberals had their heroes in exile. Well, I don't know. The economists, of course, Friedman, and others who spoke against New Deal liberalism. Are there in your history or in your mind, Ian, the equivalent of a Milton Friedman who politically or in economic terms has been warning us about this missed turn — that we took the wrong fork in the road for the last forty years? Who has been telling us — I mean, you're a historian, so you know this stuff better than anyone. Who who warned us back in the late nineties or the early 2000s about this incorrect fork in the road?

00:37:38 Ian Shapiro: You know, I think that there were many people complaining about what was happening, but there was no, the there certainly was not an equivalent of a John Maynard Keynes, you know, articulating an alternative vision. And, obviously, socialism in all of its variants was, you know, complete nonstarter at the time. I think there were not big answers, but my own view is that Keynesian thinking never went away. And, you know, in the sense that and we saw it come roaring back as soon as the financial crisis struck, and they all panicked. Of course, that's what they reached for, to recapitalize the economy and prevent the recession from becoming a depression and so on. It's just that they did it in this hypocritical way. I do think there are people. I mean, I think, you know, I think, for example, the Biden administration was star-crossed in many ways, and, you know, they were drinking out of a fire hydrant during COVID, so their positive agenda came much too late to have an effect. And they were fighting their own people in their own party, and Biden was a terrible messenger, and we had the inflation that was mostly imported, but for which he got blamed, it's on and on and on. But, actually, if you look at what the they were trying to do, things like, I think, Gina Raimondo, who was his commerce secretary — the former governor of Rhode Island. She pretty much wrote the CHIPS Act. And, you know, it's original idea of that was gonna be 10 times the size. It was it was sidelined by Joe Manchin and, Kyrsten Sinema and others. But, you know, that — so, if you if you've talked to her, you will know. You know, she's not somebody who wants to say, no. We need to go back and have the New Deal all over again. But she is thinking about right and center. She's thinking about two things — I don't agree with her about everything, but I agree with her about these two things. One is, you know, we really have to focus now on a workforce for the tech economy, because, you know, all these populists are fighting the last war. Anyway, the jobs are not going offshore or, you know, to immigrants. The jobs are going to technology. They're going to AI. And, you know, so focusing front and center on ways to prepare the workforce for what's coming is hugely important. And then secondly, because this is where the jobs are gonna be, You know, she has a big emphasis on what she calls applied AI, the packaging, the applications, the things that, actually, the Chinese are working a lot harder on than we are working on. And so I think these are not big ideas in a sense, you know, of Keynesianism versus neoclassical economics or something like this. But at the level of policy, these are the kinds of ideas we should be looking at. These are the kinds of things that should be, you know, the centerpiece of Project 2029, which the Democrats don't have, but they need. You know?

00:41:18 Andrew Keen: Yeah. The person I was thinking of when I asked that question actually was Bernie Sanders. He's been warning about the consequences of all this now for thirty or forty years. Are you in the Bernie camp, Ian? Do you think that he is a visionary, that he his Bernie, of course, might be thought of as a Cassandra, someone who was warning us correctly about the rottenness of this system, or do you think that he has a fundamental misunderstanding of economics and of capitalism?

00:41:50 Ian Shapiro: Well, I you know, I think he was he was much of his what he said diagnostically was correct. I don't think he's thinking programmatically, you know — I think he's more in the he was more in the realm of stopping the change rather than trying to harness the change and shape the change. You know, I think the idea that you can just throw up trade barriers and stop the change, I think it's fantastical. And, I also think, you know, he cares so much about inequality, and I think fighting inequality is sort of a fool's errand, especially in the US. What we really have to focus on is insecurity. Most people care about insecurity. They don't really care about inequality. And so you can yell and scream as much as you like about what the people at the top have, but you're never gonna sell, you know, big time redistributive politics in these capitalist democracies. I think it's just political nonstarter, particularly when labor is so weak. So in that sense, I'm not in that camp. What I think people can be mobilized around is insecurity. And so it's for me, the fact that all the benefits of neoliberal economics have flowed to the top is not so much a story about inequality. It's a fact that it's left millions and millions and millions of people incredibly insecure economically. You know, the long-term employment has gone away. The world in which people finish their education, whether high school or college got a job for thirty years and then retired, that world is never coming back. And so we've got populations who are gonna go in and out of jobs, who are gonna have to constantly retool, and who are gonna have to be flexible in ways that we can't even imagine. And that's the population we're dealing with, and I think it's this insecurity. So, yeah, you know, I think Bernie wanted to just basically throw sand in the wheels of change, and I think, really, you have to try and ride the tiger into the future.

00:44:20 Andrew Keen: Right. And riding the tiger requires a very skilled jockey. Your narrative is politics-centric. You believe that the politicians broke our world so they can maybe unbreak it, rebuild it. You mentioned Gina Raimondo. She was on the show. Delightful woman. Incredibly smart.

00:44:40 Ian Shapiro: Incredibly smart. Yeah.

00:44:41 Andrew Keen: She was in the Biden administration. You certainly prefer her over Bernie and, I'm guessing, AOC. But in terms of riding the tiger, Ian, I mean, whatever one thinks about Trump, he's a very skilled rider of the tiger. Aren't we gonna require politicians with a lot more, I don't know, glamour, shall we say, than a than a Gina Raimondo, a highly sophisticated technocrat who worked well in the Biden administration. The person who comes to mind, I've been doing a lot of thinking and writing on it, is Robert Kennedy, who was able to bring together the elites in part and also the white and black working classes in the 1960s. Is this what's missing from the equation, that we need Gina Raimondo plus a Trump or an AOC, someone with a bit of glamour, a bit of sizzle?

00:45:42 Ian Shapiro: Well, sure. You, you know, you can't run it for president in American politics unless you unless you have charisma. You're not gonna be likely to be very successful. You know? So who are the you know, think of who they are. I mean, they're Reagan, they're Clinton, they're, Obama, they're Trump. Those are the four major charismatic figures, of American politics. But, you know, I think the question is, where do the ideas come from? You know, look — the main policies that Trump is pursuing have come out of Project 2025. You know, and they've been put together by people who are not, these charismatic figures. But, you know, they have basically created the ramp that he's been running on. And, you know, if there's no ramp for the alternative, they're just going to stumble around. I think the Starmer government is so illustrative of this. He comes in with this enormous majority. You know, he could have had a policy agenda that produced 50 or 60 backbench no votes, and he still could have gotten it through. And yet he hadn't he did nothing. You know? He basically, just did it and, you know, took a tiny step to the left, a tiny step to the right, and then reversed himself and, you know, on whatever it is, the child benefits or, you know, the Oxford-Cambridge Arc or you name it. And so that's what I worry about. And, you know, on the other thing to say about this is, of course, a lot of the policy future for riding the tiger is unclear, and many things will fail. But, you know, the New Deal was not there was no blueprint for the New Deal. FDR made it up as he went along.

00:47:52 Andrew Keen: That was his genius — bringing together a political coalition, a very unholy political coalition. So let's end with your project, 2029, Ian, in terms of what is to be done. What would you like to see in it to allow us to get up after this fall? I mean, we may be Humpty Dumpty. We can put all our pieces together again. What where's the beginning to getting up after the fall? What concretely would you like to see in this, in this path towards rebuilding the United States in particular?

00:48:33 Ian Shapiro: There's gotta be huge not just in the United States, but all European countries. There's gotta be massive investment in the infrastructure for the future, both of the physical infrastructure, the tech infrastructure, and the labor market infrastructure. You know? And you talk about, you know, unlikely bedfellows and that. Look at Germany. Who has, you know, abandoned austerity and decided to borrow half a trillion euros to put into infrastructure. It's Chancellor Merz in Germany. You know, that would be like putting $2.6 trillion into the US economy. And now, you know, you've got Macron partly because he wants I think he wants to be president of European Commission next, talking about, you know, euro bonds for infrastructure. So that you know, we could be seeing a big splurge of Keynesian spending, in many of those countries. And the US needs the same thing. It needs a massive investment. I think the sorts of things that were in the CHIPS Act, incentivizing business to train and retrain the workforce, gearing it to the tech revolution and gearing it, of course, to the green transition, which is, you know, taken five steps back, but it's, you know, it's coming back. Everywhere else in the world understands this, including the Chinese. I mean, it's not going away.

00:50:08 Andrew Keen: So are you, basically, throwing your cap in with the abundance crowd — the Ezra Kleins and Derek Thompsons of the world. Is that what you're saying?

00:50:18 Ian Shapiro: No, I'm just — maybe there'll be abundance, but

00:50:21 Andrew Keen: Well, I'm not saying that there'll be literally abundance. But centrist, innovative Democrats like Klein and Thompson, whose book has had an enormous impact.

00:50:33 Ian Shapiro: I certainly think democratic governments have to both invest in the infrastructure for 21st century capitalism and incentivize business to invest in that infrastructure. Because without it, you know, we'll just have another Trump, and another Trump, and another Trump.

00:50:57 Andrew Keen: We certainly don't want that, do we? I think we've had enough Trumps already. The book is out. It's by Ian Shapiro, one of America's leading historians, teaches at Yale. Important new book. It's out today, After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy — How Politicians Broke Our World. It's also about how politicians might fix it as well. Ian, congratulations on the book. Wonderful conversation and, so much more to talk about. Thank you so much. We'll have you back on the show later in the year.

00:51:27 Ian Shapiro: Thanks so much for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity.