Can America Survive Its Political Divide?

As the cofounder of the massively influential Spy magazine in the 1980s, Kurt Andersen was among the first journalists to recognize Donald Trump as a significant figure in American culture. (Spy famously called the future president “a short-fingered vulgarian,” a description that still irks the billionaire). Over the past 40 years, Andersen emerged as one of the leading cultural critics of America, hosting the massively popular Studio 360 radio program for 20 years and writing a shelf of novels and nonfiction books.

His new novel, The Breakup, is set in 2045 and chronicles a married couple contemplating divorce as the United States reorganizes itself after a short but violent civil war. Like the best fiction, the characters in The Breakup are complicated and ambivalent as they deal with fast-evolving technology, generational strife, and the lingering effects of identity politics.

Andersen and Nick Gillespie talk about polarization, the baby boom’s senescence, and whether markets have failed today’s younger generations. They revisit and debate Andersen’s critique of Milton Friedman in Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America (“he gave people in business the green light to be entirely selfish”), civil libertarianism vs. economic libertarianism, inequality and mobility, and whether politics can ever return to what used to be called normal.

0:00—Summary of The Breakup

6:06—Could America have another civil war?

10:02—The 2024 Presidential election

12:45—Identity politics

15:52—Economic populism

17:23—Andersen’s Nebraskan roots

22:05—The Harvard Lampoon

28:43—MAD magazine’s cultural influence

30:20—Spy magazine and Donald Trump

36:09—Trump’s enduring appeal

41:50—Generational conflict

50:05—Milton Friedman