The 18-year-old who cannot remember America without Trump

Lex Fridman opens with the obvious question: why did Trump win? Before the election Enjeti had said immigration would decide it if Trump prevailed, and he promises to come back to that. First he offers the easy layers. A Financial Times chart had gone viral showing anti-incumbent parties losing almost everywhere, possibly the first such sweep since World War II or even 1905. Inside the United States the simpler story is that Joe Biden was very old, very unpopular, and inflation was high, and inflation is one of the strongest reasons people switch their votes.

Then he goes deeper. Trump's victory, he says, makes him the most important and transformative figure in American politics since FDR. In 2028 there will be an 18-year-old eligible to vote who cannot remember a time when Donald J. Trump was not the central American figure. Enjeti reaches for a World War II story: 18- and 19-year-old troops on the front, told that FDR had died, asked who the president was. Harry Truman, you dumbass. They said, who? They could not conceive of a universe without Roosevelt. Even during the Biden years, Enjeti notes, Trump remained the figure. Biden defined his candidacy and his legacy around defeating that man, and he failed.

What Enjeti wants listeners to take away is how unique Trump is as a political animal, and what he did to realign American politics. The 2016 white working-class shift was the start. 2024 activated a multiracial working-class coalition and split the country along a single question: did you attend a four-year college? Trump, he says, is one of the most racially *depolarizing* electoral figures in American history. Groups that once voted in blocs no longer do. Born in Texas, Enjeti remembers the shock when George W. Bush won some 40 percent of the Latino vote. Trump just beat Kamala Harris among Latino men and ran up the table with young men.

Winning the popular vote for the first time since 2004, Enjeti says, is a shocking Republican achievement. It erases years of talk about gerrymandering and an Electoral College bias toward Republicans. On his shelf sits James Carville's 2008 book *40 More Years*, written after the Obama landslide, about how Democrats would never lose again. Enjeti was born in 1992. He has watched red states go blue and blue states go red, and he has watched the largest internal migration in the United States since World War II. People change their minds, he says, and that is what he loves about the country.

Fridman asks whether the election became a class struggle. Enjeti will not go that far, because class struggle implies the lines are economic. A widely cited post-election statistic has Harris winning households over $100,000 and Trump winning those under it. Viewed that way, it looks like class war. Enjeti's objection is that income is a proxy for a four-year degree. The book he keeps recommending is Charles Murray's *Coming Apart*, which describes the cultural milieu that college produces: where you live, whom you marry, which grocery store you use, which shows you watch.

Murray's Bubble Quiz asks what the word Branson means. Richard Branson of Virgin; Branson, Missouri, the country-music tourist town; or nothing. You are less in a bubble if you say country music, and very much in it if you say Sir Richard. Enjeti took it, thought 'obviously Virgin Atlantic,' and realized he was in the bubble. Most college-educated people he knows have no family in the military. America's most popular shows are *The Big Bang Theory* and *NCIS*; his milieu watches *The White Lotus* and *The Last of Us*. Whether you read books, whether you have a passport, whether you travel to Europe: that, he says, is the real cultural divide, and Trump activated it across racial lines along a feeling of sneering elitism.

Fridman asks if the election declared wokeism dead. Enjeti does not know. Wokeism has no party leader and no org chart. It is an amorphous belief that has worked through institutions for 40 or 50 years, 'effectively a religion.' Hollywood's trans side characters and pride-flag cameos may recede. What has institutional weight is older: affirmative action with roots in the 1960s, ESG, a Nasdaq rule that a public company needs a woman and a person of color on the board. He calls that 'blatant and extraordinary racialism' written into bylaws. You can drop the word Latinx and still run Justice on an equity mindset of equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity. DEI, he argues, makes sense in multi-ethnic countries that literally allocate seats to Christians and Muslims. America's story is that you come here, integrate, and leave that behind. He grants the left a point: meritocracy can reproduce privilege. His fix is more equality of opportunity, not the erasure of merit.

Enjeti keeps sending people to Jim Webb's *Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America*. Fridman recites the book's charge: fierce individualism, deep distrust of government and elites, bottom-up governance, a 2,000-year military tradition. They made up about 40 percent of the Revolutionary army and produced Stonewall Jackson, Grant, Patton, and presidents including Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Reagan, and Clinton. Country music's whole cultural line comes from them. After mass European immigration, Enjeti says, 'white' became a blanket that hid how different these people are. They never get their due the way the Puritans do, in part because of the racialism he has been describing.

The book answers a puzzle that has baffled elites for years: how a white working-class voter who chose a man named Barack Hussein Obama in 2012 could choose Trump in 2016. Combine Webb with affirmative action, distrust of elites, and the sense that institutions neither see you nor value your history, and it makes sense. JD Vance's *Hillbilly Elegy* had a renaissance around the same moment; Enjeti says its real service was translating those lives for American elites who could not imagine anyone voting for Trump. He met Vance in a bar in 2017 and never thought he would be vice president-elect. The email was just 'hey, want to meet up?' Watching confetti fall on nomination night, he thought: you are in the history books now.

On Biden, Enjeti tries not to issue big historical verdicts in the moment and then does: one of the worst presidents in modern history, second only to George W. Bush, judged by what Biden set out to do. Biden has been the same person his whole career, 'a C student who thinks he's an A student.' Richard Ben Cramer's *What It Takes* already captured the arrogance in 1988. Elected as a transitional figure after Trump chaos, Biden lost his faculties, surrounded himself with sycophants, and had no one to tell him to drop out until it was undeniable. People will not remember the CHIPS Act or Lina Khan. They will remember inflation and a man who never seemed up to the job.

The contrast is vigor. David Kennedy's *Freedom from Fear* is Enjeti's text for the Roosevelt years. The New Deal did not work the way people wanted: unemployment stayed high, people still suffered. What changed is that Americans felt they had a commander-in-chief attacking their problems every day. Hoover was seen as a do-nothing joke dining on nine-course meals; FDR gave fireside chats, passed bills, got knocked down by the Court, and came back fighting, a habit Enjeti ties to polio. From 1933 to 1937, he says, America was not ruled by a president but by a king, and people liked it: 'He was a dictator and he was a good one.' An 80-year-old eating ice cream at the beach while prices rose 25 percent lost on that axis. Biden's 2019 pitch was Charlottesville and a vow to defeat Trump forever. By his own metric, he failed. Fridman notes that arrogance and narcissism fit Trump too. Enjeti agrees: you have to be a little crazy to want the job. Lady Bird Johnson told the White House butler that everything revolved around her husband, the scraps went to the girls, and she took what was left. Saturday was breakfast with Richard Russell, Sunday with Sam Rayburn. Johnson died of a massive heart attack, deeply depressed.

Fridman sides with Enjeti's co-host Marshall Kosloff: character in the room with the generals matters. Enjeti answers with judgment. Johnson, Nixon, Teddy Roosevelt, even FDR had laundry lists of personal problems and still had great judgment. JFK, a brand-new president, had the best judgment in the room during the Cuban Missile Crisis and avoided nuclear war. Some of that was character and PT-109; some was watching his father's mistakes and writing *Why England Slept* at 23. Enjeti's most prized possession is a 1939 first edition. At Potsdam, he notes, Truman, Eisenhower, and a 26-year-old Kennedy as a journalist were in the same room with Stalin. You never know who rises.

The text he was forced to read in graduate school is Graham Allison's *Essence of Decision*. It lays out three models of how government works: the rational actor maximizing national interest, the organizational model of standard operating procedures, and bureaucratic politics as internal power struggle. You cannot read it, Enjeti says, and declare one true and the others false. All three are deeply true. Washington is a creature with traditions that do not care about you, and usually do not care about the president. It usually takes a shock like World War II to change anything beyond the margin.

On Rogan, Trump said something Enjeti calls among the most important things he has ever said: he likes people like John Bolton in the administration because they scare the other side and make him seem the most rational man in the room. That intuition may work at the highest table. What Trump never understood, Enjeti suspects still does not, is the other two models. Ninety-nine percent of decisions never reach the president's desk. One of Obama's most important lines, in Enjeti's view: by the time it gets to his desk, nobody else can solve it; the problems are hard and have no standard answer. The national security advisor does not wander in and opine on Iran. The job is to convene the interagency before the president walks in and pack three options: dove, middle, hard. Who has the power, Enjeti asks, the man who picks one, two, or three, or the man who decides what is inside them?

He watched it happen. After Mike Flynn lasted 33 days, H.R. McMaster, who did not agree with Trump on Afghanistan, used the interagency and the Joint Chiefs to leave Trump no option but more troops. Trump escalated in 2017 and did not sign the Taliban deal until February 2020, a deal Enjeti thinks should have been signed in 2017. Bob Woodward's *Obama's Wars* shows the same squeeze on Obama in 2009: leaks from the Situation Room, Petraeus and McChrystal narrowing the path, a surge plus a two-year withdrawal as a consolation. FDR, Enjeti says, never made a fully considered presidential decision to embargo Japanese oil. It was a State Department and advisor-level choice he signed. Nobody war-gamed Pearl Harbor. That is why you want good judgment all the way down the chain, not only in the chair.

Enjeti calls Biden's break with the immigration status quo the second-largest reason Trump won, after inflation. He is the son of Indian immigrants with PhDs who applied legally and spent thousands of dollars. Mark Krikorian's line is the one he wants remembered: we do not make immigration policy for our grandparents, we make it for our grandchildren. Family-based migration, which he calls chain migration, lets a green-card holder sponsor a cousin regardless of whether that cousin is a plumber or a coder. He has talented relatives in India. If they want to come, they should apply on their own merit. The United States, he says, is one of the only Western countries without a points-based system like Australia or Canada.

He walks through the dishonest machinery. TPS, Temporary Protected Status, was built for a volcano or an earthquake, with the idea that people would go home when it was safe. They did not. There are adults in America whose parents still live here under TPS. Asylum law lets you throw up your hands, say you fear for your life, wait four or five years for a court date, get a work permit, and ignore a deportation order because no ICE agent will enforce it. A common left argument is that America wrecked Central America and therefore owes entry. Enjeti says that even on its own terms the claim fails: Iraqis would have a stronger grievance, they just cannot walk here. It also strips those countries of agency. Nayib Bukele's drop in El Salvador's murder rate is his counterexample.

He steelmans the other side honestly. People already work here; many have citizen children; mass deportation means splitting families across a border, which Fridman calls un-American. The strongest non-moral case is business: illegal immigration is great for big firms and big agriculture, so if you want the lowest prices of all time, mass deportation is a terrible idea. Enjeti supports mass deportation and is not sure the public is ready. Mandatory E-Verify is still not federal law, which he finds crazy. Taxing remittances would make illegal residence harder and produce self-deportation. Actually rounding up millions, building camps, and arranging flights across the globe is a logistical nightmare Congress would have to fund. 'We can have DOGE or we can have mass deportation. Those two things are kind of irreconcilable.' He is relatively confident of a million over four years. Anything more is a guess. Nobody even knows the illegal population: 20 million, maybe 30.

The Department of Government Efficiency, Enjeti notes, is a non-statutory agency with zero funding that Trump says will advise OMB. He predicted it would become a blue-ribbon commission. Recommendations are due by July 2026. Private money will have to stand it up, which is not a problem for Musk. None of it matters if House Republican appropriators do not care, and historically they do not. The president still releases a budget; for a decade it has been almost meaningless. Ways and Means originates spending. DOGE cannot compel anyone. Its entire mechanical case is a report meant to convince Republican legislators to cut.

People, he says, do not understand federal spending. The vast majority is Social Security, Medicare, and the military. Trump has taken entitlements off the table. Discretionary non-military spending is a thin slice, and about 90 percent of that slice is bipartisan: NOAA, hurricane hunters, inspectors. Food stamps and the other controversial bits are tiny. If someone is throwing around $5 trillion, the only realistic path is to change how the Pentagon buys everything. Musk actually has that background from a decade of SpaceX versus Boeing. Enjeti just has not seen enough energy pointed there.

Fridman offers the counter: don't bet against Elon, and a megaphone plus a populist movement is not a typical commission. Enjeti points to a fresh failure. Musk endorsed Rick Scott for Senate Republican leader. Scott got the fewest votes, 13. John Thune won. Robert Caro's *Master of the Senate* is the book: the chamber is built to be immune from public pressure, six-year terms, only marginally popular at home. Jefferson asked Washington why a Senate. Washington asked why he poured tea into a saucer. To cool it. Just so. Enjeti's advice is to redesign systems, not hunt programs to cut. Different agencies still run different payrolls for historical reasons; people in 2024 still tend IBM mainframes; a Pentagon janitor contract needs a clearance, so five firms bid and jack the price. Radically successful DOGE would study the law and change it. Historically the thing that throws paperwork off the table is war. There was no national currency until the Civil War needed greenbacks; the income tax is a war product; DHS did not exist before 9/11. Twitter is not a template: Musk owned the company. No statute stopped him from firing 90 percent. Government is not that.

Fridman asks, if Trumpism and MAGA can be treated as a coherent ideology, what the pillars are. Enjeti answers in a sentence: MAGA is a rejection of cultural elitism. On immigration, cultural liberalism treats more immigrants as a natural good at any level. On foreign policy, it fuses American values with American interests and treats spreading human rights as the national interest. At home it becomes worship of the post-civil-rights bureaucracy, DEI, and progressive social ideology. In 2020 he drove through rural Nevada and saw the biggest political sign of his life: 'Trump, fuck your feelings.' That, he still thinks, is the most coherent MAGA statement he has ever seen. How can a neocon, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr. share an umbrella? Each rejected the cultural elite in a different way and arrived at the same place.

Anti-establishment is the wrong synonym, because left populists are anti-establishment too. They accept the cultural left's premises, that race is America's core problem, and argue about means. MAGA rejects the premises. Bernie Sanders spent years railing against open borders. There are YouTube clips of him agreeing with Lou Dobbs. In a 2015 Vox interview he called open borders a Koch brothers libertarian idea, the European welfare-state logic of high taxes, high services, low immigration. As late as 2017 he endorsed a pro-life candidate because the candidate was pro-worker, took a ton of grief, and has not done it since. Enjeti's judgment: Bernie never went full Trump. He kept saying sorry. In 2020 he called Biden 'my friend' while Biden stood for almost everything he opposed. Voters wanted the establishment humiliated, not a polite disagreement. The 2020 Democratic base also had a strategic advantage Enjeti respects: they cared about winning. The Republican base loves Trump. Winning is nice.

Fridman, in a great-man mood, says Obama would have kept winning without term limits. Enjeti flips it: without term limits Clinton would still have been president, and Obama would never have been elected. He does not support presidential term limits. Clinton left with 60 percent approval despite Lewinsky; Bush does not beat that, and Enjeti is fairly confident there is no Iraq. The 22nd Amendment, in his telling, was Republicans and elite Democrats waiting until FDR the God was dead. Trump's 2016 bet, which he pairs with Peter Thiel's, was to ignore the GOP's 2012 autopsy, which said become more pro-immigration, and run on American carnage instead. Dave Brat had already beaten Eric Cantor on amnesty in 2014. Thiel, in George Packer's *The Unwinding* in 2013, said the next candidate should not run on optimism but on everything being broken. Enjeti puts the American carnage inaugural against any other. There is nothing else like it.

Several people have told Fridman that Nancy Pelosi is the best they have ever met at attaining and wielding power. Enjeti thinks that is fair for the last 25 years: longevity, fundraising, a House process that kept fights in the office so bills hit the floor and passed. Republicans have cycled through speakers since John Boehner. The real test is ruling without the title. She gave the leader job to Hakeem Jeffries, and everyone knows she pulled Biden out of the race. Kamala Harris raised a billion dollars. Enjeti does not think money matters that much. Trump has won twice as an underdog on earned media. He would not buy $425,000-a-day ads on the Vegas Sphere, and he still cannot believe a campaign spent $100,000 on a *Call Her Daddy* set or that Oprah was paid a million to endorse. If you believe it, he says, do it for free.

Fridman cannot get actual Democratic politicians onto a three-hour show; the highest-profile names offer 15 or 20 minutes. Enjeti tells him to stay optimistic, because a huge post-election narrative is that Democrats blew it by ducking long-form. Then he turns to the room he used to sit in. As a *Daily Caller* White House correspondent and a former WHCA member, he wants the association broken. Seats in the briefing room are assigned by the association, not the White House. Applying can take years of bylaws and elections, which slow-rolls new media. Without a seat you stand in the wings for hours hoping the press secretary sees you in a 15-minute briefing. The Associated Press correspondent, who is not even a WHCA member, traditionally asks the first question and ends the briefing. The first row is television, for stand-ups, and the networks ask versions of the same question because they need a clip of their correspondent going after the secretary. The room is designed for traditional media's needs. The public comes second.

Election-night cable ratings were down 25 percent in four years. Enjeti's show hit records. So did Candace Owens, Patrick Bet-David, Tim Pool, David Pakman, TYT. CNN's median viewer is 68. His proposal: cut mainstream credentials, lottery in people with large audiences, and try a two-hour streamed session in the Roosevelt Room, twelve seats, Shure mics, substantive questions. He knows they would dunk on it. He thinks it could work. Colleagues once hated him for asking Trump whether Kim Jong Un was sincere about a meeting instead of that week's political scandal. When a future Robert Caro reads the transcript, which question matters? His career goal is one line in a history book, fifty years on, of a president answering him. If someone had told him that at nine, he would have said the life was worth it.

Fridman then asks whether 2020 was rigged the way Trump claimed. Enjeti says no, and then refuses the word. Low-IQ Stop the Steal is Dominion, bamboo ballots, Venezuela, Sidney Powell: the Georgia indictments. High-IQ Stop the Steal is Pennsylvania and other swing states changing mail-in rules during COVID, enough to swing the result. Enjeti thinks that is true, and awkward, because the Pennsylvania legislature and the state supreme court were Republican. Galaxy-brain Stop the Steal is the version JD Vance gave Tim Walz: censorship, the Hunter Biden laptop, big tech's thumb on the scale. That, Enjeti says, is empirically true. He will not say rigged. He will say unfair. Trump himself will never tell you this version. JD will. Then the Ailes line from Gabriel Sherman's *The Loudest Voice in the Room*: people don't want to be informed, they want to feel informed. Liberals will sneer at Republicans. Enjeti says they bought a lot of crazy too, Russiagate and Cambridge Analytica among them, and that *The Daily* listeners are as brainwashed as Fox viewers. Equal-opportunity cancer.

Fridman asks how you know you are in a bubble and how you get out. Enjeti's answer is his childhood. Son of immigrants, raised in College Station, Texas, in the Bible Belt, he was always an outsider, and that forced him to observe. He could tell the evangelicals around him really believed it. His parents' other gift was travel: 25 or 30 countries by 18. Japan is the honeymoon he is excited about, a rich country where most people do not speak English and the daily rhythm is their own. If you lack that training, he says, flex the muscle. Go somewhere that makes you uncomfortable.

He admits it sounds boomer, but he hates that 5G follows you everywhere. Some of his best days were wandering Warsaw with a printed bus ticket to Lithuania, pointing and gesturing, meeting Poles. Same in rural Thailand and Colombia. If you were raised rich, spend time with poor people. If you were raised poor, you can still steal index funds and budgeting from the rich, while they might notice the deathbed study in which everyone says they wish they had spent more time with their children. These days, when a job would take him away from his wife for a long stretch, the answer is almost always no unless she can come.

Fridman is worried about the San Francisco bubble: brilliant friends, systems thinkers, a closed weather system of thought. Enjeti admires tech people for global-scale systems thinking; code is in some ways an expression of mind. Those are also the people who most need to get out. After economic success you close yourself off, one reasonable choice at a time. Coach is annoying, so first class. The house is small, so a bigger one. Each choice is rational. Stacked up, they are the thickness of the bubble. You have to seek discomfort on purpose.

Fridman asks Enjeti to steelman Sam Harris, who has argued for years that Trump is a genuine danger to democracy and maybe the world. Enjeti has listened to Harris for years and bought the meditation app; he is not a hater. A lot of this podcast, he says, has been the steelman, because Harris is a character-matters guy and that concern is legitimate. After Trump, Enjeti thinks Harris slipped into elite liberalism's account of the voters and of the presidency: that narcissism will eventually override any benefit of the office. Enjeti had the 'enemy from within' debate with Krystal Ball. She asked if he worried about Trump prosecuting opponents. He does not. He believes the checks that constrained Trump last time, and he believes in democracy: the loudest Stop the Steal Republicans got beaten in 2022, and in 2024 voters chose to forgive some of it.

Calling Trump Hitler makes him angry. He and Fridman have spent dozens or hundreds of hours on Weimar and Hitler. The word has been emptied. Flip it, he says: why do you think America is Weimar Germany? Do you actually believe that? You do not. Fridman adds a useful hedge: for any candidate there is a small-probability path to the extreme, and if you stare at it, it swallows the field. Trump's character does include a desire to hold power. So does every politician's. Biden cannot imagine a third term and still had the arrogance to cling. A third Trump term, Enjeti notes, needs the House, the Senate, and three-quarters of the states. He does not think it happens. The norms critique he accepts. Trump is a norms buster. Foreign-policy and economic norms Enjeti likes; 2020 he hates; tweeting about Mika Brzezinski's facelift was objectively ridiculous, funny, and crazy.

Deifying politicians, he says, is sick, around Trump and around Obama. They are people. Meet a few billionaires and you notice some got lucky. Meet a few politicians and you notice they are not that smart. At 19, interning on the Hill, he watched them behave ridiculously, treat people badly, say stupid things, and realized this was not *The West Wing*. Now he has had dinner and drinks with future cabinet secretaries and the vice president-elect. That is grounding: you are going to have a lot of power, that is scary, and you are just a person.

On UFOs, Enjeti is sure a great deal is hidden and that official explanations are nonsense. The deeper point is mechanism. How deep is the deep state? Deeper than anyone can imagine, and the worst part is that it is an ideology, not a roster of named villains. People say a senator opposes Medicare for All because of money, or wants war with Iran because of an AIPAC payroll. Money helps. They also believe it. Chomsky's systemic version is the one he buys: a journalist worth their salt would never get hired into mainstream media in the first place. The filter is the ideology. John Podesta, a UFO believer and White House chief of staff, tried to make the Pentagon talk and was stonewalled. LBJ and the Kennedys feared Hoover; Eisenhower was uneasy with the Dulles brothers. Presidents come and go. They stay. Trump says he wants the JFK files; staff say yes sir, three months; three months later there are national-security hurdles. Unless you bring real urgency, the process waits you out. He saw Trump get rolled last time.

After Trump, Enjeti will not name a Republican future. If he had been speaking the day after 2004, he would have predicted more Bible-belt war-on-terror politics; they tried that, and John McCain got blown out by Obama. If Trump is a net positive, the path is JD Vance the way George H.W. Bush followed Reagan, his own man. If Trump misreads the mandate the way Bush did, someone aesthetically opposed to MAGA, a Glenn Youngkin type, could rise from the ashes. The new voters complicate even that. A Latino man in suburban Los Angeles in a MAGA hat may not become a Republican primary voter. The traditional primary voter is still a white boomer around 58. Enjeti puts his own cards on the table: he does not understand preferring Trump to Vance, and he knows that is a bubble. He wants a well-read, empathetic, articulate president. That is not how the country votes. This election taught him that.

For Democrats he would not bet on anyone tainted by the Great Awokening or Trump-era mania. After twelve years out of power, 1980 to 1992, it took a brand-new Clinton to convince the base and the country. His dark horse is Dean Phillips: a no-name Minnesota congressman who came out against Biden early, the way Obama showed judgment by taking a risk. He cannot imagine a progressive populist winning easily now that a huge share of the multiracial working class has moved right, unless Trump actually solves immigration. Then, as with the Supreme Court and gay marriage, Republicans shrug and the left gets to fight on the economy and abortion.

Will the American empire collapse? Statistically, Enjeti laughs, yes. He quotes *Fight Club*: on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everything drops to zero. The pattern is usually a series of unpopular wars driven by elite interests, then a miscalculation, rarely one catastrophic defeat. Decline is gradual, and the people inside often have no idea they are living through the end. In 1919 nobody said the British Empire had just collapsed. They still had India and the African colonies. Then came debt to America, upheaval, Bolshevism, American industry. At Potsdam, Churchill realized he barely had power in the room. From there to the real end took almost forty years. America's path would be rising competition, likely China, maybe India; overstretch; elite capture; and a misreading of what made the original society work. All three at once, over a very long time. He would not bet against America now. Every time he leaves, he loves it more.

Enjeti likes to think about Americans in 1866. Two or three percent of the population had just been killed. A visionary president was assassinated at Ford's Theatre right after Lee surrendered. Andrew Johnson, 'a bumbling fucktard,' was in charge. Southern cities were burned; a whole economy and way of life had been overthrown in five years. Anyone would have despaired. By the 1890s, Union and Confederate veterans were shaking hands. There is a YouTube clip of FDR addressing some of the last Gettysburg veterans, old men shaking hands across a stone wall. That gives him hope.

Fridman asks where the optimism for the twenty-first century comes from. Enjeti says the American character still expresses what has long made humanity great: individualism, the frontier mindset, geography, an economy that can take in cultures and compound them. This is the country that put a man on the moon. He is obsessed with Antarctic exploration and has read almost every book on it, for a strange reason: there is no reason to care about Antarctica. There is nothing there. Going to the South Pole is a truly useless exercise. And we went, twice, two expeditions five weeks apart, competing. The spirit in Amundsen and Scott, and above all in Ernest Shackleton, his hero of heroes, lives on in the United States. It died in Britain, and the British have noticed how popular Shackleton is here. Irish-born, a British subject, to Enjeti he is a spiritual American.

Nowhere else, he says, can you reset a life inside the same country: go broke, get rich, go back and forth. He has plenty of complaints, and he has traveled enough to know the place is special. Earlier he had said Americans study the years when greatness happened and rarely the years when nothing happened, or when really bad things happened. We know FDR and not how we got to the Depression, and not what it felt like to be alive in 1840. Those people were as conscientious and intelligent as we are, trying to figure it out, feeling that things were very big. *The Age of Acrimony* taught him that turnout is highest when people are angry, not when they are happy. When the system works, participation falls. High turnout is a sign of political health. Fridman closes with Voltaire: history is the study of the world's crime. Enjeti's book list is at SaagarEnjeti.io. He will keep editing it.