While America fixates on President Donald Trump’s psychology, the real story may be the fundamental mutation of American power itself — one that makes Trump merely a symptom of a deeper transformation reshaping our world.

On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, British novelist and essayist Rana Dasgupta argues we’re missing the seismic shifts beneath the surface. Author of the upcoming book After Nations: The History and Future of the Nation State, Dasgupta reveals how three interconnected crises are fundamentally altering the relationship between the state and its people, creating conditions that demand exactly the kind of disruptive figure Trump represents.

America can no longer control the flow of strategic resources that once guaranteed its superpower status. China is building alternative trading networks that bypass traditional American corporate access. Meanwhile, the dollar’s global dominance — which has allowed the US to sustain massive debt — faces unprecedented threats from China.

When tech titans stood alongside the president at his 2025 inauguration, they weren’t just honored guests — they represented what may be America’s new ruling class. 

Dasgupta draws striking parallels between today’s Silicon Valley and 18th-century Britain’s East India Company, arguing that tech giants represent “a rival form of political organization” that increasingly competes with the nation-state itself. Seven firms now command market capitalization equivalent to two-thirds of the US GDP, wielding technological and financial power essential to America’s geopolitical position — but serving their own interests rather than the public good.

The same companies propping up American supremacy are simultaneously automating away the middle-class jobs that historically provided the economic foundation for democracy. As AI creates what Dasgupta calls “giant vaults of aristocratic property,” the question becomes whether democratic institutions can survive when most citizens no longer have meaningful economic stakes in the system.

Dasgupta traces this transformation from ancient empires to Silicon Valley boardrooms, arguing that the post-WWII political order may be reaching its breaking point. The implications extend far beyond America’s borders, suggesting we may need entirely new forms of political organization suited to our globalized, technologically dominated world.

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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:10] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In the grand theater of American politics, we’ve become obsessed with the leading man, dissecting every psychological tick, every vindictive impulse, every compulsive lie. But what if we’re watching the wrong performance entirely? What if the real drama isn’t unfolding in the Oval Office, but in the deeper structural transformation of American power itself, a mutation so profound that it’s reshaping not just how we govern, but what governance means in the 21st century. When tech titans stood alongside the president at his 2025 inauguration, they weren’t just honored guests. They represented what my guest today calls a rival form of political organization, one that increasingly competes with the nation state itself. The question isn’t whether Donald Trump is dismantling democracy through sheer force of personality, but whether democracy as we’ve known it can survive the collision between 20th century political institutions and 21st century economic realities. My guest, Rana Desgupta, is a British novelist and essayist whose penetrating analysis cuts through the noise of personality politics to reveal the seismic shifts beneath. Winner of the 2025 Wyndham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, Desgupta argues that America’s current upheaval springs not from one man’s psychology, but from the interconnected crises that are fundamentally altering the relationship between the state and its people. His forthcoming book, After Nations, the History and Future of the Nation State, traces the transformation from ancient empires to Silicon Valley boardrooms, revealing why the system that emerged from World War II may be reaching its breaking point. The parallels are unsettling, the implications profound, and the questions urgent. If Silicon Valley has become America’s new East India Company, what does that mean for democracy? And if Trump is merely a symptom of this deeper mutation, what comes next? To examine and better understand all of this, I am joined by Rana Desgupta. His forthcoming book is After Nations, the History and Future of the Nation State. Rana, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

[00:02:27] Rana Dasgupta: Thank you for having me. And thank you for that extraordinary summary of the situation we’re in today.

[00:02:34] Jeff Schechtman: Well, it is a delight to have you here. And I want to begin with this idea that Trump is merely a symptom, as you talk about in your recen Yale Review article. And you talk about the fact that it’s too convenient to imagine that America’s present upheaval springs just from one man’s head, that there’s a deeper process going on, one that represents really rival political organizations that are forming. Let’s talk about that first.

[00:03:01] Rana Dasgupta: Yeah. I think that the structure of our media is, of course, very fixated on personalities, identities, parties. And Trump is an exceptional figure. So he craves attention and media coverage and he gets it. But I find it distracting. When we look at historical moments, it would be strange to say that, for instance, the end of feudalism was the work of one person’s psyche. We are in a moment of great technological change. We are in a moment where the relative power of the USA and China is shifting in very significant ways. So it would be strange to assign explanations for all of this to one person’s personality. Now, I don’t think Donald Trump is, I’m not arguing in any way that he is an irrelevant figure. I think it’s more accurate to say that there is a perfect fit between the particular idiosyncrasies of Donald Trump and the political needs of the moment. And I think that even within the Republican Party, the choice of Donald Trump at a moment when Mitt Romney had shown that the Republican Party had reached the end of a certain logic was very much aligned with some of these other demands on America today. Demands which had to do with very significant internal turmoil and anxiety and searching for answers. As well, of course, as the American states sort of declining power to govern world affairs.

[00:05:01] Jeff Schechtman: The other part of the equation is the degree to which even as Trump meets the moment and is a symptom of that moment, whether or not the things that he is doing from that vantage point are exacerbating the situation in ways that make it worse and harder to return from.

[00:05:20] Rana Dasgupta: Well, I think that’s no doubt the case. I mean, we can imagine a scenario in which a declining superpower, I don’t know if America has these sort of capacities of sort of empathy and wisdom, but we can imagine a scenario in which a declining superpower negotiates its way into a sort of more multi-polar power system. So a scenario in which a different kind of leader might, for instance, make different kinds of overtures to China and to other powers to say, okay, we’re no longer in a period where there is one world policeman and one economic superpower. We all control a bit of the pie. Let’s think about ways that we can create platforms to solve climate change, to create a safe trading system, to create a stable currency system, to organize conversations around nuclear weapons and things like this. I think that would be the greatest contribution that an American leader could make right now to the world. But Donald Trump is clearly not that figure. And he’s introducing significant, unnecessary amounts of volatility, aggression, et cetera, into the conversation. But I think that Donald Trump does serve many kinds of purpose. I think that democracy in the way that it was known in the 1970s and 80s in America is becoming unaffordable for the system that is now emerging, which means that somebody needs to break it. And Donald Trump is turning out to be an excellent candidate for that role, assisted by Silicon Valley, which is confusing a lot of the sort of systems of information and deliberation that existed until the early 2000s. So we, to some extent, yes, Donald Trump is doing things that are of his own volition. But I think that some of the profound structural changes that are going on in America demand some kind of departure from the systems we knew until quite recently.

[00:07:59] Jeff Schechtman: And talk about the changes, the underlying changes that are taking place that you talk about. One is this idea of loss of resource control, which is fairly profound.

[00:08:10] Rana Dasgupta: Yes. So I think it’s very important to understand that the United States has never been a simple nation-state like other nation-states. The United States has always had responsibility for the capitalist system. It is in that sense an imperial power, and it has responsibilities towards the global capitalist system that have always introduced a gap between the needs and desires of the American people and the purpose of the state. For quite a long time, there was a general feeling in the United States that with some weird exceptions, like going and fighting in Vietnam and things like this, the state did serve the interests of the American people at a very general level with lots of sort of complications and caveats we all know. Today, I think that the need to manage the global system is causing the state to diverge and depart from the needs of the American people. And one of these things that is what you describe, that America has had responsibility certainly since 1945 for making sure that basic commodities and resources flow into the capitalist system in a predictable way that business can carry on. The primary resource that it had to control, of course, was oil. And a great amount of America’s foreign policy and political strategy has been based on making sure that all that happens. Now, today, lots of things are disrupting America’s ability to stand in that position. And they vary. One of them is that China is to some extent creating an alternative ecological system, which is based on renewable energies and not on oil. And there are all kinds of objectives to that. One of them is to, of course, avert future more carbon dioxide emissions. But there are also geopolitical agendas to creating a China-centered power system that does not have to go through the dollar or through gas and oil. But there are lots of other things, too. This new ecological regime that China is introducing also places demands for lots of new kinds of minerals associated with battery production, etc., which China has sewn up, so that it controls between 80% and 100% of some of these resources. And America is in a very weak position. A lot of these resources have also been sourced from countries where America does not have a very good footprint, because American corporations are constrained by all kinds of anti-corruption legislation, which means that they can’t go into certain kinds of places where, for instance, war is dominant, or where extreme kinds of bribery is required to get access. And China has proved very good at these things, basically creating a distribution system that includes all these areas where America is not traditionally functioning very well. So this is one way in which America is rapidly losing a sort of monopolistic position, not only to China. There are other major players, too, such as the UAE. And this threatens America’s managerial power over the capitalist system and allows potentially for significant sectors of the global economy to be taken away from America’s control. And one of those, of course, or two of those, because they’re interrelated, is alternative energy and AI, which is one of the things that’s fueled by… So this is a situation we haven’t known in our lifetime. America has always dominated, had the technological lead and the industrial lead, and therefore has been able to really set the terms of geopolitical engagement. And the fact that it cannot now necessitates a lot of new directions and new thoughts on the part of Washington and indeed on the U.S. military.

[00:13:00] Jeff Schechtman: And one of the things that it impacts is the dollar and the vulnerability of the dollar in the kind of world situation we face today. The dollar’s global dominance is under threat, as it never has been before.

[00:13:14] Rana Dasgupta: It is. And this is, of course, we know that one of the major terrorists in Washington and New York has always been that dollar supremacy would in some ways be undermined. But it hasn’t really been a plausible scenario between 1944 and the present day. All major transactions go via the dollar, and there has not really been a significant rival. The euro, which some people thought back in the 1990s that the euro might present a plausible threat to the dollar, has never presented such a threat. Now, one of the things that this has done for the United States is to give it a relatively easy ride as far as debt is concerned. American debt has exploded over the years since Reagan. And since there’s such a massive demand for the dollar all over the world, since so many currencies are propped up by dollar reserves, since so many individuals across the world who are used to transacting in relatively unstable currencies like to hold dollars as a hedge against their own transactions, the dollar’s always kept its value and there’s always been an inflow of dollars into the United States. Today, we realize that that situation is much more fragile. One of the reasons is that China is actively promoting alternative currency scenarios. There’s been talk of a BRICS currency, but probably more likely is that the Chinese currency itself become in a digital format generalized among some of the kind of tribute nations in, let’s say, Africa or Asia. And in order to try and stave off such a situation, America is thrown very much onto the mercy of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. These are two sort of formations in the United States which keep the American exception alive. Wall Street has no power in China, by which I mean the stock markets. There’s nothing remotely as magnetic in China as the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. But Silicon Valley, which has until now helped to keep the dollar in its present position by ensuring American technological lead, that is a much more vulnerable scenario. It is easily possible for us to imagine that some of the monopolies that exist in Silicon Valley could be taken away by China. And that would be very serious, I think, for the dollar.

[00:16:27] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about the influence of Silicon Valley and the amount of capital and the influence that it has, not just on the administration, as we talked about earlier, but its global influence and impact. Yes.

[00:16:42] Rana Dasgupta: I mean, I think that we’re used to talking about nation states and indeed politics on very short-term frames. So we tend to, well, we talk in sort of five or 10-year horizons. And in the United States, most historical conversation starts in 1945. But if you look at nation states over long periods of time, I mean, I’m only talking about leading states here, leading capitalist states. There are moments when major banking and corporate interests rival the state for power. And the state often is reduced to a kind of subservient position because it is so dependent on the financial, technological, and imperial power wielded by private interests. That scenario was not very present in the second half of the 20th century because the Second World War centralized immense powers in the U.S. state, and it was able to govern private interest to a very great extent. Today, we have corporations whose market capitalization is a very significant percentage of American GDP, whose financial and technological power is, as I said, of enormous importance to propping up America’s geostrategic position and which therefore gain significant political influence. They can dictate to the state in certain ways because the state is helpless without them. But I think what’s interesting in your question is that these are not just big car companies, big oil companies, big telecommunications companies such as we knew them in, let’s say, the 1960s or 70s, which, of course, also had significant lobbying power in D.C. Those companies sat very neatly within the nation state structure, and they magnified its economic and political authority. Companies like Silicon Valley have a much more ambiguous and indeed competitive relationship with the U.S. state. It’s not clear that the U.S. state mortgaging itself to Silicon Valley will have the same virtuous impact on its own position. Silicon Valley is developing significant military and satellite communications infrastructure of its own. It wields enormous propaganda power, which has already interfered massively with the media systems on which the high era of American democracy were based. There is a great potential, given the transactional dominance of these companies, that they might get into the business of currency generation or to internalize or absorb banking systems or cryptocurrency systems such that they represent an alternative currency possibility. Clearly, these are companies that do not have the same relationship that, let’s say, General Motors did to generating jobs in the United States, to paying taxes in the United States, and generally supporting the state’s own power to manage society. Increasingly, I think, and quite clearly, they are their own geopolitical actors. There are countries that send ambassadors to Silicon Valley. They have embassy-like relationships with major states such as China, where they have to negotiate over all kinds of geopolitical concerns. They hold enormous amounts of data about foreign citizens, much, much greater amounts of data than the governments of those foreign countries hold about their own citizens. They represent a rival formation, which can unfurl into a political formation such that I think the American system, like a lot of nation-states, finds itself no longer sort of at the technological forefront of political systems. It is facing technologically superior political managers whose future relationship to the state is deeply unknowable.

[00:21:32] Jeff Schechtman: Richard Pena You make the comparison to 18th-century Britain and the East India Company. Talk about that comparison.

[00:21:38] Rana Dasgupta: Rupert Murdoch Well, that’s, I think, a critical… I think we have spent a lot of time, or the media has spent a lot of time looking at 1930s Germany to try and see parallels or precedents to what is going on in the United States today. I think it’s wise to expand that search to include 18th-century Britain, because 18th-century Britain looked quite like the United States today in certain ways. It was ruled by… well, of course, it was ruled by a king, but the king was surrounded by a number of radical, globalizing entrepreneurs and corporate managers who ran a number of trading monopolies whose business was essentially to expand the capitalist system itself, which reaped enormous returns of profit and wealth for their shareholders, who were very few, and which so underpinned the financial system, the banking system, and even the political system, that the state was essentially outsourced to private interests. The crunch moment, and the moment is very fascinating for me when I’m trying to understand what’s going on in the United States today, is in the 1760s and 70s when the East India Company, which 25% of British MPs were shareholders in, and which had a market capitalization in the many trillions of contemporary dollars, went bankrupt. Its share price crashed, its businesses in India were suddenly subjected to catastrophic forces, and the British state had a dilemma. Should it save the company or should it save the state? It chose to save the company, and it chose to save the company essentially by asking American taxpayers to bail the company out with the result of the American Revolution and the loss of the American colonies to the British crown. Now, many people today might think that it wasn’t really a big disaster that America became independent, but as far as Britain was concerned in the 1760s, essentially, these politicians decided to gamble the state and lost it in order to save the company. I think it’s a fascinating sort of parable for our own times where you see what happens to a state when it is mortgaged to that extent to the interests of the company. Certainly, democracy was not on the table while all this was going on. Since the Silicon Valley companies will play over the next few years a significant role in dismantling the labor system that especially middle class Americans are completely dependent on, I think that democracy and how it sort of can, to what extent is compatible with the form of society that Silicon Valley is developing is going to be a huge concern here. And so those 18th century parallels are, I would say, there’s a red warning light there.

[00:25:12] Jeff Schechtman: We talk a lot about the wealth gap here in the country, but it really, in the context of what you’re talking about, it goes beyond that. It’s this disconnect, this uncoupling that you talk about between wealth and growth in the country and the impact on the population at large, that they’re two separate worlds.

[00:25:32] Rana Dasgupta: Yes. I think increasingly, I think there are a number of issues here. One is, of course, as you say, the wealth gap. And I don’t think it’s simply the fact that some people are not getting richer while others are getting richer. I think it’s the fact that increasingly the very, very rich in the United States inhabit a totally separate economy from the mainstream. And that economy has its own logic, its own rules for growth. And it is increasingly not uncoupled from the rest of the American population and economy. So the reason that the very rich are getting richer and owning more and more of the economy, whilst, let’s say, the bottom 50% don’t seem to be getting much richer at all, and that’s been the case for quite a long time, is that these are completely different economic experiences. The very rich are deriving their wealth from the expansion of the shadow banking system, hedge funds and private equity. They’re managing to extract more and more kinds of profit and rent from the American system itself and from the global system. And a lot of their wealth is invested in financial instruments, very profitable real estate. And therefore, they have various kinds of economic interests and indeed political interests that are at odds with the interest of the rest of the population. This is one of the reasons that democracy is coming under strain. But I think the other aspect of this is that we, to some extent, focus too much on money because it’s measurable and we can see trillion dollar fortunes or near trillion dollar fortunes. And we can see other people who are suffering, earning less and less, etc. And this is very easy to measure. But I think the other aspect of what is going on in the world, not just in America, is the shift in political influence of different classes. Increasingly, the very wealthy are finding ways to disenfranchise other people in their own societies. Outsourcing itself was part of this because you took jobs from somewhere like the United States where those jobs were associated with a lot of other kinds of rights, legal rights, etc. And you put those jobs in places where, let’s say China, where the recipients of those jobs do not have a vote and do not have several of the legal rights. So there is a kind of deflation of the political privileges accruing to work over several decades. So this is a sort of magnification of the political power of the very wealthy and the property owners and capital owners. And I think all of these things are what is generating the level of kind of desperation and anxiety about the future of states. What does democracy mean today? And do ordinary people have any authentic influence over the distribution of wealth and resources?

[00:29:10] Jeff Schechtman: I guess to bring it around full circle, to the extent that the election of Trump and Trump being where he is today is as a result, in part, a symptom of many of the things that we’ve been talking about. Talk a little bit about how he is responding to this and where those actions might lead us and have led us. Well, I think there’s a combination of things.

[00:29:35] Rana Dasgupta: So I don’t think that… I think that Trump is acting very often from his own instincts and his own desires. To that extent, he does not always have a coherent political program. And so some of the things that he is doing might serve some of these interests and some of them might not. Trump’s actions on tariffs and foreign labor are not helpful, I think, to a lot of powerful people in Silicon Valley, and they are quite unhappy about that. But I think another thing that is characteristic of this moment is simply a level of chaos and uncertainty, which is useful to a lot of people. So I think if you can basically push powerful institutions, the courts, the law firms, the universities onto the back foot, if you can create a system where people are afraid to speak out, where people are informing on others for their political opinions, creating a feeling that we have less and less a claim on the state, our democratic rights are fragile, and we may have to sort of reduce our expectations. This situation of of terror and anxiety, I think, is something that prepares the ground and creates the atmosphere in which very powerful interests can advance their causes sort of quietly in the background without really facing the level of scrutiny or interference that they might in much more settled circumstances. So I think it’s not only to advance a particular program of taxation, labor, and all these sorts of things, it’s also to break old systems, to get people used to the idea that they do not have the same kind of political claims they used to have, and to prepare the ground for a new formation that as yet no one really knows. But I think we have to take very seriously… I mean, I think that political systems are built on economic systems and not the other way around. I don’t think that democracy floats free of the economic conditions in which it… Democracy flourished in Western countries when they were very wealthy, when their economy was growing very fast, and when there was a big technological and economic gap between them and the rest of the world. Now that those conditions are drying up, many Western democracies are in trouble. And I think that the coming chaos with regard to Western jobs, well-paid Western jobs, the jobs that have gone to the people who are the biggest proponents of the existing political system, who voted passionately, who’ve supported the political systems we have with all of their energy, I think that that is going to create enormous chaos for democracy. And in order to withdraw political rights, there has to be a crisis. You can’t just announce it. You have to start the process of eroding those rights early and on all fronts in order to see what happens next.

[00:33:36] Jeff Schechtman: The fact that China exists as a countervailing force, what impact does that have on this larger framework, particularly with respect to the trouble that Western democracies are having now, as you say?

[00:33:51] Rana Dasgupta: Well, there is China and then there’s also America’s fantasy of China, and I think they’re distinct. And I think part of the problem in this scenario is America’s fantasy of China. America rose to the position of global superpower through a massive military cataclysm that essentially destroyed the entire world, destroyed enormous amounts of the human population, it destroyed the global trading system, and it destroyed many nations outright. And I think that America imagines that were any other power to rise to the position of superpower, it would take a similar kind of event. And so America has fantasies of kind of Chinese military showdown that is cataclysmic that I do not think is really in the plans of Beijing. And that American idea creates a lot of volatility of its own. I think at this point, China probably faces a much greater military threat from America than the other way around. So I think America has to do a little bit of sort of introspection about what are the actual threats that it faces, and are they threats simply to American power, or are they threats to the world? And if they’re simply threats to the status quo, are there ways of managing them that are good for everybody, including the United States? But having said that, the meteoric expansion of Chinese influence, political and economic over the last couple of decades, and especially the last decade, or especially the time since the American financial crisis, does spell a very, very different near future for the planet. I think we should remember that, once again, the high point of American economic superiority and of Western democracy coincided, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence, with the total irrelevance of China to the global economy. Between about 1950 and about 1980, China simply played no role. This historic superpower played almost no role in the global economy, and that removed a lot of historical friction from the West. Today, China is looking to take up a lot of the powers that it wielded in the past, which are not only industrial powers, which of course were gigantic until the 18th century, when China was responsible for something like 25% of the global GDP, but also currency powers. China sets the global currency as silver. Everybody else had to trade in silver because China’s domestic economy was denominated as silver, and part of the madness of European colonialism was simply about how they could generate enough silver to pay China. Once again, China is threatening to take back control of the global currency system. China has already taken back control of the global industrial system, and China is creating alternative geopolitical networks that sidestep formations that were built up during the period of European colonialism and during the period of the American Empire, too. I think we don’t have to decide whether those things are good or bad for humanity. They are different from what we know until now, and they’re deeply threatening to Western countries, partly because they disenfranchise significantly the bottom 50% of most Western countries, that bottom 50% having had a labor situation that is now greatly diminished as a result of the rise of not just China, but Asia in general. But I think one thing we can state with some certainty about the rise of China is that it’s probably bad for natural systems. China is hugely increasing the efficiency of our resource extraction and distribution. I think China’s increased powers of all sorts will bring us much more quickly to our ecological limits than would have been the case otherwise.

[00:38:58] Jeff Schechtman: One thing that becomes abundantly clear in all of this is that what was the Washington consensus, the market-based economy in the West in particular from the mid-20th century forward, that we’re not going back to anything like that, that the world has fundamentally changed. And while we may not have a crystal ball to see exactly where it’s going, it’s not going back to the way it was.

[00:39:24] Rana Dasgupta: No, I think that’s very critical. I mean, any idea that we have, I mean, Trump, if he leaves office in 2028, he will have been the major figure in Washington politics for 12 years. And they are 12 extremely consequential years with or without him. They are 12 extremely consequential years in America’s relative power, relative to other power centers. And we should certainly not imagine that if Trump leaves office in 2028, we’re going to sort of suddenly be in 2016 again. The United States is not the only part of this puzzle. America and its allies, which includes principally when you go back to the Second World War, Japan and Western Europe, all of those countries too have faced a decline in their geopolitical influence over that period. And we have to take seriously the role of, well, certainly Russia and China, but also a lot of less immense powers such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE and even Turkey, India, of course. These countries are now have very, very significant influence and we’re not going back. So I think that all our politics has to be future looking. There’s no point thinking about how things were in the 1960s or in the Clinton years or the Obama years or whatever it might be. That is not coming back. We have to design a politics that’s fit for the world to come.

[00:41:24] Jeff Schechtman: And of course that’s going to take some leadership and probably a new generation of leadership.

[00:41:30] Rana Dasgupta: Well, we have the problem with declining countries is that they are quite obsessed with their own past. They’re quite obsessed with making themselves great again. And they believe that that is a plausible scenario. And they start to do slightly hysterical things in order to deny change. So most of these countries and the United States, we’re talking about the United States, but we can look at Britain, we can look at France, we can look at Germany, Hungary, Italy, et cetera. Most of these countries have decided that, well, their right wing parties have decided, and a lot of the left wing parties that sort of followed on in that, those footsteps have decided that the key problem is one of borders, is one of illegitimate citizens, non-citizens, immigrants, et cetera. And that all of this, this clock can be turned back essentially by strengthening sort of national defenses against the global system. And that takes all kinds of forms, as we know, but immigrants may be the enemy, foreign corporations might be the enemy, foreign governments might be the enemy. But this is clearly not going to produce the outcomes that we hope for. It’s certainly not going to help the bottom 50% of those populations who are, in many cases, the ones voting for these kinds of changes. The sort of leadership that we might hope could emerge in this moment, that could look rationally at the reorganization of economic and political forces and find new niches for these countries to fit into where they can continue to grow and profit, that is not really happening. So, and I think it’s a failure of the left too, the center, even the center right parties, but the center left parties, the left wing parties, they have taken some, they’ve allowed the right to sort of set the terms of the debate. And we have not really had stunning ideas coming out to contest what people like Donald Trump are doing.

[00:44:03] Jeff Schechtman: To what extent can the situation become more untenable, finally, than it is now? How bad can it get in the current environment?

[00:44:12] Rana Dasgupta: Well, I think it can get very bad. And I don’t think we, there are any kind of magical forces that protect us from it doing so. We are not more important or more intelligent than the number, the great number of incredible civilizations in the past that have been overtaken by superior forces, or they’ve crumbled from within, or they’ve committed some kind of political suicide. That has happened many times in the past. There’s no reason to think it cannot happen today. And to some extent, we’re doing many of the things that can bring about those sort of outcomes. I think that some of the problems are worse, are not as bad as we say they are. I mean, the fact that certain people are seeing their situation in the West not getting better does not mean that they are not in historical terms, extremely privileged with material and cultural and educational opportunities that have been denied to most people in history. So some of the things that are presented as catastrophe, perhaps we should not think of in that way. But I certainly think that we are in a moment where we need radically new kinds of political intelligence in the West and in several other countries to get us through the near future. I mean, to take the title of my upcoming book, After Nations, I mean, I’m not arguing in that book that nations are kind of disappearing. I am arguing that they might be getting less and less good at the jobs that we hoped that they would do in the 20th century, especially in providing a thriving environment for human society. I think that already over the last 20 years, people in rich countries have faced levels of anxiety, levels of surveillance, levels of sort of emergency footing that they didn’t really imagine in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. And if we’re getting into a kind of systemic problem where nation states themselves are in even in theory, unable to do what we want them to do, then we have to start innovating politically.

[00:46:57] Jeff Schechtman: And beyond leadership, which we talked about, it may require a whole new political systems that have to be embraced or even invented. Yes.

[00:47:07] Rana Dasgupta: Well, that’s my that’s my contention and my conviction. And I think that I think that nation states are in some ways not they’re not proving very intelligent about the threats of the contemporary. You know, you don’t see many elected leaders having serious conversations, for instance, about what it would mean if if very large numbers of middle class jobs disappeared. It’s it’s not compatible with their their need to be reelected, to have those kinds of conversations. Similarly, nation states are terrible at dealing with terrorism when they face terrorist threats. They they very often respond in sort of overblown military ways and when the problem is political rather than military. In these kinds of ways, I think maybe we can’t rely on nation states to to produce the sort of two point one version that we all need right now. And maybe those systems and ideas have to be produced elsewhere. I think it’s very, very significant what we’ve seen in Silicon Valley over the last 20 years. It’s amazing that something like Facebook can be born out of a student dorm room and within 10 or 15 years without any military campaigns or or violence infiltrate nearly all the nation states of the world and acquire a population of three billion. That is the sort of that is the extraordinary velocity of contemporary technology, the ability to scale. And we’re seeing with with with social media, we’re seeing with cryptocurrencies, all these systems that have scaled in similar ways. These something like Facebook, it only addressed, it addressed essentially social needs. There are there are a large number of human beings who face much, much more urgent needs than the needs that Facebook addressed, needs, political, legal and economic needs. And I think it is possible for us in our moment to design systems that essentially will can serve as a safety net for our entire global political system and prevent it from collapsing. Some of those systems will can be taken up by nation states, absorbed into nation states so that they start to supply needs that they’re not supplying now. And some of those might might be parallel systems that that can allow people to sort of transact, for instance, without having to get their hands on dollar dollar convertible currencies, which for many people in the world is very difficult. But I think this is one of the most significant areas for us to be thinking about right now, not not in an attempt to destroy what exists because we really don’t need more things to be destroyed, but in an act of radical preservation.

[00:50:36] Jeff Schechtman: Rana Desgupta, thank you so very much for spending time with us today.

[00:50:40] Rana Dasgupta: Thank you so much. This was very interesting. Thank you.

[00:50:43] Jeff Schechtman: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.