Earlier this month, I sat down with Danny Bessner and Derek Davison, hosts of the American Prestige podcast, to talk about my new book, Self-Censorship. While this is technically an episode of their show, they were generous enough to allow me to cross-post the episode here. I’ve had Danny on the show many times over the years, and this brilliant, young (compared to me, anyway) historian has become one of my favorite sparring partners. I’m nominally on the right and he’s on the left, but I’ve been fascinated by our unexpected convergences and divergences—on that score, this week’s conversation does not disappoint.
Danny, Derek and I start off by discussing the original essay’s emergence in the late 1980s, as I watched the communist bloc crumble and contemplated my own embattled position as a black Reagan Republican. From there, the conversation ranges from the thinkers who inspired the essay’s approach—Erving Goffman, Albert Hirschman, and Thomas Schelling—and the role of Jews (though Schelling wasn’t one) in the mid-century quantitative revolution in the social sciences. As an historian, Danny is interested in the broader conditions that produced this new and still-dominant paradigm. It’s certainly influenced economists’ approach to analyzing geopolitical developments, including the rise of China. And though I’m well into my eighth decade on Earth, I’m still developing myself, and Danny asks how and why. The Gaza War is certainly part of that personal development, and I explain how that led to my exit from the Manhattan Institute. We end, perhaps inevitably, on my confession that, while I still hold out hope that Trump can extract the US from some of its present conundrums, I’m disappointed in his performance to date.
I encourage everyone who enjoyed this episode to listen and subscribe to American Prestige for fun, intelligent, and non-dogmatic commentary on global affairs. And if you haven’t yet purchased Self-Censorship, what are you waiting for? It’s available wherever you get your books.
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0:00 The origins of Self-Censorship
4:11 Black and conservative in Reagan’s America
8:30 The social science hall of fame
12:45 Ground News ad
14:42 Jews, assimilation, and the quantitative revolution
19:53 Human universalism vs. ethno-national particularity
23:39 Historicizing “the Jew”
25:44 Danny: Larry Summers can’t see outside his own neoliberal paradigm
29:47 Are we entering a period of, as Marx wrote, “mutual ruin”?
32:43 Is capitalism leading us toward nuclear war?
39:15 What the Manhattan Institute incident taught Glenn about his own book
44:59 Glenn: “I’m rethinking everything”
48:37 Is the right reverting to a pre-New Deal political paradigm?
53:34 Is Israel a reversion to an Early Modern model of nation-building?
1:00:04 American Jews’s role in Israel’s creation and perpetuation
1:05:01 Why Glenn previously censored himself on Gaza
1:11:27 Glenn: So far, I’m disappointed in Trump
Recorded August 6, 2025
Links and Readings
Danny and Derek’s podcast, American Prestige
Glenn’s new book, Self-Censorship
John Murray Cuddihy’s book, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity
Corey Robin’s book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas
Glenn’s City Journal essay, “Clarence Thomas and Me”
Seth Schwartz’s book, The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhamad
Omar El Akkad’s book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Glenn’s post, “I Was Fired by the Manhattan Institute. Here’s Why.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message
Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch’s book, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire
Avi Shlaim’s book, Genocide in Gaza: Israel, Hamas, and the Long War on Palestine
Peter Beinart’s book, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning
Glenn’s conversation with Beinart
