The Jackpod: America as a dual state
On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti
WBUR
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Point news analyst Jack Beatty on the division between the normative state and the prerogative state and the role that could be playing in the U.S. today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Support for this podcast comes from Nature is the Solution, a podcast from the Nature Conservancy. |
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| 0:27.5 | A recent episode asks, |
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| 0:40.3 | WBUR Podcast Podcasts, Boston. |
| 0:53.3 | I'm Megna Chakra-Bardi, and this is the Jack Pod, where On Point News Analyst, Jack Beattieie helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in now. |
| 1:00.8 | Hello there, Jack. |
| 1:02.5 | Hello, Magna. |
| 1:03.3 | Episode 104. What's your headline? |
| 1:07.0 | America as a dual state. |
| 1:09.7 | Okay. There's a lot of ways that you could parse that. Tell me more. |
| 1:14.4 | Well, in 1941, the University of Chicago Press published a book that's remarkably clairvoyant on what's happening now, on the ground in Minneapolis, and prophetic of what may happen soon in a city near you. |
| 1:31.5 | The title, The Dual State, a contribution to the theory of dictatorship, is unsettling, inviting as it does, |
| 1:42.0 | a comparison between Trump's America and Nazi Germany. |
| 1:46.9 | Wow. Okay, so this is 1941 when this book was published, so obviously in the middle of the |
| 1:52.2 | Second World War. Who wrote it? Ernst Frankel, and he was a German Jewish lawyer who was able to practice law in the courts long after the laws of 1933 and the Nuremberg restrictions of 35, |
| 2:12.9 | long after those had limited what almost eliminated Jews completely from the professions and from many |
| 2:19.8 | other walks of life. He was able to stay on because he was a veteran of the first World War. |
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