The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:02:51 · Heather Cox Richardson, Scott Galloway
[00:02:51] S1: Back at you, professor Galloway. How are you? How's this how's this season treating [00:02:56] S0: you? Well, it's great. I I was down for parents weekend at UVA, which feels very American, college football and Jeffersonian, so it's been wonderful. And I see you've been up to a lot of trouble. I keep seeing clips of you hugging female candidates and other historians. It seems like you're out and about. I'm not used to seeing you outside of outside of Maine. Seems like you've been traveling. [00:03:17] S1: I have been traveling. Now I I did travel a lot in 2324 because I had a new book out, and then I went to ground to write another new book, which will be out next September. And so you haven't seen me out and around much, but you will again soon because I do a lot of on the road stuff too, especially now that I'm not teaching at the university. [00:03:35] S0: Okay. Let's bust right into it. You were our first ever Prof G Conversations livestream guest back in June. We were discussing America Two Fifty. Now we're eight days from the midterms with nearly 30,000,000 Americans having already voted. As a historian, is there any point in history that reminds you of this moment where we are now, and what does that say about what might happen over the next several days?
00:04:01 · Heather Cox Richardson, Scott Galloway
[00:04:01] S1: It's funny you say that because I've been telling people it's such a weird time to be a historian because you are watching the news being made around us, the history being made around us, and it's almost like your brain is on a split screen because you can also overlay the past onto where we are now. And, yes, this moment, politically, looks very much to me like the eighteen fifties, the eighteen nineties, and the late nineteen twenties, early nineteen thirties. But it's the 1850 comparison that is the one that is really engaging me intellectually more than the others right now. Because what happened in the eighteen fifties is you had the breakdown of the two major political parties, the Whigs and the Democrats. And from that, you got the rise of a number of new parties and gradually the separation of the political system into an oligarchic party. The Democrats became the oligarchic party. And what was left became the political party, which were the Republicans. And watching what we are doing now looks so much like that. And I'm happy to unpack that if you would like, but it's just a it's just a really funny thing to be watching it happen, to be in it rather than just reading about it in the books from the eighteen fifties. [00:05:15] S0: That's really interesting because we're so focused on whether whether the Democrats take the Senate right now that we might miss a more structural shift. Is there... Are we potentially in a historic moment where the parties could actually be reconstructed as something different?
00:05:15 · Scott Galloway, Heather Cox Richardson
[00:05:15] S0: That's really interesting because we're so focused on whether whether the Democrats take the Senate right now that we might miss a more structural shift. Is there... Are we potentially in a historic moment where the parties could actually be reconstructed as something different? [00:05:31] S1: Oh, I think we are. I I I would lay money on that. And what I find really interesting about it, and and it might be worth us talking about what the eighteen fifties looked like and how those parties broke apart and But what I find really interesting about this moment is that when I have studied political ideology in the past, which is really what interests me, the difference between people's ideas and reality. That has always been my go to intellectually. I have always thought the political ideology essentially came from sort of the the patterns in American political history. That is you'd sorta heard people talking about stuff. You kinda thought about it this way, and it changed a little bit because of that. But I feel like we we are actually seeing right now is political ideology being built from the ground up, somewhat... I won't say haph azardly, but extraordinarily organically. And that's not something that I ever thought was happening in, say, the eighteen fifties or the eighteen nineties. So it's really making me sit back and say, wait a minute. Was Abraham Lincoln really figuring this out intellectually, or was he listening to his neighbor and going, hey, that's not such a bad idea?
00:06:41 · Scott Galloway
[00:06:41] S0: I was speaking to a friend of mine, Anthony Scaramucci, and I said, you should run for president. You'd be a really interesting voice in the race. And I think the more voices, the better. That the primary... The election process is great at making everyone stronger the more voices that are in it, and producing not only the right person, but the right person for the moment. He said, I couldn't get through the Democratic primary. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Your campaign should be to try and reconstitute the GOP, which no longer exists. I'm curious if you think, like, if if if does MAGA survive? Does the GOP reconstruct? While the Democrats are very, know, out of favor right now, I don't see and I'll maybe I'm wrong I don't see this structural change of the Democratic Party where I think there might be opportunity for reformulation or an emergence of a different wing would be around the around the the fissure or the tension I see is between MAGA and what used to be the GOP. Have I have I misdiagnosed that?
00:07:37 · Heather Cox Richardson
[00:07:37] S1: Well, of course, neither one of us can predict the future, and I am a prophet of the past. But what it looks like to me, again, overlaying the past onto this moment, is that the Republican Party no longer exists. It has become a MAGA movement, and it's tied itself to Donald Trump, which was always a bad idea. He was always mercurial. He was always, really a salesman more than a politician. And I mean not just intellectually, have tied themselves to him and on issues of election election being tied to him, but also financially, they have tied themselves to him. They've destroyed their broad base of political supporters financially, and they've also corrupted all their email lists, which, you know, if you think about the continuation of a political party, there's an awful lot of envelope stuffing, and I don't mean that literally any longer, but all that has gone into Donald Trump's pocket. And it seems to me this is the kind of moment where exactly as you say, there is plenty of room for a new Republican Party, which really be kind of an old Republican Party, and we can talk more about that. But I'm actually really interested on who's left. If MAGA has jumped off a cliff, who's left? And what you're seeing in this election is a number of Republicans who went along with Trump until very recently suddenly jumping ship. And you're seeing that, of course, over the Amy Acton ad, for example. But you're also seeing it in South Carolina where a Republican governor... Former governor just came out and endorsed the, the Darlene Graham's opponent because he said we just can't go this way. You're starting to see that split. Again, very much like the eighteen fifties, which we can talk about. But what you have left standing then on the people who haven't jumped off the cliff is an entire constituency, a huge constituency that doesn't necessarily know what it stands for yet. And we have as well the injection of a whole bunch of new issues, like data centers, like climate change, like AI, like all these things that people actually don't have a position on necessarily, and they are willing to make common cause in ways that they haven't before. Again, very much like the eighteen fifties.
00:09:44 · Heather Cox Richardson, Scott Galloway
So I'm interested in what's happening with who's left on the table because it looks again to me like, I'm so sorry to say it again, the eighteen fifties where you had a whole bunch of people jumping into the same swimming pool together and saying, listen. We don't agree on immigration. We don't agree on finances. We don't agree on internal improvements. But by God, we can agree that we don't want the elite enslavers to take over our country and turn the rest of into sir... The rest of us into serfs. And when that happened, you got the Republican Party rising, and then, of course, you also got the, the Democratic Party reforming in the the North and coming up with a new approach to a bunch of older problems. And then, of course, we went forward with that system for a long time. And I think we did the same thing in the eighteen nineties and again in the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties. [00:10:37] S0: So I think the eighteen fifties and the nineteen twenties is not ending well. Do do you see the same danger or the same clouds forming now?