The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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?
00:10:45 · Heather Cox Richardson
[00:10:45] S1: One of the reasons I wanted to talk about this with you is that I think there's a bunch of things going on that are worth taking a look at. And and I am not advocating these. I am still thinking about how to think about them, but that's one of the reasons I like to talk about... Talk with you is because you are also willing to think about these things. One of the things that we got in the eighteen fifties, eighteen forties really, is we got the rise of the American party, the Know Nothing Party, which was an explicitly anti immigrant party. And yet with the rise of the Republican Party explicitly standing against what they called the slave power, the elite southern enslavers, those people who had been Know Nothings jumped almost a 100% into the Republican Party, which explicitly was pro immigrant. That is they switched who... What they theoretically believed in on a dime. And historians argue that that's because they went to the know nothings because they seem to be the only group that was standing against oligarchy. And as soon as a major political party did that, they jumped ship and went with that major anti oligarchy party. And I look at that, and I think, MAGA, maybe? Some people in MAGA? That... It it... It's an interesting comparison. And, again, I can just hear all the hate mail that you're gonna get from me saying that, but it is an interesting comparison on that front. In terms of whether or not the eighteen fifties are a model for where we're gonna end up, I think not for a number of reasons, but I will point out something else there that I think is really interesting because we're coming up on this midterm. What happens is in the eighteen fifties, you get the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act, which says that enslavement can move into the American West. And once that happens, slave states in the West are gonna work with slave states in the South to make the entire country a slave holding nation, and they're gonna spread that around the world. They're very articulate about this is what they wanna do. And that's when Northerners finally wake up and say, hey. We got a real problem here, and we gotta get rid of those people. And in the elections of eighteen fifty five and 1856, there's no Republican Party yet. There's an anti Nebraska party, and that that anti Nebraska party sweeps the North.