The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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.
00:13:02 · Heather Cox Richardson
It tosses the Democrats out of office by, like, two to one. But what happens when they... You have this huge sweep is that the Democrats that are left in office are only those ones from extreme districts, and they tend to be the real extremists. So what happens is all the moderates, the Democrats and the Whigs, former Whigs, switch to become Republicans. And what's left are these pockets of extreme, radicalism that associates itself with the American South. And I look at that, and I think, look at who's gonna be winning in Republican districts now with this apparent shift toward the Democrats in so many districts. You're gonna be left with the real MAGA people against everybody else.
00:13:43 · Scott Galloway
[00:13:43] S0: Yeah. So the the eighteen fifties sort of ended in a war that settled one question. And today, it feels as if we don't have one defining issue. We have immigration, trade, AI, bodily autonomy. But I'll put forward a thesis to you. I do think there is one central question that is being asked and potentially answered across the West, and I think that France is sort of the canary in the coal mine. And that is in France, a third of the spending on education is going to teachers who are no longer teaching. Retirees are of greater incomes on average than working Frenchmen and Frenchwomen. And it feels as if young people have been served a bill for a party or a dinner they never got to attend. And it is bubbling up everywhere in terms of a lack of trust in institution, a propensity to riot over whether the match is Me Too or Black Lives Matter or George Floyd, which are all righteous movements, the kerosene we're knee deep in is the fact that the entrants feel like the incumbents continue to vote themselves more money. I see that as the central issue. If there was one issue to be answered or fought over in the... Similar to what the one question that was answered in the eighteen fifties, then it would be entrants versus incumbents, young versus old. React to that thesis.
00:15:13 · Heather Cox Richardson
[00:15:13] S1: I'm gonna react by starting with the eighteen fifties. The question that was answered was not human enslavement. The question that was answered was whether or not the government should protect property that privileged a very few people or whether it protected the good of the community, whether it protected everybody else. And that's where we get and why it becomes such a big deal that the Gettysburg Address in November 1863 talks about a new birth of freedom and the protection of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Because remember, before that, the elite enslavers who controlled the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Senate were very clear that no matter what people wanted... There's a very famous speech. This no matter... It doesn't matter if 99% of American voters want something, they can't have it because the constitution very explicitly prevents the government from doing anything but protecting property. So what Lincoln is really doing is he's bringing white voters, the white male voters in those days, of course, on board, not by saying we're going to get rid of human enslavement on any moral issues, but rather we're going to get rid of the power of that small group of elite southern enslavers to control the American political system and make you end up working for them. And then if you if you redefine that, then I think you look at this moment and you see a very similar question. And I won't speak to France because I am not a specialist in France, and it has its own history, of course, including a very public displays of disaffection with the the government. But I think you are seeing in any number of issues in The United States today, And I think the fight against data centers is the symbol of that, this idea that we do not want a government that reacts only to a very few people in power. Because what we're seeing is more pushing back against billionaires than pushing back against retirees, for example, who in fact... Many of whom, in fact, aren't really hurting with the potential cuts to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and so on. So I think I... If you switch that lens a little bit, it's just always the same story. A few people want everything, and the rest of us would like a government that actually serves our needs as well.