The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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.
00:17:24 · Scott Galloway
[00:17:24] S0: Centering analogy because the way you're framing it is that the 1% who were the... Also happened to be the slave owners who had the majority of private property. I mean, the analogy is striking when you put it that way, because essentially what we're talking about is income inequality, right? Where a small number of people engage in regulatory capture and just start to run away with it. I saw this crazy stat that since 2022, people aged 75 and above have increased their net worth to 37%, and people under the age of 25 have seen their net worth plummet by 23%. What typically happens though? Like, how does that... I see I see, to your point, data centers for me, I I don't... I I think some of the notion around the water and the noise, I know there are issues, but it's an age old problem. Nobody wants a chicken processing plant or a factory or nuclear power plant down the river. That is... That always happens. But this seems especially angry because I think these data centers are a vessel for anger around income inequality. And people now look at the quote unquote, they no longer refer to them as the billionaire class, but as the Epstein class. How does that usually play out though in terms of not only elections swinging one way or the other, how does it play out in terms of new laws, new approach to government? I would argue the last forty years has been all about how to create wealth, and the next decade is gonna be about the responsibilities of wealth. But I don't know exactly how that bubbles up and manifests in terms of laws or political movements. Any thoughts?
00:18:55 · Heather Cox Richardson
[00:18:55] S1: I have a lot of thoughts on this, and they may or may not be right. But isn't that the central question? How do you transfer frustration on the part of voters or nonvoters, people who are not people with power or money? How does that translate into actual political change? And this spends... I spent a great deal of time on this question when I was writing my book on the Republican Party because my whole... All of my books had been about... And all my work had been about sort of the political zeitgeist, how ideas get written into laws. And my argument at the time until I was writing that book was that, essentially, you had the construction of ideas that show up in newspapers. You see them in political speeches and so on. And in order to stay in office, lawmakers put those things into law. And then I'm writing a Republican book, and a lot comes down to this stupid dinner party in which, basically, one guy is trying to flex his muscles, and he... You know, it... There's only about six people involved. And this was actually a real intellectual crisis for me because if, in fact, a dinner party made the difference between the way Reconstruction played out, what did that say about all my ideas about zeitgeist and people whose ideas being important and all that? And and I spent... I actually stopped writing for a number of months and really dug into the political theory of what happens in translation of ideas to policy and vice versa. And what I came to believe through the help of actually a scholar, a friend of mine who's a scholar of Brazil and does a lot of work in political work... Political theory there, is that what happens is if if people are generally happy, they're not necessarily paying a lot of attention to politics. There are couple people who are saying, hey. These are... Things aren't so great, and everybody thinks of them as sort of whack a doodle. Right? They're not paying attention to them. But the more the people in power are not responding to the people on the ground, the more those people who are unhappy start to speak up and start to find each other. And that's fine. They can find each other, and they can grumble, but still they're not running politics. Right?