Heather Cox Richardson on Why “The Republican Party No Longer Exists”

Heather Cox Richardson, historian and author of the newsletter Letters from an American, joins Scott Galloway to discuss what the midterms could reveal about America’s political future—and why she sees echoes of the 1850s in today’s shifting coalitions. She explains how concentrated wealth fuels political upheaval, why the backlash against billionaires could unite voters across party lines, and what Democrats would need to deliver if they win Congress. Plus, the case for a new era of trust busting, Elon Musk’s power, and why she’s watching JD Vance beyond Election Day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:36Speaker 00

  Episode 419. For 190 zero code covering Northwestern Ohio in 2019, a photo of an egg became Instagram's most liked post at the time. True story, last year, I went dressed as a chicken for Halloween, and I met someone dressed as an egg, and one thing led to another, and let's just say we answered the age-old question. The chicken.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  Go, go, go!

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Welcome to the 419 episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? In today's episode, we speak with Heather Cox Richardson, historian at Boston College, author, and the voice of the newsletter, Letters from an American. We discuss with Heather where the midterms stand with less than a week to go, corruption in the economy, and the lessons of history, Elon Musk's influence on American politics, and what's at stake for democracy after Election Day. With that, I absolutely adore Professor Richardson. She's probably one of our three favorite guests here on Prop G. So with that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Heather Cox Richardson.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Professor, it's always good to see you.

• 2:56Heather Cox Richardson?

  Back at you, Professor Galloway. How are you? How's the season treating you?

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Well, it's great. 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 Maine. It seems like you've been traveling.

• 3:21Heather Cox Richardson?

  I have been traveling now. 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.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Okay, let's bust right into it. You were our first-ever Prop G Conversations livestream guest back in June. We were discussing America 250. Now we're eight days from the midterms with nearly 30 million 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?

• 4:06Heather Cox Richardson?

  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 1850s, the 1890s, and the late 1920s, early 1930s. 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 1850s is you had the breakdown of the two major political parties, the Whigs and the Democrats.

• 4:50Heather Cox Richardson?

  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 really funny thing to be watching it happen, to be in it, rather than just reading about it in the books from the 1850s.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  That's really interesting because we're so focused on 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?

• 5:35Heather Cox Richardson?

  Oh, I think we are. I would lay money on that. And what I find really interesting about it, and it might be worth us talking about what the 1850s looked like and how those parties broke apart and rebuilt. 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 patterns in American political history. That is, you'd sort of heard people talking about stuff, you kind of thought about it this way, and it changed a little bit because of that.

• 6:18Heather Cox Richardson?

  But I feel like what we are actually seeing right now is political ideology being built from the ground up, somewhat, I won't say haphazardly, but extraordinarily organically. And that's not something that I ever thought was happening in, say, the 1850s or the 1890s. 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?

• 6:45Speaker 00

  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. And he said, I couldn't get through the Democratic primary. And 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, does MAGA survive? Does the GOP reconstruct? While the Democrats are very, you 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

• 7:28Speaker 00

  there might be opportunity for a reformulation or an emergence of a different wing would be around the, around the fissure or the tension I see is between MAGA and what used to be the GOP. Have I, have I misdiagnosed that?

• 7:41Heather Cox Richardson?

  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, they have tied themselves to him, and on issues of 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, if you think about the continuation of a political

• 8:22Heather Cox Richardson?

  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 would 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

• 9:05Heather Cox Richardson?

  and endorsed 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 1850s, 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 1850s.

• 9:49Heather Cox Richardson?

  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 1850s, 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, the rest of us into serfs. And when that happened, you got the Republican Party rising, and then, of course, you also got the Democratic Party reforming in the North and coming up with a new approach to a bunch of older problems.

• 10:32Heather Cox Richardson?

  And then, of course, we went forward with that system for a long time. And I think we did the same thing in the 1890s and again, in the 1920s, 1930s.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  So I think of the 1850s and the 1920s as not ending well. Do you see the same danger or the same clouds forming now?

• 10:50Heather Cox Richardson?

  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 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 1850s, 1840s 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 100% into the Republican Party, which explicitly was pro-immigrant.

• 11:34Heather Cox Richardson?

  That is, they switched what they theoretically believed in on a dime. And historians argue that that's because they went to the know-nothings because they seemed 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? It's an interesting comparison. And again, I can just hear all the hate mail that you're going to get from me saying that, but it is an interesting comparison on that front. In terms of whether or not the 1850s are a model for where we're going to end up, I

• 12:18Heather Cox Richardson?

  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 1850s, 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 going to work with slave states in the South to make the entire country a slave-holding nation, and they're going to spread that around the world. They're very articulate about this is what they want to do. And that's when Northerners finally wake up and say, hey, we got a real problem here and we got to get rid of those people. And in the elections of 1855 and 1856, there's no Republican Party yet. There's an anti-Nebraska Party. And that anti-Nebraska Party sweeps the North.

• 13:03Heather Cox Richardson?

  It tosses the Democrats out of office by like two to one. But what happens when 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 going to be winning in Republican districts now with this apparent shift toward the Democrats in so many districts. You're going to be left with the real MAGA people against everybody else.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the 1850s 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 have greater incomes on average than working Frenchmen and Frenchwomen.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  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 the one question that was answered in the 1850s, that it would be entrants versus incumbents, young versus old. React to that thesis.

• 15:17Heather Cox Richardson?

  I'm going to react by starting with the 1850s. 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 of 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, it doesn't matter if 99% of American voters want something, they

• 16:02Heather Cox Richardson?

  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 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'm not a specialist in France, and it has its own

• 16:39Heather Cox Richardson?

  history, of course, including a very public displays of disaffection with 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 if you switch that lens a little bit, it's just always the same story.

• 17:22Heather Cox Richardson?

  A few people want everything, and the rest of us would like a government that actually serves our needs as well.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  It's an interesting analogy because the way you're framing it is that the 1% who were 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, to your point, data centers, for me, I think some of the notion around the water

• 18:13Speaker 00

  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, data was 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 40 years has been all about how to create wealth, and the next decade is going to 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?

• 18:59Heather Cox Richardson?

  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 non-voters, 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, all of 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

• 19:40Heather Cox Richardson?

  on, and in order to stay in office, lawmakers put those things into law. And then I'm writing the 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, 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 I spent, I actually stopped writing for a number of months and really dug into

• 20:19Heather Cox Richardson?

  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 people are generally happy, they're not necessarily paying a lot of attention to politics. There are a couple of people who are saying, hey, things aren't so great, and everybody thinks of them as sort of wackadoodle, 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?

• 21:04Heather Cox Richardson?

  But what seems to turn the trick is that as you get new people moving into politics and wanting to break the stranglehold of the political system that is controlled by a very few people, they start to become the vehicles for that argument that people on the ground are making, and they start to feed it as well. And I can tell you how we get to there. But that idea that the more people who speak up, the more they will affect, not necessarily the people in office. Nobody is going to be changing Ron Johnson's opinion at this point, right? But they affect the positions of the people who are trying to get into office, who then get voted in by those people.

• 21:48Heather Cox Richardson?

  That's how you change the political system. And that feels very much like what we're seeing now. You see the rise of a candidate like Nixon in Florida, for example, or the rise of Brian Poindexter in Iowa. These people who could not have broken into the system 10 years ago, but who now are running really, really strong. And so that idea that you change society by speaking up, by demanding things of your leaders, but also of the rising leaders, and you elect them, that's how we got the 1890s and the 1900s and the progressive era was simply a peaceful transition of power into the hands of numerically younger,

• 22:33Heather Cox Richardson?

  but also politicians with new ideas who couldn't get a foothold 10 years before they were finally pushed into power around 1900.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  So everyone's focused on the next eight days. I've been thinking a lot about day nine. And that is, let's assume for fun, take the House, Democrats take the Senate. I'm worried that the Democrats are mistaking a fling for real love. The way I would describe the Democrats right now in the populace is they hate us less. But to believe that all of a sudden we have a mandate going into 28, I feel like day one, we've got two years to show we're the party of ideas versus just indignance and shame and hand wringing. I don't think that carries us into 28. If you were advising the Democratic Party and assume that they get control of Congress,

• 23:25Speaker 00

  when has party movements sustained and been successful? And what are the attributes, features and behaviors of parties who were able to capitalize on midterm elections, establish a relationship with centrists as opposed to just a fling? Because right now, it feels like the Democratic Party does not have a lot of love. Everyone's calling this a blue wave. I would call it a red riptide. And that is, okay, it's not us, folks, it's them. And I mean that in both a good and a bad way. Your thoughts?

• 23:56Heather Cox Richardson?

  I agree with you. But that being said, again, pretty common in the periods of great change where the initial vote is against the other party. And then the trick is for the party in power to hit the ground running. And I think the Democrats have been pretty clear about the fact they want to start right off with extending the child tax credit, which is enormously popular. Extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies, again, enormously popular. One of the things about this moment is there's so much low hanging fruit that they can, at least in the House, bring to a vote and pass. And then if they have the Senate put pressure on Republicans to vote in favor of. And then if Trump or Vance then vetoes it, then that's hanging around the necks, again, of the Republicans.

• 24:41Heather Cox Richardson?

  So I don't think that we're in an unusual place there. I think it's one that the Democrats have to capitalize on. But I would also say, one of the things that always surprises me is what happened after Watergate. We tend to forget that period, which I think is really interesting. Because of course, we get the Watergate babies in 74. And people, they're elected in 74, they take office in 75, 19 in both of those cases. And in 75, 76, they pass a slew of legislation to rein in the power of the president. Much of what Trump is overturning now comes from that late 74, 75, 76 period. And then you really get, you get Carter elected in 76.

• 25:26Heather Cox Richardson?

  And then you actually get dramatic legislation in 77, 78 that is social welfare legislation, progressive legislation. And people tend to forget that because then we get the oil crisis and then we get the hostage crisis. And they tend to just think, oh, nothing got done in the 70s. But if you actually look at the laws that get passed in 77, 78, it's enough of a progressive menu that it has made me wonder, contrary to much of what I've written in the past, if what is really driving the Reagan revolution and Ronald Reagan at the end of the 70s is that period of four years of legislation even more than his opposition to civil rights from the 1950s.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

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• 29:38Speaker 00

  So you had mentioned the 1920s. And on Saturday, you published a history of the decade before the 1920s crash, when an economy that benefited too few people collapsed. Meanwhile, the report on people profiting from this administration keeps piling up. Trump's own financial disclosure shows at least $2.2 billion in revenue in 2025, up from $622 million the year before he took office. Forbes estimates he's $2.7 billion richer than when he won in 2024. And I'd also like to point out that he's making more trades in a single day than Speaker Pelosi, who gets pilloried for this, has made in the last 10 years. He's made more trades than all of the rest of Congress combined. And then my other favorite stat is that the Gini coefficient,

• 30:23Speaker 00

  which measures inequality, when it's at zero, everybody gets the same thing. When it's at one, one person has everything. The French began separating people from their heads when it was at 0.83. It's at 0.85 in the US right now. Talk about the 20s and the moment we're in and what it says about the 2030s in the United States.

• 30:45Heather Cox Richardson?

  Well, let's move backward on that one. And I would love to see what you think about this in the sense that it astonishes me that the people who are openly saying to the American people that there's nothing wrong, the economy's great, and whose wealth is now measured in the hundreds of millions, I mean, numbers that are just unfathomable, billions, billions of dollars, or even a trillionaire. It astonishes me that they don't seem to understand that that sort of inequality usually ends up involving piano wire.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, or a guillotine.

• 31:23Heather Cox Richardson?

  And I don't, I just don't understand.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:27Heather Cox Richardson?

  Do you have any sense of what they're thinking?

• 31:31Speaker 00

  They don't listen to Heather Cox Richardson. They have a total lack of understanding of history. It doesn't, or they're comfortable that they're... I mean, this is a crude example. A friend of mine, who is a tech billionaire, has a plane and a go bag in a bunker in New Zealand. And I just said to him, if, quote unquote, things really get real here and you have to get on a Gulfstream to head to your bunker in New Zealand, I'm like, you don't think your pilots are going to kill you and take your shit? I mean, there is no escaping if things really get this bad. And so in some, I don't think they have a historical reference. And also, and I want to come back to your comments, but I'll pose another question.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  I now believe that one of the keys to, you know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts. And when we have one person worth a trillion dollars who's acting like a nation state, turning off and on and throttling back battlefield technology, it is the best argument I have heard for exceptionally progressive tax rates, where say above, say above $100 million, more money than you could ever spend, more money than you could ever want to be happy. And Daniel Kahneman shows above a number much lower than that, you get no incremental happiness. So you're not really losing anything from these individuals, that exceptionally progressive taxation actually protects us from this type of aggregation of power. A lot there. Your thoughts?

• 32:56Heather Cox Richardson?

  Well, I would say it also protects them in that, that one of the geniuses of democracy and the easy transfer of power is that you can leave office. You know, we think about it protecting the people who are in danger of being suppressed or injured by a leader, but it also protects a leader and enables them to say, I'm sorry I didn't get elected. I'm going to go home and, you know, play with my grandchildren.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  Putin's exit is a window right now.

• 33:26Heather Cox Richardson?

  That's, that's right. And, and so one of the things that, that strikes me, there's two things that strike me in this moment. One is that you were talking about Democrats and their base at this point. They keep talking about farmers and workers. 100%, they're both hurting. But also key to that is entrepreneurs, is small business people who look at a system that they can't break into and are more than happy in moments of political change to join with the farmers and workers and say, listen, we don't like those billionaires either because we're never going to be able to break into a market that is monopolized by them. And that's a winning coalition. That's what we've seen again, 1850s, 1890s and 1930s.

• 34:09Heather Cox Richardson?

  But then looking at the 1930s, I think key to that moment was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic president elected in 32, was very clear that he was not destroying the capitalist system in the United States. He was protecting it. And the, because, because he said, listen, look around the world. You've got the rise of fascism and you've got the rise of communism. The only way to maintain this system is to file off the sharp edges of modern day industrial capitalism and turn it into a regulated system whereby individuals really can work hard and rise. And of course, under him, we get the great compression

• 34:54Heather Cox Richardson?

  where there's much less of a distance between the people at the bottom and the people at the top in terms of their income and wealth both than there is, than there has been since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981 or since what there was before FDR was elected in 33. So that idea that what Democrats, and by the way, I'm thinking about again is that broad coalition that I think is going to change under that label. Parties always change. What they are, should be arguing and could be arguing is that what they're really trying to do is, is go back, if you will, to the future, to a regulated system that protects the American dream. I'm hearing that word a lot again, which I hadn't for a long time,

• 35:38Heather Cox Richardson?

  that protects the American dream by making sure people have access to education and to healthcare and to loans to start a small business and so on. Because that's the language that FDR managed to use to create this broad coalition. Although, of course, the very wealthy never liked him. One of my favorite cartoons ever is that one from The New Yorker of all the, the rich people and their incredibly fine furs and all that stopping. You know, this one stopping by somebody's ballroom and saying, do come along with us. We're going down to the trans-lux to his Roosevelt.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  When I think of the buckets of capitalism or three key agents, I think of the owners, the earners and the consumers, right? The gal who owns the factory, the gal working in it and the gal buying their products. I see over the last 40 years, the rivers of leverage, prosperity and income have all flowed from consumers and earners up into the owners. And it feels to me like we are ripe. And also I think the boring stuff is what moves the needle here. And the boring stuff that, or the boring thing that I think the moons are lining up around is another great era of trust busting. I feel the concentration that's been allowed to happen at a corporate level is just every day extracting

• 36:58Speaker 00

  more and more rents from earners. Lowest percentage of GDP represented by salaries in history. Greatest percentage of corporate profits as a percentage of GDP, both happening at the same time. Based on like Teddy Roosevelt like trust busting or breaking up the railroads or even going to the 80s and AT&T, do you think the moons are lining up around a potential, another great next era of trust busting?

• 37:25Heather Cox Richardson?

  100%. It is worth pointing out, of course, that the Reagan administration changed the way that the country interpreted the idea of trust busting. Under Robert Bork, they decided to enforce the, the antitrust only if it meant, what they were really looking at was the cost for consumers. So, so long as a merger made things cheaper for consumers, that's all they looked, that's all they looked at. So they permitted environmental degradation. They permitted worker degradation and so on.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  The consumer test, yeah.

• 37:58Heather Cox Richardson?

  Yeah. And so flipping that back to the way it was originally, although the Sherman Antitrust Act was always a crock. It, it was a benchmark more than anything else. But flipping it back to the idea that there are societal costs to creating these mega businesses would change a lot of things without having to pass new legislation off the, right off the top. But yeah, I mean, right now you just have to look around you and recognize just how much power very few industries have and how that's never going to take you anywhere good. And, and I would love to hear what you have to say about what seems to me anyway, to be the overcapitalization of AI. Because again, that looks very much to me

• 38:41Heather Cox Richardson?

  like the railroads in the 1890s, the cars in the 1920s and now AI in the, in the 2020s. And that concentration of the real capital in the country behind a single industry in the previous two iterations did not turn out well.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. What you were talking about with the trust busting, it's, it's been Bork and who bested kind of the Brandeisian notion of antitrust where now it's the consumer test. It used to be market power. Because to your notion, even if you can claim, as Google does, there's nothing that is better for the consumer than Google continued to let us acquire YouTube and these other. It ends up benefiting the end consumer. Meanwhile, rents on advertisers keep going up and up and up. And small businesses are, have this enormous toll booth called Google Online. Like I don't, I think if we're going to see, I, I think there needs to be across big chicken,

• 39:44Speaker 00

  big meat, big pharma, big tech, a dramatic breaking up of these companies. And what the right has done a really good job is of convincing us that somehow that's anathema to corporate profits. If you look up the breakup of AT&T, within 11 years, each of those companies was worth more, each of those seven companies was worth more than the original AT&T. It's good for shareholders. It's good for competition. It's good for tax revenue, employment growth. The only stakeholder that loses is the CEO who wants to sit on the iron throne of a much bigger company. And unfortunately, they're usually single share stocks or dual class share stocks, so they have control.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  And the greatest ROI in history, as I can tell economically, is political donations. I've just never seen anything have that kind of payoff before. So I'm, I'm super excited about what might be the new era of trust busting. Unfortunately, and this goes to, and I'm curious if you think there's a historical analogy here. For me, it all kinds of reverse engineers, again, to something quite boring, and that is Citizens United. Has there been a historical equivalent of Citizens United? And has it been overturned before?

• 40:58Heather Cox Richardson?

  No. And so there, it hasn't been overturned before. But there, there's been nothing in terms of a Supreme Court decision like that. What you did have in the 1890s were a very few robber barons, as we call them now, industrialists, who did in fact run the political system. And one of the statistics I like is that J.D. Rockefeller controlled about 2% of the nation's GDP. Elon Musk controls 3%. So, so we do have a moment in which we had very wealthy people controlling our political system. And that gets overturned, of course, in the 20th century, both beginning with the progressive era and then later on.

• 41:42Heather Cox Richardson?

  So we've had it before, but I would say, I agree with you. Citizens United is the, the thing that's got to go first. That being said, there is something interesting about the idea of the breakup of these monopolies and the, the large corporations. And that's it, of course, this is exactly, exactly where we were in the election of 1912. And in that case, all three of the major candidates running were running as progressives. Gene Debs was also running. He was running as a socialist. It's the highest any presidential candidate is running as a socialist ever. Number of votes such a person ever got. But the, the reason that Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt was apoplectic about Woodrow Wilson

• 42:26Heather Cox Richardson?

  running as a Democrat, there are many reasons. But one of the ones that he was upset about in terms of trusts was that Woodrow Wilson kept calling for the destruction of the trusts that everybody recognized were a problem. And along with it, the destruction of a federal government. Get rid of the federal government, make it small, put everything back to the states. And what Teddy Roosevelt kept saying was, the minute you do that, those trusts are just going to reform. So he came up with a system that.

• 42:59Heather Cox Richardson?

  Called for the breakup of the trusts, but also insisted on having a strong government that maintained the destruction of trusts and maintained a world in which there was economic competition. And at the end of the day, it didn't really matter because Woodrow Wilson ends up in World War I and ends up with a system that looks very much like Theodore Roosevelt's system. But I do think it's worth thinking about the fact that one of the complaints on the radical right about the idea of breaking up these monopolies or this concentration of economic power is that in order to do that, you've got to maintain a government that has regulators and that has rules and that actually does such a thing. And they're very much against the idea of a strong federal government. They'd rather get rid of that power, send it back to the states.

• 43:44Heather Cox Richardson?

  And when that happens, the people who are running these mega corporations can do whatever they want.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  So we talked a little bit about the GOP and historical analogies to some of the tumult it's going through and MAGA. Let's talk about the Democratic Party, specifically the emergence of the DSA. What is, what does history tell us about the prospects? Is the emergency of the DSA a structural shift? Is it a, is it a hot, you know, a hot take? The democratic socialists of America, your thoughts?

• 44:21Heather Cox Richardson?

  So I'm going to say something that is probably a little different than a lot of people are saying. One of the things that I have noticed, of course, remember there's a difference between the national DSA and the people who are running at state or local levels and calling themselves members of the DSA. And that's an important distinction. But one of the things that if you look around you now at the nation as a whole, and if you are willing to go along with me with the idea that the MAGA movement has jumped off a cliff and left everybody else who doesn't want to jump off the cliff kind of eyeing each other nervously about whether or not you can make common cause with those, those people, right? One of the things you have seen is that people

• 45:01Heather Cox Richardson?

  running as non-Republicans around the country have taken on a lot of different names. They have called themselves democratic socialists. They have called themselves prairie populists. They, some are running as independents. They are backing away from the name democratic, especially in states where there are a lot of Republicans, where it's almost as if they're trying to create a bridge out of that party. So in terms of what DSA actually means in this context, to me, it's a way to say, I believe in these things that are wildly popular. Like I say, at this point, universal healthcare, for example,

• 45:44Heather Cox Richardson?

  gathers 57% of Republicans, not independents and Democrats, but 57% of Republicans want that. This is really low hanging fruit. It's a way to say, I believe in all that stuff. And so it's okay to vote for me because I'm not really a Democrat, even if I'm embracing the same democratic principles. So I'm looking at them and I'm thinking, you explain to me the difference between somebody like Mamdani and somebody like Brian Poindexter. And they're really, I mean, and by the way, there's different flavors. Some people are really emphasizing reproductive healthcare, especially in states where the Republicans have tried to overturn constitutional amendments

• 46:29Heather Cox Richardson?

  enshrining reproductive healthcare in their constitutions. Other people are running on workers' rights. You know, there's, there's different things that they're emphasizing, but I just don't see a huge amount of daylight between any of these labels. Where I see the daylight is, as you say, between this whole group of people and the MAGA Republicans. Right now, it's a more, we're not them, we're us, and we're going to go for these really popular things. But they have not yet articulated a party-wide position, which is what I think is going to happen over the next two years.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  We'll be right back.

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• 48:29Speaker 00

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• 49:14Speaker 00

  That is entertaining and informative. We hope you check it out.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  We're back with more from Heather Cox Richardson.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  So Heather, I'm going to brag now because I'm desperate for your affirmation, but I reached new levels of pride today. Elon Musk said of me that he has never had any clue, and has a picture of me, which is, I wear as a badge of honor. But there is a question here.

• 49:47Heather Cox Richardson?

  What don't you, wait, what don't you have any clue about?

• 49:50Speaker 00

  Oh, I wrote that SpaceX was essentially using, is the organ donor for Tesla shareholders, that SpaceX shareholders are going to bail out Tesla, which is, in my opinion, a failing car company that trades like a software company. But more boring stock stuff than, than it's warranted in this conversation. The larger question is the following.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  Is there historical, I believe, and I've said this publicly, I think that Elon Musk is a traitor to the West. And that if Charles Lindbergh had managed to buy McDonnell Douglas, one of the largest aircraft companies in the middle part of the last century, and that had control over their guidance systems, and Roosevelt had decided to give DC-3s to the British, to the RAF, to try and fend off Hitler's attack on London, and then somehow Lindbergh unilaterally decided to disable the radar on those planes. And as a result, the blitzkrieg increased in ferocity. I would be curious how we would treat Charles Lindbergh.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  I see this nothing less than, you know, look what we did to the Rosenbergs. I think we have normalized the notion that because people have billions of dollars and they're innovators and they're geniuses with technology and is all of that, that they get to live by an absolutely different set of standards, for which I see no historical reference here. So ground me in history around Elon Musk, how he acquits himself, and what we can learn from past examples of people with this much power.

• 51:30Heather Cox Richardson?

  Well, I'm going to start by saying, thank you. It sure as hell looks like treason to me. And I am, I am beside myself that this man has taken upon himself the foreign policy of the United States and is doing whatever the hell he wants. I am, I am apoplectic.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  A hundred percent, agreed.

• 51:51Heather Cox Richardson?

  So I, but I'm going to go a step before that and say, you know what it looks like to me, although it's the same story really, is...

• 52:01Heather Cox Richardson?

  Benedict Arnold and how he was, of course, an American general or a general with the colonial forces who sells out to the British and takes the fort at West Point, which is a crucially important fort. It starts to drain it of supplies and of fortifications in order to make it easier for the British to capture. And of course, the plot gets exposed and he ends up being able to flee and become openly working for the British. But I don't understand why people, I mean, you're certainly hearing some Democrats saying, you know, we're going to look into this, but oh my God, like, listen to me, I can't even put a sentence together because I'm with you.

• 52:45Heather Cox Richardson?

  Nobody should have that kind of power. And nobody should take, no private citizen should take a stand against the stated foreign policy of the United States of America. And frankly, I think we got an issue with Trump there, too, deciding that all of a sudden he's going to create, you know, or he's going to use an escape hatch so he doesn't have to put into effect the Graham Act that puts new sanctions on Russia. And he's openly working for Russia. And, you know, to me, that's, that's the big story of this era is the degree to which the United States has been compromised by its leaders' relationship with Russia.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  I 100% agree. It strikes me that any other administration, Musk would be in an interrogation room in Langley, Virginia, answering very serious questions. So let's move on to some Q and A from our audience here. Bill asks, Heather said Trump or Vance may veto. Thoughts on Trump leaving office and why? What do you think happens on, is there a chance on January 2029, two people show up to be inaugurated?

• 53:52Heather Cox Richardson?

  January 29 of?

• 53:53Speaker 00

  I'm sorry, January of 29. Is that right?

• 53:56Heather Cox Richardson?

  Two people, no, no. What I was referring to there is two things that I think work together. Trump is not healthy. I am not a doctor. I am not a psychiatrist, but the dude is not okay.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  He's obese in 80 or 81.

• 54:13Heather Cox Richardson?

  Yeah, yeah. And he's, he's not okay. And, not but, but and, as of the midterms, he has nothing he can deliver to the Republicans. He's a lame duck. He's made it clear he can't turn out voters any longer. Why are they going to try and keep him? And the bottom line is, I would, I would actually be surprised if he isn't moved off stage in one way or another over the next two years. I'm not suggesting it's going to happen or not, but you can see J D Vance ramping up his performances, you know, being out there in front of people. You can see his attempt to cement control. And of course, once you're past the midterms, he could have that time and go into 28, 28,

• 54:57Heather Cox Richardson?

  right, 28 as an incumbent. And you can also look and see, increasingly appears that certain members of the inner circle are getting iced out. So you can see J D Vance trying to consolidate power. And of course, he's got the tech bros behind him. My concern about the period after this midterm, I have many concerns about it, but one of them is that what you're going to see is J D Vance consolidating power with extraordinary money behind him and using the power of the federal government to do whatever he wants for two years. So I think, you know, we're all focused on the midterms. I think Vance is a, is a real place to be watching the next couple of years. Maybe it won't happen, who knows?

• 55:36Heather Cox Richardson?

  But I, do you see Trump continuing to be able to walk for two more years? I don't know. I'm not a doctor, but I, I'm, my money is not on him for two more years.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  Look, I think that biology is undefeated. And it does, and one of the things about cognitive decline is one of the first symptoms is you don't recognize your own cognitive decline. I remember my dad suggesting we go to a go-kart racing track the day I took his driver's license away. I'm like, you don't understand, you no longer have the hand-eye coordination or the gross motor skills here. And I do think there, there are a couple of silver linings coming out of this election that I see. One, I do think there's generally a recognition that ageism is warranted, that 15-year-olds should not have driver's licenses, 16-year-olds should not be allowed to join the army, and

• 56:28Speaker 00

  65-year-olds should not be allowed to command troops, fly planes, or potentially, a 75-year-old should not be on the Supreme Court or run for president. It does feel like we are heading towards, there's renewed momentum around term limits or age gating. And then the second thing I would put to you that I see as a silver lining, I see the ROI on political spending or money dropping off the face of the planet right now. If they can't buy a senator in Texas in GOP dark red Texas for $800 million, that means that the ROI on money has finally, finally really started to decay, if you will. Thoughts on either of those?

• 57:12Heather Cox Richardson?

  Well, on both of them, first of all, I think that that is, the latter is a reflection of the fact the American people have woken up and remembered that it is in fact their country and that they have agency to change the future. And that kind of organizing, you can't buy with money. And you've seen that, and you saw that in Brazil, right, over the, over the weekend. So there's that. I will say about, about older people in office that we are in, I think, a unique moment right now because of the extraordinary improvements in healthcare over the last, you know, 20, 30 years, so that people are able to still, you know, be in public in a way that they weren't in our parents' generation, for example.

• 57:55Heather Cox Richardson?

  And if you couple that with the reliability of air travel, so that people don't have to have the grueling, you know, think about the Supreme Court in the early years, you literally had to ride a horse around the circuit, you know, and you weren't going to have somebody who was 90 out there riding the circuit. It was a young person's game. And those two changes, we haven't yet reflected in our political system, but there's no reason to think we won't. Because yeah, I actually heard a focus group talking about this, the Senate race here in Maine, and Senator Susan Collins, the Republican who's running for a seat against Democrat Troy Jackson, is 72 years old, but she has some sort of a condition that makes her seem a great deal older than that.

• 58:38Heather Cox Richardson?

  And one of the people who was a Collins voter in a focus group said she would not be a Collins voter this time around because, and this is not a direct quote, but she essentially said, I don't want to pay for her nursing home in the Senate the same way we paid for Mitch McConnell's. And I was like, whoa. And then I thought, honestly, that's not really unfair.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  Average age of Americans is 38. Average age of our elected officials is 62. I see, you see McConnell, Ginsburg, Feinstein, it's just, it's become ghoulish. It's become very strange. And I also just, I wonder if they, when you're that age, if you're pricing the risk of your policies on youth and if you're able to grasp an increasingly technological society, and also a component of democracy, I believe, is churn and shedding new skin. And to your point, what you said was really powerful about one of the benefits of a democracy versus an autocracy, it gives them kind of peace with honor and an exit. I think what, I think Mitch McConnell's family should be ashamed of themselves for

• 59:43Speaker 00

  putting him through that. It just strikes me that at some point, someone, our kid should come to us, professor, and say, you know, Mom, Dad, it's time to come home. And I think term limits and age gating, if you will, actually give more dignity, you know, provide the same type of dignity and graceful acts that you're talking about that democracy provides. So we'll go, sorry, go ahead, Heather.

• 1:00:11Heather Cox Richardson?

  Well, there's also, I think, the corollary to the fact that we're in this moment where you do have this 20 to 30-year period that our parents didn't have, is that we don't really talk as a society enough about what that should look like. And somebody said to me a number of books ago, this is the most famous you're ever going to be, ironically, right? What are you going to do with the rest of your life? Like, what is your next move? And I remember being really taken aback, but spending time and thinking, yeah, what do I want to do going forward? And what I wanted was to support other people. And just having that question asked when I was in my 50s feels like that's something we should put more of an emphasis on so that people don't get to be 80 and still clinging

• 1:00:53Heather Cox Richardson?

  to what, not just, by the way, in politics, but also in business or in any profession. It is time to, not just to pass the torch, but to, to invest in younger generations.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  I see it in academia. I see it in politics. I see it in business. The thing that I really think plagues society is people who won't leave. And I, you know, people who won't, I was just thinking about Christiane Amanpour, who after 45 years or 43 years is leaving CNN, Clarissa Ward is going to take her place in outstanding, I'm like, there's a dignity to saying, okay, it's time for me to make room for younger people. A last question about technology. I believe the rise of social going on mobile has created an atmosphere for almost everything really awful in the world. I think social media on mobile has created atmospherics for it.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  A decline in the trust of our institutions, an increase in not shared truths but shared lies. I'm curious for your thoughts about historically, whether it's the printing press or newspapers or radio or TV, this moment with this technology. Well, one, do you buy that thesis that social media has been a real social ill for democracy? And two, any historical references that help us understand where it heads or what we can do about it?

• 1:02:16Heather Cox Richardson?

  So it's interesting you would say that. And this is probably a glass half full or half empty response in that if you look at the disinformation that has traveled over social media, 100% it's been vile. But you can also turn around and look at the fact that we've been able to create extraordinarily strong democratic movements thanks to social media. And you look at someplace like the American South during Reconstruction, when you had the arrival of the KKK, there was nothing a black family could do. They couldn't call their neighbors to them. They couldn't say, hey, I'm worried these guys are in the neighborhood. They were on their own. And you compare that to what happened in Minneapolis with the ICE agents there. You could reach out to people and say, I need help here right now.

• 1:03:01Heather Cox Richardson?

  And of course, that made it possible to push back on them. What I would, and then you also have the fact that the social media has made it impossible now for politicians to say one thing to one audience and something else to another audience, which looks very much like The Telegraph. Once you had The Telegraph giving information about what a politician said in Southern Illinois, for example, versus Northern Illinois, there was a big split across the center of the state. That's what gave rise to people like Abraham Lincoln, who said, hey, I'm talking the same way on both sides of this line. Stephen Douglas is not. So it definitely changes a lot of things up. But I think what I would say about that is like everything else, we need to have guardrails around how we use any new technology.

• 1:03:45Heather Cox Richardson?

  And I'm a huge defender of the First Amendment. So I'm not at all about people in the government trying to corral what people can say on social media. But I do think that the algorithms that give privilege to bots and trolls and disinformation should and could be regulated. And then we would take that tool and turn it into something that is predominantly good rather than predominantly bad. I feel your pain on that one, though, because the stuff that's out there is horrible, vile, and of course, was instrumental in giving us Donald Trump. The same token, we could also use it the other way.

• 1:04:25Speaker 00

  About halfway through my question, I realized that social media and new technologies and Substack have given us Heather Cox Richardson. I just don't know if you would have the same impact and the same real time ability to communicate and have like Doris Kearns Goodwin, fantastic historian, there's been amazing history, the guy who wrote the Churchill books. They wrote books and taught classes. So they had a big impact on hundreds of people daily. But their impact on millions of people was very intermittent and

• 1:04:56Heather Cox Richardson?

  Well, we also got to work around the gatekeepers. That, that is, that is, so the voices that are out there now, I think one of the things pushing this moment, the voices that are out there are voices that did not get traction until they could work around the gatekeepers.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  Or they got fired by the gatekeepers and they said, I'm going to keep going.

• 1:05:13Heather Cox Richardson?

  Oh, and, and look at the difference that's made in so many different people who are somewhat unleashed. I mean, I think the best example of that is Paul Krugman, who, you know, he was fine at the times, but boy, now that he's writing on his own every day, I never miss a column because it just, it's got a, an authentic edge where you feel like you're

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, Honey Badger don't give a shit.

• 1:05:34Heather Cox Richardson?

  That's right.

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  There's no, there's no editor saying, should we really say this? Yeah, there's a, there's a, it's, it's more salsa, less chip right now. Yeah, I agree with you. There's a certain, there's a certain edge to it. Professor Richardson, you are always our favorite guest here. I love that you're having this moment. I think it's fantastic. And I always repeat this story, but whenever we go on tour and we reference you or name check your work, we get this incredible level of applause. So I trust you're taking time to just appreciate the moment that you're having. It's always great to see you, Heather.

• 1:06:11Heather Cox Richardson?

  Always a pleasure to be here.

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez, Laura Janier and Asher Schwartz. Our video editor is Bianca Rosario Ramirez. Kami Reek is our social producer. Drew Burrows is our technical director and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thanks for listening to the Prof G Pod from Prof G Media.

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• 1:07:09Speaker 05

  If you're building AI agents, you should check out Strands Agents. It's an open source SDK for Python and TypeScript. The idea is simple. Give a model some tools, let it decide what to call and when, and loop until it's done. No chain configs, no graph orchestration, and works with any model provider. It's also open source and built and tested for production agents. Get started at strandsagents.com.