I think that Elon Musk is a traitor to the West. Nobody should have that kind of power. No private citizen should take a stand against the stated foreign policy of the United States of America. I think we got an issue with Trump there, too, deciding that all of a sudden 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. 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.
Professor, it's always good to see you.
Back at you, Professor Galloway. How are you? How's this, how's the season treating you?
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. Seems like you've been traveling.
I have been traveling. Now, I did travel a lot in '23-'24 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.
Okay, let's bust right into it. You were our first ever Prop Conversations live stream 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?
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. 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.
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. Are we potentially in a historic moment where the parties could actually be reconstructed as something different?
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 that 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. 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"?'
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. 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, does MAGA survive? Does the GOP reconstruct? Well, the Democrats are very, you know, out of favor right now. I don't see, and maybe I'm wrong, I don't see this structural change of the Democratic Party where I think there might be opportunity for a reformulation or an emergence of a different wing would be around the fissure or the tension I see is between MAGA and what used to be the GOP. Have I misdiagnosed that?
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 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 in 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 Lindsey 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. 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 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. 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.
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?
So, 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 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. 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 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 slaveholding 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 though that anti-Nebraska Party sweeps the North, 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.
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. 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 institutions, 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, 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.
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 that says 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 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 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, many of whom in fact are 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: a few people want everything, and the rest of us would like a government that actually serves our needs as well.
It's an interesting analogy because the way you're framing it is that the 1% who also happen to be the slave owners 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 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 don't, 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, a nuclear power plant down the river. 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 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?
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 I spent a great deal of time on this question when I was writing my book on the Republican Party, because all of my books had been about, 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 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 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's ideas being important and all that? And 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 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, these things aren't so great,' and everybody thinks of them as sort of whackadoodle, 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? 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. 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, um, like, uh, Nixon in Florida, for example, or the rise of Bryan Pothast 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 progressive era was simply a peaceful transition of power into the hands of numerically younger but also politicians with new ideas who couldn't get a foothold 10 years before they were finally pushed into power around 1900.
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, Republicans take the House, Democrats take the Senate. I'm worried that the Democrats are mistaking a fling for real love. That 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, when has party movement sustained and been successful, and what have 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?
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. 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 elected in '74, they take office in '75, '76, 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 Carter elected in '76, 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, you know, the 1950s.
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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, 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, you know, the 2030s in the United States.
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 is 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.
And I just don't understand.
Do you have any sense of like what they're thinking?
They don't listen to Heather Cox Richardson. They have a total lack of understanding of history. 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... I mean, there is no escaping if things really get this bad.
And so I don't, in some, I don't think they have a historical reference. And also, and I want to come back to your comments, and then I'll pose another question. 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, 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, you know, 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?
Well, I would say it also protects them in 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.'
Putin's exact set is a window right now.
That's right. And 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. 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 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, 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 has been since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981, or than there was before FDR was elected in '33.
So that idea that what Democrats—and by the way, I'm thinking of again as that broad coalition that I think is going to change under that label. Parties always change. What they should be arguing and could be arguing is that what they're really trying to do 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. That protects the American dream by making sure people have access to education and to health care 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 rich people in their incredibly fine furs and all that stopping by somebody's ballroom and saying, 'Come along with us. We're going down to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt.'
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 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 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 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?
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 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 at. So they permitted environmental degradation, they permitted worker degradation and so on.
