No Mercy / No Malice: Resist

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1:24Visit sierra.ai to learn more. I'm Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. One of the wonderful things about this business is occasionally you stumble upon someone who is just so impressive. Professor Heather Cox Richardson, a historian of American history, is one of those people. Here are some of Professor Richardson's views on the crisis-facing American democracy. Resist, as read by George Hahn.

2:01My go-to historical frame of reference is World War II. At a staggering global cost of 85 million lives, the Second World War was the crucible of the 20th century, an explosion of unfathomable destruction, followed by an unparalleled period of unevenly distributed peace and prosperity. As I'm a catastrophist, I'm hardwired to dwell on the first part and take the second part for granted. Also, World War II, specifically the European theater, is personal. As a kid, my father and his friends kept tabs on people with foreign accents, believing they were tracking Nazi spies in their hometown of Glasgow.

2:47When the war ended, Dad was 15, three years away from being deployed to the front. My Jewish mother narrowly escaped the horrors of the Holocaust. She found relative safety sheltering in the London Tube during the Blitz. Had the Allies not stood their ground, my mom's life could have ended with a train ride, and you'd be listening to something else. So many of us don't appreciate how much of our success isn't our fault.

3:20Last week, I wrote that masked agents in fatigues, raiding churches, schools, and workplaces, and separating families without due process is not modern America, but 1930s Europe. We've seen this movie before. It doesn't end well. History, however, isn't a single-screen theater, but a multiplex of outcomes. I recently spoke with historian Heather Cox Richardson, who is remarkable. While we share a diagnosis of the present, Professor Richardson is an optimist and an Americanist. Comparing the present, what I call our slow burn into fascism, to previous periods of instability in American history, Richardson says, quote, I'm not convinced that the outcome is going to be a dictatorship.

4:10It could just as easily be that the outcome is a renewed American democracy, but it's going to be messy either way. Unquote. The question isn't whether she is correct, but rather, what can we learn from American history? Specifically the 1850s and 1890s. At the beginning of the 1850s, American slaveholders were undefeated. They had the political capital to expand the fugitive slave laws, requiring law enforcement throughout the U.S. to aid in the arrest of runaways. If that sounds like it rhymes with today's battle over sanctuary cities and the federalization of the California National Guard, trust your instincts.

4:56In 1855, Free Staters and pro-slavery forces, egged on by national political leaders, clashed in a Civil War sneak preview called Bleeding Kansas. A year later, a pro-slavery senator attacked an abolitionist one, Charles Sumner, with a cane, nearly beating him to death on the Senate floor. If rhetoric leading to political violence reminds you of what currently passes for presidential leadership, again, trust your instincts. And for contemporary parallels of political violence, see January 6th, Charlottesville, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Paul Pelosi, Steve Scalise, the attacks on state legislators in Minnesota, and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

5:46As Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski recently said, we are all afraid. Given our history, that's common sense. As the 1850s neared their end, slaveholders appeared invincible. In a distant echo of today's court battles over birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott that black Americans, whether free or slaves, couldn't be U.S. citizens. Two years later, abolitionist John Brown led a Hail Mary raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper's Ferry, intending to ignite a nationwide slave revolt. Federal military forces under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee put down what contemporary accounts called an insurrection.

6:38At the time, Brown's failed raid was a low point for abolitionists, but in retrospect it may have represented a high watermark of pro-slave power in U.S. politics. Within a few years, a previously unthinkable coalition of Unionists, many of whom held deeply racist views, and abolitionists, had formed around Lincoln's Republican Party, won a war to preserve the Union, freed the slaves, launched Reconstruction, and set America on the path of industrialization. There's a reason many contemporary scholars are talking about a new Gilded Age. The period between 1870 and 1900, similar to our era, was defined by extreme inequality, the corporate capture of government, corruption, and widespread distrust in institutions.

7:37Today, the robber barons have rebranded as tech bros. Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine have been reborn as Trump's meme coin, a pay-for-play crypto scheme operating out of the Oval Office. The fear that Congress and the courts work for corporations and the wealthy remains a constant. Reformers offer another parallel. The trustbusters of the Gilded Age had Teddy Roosevelt, who took on monopolies in railroads, sugar, and oil. We have Lena Kahn, working to regulate digital monopolies that dictate the terms of commerce and preside over a broken information ecosystem. Leveraging distrust of Republicans and Democrats, the short-lived populist party of the 1890s demanded the direct election of senators, progressive taxation, and labor protections.

8:36Andrew Yang, who consistently loses elections but wins arguments, has championed reforms, notably the universal basic income and ranked choice voting. Zoran Mamdani, a progressive beneficiary of ranked choice voting, echoes William Jennings Bryan's slogan, Plutocracy is Abhorrent to the Republic, when he talks about halalflation. Reformers and their demands change throughout our history, but they share a common theme of fighting for the little guy against moneyed interests. American history is a competition between two visions of governance, according to Professor Richardson. Either we're a society where people are equal under the law and have a say in their government, or we're a society where elites have the right to rule and concentrate wealth, as they're simply better than everyone else.

9:36At this moment, I'd argue that the 1 % are protected by the law, but not bound by it, and the bottom 99 % are bound by the law, but not protected by it. In the Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie personified the elite. An immigrant who made his fortune in steel during the early years of American industrialization, Carnegie initially credited his adopted country with his success. Later, however, Carnegie argued he was self-made, insisting he had a right to concentrate wealth in his hands, as he was the best steward for society. Elon Musk, also an immigrant, built his fortune on Internet infrastructure financed by American taxpayers.

10:23He built his second fortune jump-starting the electric car industry, financed once again by billions in subsidies. Somewhere along the way, he became convinced he was humanity's savior. For Musk, anyone who stands in the way of anointing him first friend and or unelected president is an enemy of the state. The most fortunate among us have replaced patriotism with technocaronism. Daniel Kahneman found that above a certain threshold, money offers no incremental increase in one's happiness. However, there's evidence everywhere that men who aggregate billions from technology firms become infected by an inexplicable sense of a grievance.

11:13Our idolatry of wealth makes Americans vulnerable to men like Carnegie and Musk. As the citizens of a country predicated on the dream of economic prosperity, Americans conflate wealth with leadership. The bottom 90 % tolerate, even celebrate, a Hunger Games economy, where the rich live long, remarkable lives and everyone else dies a slow death. Why? Because each of us believes we'll eventually reach the top. That belief isn't optimism, but opium. And it keeps the bottom 90 % from realizing they're essentially nutrition for the top 10%. private jet owners can now accelerate the depreciation on their planes but we're stripping health care from millions of people does that make any fucking sense one common protest slogan in the trump era is this is not who we are i agree but as a student of history i know that's incomplete a more accurate slogan this isn't who we want to be Richardson says our model should be Abraham Lincoln, who navigated through a period of political instability and violence and renewed American democracy by appealing to the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

12:41This Independence Day, Richardson wrote about the men who signed America's founding document. They risked everything they had to defend the idea of human equality, an idea that's been America's work in progress since 1776. Quote, Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to, quote, take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth, unquote, unquote.

13:46I find it difficult to see optimism in Lincoln's story. See, Catastrophist. After he won the bloodiest war in American history, an assassin's bullet robbed him of the opportunity to shape the peace. But at Gettysburg, just a few months after a pivotal battle where tens of thousands of Americans gave the last full measure of devotion, Lincoln appealed to American values as well as the American people. Then as now, the ball is in our court. Richardson told me, quote, I'm not ready to give up on America. We've renewed our democracy in the past, and we have the tools to do it again, unquote. None of us knows how this moment will turn out.

14:39Perhaps that's the point. But previous generations of reformers who renewed American democracy didn't have the luxury of hindsight or guarantees either. They had only the present moment and a choice. Retreat into cynicism or push forward into the messy, uncertain work of democracy. Susan B. Anthony faced decades of ridicule and arrest. Martin Luther King's dream must have seemed impossible from his Birmingham jail cell. Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez organized immigrant farm workers who had every reason to believe the system would never change. Harvey Milk knew visibility meant vulnerability in a hostile world.

15:27What they shared wasn't optimism, but the willingness to act as if democracy could be renewed even when the evidence suggested otherwise. My mother survived the Blitz because the Allies refused to give fascists the satisfaction of her fear. My father spent his youth tracking imaginary Nazi spies and joined the Royal Navy as freedom felt worth protecting. Democracy survives the same way it always has. Not because the outcome is guaranteed, but because ordinary people decide it's worth the risk. Resist. Life is so rich.

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