Dr. Richardson confuses many of the media’s assumptions about this moment. She has built up a large and dedicated following on Facebook, which is widely and frequently accurately regarded in media circles as a home of misinformation, and where most journalists do not view their personal pages as meaningful channels for their work.
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She also contradicts the stereotype of Substack, which has become synonymous with offering new opportunities for individual writers to transform their social media into careers outside the big media, and it sometimes seems as if the purified ideological factions are going to regroup. This is true of Never Trump Republicans printed out of conservative media, whose publications, The Dispatch and The Bulwark, are the biggest brands on the platform (just above and below Dr. Richardson’s revenue, respectively). And this is true of left-wing writers who have bitterly broken with elements of the general liberal consensus, whether around race or national security, from Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald to Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias to fiery Matt Taibbi , as Dr. Richardson sat out the top lock at the end of August.
Dr. Richardson happened to happen almost by accident in this frontier of the media industry. When readers on Facebook started suggesting she should write a newsletter, she realized she did not want to pay hundreds of dollars a month for a commercial platform, and jumped on Substack because it allowed her to email her at no cost. send her or her out. readers. Substack earns its money by taking a percentage of the authors ‘subscription revenue, and she said she feels guilty that the company’s support team is not being paid for fixing her recurring problem: that her extensive footnotes filter readers’ spam filters calculate. She seems to be talking very awkwardly about the money her job brings in.
“If you start doing things for the money, stop being authentic,” she said, adding that she knew it was a privilege of her firm professorship and an old puritanical way of looking at things. ‘
Like the other Substack writers, Dr. Richardson in it, because she’s offering something you can not find in the mainstream media, and indeed many editors will assume it’s too boring to admit. But unlike the others, it is not in itself her politics: she considers her politics a Republican from the Lincoln era, but she is in today’s terms a fairly conventional liberal, disturbed by President Trump and his attacks on the US institutions. She is a historian who studied under the great Harvard Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald, and her work on 19th century political history currently feels particularly relevant. This spring, she published her sixth book ‘How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America’, an extensive attack on the kind of nostalgia that the struggle of Mr. Trump to preserve the Confederate gives animation. symbols. The face of the South in the book of Dr. Richardson is a bitterly racist and sexually abusive South Carolina planter and senator, James Henry Hammond, who called Jefferson’s view that all men are equal “ridiculously absurd”.
What is unusual is to apply a historian’s confident context to everyday politics. She appealed to Senator Hammond when Representative Kevin McCarthy and other Republican leaders signed a lawsuit in Texas to block the presidential election, comparing Republican action to moments in U.S. history when lawmakers explicitly questioned the idea of democracy.
“Ordinary men should, Hammond explained, have no say in policy because they would demand a greater share of the wealth they produced,” she wrote.