Dr. Richardson confuses many of the media’s assumptions about this moment. She has garnered a huge and devoted Facebook following, which is widely and often accurately seen in media circles as a home of misinformation, and where most journalists do not see their personal pages as meaningful channels for their work.
Business and Economy
It also contradicts the stereotype of Substack, which has become synonymous with offering new opportunities for individual writers to turn their social media followers into careers outside the mainstream media, and at times seems to be the place where the eliminated ideological factions will regroup. This is true for Republicans of Never Trump expelled from the conservative media, whose publications, The Dispatch and The Bulwark, are the platform’s biggest brands (just above and below Dr. Richardson’s recipe, respectively). And it’s true for left-wing writers who have bitterly broken with elements of the dominant liberal consensus, whether around race or national security, from Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald, to Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, to the arsonist Matt Taibbi, whom O Dr. Richardson was removed from first place in late August.
Dr. Richardson came across this frontier of the media business by accident. When Facebook readers started suggesting that she write a newsletter, she realized that she didn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars a month for a commercial platform and jumped on Substack because it would allow her to send her emails without charging her readers anything. . Substack makes money by taking a percentage of the copywriter’s subscription revenue, and she said she felt guilty because the company’s support team was not being paid to fix her recurring problem: her extensive footnotes activated her spam filters. readers. She seemed extremely uncomfortable when talking about the money her job is making.
“If you start doing things for the money, they are no longer authentic,” she said, adding that she knew it was both a privilege from her position as a full professor and “an old Puritan way of looking at things.”
Like the other Substack writers, Dr. Richardson is succeeding because she is offering something that you cannot find in mainstream media and, in fact, that many publishers would find it very annoying to attribute. But unlike the others, it is not her policy itself: she thinks of her politics as a Lincoln-era Republican, but she is, in today’s terms, a fairly conventional liberal, troubled by President Trump and his attacks on American institutions. She is a historian who studied with Harvard’s great scholar Lincoln, David Herbert Donald, and her work on 19th century political history seems particularly relevant now. This spring, she published her sixth book, “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy and the Continuing Struggle for the Soul of America,” a prolonged attack on the kind of nostalgia that animates Trump’s struggle to preserve Confederate symbols. The South face in Dr. Richardson’s book is an extremely racist and sexually abusive South Carolina senator and farmer, James Henry Hammond, who called Jefferson’s notion that all men are created equal “ridiculously absurd”.
What is unusual is to bring a historian’s confident context into the mundane politics of the day. She invoked Senator Hammond when Congressman Kevin McCarthy and other Republican leaders signed a lawsuit in Texas that sought to reverse the presidential election, comparing Republican action to times in American history when lawmakers explicitly questioned the very idea of democracy.
“Ordinary men should not, Hammond explained, have a say in politics, because they would demand a greater share of the wealth they produced,” she wrote.