E244 - The Party of Chaos w/ Paul Heideman

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

News, History, Politics

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2026

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Subscribe now to skip the ads and get all of our episodes. Danny and Derek welcome to the show writer Paul Heideman to talk about the transformation of the Republican Party from the main party of business interests to a fragmented, personality-driven coalition. They discuss the historical relationship between Republicans and capital, the disorganization of American employers, the political economy of the 1970s crisis, Reagan-era fragmentation, Gingrich and fundraising, globalization and bipartisan neoliberalism in the 1990s, the Koch network and Tea Party, Republicanism after Romney, the conditions that enabled Trump’s rise, and much more. Read Paul’s book Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to American Prestige.
0:02.7	To listen ad-free, you can subscribe at Americanprostagepod.com.
0:08.3	Find the link in our show notes. Hello, Hello, Prestige heads, and welcome to American prestige.
0:35.9	I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade Derek Davidson.
0:40.2	And we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today. Paul Heideman, Paul's a researcher and writer.
0:45.5	And he's also the author of The Excellent Rogue Elephant, How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos, recently published with Verso.
0:55.0	Paul, thank you very much for joining us.
0:57.1	Hey, thanks for having me on.
0:58.6	So the first question that I want to ask is just a broad view.
1:02.9	What do you consider to be the state of the Republican Party today?
1:08.5	And feel free to take this as broadly as you like, because of course, one of the
1:12.5	longstanding questions of American history and American political science is the nature of the
1:17.3	American Party system, because it's kind of unique in world history. It's not a parliamentary
1:22.3	system. You have these gigantic collections of interests that are very different from what you see in the UK,
1:28.7	Germany or France, or what have you?
1:30.6	So what is the Republican Party and what is it today?
1:35.2	So, yeah, if you were to put the Republican Party today in historical perspective,
1:40.4	on one level, you might say not much has changed.
1:43.0	Like if you were to tell someone in the 1920s that a century from now,
1:46.3	the Republican Party will be extremely anti-immigrant
1:49.7	and will love tax cuts for the rich, they would say, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
1:54.4	But on the other hand, there are a lot of elements of the party today
	...

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