Terms of Engagement – Sinking Yachts: Can a Billionaire Backlash Save Democracy?

Archon Fung: Hey everyone. Welcome to Terms of Engagement. I’m Archon Fung, a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation here.

Stephen Richer: And I’m Steven Richer. I’m the former elected Maricopa County recorder and I’m now a senior fellow at the Ash Center.

Archon Fung: And we are once again recording this show live. So if you’re on the chat and watching live, put in comments, questions, feedback, and we’ll try to get to as many questions as we can.

Stephen Richer: And of course, the show will also be recorded. And so if you’re watching it on the recorded version and if you have some comments, you can email us about them afterwards. We do our best to respond to all of those. But as always, Archon and I are speaking on behalf of ourselves and only ourselves, not on behalf of the Ash Center, Harvard University, Harvard Kennedy School, or University of Oxford for Professor Culpepper, which who we’ll introduce here in a second.

Archon Fung: Great. And before I introduce Pepper, what are we talking about today?

Stephen Richer: Well, one, today’s just going to be a wonderful day because I already had the worst part of my day because I had to have this back procedure. And so now everything’s downhill. But this is a little bit of a hard topic for me because we’re going to talk a bit about the notion of can there be a good populism, which makes my skin crawl a little bit because I’m pretty sort of … I’m not your biggest fan of populism, but whether or not moments of popular outrage maybe begun by reaction to some sort of calamity or phenomenon in society can be used to achieve policy outcomes that can either sort of thwart the undue influence of large corporations, especially the billionaire class, or otherwise can achieve good public policy outcomes. So channeling sort of that raw human emotion and channeling that outrage and channeling that broad consensus that something has gone wrong and turning it into something good, or is that just sort of animal emotions run amuck and you can’t put that genie back in the bottle and it’s going to do something ugly before you try and corral it.

Archon Fung: Great. Excellent. And just for a little kind of stage setting here, we’re going to be talking about big corporations and billionaires today, hence the title of the book. And there’s at least a couple of different ways you can talk about that. One is at the policy level. Should there be billionaires? Should there be a highly progressive tax rate? How much should corporations and billionaires be regulated? Those are policy questions. This is a democracy show and so we’re going to be focusing on democracy as it gets to policy. And there a democracy question is who’s driving the political process and how much political equality is there? So a couple semesters ago in my MVP politics and ethics class, a student piped up when in the democracy discussion, he said, “Wait, Professor Fung, so you actually think that billionaires, you think Bill Gates should have as much political voice as the Uber driver in Boston?” And I said, “Yes, I think that’s the case because I’m a small D Democrat and I believe in equal political voice and citizenship.” And it was a little bit shocking to me that he said that, but I think that it kind of put the question very, very sharply.

One of the questions that we’ll be talking about today and let me introduce our guest to help us think about that question. Our guest today is Pepper Cole Pepper, who’s a very good longtime friend of mine. He is a professor at the Black, but that’s not why we invited him. We invited him. He’s

Stephen Richer: Also a scholar of some note.

Archon Fung: Of some note, exactly. He is the Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy at Oxford University and the vice dean of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. He co-authored very recently with another very good friend of mine with Tegu Li, a new book called “Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy.” He’s been writing about politics and business power for some time. His prior book, “Quiet Politics and Business Power” was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for comparative social science research and he’s written widely on comparative politics and especially European politics. The two kind of works that we’ll be talking about today are “Billionaire Backlash,” the book that I just mentioned. And then also he and Taeku have published a really interesting article very recently in the April 2026 issue of Journal of Democracy on Good Populism, which we’ll also be talking about.

Pepper, welcome to Terms of Engagement.

Pepper Culpepper: Oh, thanks for having me here. Let’s engage.

Stephen Richer: And the book was published just about two months ago. So for any of you who are searching for it on Amazon, it’s available there as is the Kindle version. But yeah, let’s engage. Archon, where do you want to start

Archon Fung: With? Well, so let’s start right with the question of scandal. So in the book, Pepper, you and Tegu argue that corporate scandals are one of the few forces that can break through to political gridlock and public attention. And so I think I read your book as steering a middle course between two really different views of where democracy and American politics is. And on view is that democracy is working just fine and that the people get what they vote for. I think it was H.L. Mankin that said that the people get what they vote for in democracy and they sometimes get it good and hard. So that’s one view of democracy. Another view of American democracy is much less optimistic and says, “Well, it’s not really democratic at all because rich people, corporations, billionaires get what they want almost all the time and people lose.” And you’re kind of steering a middle course between those two views and it all hinges on scandal.

So what’s a key scandal in the book that really illustrates the opportunity that scandal provides for democracy?

Pepper Culpepper: Well, let me step back and say the reason we focus on corporate scandal is that we note in the book and we discuss how political scandals don’t have the same power to shock politics and produce accountability that they used to have. And in the book we talk about the Profumo scandal, which shook up the government and led to eventually to the fall of the government in the 1960s. And of course, I don’t really need to explain the Watergate scandal, but you had at the time of the Watergate scandal, Republicans like Howard Baker, they break with the Nixon administration when they see too much and they want to know what the president knew and when he knew it. That’s farcical today. Every scandal is now read through very partisan lenses where if there’s a scandal involving a politician of the right, then those on the right will fall in line and say, “This is a big … Us is being made about nothing.” And those on the left will absolutely lose their stuff about what’s been going on and vice versa.

So corporate scandals aren’t like that we argue. They continue to sort of … We have a story that cuts across both left and right in terms of how people respond because we argue, and we can talk more about this, there’s an underlying sense that these large corporations play a larger and larger role in our lives in particular, but not only these very large tech companies. And so the role of corporate scandals to illustrate, as you asked about, I would say, think about the Cambridge Analytica scandal around Facebook. So what happened there is it was revealed in 2018 that the data of 90 million users had been leaked by or had been taken from Facebook and used by a firm called Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm. It was a firm that advertised that it was behind the Brexit vote and behind the first Trump election against Hillary Clinton.

And so it was a very juicy scandal and it involved what we … And when I say we, I mean, many people around the world had been concerned about was that these large data companies were mishandling our data. And so what happened then, you had Mark Zuckerberg called before both Congress and the UK parliament. He answered Congress. He didn’t answer the UK parliament and had the European Union beginning to ramp up its own legislative goals. And so what happened in the United States is that Zuckerberg is called to Congress and he testifies for a while. And then at some moment, Oren Hatch, the Senator from Utah stands up and says, “Tell us how it is, Mr. Zuckerberg, that you can provide all these services for free.” And Facebook is the largest advertising company in the world with Google. He says, “Senator, we sell ads.” And that’s game over in terms of national legislation right there because all of the a program that had built up and was sort of pointed at the national level got ran into the fact that we have a bunch of very aged senators who don’t know how on both left and right, don’t know how the tech companies work.

And so Zuckerberg was able to dance around them and not answer their questions directly. But that’s not true at the state level. At the state level, you had a group that had previously sort of put on the ballot an initiative to pass a privacy law. They’d had great trouble. All of the big tech companies had lined up against them given $200,000 each to make sure that they could bury this amendment and these guys were thinking that they were going to get killed and suddenly Cambridge Analytica breaks out and these people who I hope we can talk about Alastair McTaggart was the leader of this group. He’s a property developer, a wealthy property developer in Northern California and he got to sort of be in his bonnet about privacy and began to push this. And so suddenly these guys are going to be able to pass their legislation and the tech companies are terrified and the politicians in Sacramento who basically do the bidding of the tech companies say, let’s cut a deal, let’s pass a law instead of passing your referendum.

And eventually they do cut a deal and he gets the law that he wants. But once that law passes, which is the first and still by far the most stringent privacy law in the nation in the United States, it immediately you get these tech companies introducing amendments, trying to undercut it, introducing interpretive steps, trying to undercut it. And so McTaggart two years later puts another initiative on the ballot. It’s 50 plus pages long. He still passes it with over 50% of the vote. And so California now has this very significant privacy regulation, which cannot be amended. It can only be strengthened. That was written into the legislation. In Europe at the same time, you’ve had moves towards the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, which regulate online safety and online competition. All of this is the product of Facebook becoming the face of concerns about the tech companies are overreaching and Facebook had become so unpopular that by 2021 with the American public, it’s even more unpopular than political parties and then Congress, the sort of least love animals in American politics.

So that’s a situation where you see on both sides of the Atlantic, a single scandal creating waves that leads to serious regulatory response in an area that was previously esoteric.

Stephen Richer: But you acknowledged that those serious legislative responses are imperfect, were unwound, sometimes unsuccessful in at least the United States Congress. So even the success stories have a little bit of an asterisk around them, right?

Pepper Culpepper: Absolutely. I mean, I’m a scholar of capitalism and democracy as Archon kindly noted at the outset. So I expect business is mostly going to win. And my co-author, Taeku Lee, he talks about the kind of wreckage of political parties in the United States now. And so we’re not expecting a perfect outcome. What we’re looking for, we’re writing this book about the state of democracy, which is what this podcast is about. And so what we’re saying is that you get responsiveness and you get laws passed that sort of impose requirements on these monstrously large tech companies that they wouldn’t have wanted. We’re not saying you get perfect regulation.

Stephen Richer: And are they a reflection of broad popular will or are they a reflection of injured particularly heightened interest groups?

Archon Fung: Yeah. Like Alistair McTaggart was somebody who was very concerned about the privacy issue and had been before the Cambridge Analytica scandal. So is it a narrow set of interests that kind of gets worked up or as Steven said, is it bigger than that?

Pepper Culpepper: Well, that’s a great question. It brings me to sort of when scandals take off and when they don’t and the idea of latent opinion. So you wouldn’t have got a privacy law in California without Alistair McTaggart. Alistair McTaggart is what we call a policy entrepreneur. These are the people who put in the hard yards. They solve some of the collective action problems that need to be solved to get actual legislation passed. Sometimes there are people like McTaggart who are outsiders who don’t really have any special role. They just decided something they’re really concerned about. Sometimes it’s insiders in the political system like Margarita Festere, the EU Competition Commissioner. So you get people on both sides who matter, but if they’re sort of trying to ride public opinion and the public doesn’t really care, they’re not going to get anywhere. McTaggart’s initiative wouldn’t have passed if he’s just a sort of narrow interest group and nobody’s really behind it.

I mean, in terms of interest group terms, he was way outgunned by the large tech companies. And so the one thing he had going for him besides tenacity was he had a public groundswell of people had been concerned for a while about tech companies. You’d had already the prism scandal and the Snowden leaks in the 2013 time. So this was already well known. People were concerned about it and this brings the issue to a head and you’ve got someone with a ready-made policy solution and they say, “You’ve got a problem, here’s the solution.”

Archon Fung: Yeah, good. Some of the pieces that need to be in place, you need policymakers, which you don’t have in the Oren Hatch case in Congress, not just Oren Hatch, but really anybody, which you do have in the EU with Margaret Vestiger and then maybe you have in California with McTaggart who’s been working with this, but then the policy people aren’t going to be able to make much progress without kind of an awakened public and then

Pepper Culpepper: They’ll need to awaken

Archon Fung: The public. Are there other pieces that need to be in place for regulation to happen?

Pepper Culpepper: So besides an awakened public and besides a set of policy entrepreneurs,

Archon Fung: Are those the two main pieces?

Pepper Culpepper: I think those are the two. Scandals are the sort of creation of the first and they’re most resonant where there’s deep latent opinion and then they can sit out there like a dish that never gets delivered by a waiter if no one is ordering it. Some policy entrepreneur is not picking it up. So it’s a very contingent theory, which is we think how reality works.

Stephen Richer: Okay. So we’re already getting some comments in the chat regarding, I think both the tech companies and how they can be maybe restrained and how this will play out in AI. But before we get to those more specific questions, like how durable is this coalition that effectuates public policy change when a scandal happens? Does that coalition form for three months, for six months, or for six years? Because so many of the victories that are generational in the United States require more than just I think a momentary outrage. So do you have to have sort of repeated reminders of this scandal? Like not BP doesn’t just have one oil spill, but like we have at least a small oil spill every six months.

Pepper Culpepper: So that’s a great point, Steven. And we confronted at the end of the book. So we talk about these scandals, but really the book is about latent opinion. And the question is, what’s going on with public opinion and what does it look like a sort of more durable coalition that could change our politics both in the United States in Europe as well that could change it and sort of lead to a kind of durable pushback that is widely popular across left and right against the role of large corporations and sort of placing some limits not on their innovation but on their ability to influence politics because they’re not particularly good at politics. They’re really good at innovation when they work on that. And we don’t want to constrain their doing that, but because they think they’re good at one thing and therefore they’re good at another thing.
And therefore if you like Bill Gates on the left or George Soros on the left or Elon Musk on the right will say, “Yeah, well, maybe I’ll just go in and influence politics and do the things I want to do. ” And then we get back to Archon’s question about the Uber driver and what happened to his voice.

Archon Fung: Right. I wanted to understand, so there’s right now a big difference between technology regulation, whether it’s social media or AI, especially AI, but also social media in Europe and the United States with Europe, in my view, having much more articulated regulatory policy. So, in my head, that was because of good bureaucrats and a lot of them in Europe, but then you’re saying, “No, no, that’s not enough. You also need scandal.” Cambridge Analytica was a while ago, that was at the kind of peak of the social media era way before AI, but then you get the AIEU Act and many other things. So convince me that good bureaucrats, good European bureaucrats are not enough in the European context, that you need scandal which precipitates some bigger shift in public opinion.

Pepper Culpepper: Look, Archon, like you, I teach at a school of government and so I believe that good bureaucrats are really important and we have an argument about state capacity and how you have to rebuild state capacity and trust in government, which maybe we can talk about a little later. But I mean alone, this is not really going to make the difference. And so if you look at EU AI regulation, would you say that it’s really influencing what’s going on with AI in the world right now? Because people in the EU wouldn’t say that. And certainly, people in Britain and the United States would not say that. They’re saying that the most important regulator in the world right now is Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, because he’s the only one who’s slightly interested in having some guardrails. And so I think the Europeans recognize that they’re able to pass this AI legislation, but there’s going to have to be a sort of cooperation across countries, particularly the countries that are most implicated in the frontier models on AI, which is to say the United States and China.

Archon Fung: And so for that you need scandal or some sort of-

Pepper Culpepper: You need a sort of strong cross-national public opinion. It doesn’t have to be scandal, but scandal is one way to do that. Yes.

Stephen Richer: So can I challenge the premise on two grounds if I may? So the first is that you’re not applying this scandal model to politics because you say in our hyper partisan society, people are going to view the Lewinsky scandal as if you’re a Democrat, well, who cares? Clinton was a good president and the economy was good. If you’re a Republican, this is an outrage and off with his head. But are we getting there in terms of business? You mentioned the analog of Soros and Musk. There’s probably a lot of people who for political partisanship reasons will just say, “Whatever happens to a Soros company is probably as not as big a deal as you might think. ” And maybe some people on the right would say, “Hey, if there was a scandal with Tesla, then whatever, he’s sort of our guy.” And then the other premise that I want to challenge or ask about is, do we even have consensus opinion at all in terms of our media environment today?

Pepper Culpepper: Yeah, two big questions. Two big ones. There’s no question that once you get hyper partisan CEOs, they come to be seen as creatures of the left or creatures of the right. And so it’s not even clear to me that a scandal around Tesla or SpaceX would have the same effects because Musk is seen in such a partisan light in the United States and in Europe, because of course he’s been a big intervener in the public space in Europe talking about the need to have supporting what are considered far right parties in Europe. So we write about that through FTX and the scandal of FTX, where Sam Bankman-Fried was perceived as correctly, he was the second largest donor to the Democrats in the 2022 cycle as someone who’s associated with the left trying to be a figure on the left. And so therefore the press coverage, which is going to get to your second question around him was completely different in the press of the left, your CNN and your New York Times than it was in your press to the right, the Wall Street Journal or Fox News.

CNN and the New York Times are saying, “Ah, it’s been a wild west and FTX shows us that we’ve got to have regulation.” And over on the Wall Street Journal, they’re like, “Look, this is as old as original sin. This is just a fraudster. He’s immoral. And by the way, he’s a democratic donor.” So you got two different stories and the American public is still divided on this issue because of the way FTX played out in a very partisan light. So I agree that with your very partisan media, it’s harder to get cut through, but I would throw back at you that look at the coverage of the Epstein files and you’re seeing there an issue that cuts through in much the way that corporate scandals do where the left is concerned about one thing, the right is concerned about another, but they’re jointly sickened by what’s going on with the leads and what’s revealed in the Epstein files. And so I don’t think we’re completely gone in any of the given policies that we’re discussing, and particularly in the United States, we’re hyper-polarized, but things can cut through. And of course, our theory depends on that being right.

Stephen Richer: And Frank Miller just made that point in the comments he pointed to the Epstein scandal as one thing that did somehow in this world in 2026 managed to bring together a lot of Democrats and a lot of Republicans in the United States, both of whom say, “We’ve got a problem here.” Now, whether or not that’s led to any reform, I guess we’ll see.

Pepper Culpepper: I think we’re not through the Epstein files yet. I think that’s something we’ll sort of see the end of a while later.

Archon Fung: Yeah. The Epstein files may … I don’t know whether it’s an exception, but these scandals, they just depend on how they’re politicized. So one feature of the Epstein files was that there was a significant part of the Republican and MAGA base that was very, very concerned with them. Then on the left, you don’t have to explain anything once President Trump starts saying, “We’re not going to release the files. There’s nothing in them.”

Pepper Culpepper: Just so case about the Epstein files, there’s a broad set of opinion that’s concerned about things. I mean, so we’re going to talk in a minute about populism. People are really upset in many countries about what’s going on with elites and the elite cozy deal, which is perceived as something that’s shared across left and right. And so there is the possibility to cut across left and right with a variety of anti-elite appeals. And I think that’s what populism is about. So Epstein speaks very much directly to that, but so do these things going wrong at these big corporations where these guys control the world and yet it’s not enough. They’ve got to control Mars II.

Archon Fung: Right. And so, David Kyler asks about AI, which may be one of those right now being framed as one of those issues that is about elitism rather than left and right. And David asks, can popular opposition to big tech be diverted to majority political support for precautionary policy that reliably scrutinizes AI or some other, I would add some other regulatory policy, what would it take to … Is popular opposition to big tech latent opinion in your view right now or has it been mobilized? Where does it fit on this kind of scandal timeline?

Pepper Culpepper: You don’t need to mobilize it. When you actually take surveys in the United States, you’ll find that a large majority, slightly more Democrats than Republicans, but both by broad majority Republicans and Democrats, they want safeguards on AI. And of course, that’s why you’re starting to get a push at the state level. Even with some Republican lawmakers where President Trump is telling them not to do that, they still have a voting base that actively is concerned about AI and any number of dimensions. But how you regulate AI, I’m teaching in a school of government, we’re trying to teach how you regulate AI. It’s hard. And so we don’t yet have a clear set of solutions for what AI regulation is going to look like. I mean, what is the EU AI Act? It’s not a clear set of rules that we can easily export. They’re not a clear set of guardrails.

So I spend a lot of my time talking to, because people who read the book think, “Yeah, I want to be a policy entrepreneur in AI.” And I think that’s exactly the area to be thinking about because something’s going to happen around AI, whether it’s the job apocalypse or whether it’s a sort of economic crash based on they’re not actually delivering all of this CapEx, whether it’s a sort of old-fashioned financial crisis that stems from that, or whether it’s 13 hospitals can’t run because the AI has been hacked by someone using mythos. Any of these could go wrong and could redound into politics. And so policy entrepreneurs in the AI space need to be ready.

Archon Fung: Yeah. So just picking up off of what you said about regulating AI being hard, David, so for people who don’t follow regulation, the precautionary principle is an idea in some European regulatory policy that you should be very careful about innovation and you shouldn’t really accept an innovation unless you’re pretty clear that it’s going to do much more good than harm. That is, you should be precautionary, especially about the harm. That’s never really been a US regulatory approach in any domain and I think it’s unlikely to be very unlikely to be in AI. And right now it’s not even the European approach with regard to AI. The European approach is much more risk-based among other things. Yeah. Steven, you’re about to jump in.

Stephen Richer: Well, so on, we already have had some AI scandals. We’ve had AI convince people to commit suicide and so I sort of wonder- And maybe

Archon Fung: Commit mass shootings allegedly.

Stephen Richer: Yeah. So I wonder what that would look like, whether it have to be AI, I don’t know, taking over a company and somehow weaponizing it against other companies or against the American public. I sort of wonder, I think our appetite for scandal, what scandal is, the bar keeps getting raised, but my concern is that governing based off of scandal leads to bad public policy. And I came into politics and into finance in the wake of the Enron scandal, which led to Sarbanes-Oxley, which in my assessment was not the best piece of legislation. And then also Woody Campbell puts in the chat is when we talk about some things that probably have the potential to do enormous good for society, and here I think of autonomous vehicles, which could reduce the number of fatalities, could reduce the amount of wasted time, drunk, dunk driving deaths. But if you have on autonomous vehicle that’s captured on social media going the wrong way and it hits somebody, then do we design public policy that is just reactive to the moment rather than being good public policy?
And so I guess I want to get your thought Thoughts on that concern?

Archon Fung: Yeah. Scandal and populism pushing the regulatory needle too far in the wrong way.

Stephen Richer: Rather than sort of a cold collected logical policymaking-

Archon Fung: Evidence-based policy analysis.

Pepper Culpepper: Well, I mean, Steven, the sort of people of the United States and of the United Kingdom of France and of Germany have looked at the last 30 years of evidence-based policymaking from the elite and they say, “This deal stinks.” And so I think we have to acknowledge the moment that we’re in where the people on this call are in a situation where they’ve benefited, but many people feel like they haven’t benefited from the deals of the last 30 years, which we’re based on good evidence. We’re going to compensate the losers. The compensation somehow doesn’t ever happen or doesn’t actually work. Oh gosh, we made a mistake on that. And people have got angrier and angrier about that very thing. And so they’re looking for some way for policy to be made. And I’m ultimately thinking what matters for democracy is getting public voices back in that are disillusioned with the politics that we have.
And so I believe in good policy too. And I believe that there’s a role for independent regulators sometimes as the way to make a good policy that takes it out of the sort of hot public eye and says, “Wait a minute, we need to think in a more dispassionate way about that. ” I’m totally in favor of that. But I’ve also spent a lot of time studying how business groups always seem to have the evidence that favors their point of view and they get listened to more often and that evidence gets baked into policy more often. I think that you get widespread disaffection with a policy that’s evidence-based, but it’s only one guy’s evidence that’s always getting in there. So I think we’ve got to come to a new place where, as you’ll know from reading the book, we harken back to the progressive movement in the United States.

As you know, that followed on a series of populist revolts in the US, which were based on globalization of the time, the sort of exploitation of a small group of elites who got very rich running the trusts and on the backs of everyone else. And of course, they had baked that into politics such that they control politics in one state after another. The private initiative in California is in fact a progressive reform to get around the capture of the parties in the Sacramento State legislature. So getting back to that, that was an age also of bringing science into government. So I think once you get democratic control reasserted, we can build a space to build a little more trust in government to allow experts to have the role that they need to have in politics, but that’s not going to be seen as also a biased voice that’s not helping the little guy.

Stephen Richer: I don’t know if I agree as far as the facts, but I certainly agree as far as the sentiment that the sterile public policymaking that’s maybe reflected in somebody like Mitt Romney now has extreme sourness from both the left as represented by sort of the Bernie AOC world and the right. I think MAGA is in no small part sort of a dissatisfaction with that type of public policy making and reflects a sort of broad moral outrage.

Archon Fung: Yeah. This kind of goes to Woody’s question about going too far on the Waymo regulation and I think self-driving cars are already at a level where they’re quite a bit safer than human drivers kind of in the aggregate. So I guess I’ve been playing with this thought that you can have evidence-based policy expertise, which Pepper, I agree as you know, for the last 30 years has been pretty good for the laptop class and not so good if you’re not in the laptop class. And that’s been most of sensible policymaking expertise. And then you get this populist revolt and populist energy and where does that go? And I think unless you have kind of policymakers and politicians who are pretty far down the road, maybe like Alison McTaggart, in offering an alternative to the evidence-based policymaking that, oh, so lucky for the laptop class happens to be very good for the laptop class, that populist energy is going to go in a pretty bad direction.
And I think we’ve been seeing that in many places in Europe, maybe I would argue in the second term Trump administration. And then I’m not enough of a New Deal historian to know, not close to enough, but what would it have been like? Where would that populist energy have gone if you didn’t have Roosevelt and a bunch of policymakers who were responsive and might have gone in quite a different and much darker direction. And so I guess I’m playing with this idea that the populist energy to some extent, at least right now, is there and very, very powerful. And then the question is where does that go? Does it go into a pretty destructive kind of politics that’s channeled by an exclusionary populism or does it go into something more sensible? And the big version of Woody’s question is, does it go into a direction that can capture the innovation of companies like Waymo without kind of destroying what they create?

Pepper Culpepper: So, I think it can go either way. We’re definitely not saying that things are going to happen the way that we hope that they will happen. What we’re trying to say is that there is what we call a good populous alternative. So let me just kind of briefly spell out the work that we talked about in our Journal of Democracy articles. So when we talk about good populism, some of the listeners will think, well, that’s just sort of left populism because they always think it’s good and that’s not right. So we’re talking about good-

Archon Fung: It’s an easy way to read the article, but not the right way to read the article.

Pepper Culpepper: Yeah. So I mean, we think that sort of Maduro in Venezuela is the same kind of problem as Orban in Hungary. That is democracy undermining populism is bad populism. And what we’re talking about is why the sort of pushback against large companies and against billionaires, because very much the public opinion kind of fuses those two things and it’s nice to have faces to put with those companies that are big behemoths. That can sort of be a way for populism to divide the people into we the people, which of course populism is always the moralized distinction between the people and the elites and who are the elites in the good populist version? They’re the billionaires in the big companies. And if you divide populism that way, which we’ve done some sort of public opinion research, people who tend to agree with the system is rigged, elites only got there because of an unfair deal and elites don’t understand the problems I’m facing, those kind of economic unfairness people are not just on the left.

They’re slightly more on the left than on the right, but they’re on both the left and the right. And they tend to be very positive towards marginalized groups, whether they’re immigrants, whether they’re blacks, whether they’re Jews, they’re very negative towards two groups, billionaires and large corporations, but they’re not negative towards small corporations. They’re not anti-capitalists. So you might think this is a sort of tear down capitalism story. It’s not. Capitalism is about competition. Big companies squash competition. Whereas something we see in many of the kind of radical right parties, especially in Europe right now, but also in parts of the Republican Party in the United States is a sort of anti-immigrant political unfairness. The part that says you can’t trust what the mainstream media says, elections don’t matter, and there’s a small and secretive group of people that sort of run the system. Belief in that sort of political unfairness tends to be associated with much more with negative feelings towards these groups, towards immigrants, blacks, Jews.

These are our co-citizens. And that’s going to make democracy fundamentally non-workable because if you’re not believing in your fellow citizens, you’re not going to believe in giving them an equal right, this sort of voice for the Uber driver that Archon talked about as well as Bill Gates’ voice. So we think there’s some empirical warrant to think that a little more focus on economic unfairness, which is not, I should say, the same as redistribution. It is about what does a fair rules of the game look like? I think that can change the system, but here we have to have a different, if you like, supply from political parties. And it’s about what emerges from political parties and political competition that structures this into politics because scandal-driven politics will give us the occasional economic regulation and it’s how people cry out against an unfair system, but it’s not going to give us a program.

Stephen Richer: My question always to people who voice support of populism and say populism can be channeled for good populism is, isn’t this just the ring of power in Lord of the Rings where you might take it for good ambitions, but ultimately it corrupts you.

And in your book, you invoked the progressive era in the United States and yeah, William Jennings Bryant is known for some of his economic reforms, but he was also a virulent racist and that was very much part of the coalition. And I guess I would just say, who are the good populists who have sustained this over a period of time without descending into sort of a lot of the ugly things that we know about the many regimes that we can named? You said Orban, you said Maduro, we can also name 20 others right now. And so it just seems like we have lots of examples of bad populism and I can’t think of the examples of good populism. And so that makes me very scary about scared to grab onto populism.

Archon Fung: Well, Pepper’s a huge Lord of the Rings fan, so he’s well positioned to answer this question.

Pepper Culpepper: Gosh, well, I mean, I could go in so many ways into the Elvin rings as opposed to the Ring of Power, but I won’t go that way because the listeners may just not care. And indeed, Tego and I are already thinking about a next book and we think about the next book as the two towers, so there may be actually three to come. So no, it’s a great question. So we really wrote this book in what we think of as my co-author coined this term, a sort of possibilist sense of political science rather than a probabilist sentence. When we look at the temptations of seizing popular anger and saying, “Woo, that makes me powerful and I really like being powerful.” And then somewhere along the way, you start being less concerned about democracy. And I think it’s the job of people like us to write about that to draw people’s attention to all of the deficits that it can have.

But I think at the same time to say that anger-driven politics never results in good outcomes is an overstatement. I think we’ve had righteous outrage has led to some good outcomes. I would point to the US Civil Rights Movement where you mobilize a large set of people who were really outraged, who endured some terrible things, but who eventually spoke to the broad sort of set of beliefs in the United States, “This is not right. This can’t be right what we’re going to do and we’re going to get some leaders who’ll do it. ” Lyndon Johnson is a pretty flawed individual, but nevertheless, he brought through the Civil Rights Act. And so I think we’ve got to sort of count on some flawed individuals who might have some good ideas that bring together some coalitions that speak to this outrage and that bring a state that can temper its worst excesses because we can’t always have outrage.

I mean, so we quote at one point Steve Macedo and Jenny Mansbridge who say that populism is democracy’s way of saying to elites, listen harder. And that’s the moment we think we’re in, but we don’t think it’s a stable equilibrium. I think that you guys are right if we sort of live in an era where democracy is not responding repeatedly to what people want, people are eventually going to give up on democracy, but we think there is a way through that channels that populism.

Archon Fung: So Steven, the article in Journal of Democracy is that you can distinguish between one kind of populist who focuses on the corruption of the economic system, or I’m sorry, of the political system and that goes with the racism, the anti-immigration, the antisemitism in the survey polls and another kind of populist who focuses on economic unfairness and they’re hostile to billionaires and economic elites, but pretty friendly towards small business. In your experience and view, can you distinguish between people who are pissed off at the corruption of the political system on one hand and people who are upset and pissed off about economic unfairness on the other, or do they come together?

Stephen Richer: Is this for me or for Pepper?

Archon Fung: Or both. I mean, in my mind, I think about the Epstein Files, that’s both Fuse, right? You can’t really split that Adam easily.

Pepper Culpepper: I heard him say Steven, so he knows-

Archon Fung: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I think you probably know more populists than I am.

Stephen Richer: My reaction to that is you’re still opposed to or demonizing a class of people, not facing any scene that they did the specific thing that they did wrong, that individual, but for merely being part of a class. And you can say about wealth that it’s immutable class unlike race, but I guess I still view that as not a good thing. Now, whether or not those types of movements, I don’t know. I think some people would look at the modern day populist left in the United States and say it’s turned somewhat antisemitic. And I think that there would also be some people who say it actually has some maybe sort of hostility to straight white men. That’s certainly what the pushback against wokeness is about, but I haven’t given that sufficient thought, but that’s my off the cuff answer.

Pepper Culpepper: Interesting.

Archon Fung: Yeah.

Pepper Culpepper: My only gloss is that I think Steven is right that we shouldn’t demonize people by belonging to a group, but I actually think, I mean, I think we have some empirical reason to believe that the people who are holding up signs saying they want you to hate immigrants so you don’t hate billionaires is a deep statement about where we are in politics right now in the United States and elsewhere. And I mean, I presented this work to some billionaires and to some centimillionaires. They don’t love it, but they always say, “I’m with you about the large companies. The large companies are terrible. What’s wrong with the billionaires?” And so that sort of distinction is, my response is people certainly have, when they take big risks and they deliver big rewards to society, they should be rewarded, but they also need to pay back and I think they have very big shoulders.

And I think if you look at public opinion right now, there’s no distinction between what people think about billionaires and what they think about large corporations and the symbolism of wrapping billionaires and large corporations back into something that’s governed by democracy is important enough that these men and women with big shoulders can afford to be a little bit villainized if it brings democracy back together, which I think is what we’re talking about.

Archon Fung: Yeah. Interesting. Blue Prairie Dog raises an interesting kind of question and he says, “So our best hope is to wait for Messiah to emerge.” And I read that as in the populism literature, it’s really hard to talk about populism without a populist leader. And indeed, as you know, a bunch of the literature is about the style in which that leader communicates and mobilizes, but you guys don’t really talk about a populist leader, you talk about populist sentiments. So what about the Messiah question and the leader question since in so much of how other people talk about populism, the leader part is so important.

Pepper Culpepper: Yeah. So we haven’t done as much work on that. If I were to say, who are the leaders? I would say, okay, well, Graham Platner is a potential leader. James Talarico is a potential leader. Zoran Mamdani is a potential leader. These are all versions of what we see as good populism. And those may all be individuals who turn out not to be leaders and I’m not trying to sort of nominate a leader, but you see animating their campaigns in very different contexts, right Maine, New York and Texas, a set of concerns that we think cut broadly that have to be tailored to an individual political context. Well, that’s what good politicians do. And so when I talked earlier about the supply that political parties are bringing, political parties ultimately produce good political leaders. Well, they produce some bad political leaders sometimes, but they’re elite reproduction machines.

And so they need to cough up some good leaders. And I think you’re starting to get, because the Democrats are doing so badly, the Democrats are finally sort of throwing up some of these individuals who are really interested. I mean, Janet Mills in the old days wouldn’t have given up against Graham Platner, but she’s got no chance nowadays. And so she is. She’s doing the Tao. And I think that’s how you’re going to get leaders who I think could be … The Messiah is a strong word of Blue Prairie Dog, but certainly it can bring people together, form unlikely coalitions and then as Archon said and Steven said, hold them together long enough to actually put a policy program in place, which is really what you need to do. And I think you kind of need to reorient politics so that the left and the right are agreeing on certain things while competing over other things.

Stephen Richer: Okay. So for my last question, since it’s 2026 and since the Ash Center is doing a lot to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States and cribbing off of the academic portal’s question in the chat, was the American Revolution, does the American Revolution fit this model that you’re talking about? Was it an outrage that led to a whole Declaration of Independence and a few years later, United States Constitution?

Pepper Culpepper: So that’s a big question and that’s certainly not the way I read Hamilton when I go to see it. The story that I get is a set of righteous outrage together with a set of outrageous practices of which I’m thinking obviously of slavery as a way to hold together a coalition to throw people out. So I think that the American Revolution has promise and problems as a model, but I think what you do see there is it seemed like a long shot at the time. And so I think when we look back on this period, I’m betting that this period is going to be one that’s productive and not sort of the end of democracy, but that does depend on people like George Washington and indeed Thomas Jefferson coming forward flawed as they are and sort of saying, “Here’s what we believe and here’s how we knit together a hard coalition that can win even if every member of the coalition doesn’t believe things that we all love.”

Archon Fung: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. We had a field trip to the Massachusetts Historical Society last week and they actually have drafts of the Declaration of Independence there. And so one of Jefferson’s earlier drafts actually had an abolition clause, a clause not quite abolition, but anti-slavery clause in it, even though of course he famously owned slaves, was an enslaver. And I think it was maybe Adams that somebody made him scratch it out. So that clause is not in the declaration. But as you say, it’s a debate as imperfect as it is and hopefully leads to a good place. My last question is in what should we do? What do you think is the one or two most important things to do in this moment of populist anger and the potential for more scandals that open the window for reform? The beginning of your book opens with muckraking as really important, Upton Sinclair and others bringing to light corporate scandals of the day.

So is it reporting? Is it mobilization? Is it something else? What’s the one first thing that you would encourage people to do and to think about and to support?

Pepper Culpepper: I don’t think there is a first thing, but I think there are a bunch of things and I guess that I would point to a few. First of all, Archon knows that my oldest daughter is a journalist and I think that the role of journalism in this story should not be understated. We have a completely broken media sphere, not merely because of politics, but because an economic model of journalism isn’t yet functioning. We’re not figuring out, especially at the local level, how to sort of keep an eye on power and that’s something that needs to be done. So thinking about how you can do something to help there. There are also lots of problems that we don’t know how to solve that people broadly agree on. There was this deliberation in Bowling Green, Kentucky that was led by a group within Google that sort of found a lot of common-sense solutions that people could agree on.

And I think seeing those solutions, talking to your neighbors, figuring out how we actually solve problems is a much more productive way than criticizing what the elites are doing. I think that the people who do that and who are really tenacious about it are the potential policy entrepreneurs. But I think we can all do that and then our solutions may get passed on or we may be the ones who carry them on. But try an obsession besides just doomscrolling. Try thinking about how you can actually solve a problem because who knows a scandal may come along and you could be able to really solve it the way Alistair McTaggart did.

Stephen Richer: Yeah. So I want everyone to note that Professor Culpepper answered these last two questions with optimism and that’s how the book ends as well. So many of the people that we bring onto this show are doomsday sayers as are occasionally-

Archon Fung: And wometimes we are, but even though we try not to be.

Stephen Richer: Yeah. And so if you’re looking for a little bit of a pick me up, check out some of the work by Professor Colpepper. Again, the book is called “Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy,” Professor Culpepper with his co-author, Professor Lee is published by the Bloomsbury Continuum. We really appreciate you tuning in from across the Atlantic and joining us for an hour and thanks to everyone who watched and was online as well. We appreciate your questions. Archon, take us home.

Archon Fung: So we’ll be back next week, same time, Tuesday at 12:15 Eastern on the live stream. And you can always catch our show on YouTube and on your favorite podcast platforms. If you’re training for your long run to be the third human being to break the two-minute marathon, listen to us on-

Pepper Culpepper: It’s two hours later. We’re not the two minutes yet, sorry.

Archon Fung: Oh, two hours. Sorry, two hours. The two-hour marathon. And then special thanks to everyone on the Terms of Engagement production team, who’s Colette, Courtney, Evelyn, and of course Ralph. Have a great day, everyone. Thanks for tuning in.

Archon Fung: Thank you for listening to Terms of Engagement. Email us your questions, suggestions, or thoughts for future episodes. You can find an email address in the show notes below. See you next time.