So I’ve noticed that a lot of people adore Heather Cox Richardson as their politics whisperer, and I’ve wondered what the fuss was about. And so [I recently watched] a video she posted in the wake of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America] wins in New York. She said it was a "40-minute grad seminar to stem the tide of misunderstanding about whether the Mamdani [winning] picks are communists." So the vibe was partly to chastise right wing influencers for their hysteria [and] partly to reassure centrist Democrats that things are still the same.
I haven’t watched much of her content or read her books which I’m sure are more nuanced. But I think it’s fair to take this primer video as a solid sample of what she wants to communicate about the definitions of capitalism, communism, fascism, and socialism to her one million plus YouTube subscribers.
So she said that she wanted to describe these systems as economic systems first. So if I hear an intention like that, I’ve got a way of quickly measuring where the person is coming from and whose interests they’re possibly serving. You just copy the transcript from YouTube, paste it into any document, and run some word searches.
Here are the words she never utters in a talk about economy: “capital,” “labor,” “manufacturing,” “union,” “strikes,” “wages,” “appropriation,” “expropriation,” “exploitation,” “surplus,” “inequality,” “struggle,” “reform,” “taxation,” “redistribution,” “socialized,” and “revolution.”
In other words, she’s not talking about economy at all. The closest she comes to defining capitalism is as a system in which we tend to honor the idea of private enterprise and private property. No capital as a social relation; no idea of money that expands through capturing labor powewr. If you listen carefully to this lecture, you’ll come away thinking that liberal democracy comes from American elites deciding altogether on a sensible regulatory regime and not through labor violence or ruling class fear of revolution that forced the New Deal and every other gain like blood from a stone.
So based on this alone, I’d humbly offer that if you care about how power works, how capitalism works; if you care about modern imperialism and neocolonialism; if you care about working people, inequality, and the perpetual love affair between capitalists and fascists, and how liberal democracies basically play the wedding march for them down the aisle of history, Richardson may not help you with any of that because these ideas are actively suppressed by the liberal point of view she comes from but which she also presents – and many other preople take – as rational, neutral, correcting misunderstandings. She's just calling balls and strikes from her fair position, taking the view from nowhere.
And I get why people love her. I lived in New England for a bunch of years, and I’m sure she is – or could be – a kind and gracious neighbor, a professor you really liked; someone you feel warm about. But as a Facebook historian, she appears to be doing full time propaganda for the legacy Democrats. And it’s not going to help anyone understand how to fight fascism. It’s really superficial.
Related Off-site Links:
We Need to Rein In the Craziness – Heather Cox Richardson (YouTube, June 25, 2026).
Heather Cox Richardson, Class, and the Failure of the Liberal Imagination – Yasmin Nair (YasminNair.com, February 24, 2026).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Capitalism on Trial
• R.I.P. Neoclassical Economics
• John le Carré’s Dark Suspicions
• Heather Cox Richardson: It’s Up to Us to Prove That Democracy Is Still a Viable Form of Government
• Heather Cox Richardson on the 4th Anniversary of the “Unite the Right” Rally in Charlotteville, VA
• Heather Cox Richardson on Combating the Republican Party’s “Rigging of the System”
• Heather Cox Richardson on the Origin of the American Obsession with “Socialism”
• Heather Cox Richardson on the Unravelling of President Trump
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