The Gilded Age Is Back

For years now the blog has maintained that today's Republican Party has been pushing to launch a new Gilded Age market by governmental policies that favor the very wealthy and push a reverse Robin Hood agenda where the poor and middle class are robbed to give to the very rich. A piece in Politico Magazine looks at the reality that this new Gilded Age with huge wealth disparities and attacks on lower economic classes, including the social safety net that benefit millions of Americans are relentless.   To fund tax cuts for the already obscenely wealthy, the Felon and the GOP are working to slash Medicaid, repeal safety regulations that protect workers and bar child labor, and are threatening Medicare and Social Security - some predicting Social Security payments are in jeopardy of interruption - and otherwise kicking millions to the gutter. Environmentally, the Felon has ordered that national forests be cut for timber (likely to make up for lost imported from Canada due to tariffs) and pushing tariffs that will raise prices for average American consumers.  The piece looks at the Gilded Age of the late 1800's and compares the abuses to what we are witnessing now.  On a brighter note, the piece warns the GOP and the Felon of the backlash that all of this may trigger (not soon enough in my view).  Here are highlights:

At his second inauguration, as President Donald Trump promised to usher America into a new “golden age,” he was surrounded in the Capitol Rotunda by a handful of tech billionaires whose companies account for roughly one-fifth of the market cap of U.S. public equities. It was a not-so-subtle sign that the second Trump administration will be staffed, advised and led by titans of wealth. Which means that Trump’s golden age looks an awful lot like a new Gilded Age.

The Gilded Age was the era in the late 19th century when business and industry dominated American life as never before or since. It was a period of unprecedented economic growth and technological progress, but also of economic consolidation and growing wealth inequality. Titans of industry enjoyed enormous control over political institutions, while everyday Americans buckled under the strain of change. As the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened, political culture ultimately grew coarse — and violent.

Then as now, growing income and wealth inequality opened a rift in American society, with a small group of elites amassing substantial power and influence. In the Gilded Age, industrial magnates like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie dominated public life, while today, tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos hold sway. Political corruption and patronage were rampant then, presaging concerns over corporate influence in politics now. Both periods witnessed intense political polarization and social upheaval, reflecting deep divisions within American society.

Despite Trump’s mass appeal among white working-class voters — and the fact that he performed better with working-class voters of other races than ever before — his coziness with billionaires like Musk and his pursuit of an economic agenda that focuses on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans both suggest that his presidency will be more of a boon to modern-day tycoons than the average working person. That could mean that the coming of America’s second Gilded Age carries with it a warning for the GOP. By the 1890s, the pendulum had swung so hard in the direction of wealth and industry that America’s brittle social compact threatened to come undone. In response to the extremes of the Gilded Age, a wave of progressive reform swept the nation from the 1890s to the 1910s, fundamentally reordering the social compact between citizens and their government. Should Trump and his allies make good on their promise to refashion America in ways that prove widely unpopular, the counter-revolution they set in place could well be the defining trope of the 2030s and beyond.

On the state and local levels, corruption was equally rampant, though nowhere was more brazen than New York City, where William M. Tweed, the boss of the Tammany Hall Democratic organization, made an art form of public graft and fraud. Through the good offices of Thomas Nast, the staff cartoonist at Harper’s Weekly, Tweed became an emblem for the excesses of the new age.

The [post Civil War] boom proved lucrative to the small number of men who controlled access to local resources, but much less profitable for the hundreds of thousands of workers who supplied the muscle. Rarely did it occur to business and political elites that they had not prospered strictly on their own talent and merit alone. And they didn’t just owe it to workers; they also owed it to the government itself, which lavished moguls with subsidies and contracts. Tycoons like Leland Stanford and Collis Huntington benefited immensely from federal land grants and government-backed bonds that funded the construction of transcontinental railways. Industrialists and financiers like Carnegie and J.P. Morgan profited from lucrative war-time contracts supplying steel, arms and financial services to the Union government.

That story is beginning to repeat itself today. Many of the tech CEOs close to Trump and his orbit are also the beneficiaries of major government largesse. Thiel’s Palantir and Bezos’ AWS, which contracts with U.S. government agencies, defense organizations and intelligence services, rely heavily on taxpayer dollars and public infrastructure. According to new reporting in the Washington Post, Musk’s various companies have “received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, often at critical moments.” And just over a month into Trump’s term, the potential conflicts of interest arising from the tech mogul’s coziness with the administration are already extending beyond the hypothetical: . . . .

In addition to federal contracts and subsidies, the capitalist powers of the Gilded Age also benefited from government allocation of resources. . . . .The end result was a massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of companies. By the turn of the century, roughly 300 corporations controlled two-fifths of all U.S. manufacturing. And that concentration spilled over into politics.

During the Gilded Age, public life was heavily influenced by wealthy industrialists and financiers who represented powerful corporate interests. The U.S. Senate was a perfect embodiment of this reality, with members often assigned monikers that reflected their economic allegiances, such as the “Senator from Standard Oil” or the “Senator from the Railroads.” . . . . . Many of these senators had interwoven financial interests and personal connections, often sitting on the boards of the very companies they legislated on. Their dominance led to the Senate being perceived as a “millionaires’ club,” where corporate interests took precedence over public welfare, fostering an era of rampant corruption and economic inequality.

McKinley’s election as president in 1896 epitomized the growing influence of monied interests in Gilded Age America, as his victory was largely fueled by an unprecedented influx of corporate and industrialist support. . . . . His presidency, in turn, reflected the interests of his benefactors, as he promoted pro-business policies, high tariffs and a gold standard that favored banking and industrial elites over working-class Americans.

Republicans and their industrial allies were right to worry about a populist backlash. The Gilded Age was marked by intense labor unrest, as rapid industrialization led to dangerous working conditions, declining wages and widespread exploitation. . . . . The country seemed as though it were falling into a state of permanent class warfare. When thousands of miners brought operations in the anthracite coal region to a virtual standstill in 1875, Republican newspapers railed against them, deeming them “enemies of society” who believed that “the world owes them a living.” The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 proved especially bloody.

From Washington, President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the military to break the strike, which it did with overwhelming force, reopening clogged rail lines, busting up union meetings and escorting strikebreakers through the picket line. . . . . It was a pattern that persisted into the 1890s.

These violent conflicts underscored the deep tensions between labor and capital, as industrialists and the government often worked together to crush worker uprisings, prioritizing economic growth and corporate power over the rights and safety of the working class.

Yet much like today, populist anger didn’t always translate into a unified political response. While many small farmers and working-class people in the Gilded Age supported the Democratic Party, factors like ethnicity, geography, partisan loyalty and religion divided the broader working class.

Today, Trump’s GOP has won over many working-class voters. The question that should keep him up at night is whether the excesses of a Second Gilded Age could disrupt that coalition, generating a more unified working-class backlash against him — just as the Progressive Era remade politics following the first Gilded Age.

The parallels between Gilded Age politics and society, and today, are striking. As was the case then, billionaires and industry leaders exert significant influence over policy and governance. Just as McKinley’s presidency was shaped by business moguls like Hanna, Trump’s administration has seen varying levels of support from wealthy figures such as tech investor Peter Thiel, oil magnate Harold Hamm, Musk, Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Like the Gilded Age GOP, Trump and his party promote policies favoring Big Business, including tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of industries and opposition to labor protections.

And just as labor unrest and economic inequality sparked upheaval in the late 19th century, growing discontent among working-class Americans today — facing stagnant wages, high corporate profits and declining labor rights — suggests that the conflicts of the Gilded Age are resurfacing in modern form.

Perhaps the most shocking parallel between then and now is Musk’s work with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. In the 19th century, powerful bankers and industrialists flouted conflicts of interest to influence government policy. Today, despite being one of the federal government’s largest contractors and a chief beneficiary of government loans and largesse, Musk has arrogated the right to send tech bros into federal agencies and departments to commandeer their systems and dictate which programs will live and die — all with the blessing of the president.

Even the political culture today resembles that of the Gilded Age . . . . political culture in the Gilded Age reflected a near obsession with reclaiming white male authority. Thus, a popular fascination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with performative displays of “masculinity,” ranging from bare knuckle boxing and body building to football, a new collegiate sport that was so unspeakably violent and lethal in its early days that President Theodore Roosevelt led efforts to institute rules in 1906

But there is a warning in this for MAGA and its new compatriots in Silicon Valley: The extreme inequalities and corporate excesses of the Gilded Age ultimately sparked a backlash that led to two decades of progressive reform, as growing public outrage over monopolies, political corruption and labor exploitation led the government to take action.

If the past is prologue, the excesses of the second Trump administration could once again provoke a new wave of political and economic reform — if enough working-class people perceive a connection between their diminished position and the policies Trump and his allies pursue.

Perhaps Trump’s hold on a broad swath of working-class voters will endure. But he’d do well to remember that things that are gilded are not the real deal — and people eventually take notice.