Politico has a long new article on our Second Gilded Age.
“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. …”
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
There is a family resemblance between the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and the Second Gilded Age of the early 21st century, but there are also some striking differences.
1. The Civil War – The bloodiest conflict in American history cast a long shadow over the rest of the 19th century. Republican politicians “waved the bloody shirt” of the rebellion for decades. In the Gilded Age, America wasn’t just culturally polarized like it is today. The South never recovered in the late 19th century from its collapse in the War Between the States. Union veterans collected government pensions which redistributed wealth to the North. The war continued through partisan politics with the tariff, the gold standard, Union pensions and government spending developing the victorious section.
In the Gilded Age, America was the victorious Northeast and Midwest, and the South and the West were reduced to industrial colonies which were remade in its image. In the Second Gilded Age, there was no violent conflict that resolved issues like slavery and secession and cleanly separated winners and losers. Instead, there was a culture war like in the 1920s which ultimately did not turn violent.
Today, it is also the Sunbelt that is the ascendant section which is gaining in wealth, population and cultural influence. Florida now has more votes in the Electoral College than New York. The South, which is no longer a benighted land of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, now has a larger population than the Northeast and Midwest. The ruling class resides in South Florida instead of New England.
2. Gilded Age Presidents – Donald Trump doesn’t resemble any Gilded Age president. Ulysses S. Grant was a war hero who led the Union to military victory in the War Between the States. Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley were Union veterans from Ohio and Indiana. Chester Arthur and Grover Cleveland were lawyers from New York. James Garfield was a Ohio politician. None of these presidents were anything like Donald Trump. They weren’t magnetic, charismatic leaders of a mass movement like MAGA. They didn’t have a cult of personality or any experience in show business like Trump.
William McKinley in particular stands out as being nothing like Trump. He was a Union veteran, a party stalwart, a devout Christian, a devoted husband who tenderly cared for his epileptic wife. McKinley campaigned from his front porch in Ohio. He was the portrait of Middle American respectability in how he zealously guarded his reputation. Donald Trump thrives on creating controversy.
3. William Jennings Bryan – In some ways, Donald Trump resembles William Jennings Bryan who like Trump ran for president three times in 1896, 1900 and 1908 and dominated his age. Bryan was a magnetic, charismatic populist figure who ran against the establishment and disrupted the Democratic Party like Trump. Bryan created the Fourth Party System, but he lost all three of his elections. He held mass rallies from the back of a railroad car during his whistle-stop campaigns. Once again, there are key differences here though. Bryan was a devout Christian who ended his life debating Clarence Darrow in the Scopes Trial. He won the Democratic nomination in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech. Bryan opposed imperialism, ran against the railroads, the tariff and supported the income tax.
4. Right Populism – Donald Trump is a billionaire and the leader of a right populist movement. He supports the tariff. He supports deregulation. He wants to get rid of the income tax. He wants to gut the civil service. He supports the acquisition of Canada and Greenland. Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have spoken positively about the gold standard which was the issue that lit the fire of prairie populism. In many ways, Trump’s version of populism is the opposite of historic populism. Trump is trying to protect the “Full Dinner Pail” of American workers against Joe Biden’s inflation.
5. Regional Differences – William McKinley won all of the Eastern states in 1896 and 1900. Bryan won all of the Southern states. In our Second Gilded Age, the two parties have traded places. Southerners have become Republicans and Easterners have become Democrats. Trump’s base of support is in the South and Mountain West with the Midwest being the battleground swing region. He has created a weird mashup of Bryan voters and populist rhetoric and McKinley policies.
6. Robber Barons – In some ways, you could say that Elon Musk resembles John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie in that he is the richest man in the world and an industrialist intervening in American politics, but on the other hand can you really compare a devout Baptist like Rockefeller to Musk who has children by multiple women via IVF who are spawned like science experiments? Did Rockefeller ever have an office in the White House? Can you seriously compare Mark Zuckerberg to Henry Clay Frick?
Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan also intervened in the 1896 election to stop a populist movement. William McKinley was the establishment candidate. In contrast, Elon Musk spent $44 billion dollars to acquire Twitter and transform it into X and close to $200 million to get Trump elected. The business tycoons of the Gilded Age were pillars of the establishment. Elon Musk is out to destroy and replace the liberal establishment in this country and across the Western world.
7. The Civil Service – Donald Trump is the leader of a populist revolt, not against “the billionaire class,” but against the college educated leftwing professionals who dominate institutions like universities and the administrative state. Trump is trying to return to the spoils system. The modern civil service was created during the Gilded Age. Government as we know it today was nearly non-existent in those days. The administrative state that was created in the 20th century was just getting off the ground.
8. The Industrial Age – In the Gilded Age, America was in the industrial age, and the so-called “Robber Barons” who controlled steel and the railroads and other industries employed lots of people and exploited cheap European immigrant labor. Farmers felt oppressed by Eastern finance which supported gold standard which kept credit expensive and the railroads which controlled the private transportation infrastructure. It should go without saying that the same dynamic doesn’t exist today. Virtually no one works in agriculture anymore and many of those who do are foreigners.
Elon Musk’s Tesla only has about 125,000 employees. SpaceX has about 13,000 employees. Less than 3,000 people work at X. Zuck’s Meta has about 70,000 employees. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is the third largest employer in America with 1,500,000 employees, but this is misleading. Amazon is a destroyer of brick and mortar retail jobs. X and Facebook are free apps. Big Tech doesn’t need an endless stream of millions of cheap laborers to work on industrial era factory floors and live in Hell’s Kitchen. Far more Americans work for Wal-Mart, Target, McDonald’s, Dollar General than anything Elon Musk is involved in.
The tech bros are also obsessed with creating the AI super intelligence – the Wizard of Oz – to automate and destroy professional class knowledge jobs. The point is, with the notable exception of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, the overwhelming majority of American workers don’t work for Big Tech which isn’t like the Gilded Age railroads which employed people all over America.
9. Modernism – The modernist tear in the American cultural fabric, which is the rift that absolutely dominates our times, drives polarization and fuels right populism, did not exist in the Victorian culture of Gilded Age America. It emerged in its earliest form in the 1920s, hit a critical mass in the 1960s counterculture and inspired the reaction against it from the 1970s forward with Trump’s movement representing a radicalized form of conservatism determined to win the culture war.
10. The World Stage – Finally, America at the end of the Gilded Age was just beginning to flex its might on the world stage in its own neighborhood in the Pacific, Caribbean and Latin America in the Spanish-American War. In contrast, America is now fed up with the post-World War II “rules-based international order,” and no longer wants the burden of upholding a global liberal world order. The Outer Empire is being sacrificed in favor of a renewed focus on the Inner Empire in the Western Hemisphere.
One last thing …
The narrative that Trump is surrounded by Robber Barons who bought the 2024 election ignores the fact that Trump was outspent by Kamala Harris. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg also didn’t support Trump until after the election was over with token donations to his inauguration fund. Musk himself didn’t endorse Trump until after the assassination attempt in Butler, PA. There is no compelling reason to believe that Elon bought the election when Trump was always the favorite in the race.
Elon Musk is a serious problem for anyone who declares himself a conservative (I am not). He was recently caught cheating at computer games, he behaves like a n!gger when it comes to producing children out of wedlock, and he supports endless Indian immigration, Musk is simply rotten.
Even if character does not matter, being the wealthiest man also does not help. The US economy will face serious problems going forward regardless who is president, having massive wealth inequality and siding with the wealthiest people in world, it will be very easy to attack this politically.
Elon Musk can behave like a n!gger when it comes to producing children out of wedlock; he’s got what like 300 Billion? He also can afford to raise them – u know any n!ggers who have that type of $$ ?
Wallace with his PolySci degree still blaming Sleepy Joe for the inflation that we have experienced for the last 5 years. Trump’s Inflation Tsunami 2020 – 1. Multiple Stimulus Checks 2. An increase in the money supply of 33% 3. $2.5T Wall Street bailout 4. $900B in PPP Loans(more money flushed out into the system. All of this against a backdrop of 0% interest rates and an economy that was completely shut down. The analogy to that would be floodwater being built up behind a dam and all of the sudden the water being released at once. 2020 was an unprecedented inflationary event in US history. Now Trump is putting tariffs on which are another just another form of taxation on the working- and middle-classes. Trump is even paying homage to the Gilded Age(clear-cutting of old-growth forests to use to build Eastern cities) by wanting to cut down US forests to compensate for a lack of a Canadian wood imports due to the upcoming tariffs.
Indeed.
Trumpenstein was at the helm along with his jewish Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin when they aided and abetted the largest public to private wealth transfer with Larry Fink in American history.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/08/blackrock-takes-command/
Oscar DICKWRANGLER, your narrative is
lets Bullshit, just like you are, Z BOY and the EUROSISSIES and the SATANIC LEFT/DEMOCRATS want WAR so much, they can fight/FINANCE it, let Hunter BIDEN, the Harris wench, Obama and Michael can lead the charge, the Ukraine the epicenter of Human trafficking, money laundering, the Narcotics trade in Europe, I’ve heard ukranian women are walking the Streets of Europe, selling themselves, in the meantime we have SOUTHERN CHILDREN, living in tool sheds in WESTERN NORTH CARALINA, what happened too all those AMERICAN PEOPLE, burnt out of their homes in CALFORNIA? We have a REPUBLIC to restore, the ukrainian’s are not the brightest folks around, if they were, they would have never given up their nukes or allowed themselves to be governed by low class Z BOY, the ukrainian’s need to replace Z BOY, as a first step, a sign of good FAITH, we really need to redefine our relationship with the EUROSISSIES,their INSOLENCE is intolerable, they weep and nash their teeth and wring their hands over Ukraine, while young girls are tricked out in the UK, common people slashed and mown down on the continent, …… The whole thing is a joke, a crime, a bloody shame …….
One thing they can go after is the massive amounts of fraud by ordinary blacks creating fake PPP loans. Yes, there were social media videos showing just how easy it was to go to the website, type in a fake company name, ad your bank account number and get five figures deposited for squandering on “South Beach” vacations with rented Lambourgini’s. The same kind of crime skills videos the 15 year old ‘hood rats were making on stealing KIA’s for joyrides. A black guy at work was commenting about some members of his social circle who went out and pulled this scam, one had his Chase bank stop the deposit as suspected fraud and the mope was asking him how to free up the money and the guy at work told him not to touch it unless he wants to go to jail. The black mindset, they are obviously on to you and he STILL wants to try to steal the money. Idiotic.
The inflation began when Biden signed the American Rescue Plan about this time in early 2021. He originally intended to sign trillions in more spending, but that was derailed by inflation becoming an issue. Inflation wasn’t an issue during the transition from Trump or in the first weeks of the Biden administration. The same was true of immigration
You can’t be serious, Wallace
Come on Hunter. Any thinking person knew those Trump checks were going to contribute to inflation very bigly. I wish I had used mine to buy some gold bars.
All true. And tariffs don’t work if you don’t have an industrial base to protect. Prices are going to go way up, and people are going to be very angry.
Besides being a politician, Garfield was a yankee general too. The only Gilded Age president who had some resemblance to Trump was McKinley’s successor TR.
“Populism” does not exist in the Trump brand or the Republican party. The GOP is historically unpopular across its life. Trump has always been a Rorschach test for everyone who is frustrated by the collapse in American living and cultural standards. Since 2015 Trump has been the figurative molotov cocktail everyone who hates the system throws into the system’s gears. No one actually likes Trump besides fools who are still “Trusting the Plan” in 2025 and the online Grifter-Industrial-Complex. No one can even articulate what it is about Trump they actually support besides reducing immigration. Trump supports H1B. He appointed to his administration an infinite H1B jeet shill. He defended Vivek and Musk when they chastized those who opposed H1B and all immigration. Trump is not against immigration. Trump is the Charlie Kirk
“we must do it legally!” immigration cuckservative.
In 2016 Trump had no plan because he did not expect to win. In 2024 he is totally absorbed by the Republican party. No, you the online Pepe meme makers did not subvert the Republican party, the Republican party subverted you. It absorbed you, not you it. You moved to the Republian party, the Republican party did not move towards you. The Republican party is the party of the rich. The “white insurrection” is over for a variety of reasons. That and the fact of Gaza is why so many Jews are coming home to the Republican party. The GOP represents Big Business. It does not represent the common white man and woman, it wants to replace you the same as the Democrats. Elon Musk wants to replace you.
Trump’s “tariff” canard is him trying to make his impromptu campaign rhetoric actual policy when it was never intended to be policy. Muh tariffs was part of his wider rabble rousing strategy and demagoguery to stir up energy in the electorate. You cannot reshore 50-60 years of offshoring without a cataclysmic restructuring of the global economy. Trump is a reality tv show star. Trump is a whore monger who did indeed pay off a pornstar to keep quiet. Whether or not that is campaign financing is another issue, but it is more proof that Trump is a clown. This is not a statesman who is going to bring about a new world order, he is the legal terrorist act of the immiserated American public who now that he survived a bullet and won an election thanks to Jewish defection, has pretentions of grandeur. The GOP is allowing this farce to play out on its terms.
None of this is about robber barons or Gilded Age. William Jennings Bryan was an anti-Gold standard economic leftist who supported increasing government as a means of wealth distribution from the rich. Bryan has more in common with Thomas Muentzer than Donald Trump. Bryan was the diametrical opposite of the GOP-ified post-2016 Trump. This is a unique fraud of its own and has more historical continuity with the White Flight era instigated by Brown vs Board. The Republican party is pursuing its ancient goal of big business, capitalism, and saving the rich, and it is using the same old post-Brown dogwhistles but blown with louder volume as permitted by Jews now that Jews have defected after Gaza.
This is all fascinating, the compare and contrast, the history.. I’m impressed by the depth of arcane political facts the author serves up.
Zooming out however.. I’m only concerned if America is going to maintain a nonhispanic White Gentile majority, if Trump/Vance will contribute to that somehow, and if so then how.
I don’t know if any of you are on social media but here’s a then and now compare and contrast that matters; I can make fun of blacks and name the jew on mainstream platforms these days when before I would get banned for suggesting either rat or ape might not be demi-gods. The rapid reracistization and counterjudaification of White normies made possible by Trump’s blowing away the kosher censorship is by far the most important macrohistorical development in my life, more important than the invention of nuclear weapons or anything since the Third Reich failing to stop the evacuation at Dunkirk or not capturing Moscow & the Caucasus. That White people can become widely and openly proWhite and verbally reject Jewry and blackery is absolutely necessary to its survival and will determine whether the planet becomes Lagos or not.
If silicon valley technocratic dweebdom inserting itself into the Oval Office is the catalyst for that, then let them eat hot pockets.
“Tax cuts for the rich” are a big mistake in the new budget. It looks like the budget is being balanced on the backs of the poor and middle class without the wealthy being asked to make a sacrifice as well. That 5% or so that comes out of your paycheck for Social Security and Medicare needs to be extended up to all income levels, not just your first $50K or whatever it is today. While I support lowering the corporate tax and getting rid of tips, incomes over a half million should go back to the 2015 tax bracket to help stabilize the national debt. Corporate taxes are just stealing from your accounting department what is available for the company payroll, they can tax the actual individuals for their salaries, not your employers accounting book. Tracking tips is way too much paperwork and bureaucracy. Let the working stiffs at the Olive Garden have that to spend at the grocery store to infuse back into the economy. But Trump had better be careful the optics don’t make it look like the rich are being asked to make zero sacrifices to get the budget in order.
What is all of those billionaires rebranded to comport with the populace?