Politico: Make America Gilded Again

Politico has a long new article on our Second Gilded Age.

Politico:

“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.