As the midterm elections draw closer, it’s déjà vu all over again. The robber barons are back big time. The wealthy have their mansions in the Hamptons and their urban pied-à-terre in New York instead of Newport. Their yachts are staffed while rivers of money flow from the coffers of billionaires who escape paying taxes and offer their obscene wealth in exchange for political favor and power. Clearly, we are once again a nation of prospering oligarchs and exploited paupers.
The glittering Gilded Age that reached its apex between 1880 and 1920 was a golden era of opulent architecture, extravagant fashion, expensive art, and expansive parties. Built on the economic growth that occurred following the Civil War and Reconstruction businessmen and bankers made out like bandits by investing in railroads, factories, and various industries that produced the raw materials needed for the development of innovative inventions that enabled mass production.
That led to “conspicuous consumption,” a term coined by a social critic at the time. Mark Twain, who dubbed the era the “Gilded Age,” was among other critics troubled by the growing disparity between social classes.
While some in the monied class applied their wealth to building libraries, museums and public improvements in large cities which often displayed their names, they overlooked the dark side of the survival needs of those on the other end of the social and economic spectrum. They ignored the exploitation of immigrant workers. This time around we just abuse and deport them.
The Vanderbilts, Astors, and Carnegies looked the other way, dismissing life in the tenements of New York City and factories like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where a 1911 fire killed 146 trapped women workers. Journalist and social reformer Jacob Riis brought the reality of these travesties to light in stark photographs of slums, schools, factories, and more in his collection, How the Other Half Lives, housed at the Library of Congress.
Among today’s most recognized robber barons are the wealthiest and most morally corrupt men in America. Their enormous wealth and lack of social conscience make their predecessors seem tame. Among them are Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the entire Trump family.
These oligarchs, and others like them, are wedded to power, prestige, and political influence. That makes them dangerous in ways that their forerunners were not, especially in a time of autocracy, patronage, and pathology. We are seeing this play out in an environment of massive corruption, chaos, and craziness as we face the imminent midterm election.
The onerous possibility of fascist behavior, massive exclusion, violence, and denial of our Constitutional and civic rights is deeply alarming. We are threatened by a regime that has one goal, and that is absolute power for those who are predominantly white, wealthy, male and racist, along with being threatened by diversity and competition.
Oh, for another Ida Tarbell. (Carol Leuning, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and Maggie Haberman, co-author of Regime Change, are up there with her exposing the machinations of the Trump administration).
Tarbell was an investigative journalist who was called a muckraker when she took down John D. Rockefeller and his oil company in 1904. She famously said, “Very often people who admit the facts, are willing to…employ force and fraud to secure [their] ends…by declaring, ‘It’s business,’ meaning ‘business’ has come to be a legitimate excuse for hard dealing, sly tricks, and special privileges. It is a common enough thing to hear men arguing that the ordinary laws of morality do not apply in business.” (The History of the Standard Oil Company)
In our current Gilden Age we are being led into a different kind of conspicuous consumption. It’s one that consumes lies and clings to false narratives while ignoring history, facts, and good governance.
It overlooks social justice issues, slashes healthcare for everyone, ignores the needs of children, pregnant women, elders, the disabled, and those in need of disaster relief, clean water, and safe food. It denies Americans the rights guaranteed in the Constitution, most notably in the First Amendment which ensures freedom of speech, religion, peaceful assembly, and a free press.
The fourth amendment stops the government from doing unreasonable searches and seizures of personal property and the sixth amendment guarantees the right to a fast and public trial by an impartial jury and the right to a lawyer.
These critical rights are ignored by those in power in our new Gilden Age while budgets are aimed at keeping tax free elites in their majestic mansions, boardrooms, and businesses in lieu of providing adequate housing, better schools, accessible healthcare and vital safety nets. It allows food and water to be contaminated because the ruling class doesn’t have to eat or drink what the lower classes do. It returns women to the Victorian age and abuses all the ‘Others’ amongst us. It is positively Dickensian.
Today’s robber barons and their elite political allies not only steal dignity and hope; they put us at great risk and conspire against anything that is fair and forward thinking while serving their own selfish purposes. As Eugene Debs put it during the original Gilded Age, “"The time has come to regenerate society [while] we are on the eve of universal change."
Mark Twain and Ida Tarbell would clearly agree.
