Jacobin: The Politics of a Second Gilded Age

This is an excellent article.

I’ve been thinking along the same lines. There came a point when the parallels with Gilded Age politics because so blindingly obvious that it became impossible to ignore. In the last two months, we have witnessed 1.) soaring support for wealth redistribution in the polls, 2.) Democrats flipping the Senate on the $2,000 stimulus checks issue and 3.) the “insurrection” panic and hysteria which flies in the face of the fact that nothing really is happening except that people on television are losing it even more than usual. We’re literally living in the Reconstruction South!

Jacobin:

“The most important election of our lifetime — until the next one — produced no fewer than three big, wet American winners. Amid plague, protest, and violence, three larger trends emerged to mark the landscape of twenty-first-century politics far more distinctly than any candidate or ideology.

In both a mathematical and a historical sense, America’s most notable winner was that heartwarming index of civic health, participation in the democratic process. More than two-thirds of eligible voters cast a ballot this fall, making 2020 the highest-turnout election since 1900. New coronavirus-related voting options may explain some of this surge, but not all of it, since participation also shot up in states that largely refused to expand ballot access. In other states, like Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota, turnout crested above the practically Scandinavian threshold of 75 percent. …

No figure embodies this truth so well as Biden, a nonentity who ran for office on the non-slogan “Build Back Better,” without a defining political goal beyond beating Trump — and rode that negative partisanship to win far more votes than any candidate in US history. Yet even this extraordinary victory only sharpened the boundary lines on our national political map, with the reds getting redder, the blues getting bluer, and Republicans losing the presidency but gaining seats in Congress. …

This was a formula for half a century of ruthless capitalist domination, racial oppression, and imperial expansion. Though America’s streets, docks, mines, and rail yards overflowed with protest — with more riots, uprisings, massacres, and police crackdowns than any other era in US history — remarkably little of this mass frustration left a deep imprint on the electoral system.

All the while, as if on a parallel track, partisan conflict between Republicans and Democrats raged hotter than ever, borrowing the emotional intensities of the Civil War era but without their ideological radicalism. Instead, the grievances of millions were channeled into passionate but sterile identity politics — where the fires of that enormous class rage fizzled into smoke. Does any of this sound familiar? …

A comparison between today’s politics and the battles of Gilded Age America lacks the moral urgency of the analogy to European fascism — and therefore is much less useful, in different ways, to progressive commentators along a broad ideological spectrum. (For liberals, the specter of fascism is a reliable tool to discipline wayward leftists; for the Left, it is an irresistible opportunity to scoff at liberal complacency in the face of apocalypse.) Unlike the struggle against Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — a fight that fits the moral arc of a superhero movie — the grubby, confused politics of the late nineteenth century offer little promise of romantic inspiration or even wholesome, spine-tingling distress.

No doubt, this Gilded Age analogy shares the defects of all crude historical analogies. It underplays the substantive differences between today’s two parties. The Democrats, despite losing much of their working-class base, retain the entrenched support of organized labor. And the Republicans, while making feeble gestures toward populism, remain far more hostile toward the foundational democratic principle of majority rule. …

But thinking about late nineteenth-century US politics may be more politically instructive than the ubiquitous comparisons to fascism or the American Civil War. For all its sound and fury, the strife between today’s Republicans and Democrats does not represent an ideological conflict on the verge of armed revolutionary struggle. Even the most outrageous breaches of normal procedure only underline this point. When the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol Building on January 6, it was apparently driven by no larger social vision than keeping its televised hero in the White House for four more years. Briefly gaining control of the House chamber, Trump’s champions sought not to take possession of the US government but to take selfies. …”

The 2016 and 2020 elections have more than a passing resemblance to the 1896 and 1900 elections – the way that the political establishment felt threatened and went all out to crush Donald Trump, the highest turnout since the 1900 election, the shift from conservatism to populism, Trump’s defeat of the Republican establishment and enduring popularity, etc.