Gilded Age Déjà vu

• Opinion by KURT STAUDTER (an installment of his “While We Were Sleeping” series)

“The golden age of America has only just begun; it will be like nothing that has ever been seen before.”

Donald Trump seems to have found a new favorite president: The flavor of the week is William McKinley, who was the last president of the Gilded Age. Since a big piece of politics is the messaging, we can see why Trump has rebranded the Gilded Age as the Golden Age. However, if you think good times are coming, we may be waiting a while, but for others, both the good and bad are coming way too fast.

                First off, let’s get our ages in order: There are five ages, the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, Heroic Age and finally the Iron Age. We are currently living in the Iron Age which is marked as society moves from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing economy. The Golden Age dates back to the ancient Greek and a period of abundance and prosperity. According to Wikipedia, “By extension, ‘Golden Age’ denotes a period of primordial peace, harmony, stability, and prosperity. During this age, peace and harmony prevailed in that people did not have to work to feed themselves for the earth provided food in abundance. They lived to a very old age with a youthful appearance, eventually dying peacefully, with spirits living on as ‘guardians’”. The Golden Age sounds wonderful like paradise, utopia or heaven, sign me up, but that isn’t what Trump is talking about.

                Now let’s dip into Wikipedia for one more quick definition, “The Gilded Age is the period from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, which occurred between the Reconstruction era and the Progressive Era. It was named by 1920s historians after Mark Twain‘s 1873 novel ‘The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today”. Historians saw late 19th-century economic expansion as a time of materialistic excesses marked by widespread political corruption.” Now wait, this sounds a lot more like what The Donald wants when he talks of a Golden Age.

                Now let’s waltz down memory lane and peer back with our historical lens and take a look at what Trump and the billionaire class mean by the Golden Age in the late 1800s. The big fight by workers back then was for a shorter workday and week. Amazingly the Supreme Court would rule that employment was a contract between the employer and the employee, and the government had no role in setting working conditions. The court ruled that if the employee didn’t like the working conditions they were free to take their labor elsewhere. Weekends and the 8 hour workday would not become a reality until the New Deal.

                To return to the Trump Golden Age would include getting rid of pesky over-regulation, like child labor laws, environmental protections, workplace safety and food safety. Let’s also remember that labor unions would not make a difference until after the turn of the century. Once again, we have to get to the new deal before many of these things get covered by the law, and clean air and water laws would wait until the 1970s, as would voting and civil rights improving race relations. Oh, and let’s not forget that the right to vote for women wouldn’t come until 1920.

                Perhaps the hallmark of the time was the wealth inequity. Wealth had been concentrated in the hands of the few like Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Carnegie, Vanderbilt and railroads and industry were popping up all over the country. Huge amounts of wealth were created, but very little of it was making it down to the workers. If this sounds like the failed trickledown economics, you’re right, but there’s one difference: in the Gilded Age no one expected their fair share. The best people could hope for back then was to somehow scratch out a meager living for the family

                I find it somewhat ironic that Trump wants a new Golden Age, because by all indications we’re living in it now. Right now, wealth distribution is as lopsided favoring the rich as it was in the Gilded Age. Let’s also remember how it ended last time with all the misery and death that came with the Great Depression. Don’t you also find it somewhat disturbing that all of the federal safety net protections that came out of the New Deal are now under scrutiny in order to pay for huge tax breaks for those that have been doing just fine in this second gilded age?

                Next on the chopping block are Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Make no mistake, the oligarchs have called government too expensive and wasteful, and they have bought our politicians with the mandate of tax breaks for the rich, while they find new and creative ways to siphon money from the government and taxpayers into their own pockets. Remember the Wikipedia quote that said, there were “materialistic excesses marked by widespread political corruption.” The Golden Age, the Gilded Age or the age of kleptocracy, brought to you by a reality television star and the folks that bought him the presidency. We’ve seen this show before.