[icopyright one button toolbar]
Americans who remember democracy and the remnants of “fairness” in our economic system are upwards of mid-seventies now and even they don’t remember actuality. What they’re remembering is the memories that belonged to their parents and grandparents: the time when Americans actually stood up and fought the overbearing wealth of few during the Gilded Age. Those who fought then actually gained some ground against the system that created and defended the super-rich. Those fighters actually scared the bejesus out of the “top ten percent,” as we label them now.
American presidents bashed “moneycrats” and “economic royalists,” and immigrant garment workers demanded not just “bread and roses” but threatened “bread or blood.” Among many such arresting anecdotes is one featuring the railway tycoon George Pullman. When he died in 1897, Fraser writes, “his family was so afraid that his corpse would be desecrated by enraged workers, they had it buried at night .?.?. in a pit eight feet deep, encased in floors and walls of steel-reinforced concrete in a lead-lined casket covered in layers of asphalt and steel rails.” …NYT
That comes from a review, by Naomi Klein in tomorrow’s Times Book Review of Steve Fraser’s “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power.”
Fraser, a labor historian, argues that deepening economic hardship for the many, combined with “insatiable lust for excess” for the few, qualifies our era as a second Gilded Age. But while contemporary wealth stratification shares much with the age of the robber barons, the popular response does not.
As Fraser forcefully shows, during the first Gilded Age — which he defines loosely as the years between the end of the Civil War and the market crash of 1929 — American elites were threatened with more than embarrassing statistics. Rather, a “broad and multifaceted resistance” fought for and won substantially higher wages, better workplace conditions, progressive taxation and, ultimately, the modern welfare state (even as they dreamed of much more). …Klein, NYT
What makes us the ineffectual mass that we are now — why we sit around asking “what’s the matter with Kansas?” — is the result of having no memories of economic justice, according to Fraser.
What fueled the resistance to the first Gilded Age, he argues, was the fact that many Americans had a recent memory of a different kind of economic system, whether in America or back in Europe. Many at the forefront of the resistance were actively fighting to protect a way of life, whether it was the family farm that was being lost to predatory creditors or small-scale artisanal businesses being wiped out by industrial capitalism. Having known something different from their grim present, they were capable of imagining — and fighting for — a radically better future.
It is this imaginative capacity that is missing from our second Gilded Age, a theme to which Fraser returns again and again in the latter half of the book. The latest inequality chasm has opened up at a time when there is no popular memory — in the United States, at least — of another kind of economic system. Whereas the activists and agitators of the first Gilded Age straddled two worlds, we find ourselves fully within capitalism’s matrix. So while we can demand slight improvements to our current conditions, we have a great deal of trouble believing in something else entirely. …Klein,NYT
That and an old disease that has only gotten worse since the 1950’s: the persistence of conformism in our middle — and particularly lower-middle — class. It goes a long way towards explaining “Kansas.”
Yes, we benefit from innovation. But that innovation thrives, for the most part, in technology while it is suffering a slow death in our moral and political world. Worst of all, we are held back now by a political movement that is determined to take us back to 1937 or before… as close to the earlier Gilded Age as we can be dragged.