Will we Escape the Second Gilded Age?

A long, powerful article, encouraging us to say "no" to the kind of capitalism that displaces democracy.

How America’s Elites Lost Their Grip

By Anand Giridharadas

6:39 AM EST

https://time.com/5735384/capitalism-reckoning-elitism-in-america-2019/



If a single cultural idea has upheld the disproportionate power of this class, it has been the idea of the “win-win.” They could get rich and then “give back” to you: win-win. They could run a fund that made them sizable returns and offered you social returns too: win-win. They could sell sugary drinks to children in schools and work on public-private partnerships to improve children’s health: win-win. They could build cutthroat technology monopolies and get credit for serving to connect humanity and foster community: win-win.

As this seductive idea fizzles out, it raises the possibility that this age of capital, in which money was the ultimate organizing principle of American life, could actually end. Something could actually replace it. After all, a century ago, America was firmly planted in the first Gilded Age—and then it found its way into the Progressive Era and the New Deal, an era of great public ambition. Business didn’t go away; it wasn’t abolished; capitalists didn’t go into gulags. It was just that the emphasis of the society shifted. Money was no longer the lodestar of all pursuits.

The choice facing Americans is whether we want to be a society organized around money’s thirsts, a playground for the whims of billionaires, or whether we wish to be a democracy. The second Gilded Age will end at some point. The question is what comes next: What Trump offers is tribal nationalism, strongman politics and plutocrat–friendly policy greased by populist rhetoric. The other possibility is that, as occurred a century ago, a gilded age collapses into an age of reform: an era defined culturally by renewed public purpose and politically by the restoration of the state in areas where people are too powerless to solve problems of their own—defined by the use of shared institutions to solve shared problems. You can already see glimpses of how an age of reform is being dreamed up. Higher taxes on the very fortunate, to be sure; more regulation and worker protections and the like. An attack on climate change almost as dramatic as climate change itself. Programs to give workers greater security. It would be an age in which it was cooler, more thrilling, more admired, more viable to change the world democratically.