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From the First Gilded Age to the Second: Alternative Coalition Strategies for a Transformed Party and Policy System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2020

M. Elizabeth Sanders
M. Elizabeth Sanders*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

Historians and social scientists have for years identified the current era as a new capital-dominant Gilded Age on the basis of economic trends (particularly rising inequality, now at a higher peak than in the early twentieth century), the coalescence of political elites (this time on a neoliberal, rather than protectionist agenda), and speculations about political upheaval on the horizon.

Type
Special Issue: A Second Gilded Age?
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 296 - 304
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2020

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References

Notes

1 Estelle Sommeiller and Mark Price, “The New Gilded Age: Income Inequality in the U.S. by State, Metropolitan Area, and County,” Economic Policy Institute, July 19, 2018; UBS, “New Value Creators Gain Momentum: Billionaires Report 2017,” https://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealth-management/uhnw/billionaires-report/new-value.html. According to Swiss banking giant UBS, the new billionaire class (with a collective fortune of more than $3.6 trillion) has led us into a new Gilded Age comparable to (or even more extremely unequal than) the First Gilded Age, https://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealth-management/uhnw/billionaires-report/new-value/master-architects.html.

2 On the rise of neoliberalism, see Slobodian, Quinn, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Far from discarding the regulatory state, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand project of protecting capitalism on a global scale,” argues the author (front cover).

3 Stephen Skowronek, “Barack Obama and the Promise of Transformative Leadership.” Foundation des Etats-Unis Universite Paris Diderot & Larca, Paris, Dec. 12, 2016. Skowronek predicted here that Trump's “disjunctive” presidency would end in 2020, and a new regime—the sixth in American history—would take the place of the Reagan regime of 1981. Skowronek's books on regimes, the presidents associated with them, and the challenges created across time by the situations of each regime stage, are The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997); and Presidential Leadership in Political Time, Reprise and Reappraisal, 2nd Edition, revised and expanded (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011).

4 See especially Schlozman, Daniel, When Movements Anchor Parties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 109–19Google Scholar; and Jusko, Karen, Who Speaks for the Poor? Electoral Geography, Party Entry, and Representation. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Bensel, Richard F., The Political Economy of American Industrialization 1877–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bensel writes, “The highest priority for the Republican Party was winning elections and the package of developmental policies was the optimal way to do that because of the distributional consequences for their coalition.”(Private communication, Jan 1, 2018).

6 Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 2.

7 Some historians slide over the dynamic, full male suffrage and active social movement democracy of the 1880s–‘90s, implying that the Jim Crow system of black oppression and the disfranchisement of African Americans and poor whites closely followed the retreat of Reconstruction, but this was not the case. Average (male) voter turnout reached its historic high in the 1884–96 period—61 percent in the South, 85.4 percent in the non-South. Burnham, Walter Dean, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review 59:1 (Mar. 1965): 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chs. 3–4Google Scholar; Greenwood, Janette Thomas, The Gilded Age: A History in Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 180–81Google Scholar.

9 On Populist era cooperatives, see Goodwin, Lawrence, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; and Schwartz, Michael, Radical Protest and Social Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

10 Anton Jaeger, “The Myth of ‘Populism’: It's the Transatlantic Commentariat's Favorite Political Put-Down. It's Also Historically Illiterate,” Jacobin, Jan. 3, 2018, https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/populism-douglas-hofstadter-onald-trump-democracy.

11 Postel, Charles, “The American Populist and Anti-Populist Legacy, in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas, eds. Abromeit, John, Chesterton, Bridget, Marotta, Gary, and Norman, York (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 116Google Scholar. See also Goodwyn, Democratic Promise; and Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties, 109–19.

12 Sarasohn, David, The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989)Google Scholar; Nugent, Walter, Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 35–107Google Scholar; Sanders, Roots of Reform, 164–77.

13 Davis, Kenneth S., FDR: The New Deal Years 1933–1937 (New York: Random House, 1979)Google Scholar; Leuchtenburg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 1932–1940 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), esp. 157–58Google Scholar.

14 Sanders, Elizabeth, “The Meaning, Causes, and Possible Results of the 2016 Presidential Election,” The Forum 15:4 (2017): 711–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Jeff Faux, “NAFTA's Impact on U.S. Workers,” Economic Policy Institute, Dec. 9, 2013, http://www.epi.org/blog/naftas-impact-workers/; Robert E. Scott, “Manufacturing Job Loss: Trade, Not Productivity, Is the Culprit,” Economic Policy Institute, Aug. 11, 2015, http://www.epi.org/publication/manufacturing-job-loss-trade-not-productivity-is-the-culprit/.

16 George J. Borjas, “The Immigration Debate We Need,” New York Times, Feb. 27, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/opinion/the-immigration-debate-we-need.html.

17 Neil Irwin and Josh Katz, “The Geography of Trumpism,” New York Times, Mar. 12, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/upshot/the-geography-of-trumpism.html?&moduleDetail=section-news2&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article; Larissa MacFarquhar, “In the Heart of Trump Country: West Virginia Used to Vote Solidly Democratic. Now It Belongs to Trump.” The increasing working-class struggle was cross-racial, but notable for the accelerated decline in prospects for the non-college educated white working class.

18 On the continuing effects of mortgage foreclosures and the weak government effort to ameliorate the losses, see Laura Kusisto, “Many Who Lost Homes to Foreclosure in Last Decade Won't Return—NAR,” Wall Street Journal, Apr. 20, 2015, 12:50 p.m. ET, http://www.wsj.com/articles/many-who-lost-homes-to-foreclosure-in-last-decade-wont-return-nar-1429548640.

19 Gwen Ifill, “Whose Welfare? The Poor, They Are Different, and in ‘92, Ever More Invisible,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/19/weekinreview/whose-welfare-the-poor-they-are-different-and-in-92-ever-more-invisible.html.

20 For longer-term data on class voting (back to the Eisenhower years), see Stonecash, Jeffrey, “The Puzzle of Class in Presidential Voting,” The Forum 15:1 (2017): 29–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the graph of Democratic Party identification of whites (by educational level) in Rob Griffin, Ruy Texeira, and John Halpin, “Voter Trends in 1916: A Final Examination,” Center for American Progress, Nov. 1, 2017, 32, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2017/11/01/441926/voter-trends-in-2016/.

21 Schaller, Thomas F., Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008)Google Scholar.

22 Mark Muro and Sifan Liu, “Another Clinton-Trump divide: High-output America vs Low-Output America,” Brookings, Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2016/11/29/another-clinton-trump-divide-high-output-america-vs-low-output-america/.

23 However, In the First Gilded Age there were some substantive benefits in the form of Union veterans’ pensions and land distribution.

24 Wyman, Mark, Round Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

25 George J. Borjas, “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers,” Politico, Sept./Oct. 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinton-immigration-economy-unemployment-jobs-214216.

26 Sanders, Elizabeth, “The Meaning, Causes, and Possible Results of the 2016 Presidential Election,” The Forum 15:4 (2017): 711–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Kazin, Michael, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Random House, 2007)Google Scholar.

28 Thomas Piketty and Antione Vauchez, “Manifesto for the Democratization of Europe, Social Europe, Nov. 12, 2018, https://www.socialeurope.eu/manifesto-for-the-democratization-of-europe.

29 Piketty and Vauchez, “Manifesto for the Democratization of Europe.”