The New Gilded Age Will Be Streamed

And people will know what the Robber Barons took from them.

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

For most of my life, right-wing ideas about the role of government were so ingrained, people talked about them like they were facts, and discovering that it wasn’t always so required formal education.

At least for a young person.

I was born in 1982, in the heart of Reagan country. When you’re that age (0) nobody’s in a hurry to tell you that the country’s undergoing a realignment.

Once upon a time, society was extremely unequal, and especially cruel to the elderly; it took a global depression and a world war to build an appetite for state institutions that insure against these ills; but a big government (through its real and imaginary flaws) is rife for exploitation by demagogues and ideological fanatics. And they finally convinced the public that the new arrangement caused more harm than good.

That was not a bedtime story, and none of it came through from the background noise.

But over the next 25 years the din changed slowly, until the Obama era, when (with the help of another global economic emergency) common assumptions inverted. Barack Obama didn’t enact another New Deal (not all crises are equal, etc.) but his presidency marked the moment, in my mind, when the politics of government and taxes and their relationship to “freedom” flipped. Democrats felt most sure-footed when fiscal issues arose. They became generally unashamed to talk about government as a force for good—to create a fairer playing field for the collective, and to “free” individuals from uncertainty and privation. It was Republicans who’d hide from or dissemble over questions about taxes.

Donald Trump’s second presidency will likely test whether those politics—social-contract politics—are still potent enough to change political alignments. I say “likely,” because Trump is too dishonest to take at his word, and narcissistic enough to abandon any objective for the greater purpose of self-glorification. If the Republican agenda vis-a-vis the safety net creates too much drag, he’ll change policy on a dime and then proclaim himself “the father of Obamacare,” or whatever.

But taking Republicans literally, and watching Trump build a government, the incoming administration really does seem to want to establish a new Gilded Age. To shed Reagan-era pretenses of top-down prosperity and just loot the place.

“The change in ideology is clear from Trump’s cabinet picks,” wrote the historian

Heather Cox Richardson

. “While the total net worth of the officials in Biden’s Cabinet was about $118 million, Laura Mannweiler of U.S. News and World Report noted, a week ago she estimated the worth of Trump’s roster of appointees to be at least $344.4 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 169 countries. That number did not include his pick for treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, whose net worth is hard to find.”

And of course Trump’s cabinet doesn’t include his interloping co-president, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. When Musk isn’t fusing his business interests to Trump’s political ones—hectoring and threatening critics, steering contracts his own way—he’s drawing up plans to cut trillions of dollars out of health-care spending for poor and working class people.

Musk has repeatedly gestured at an underlying objective to slash Social Security, and the oligarchs just one rung beneath him have booty of their own in mind.

Robber Barons—not as hyperbole, but in their self-conception. Trump in particular seems to valorize the Gilded Age (or what he knows of it) because the industrialists who purchased the government back then lived opulent lives in gaudy mansions. As best I can tell, that’s why he says silly things like, “in the 1890s, our country was probably the wealthiest it ever was.”

And, I think it’s no coincidence that the GOP’s new appeal to voters is largely bereft of Reaganite cliches. They’ve turned the clock back a century further than that. They don’t talk about freedom or liberty. The speak instead in the language of fiat, coercion, zero-sum conflict, and sacrifice. (Other people’s, naturally.)

They threaten enemies, bully anyone with qualms over the MAGA agenda, and behave as though theirs is an unstoppable juggernaut.

I suspect this is of necessity, rather than choice. The new Gilded Age can’t be sold with theory or false abstraction, a la trickle-down economics, because we’ve experienced the benefits of shared-prosperity through collective action for decades, and it’s incompatible with Robber Baron rule. They are antitheses.

This time, members of the working class and their children will know what they’re losing.

CAN’T HIDE YOUR PRIVATIZE

There’s more at stake than the safety net alone, and even if politics get in the way of the Robber Barons, they will be able to strip much of the government for parts. Most people don’t have first-principles views on whether NASA or the weather service should be public or private. Space exploration is American heritage, and weather forecasts are useful, but the notion that they should be government programs is philosophical, and non-obvious. We have the postal service, but also UPS and FedEx and Amazon. Other countries have national airlines, we have private carriers. There’s no iron law about any of it.

But people probably do have first-principles views on the purposes these entities should serve. Should we be able to check the weather or hurricane forecasts for free, or only if some Trump loyalist gets to make a profit? Should we explore space so rich people can have mind-bending experiences in low-earth orbit hotels, or should it be insurance for mankind? Earth, after all, is a single point of failure.

Likewise tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans know what Social Security is and have strong feelings (if not literally first principles) about whether that program should continue. Same Medicare and Obamacare. Same veterans’ benefits.

We’ve lived through a destabilizing period that has included two major global economic shocks, one caused by financial industry greed, and one by a pandemic. But people will come to miss the 12 year reprieve between those episodes if Republicans cronyize the Federal Reserve and make financial crises as common as they were before the Fed existed.

If the new Robber Barons enshittefy the country the way they’ve already enshittefied their industries, they will become objects of hate much moreso than they already are. That surely helps explains why they’ve embraced mafia idiom. Their mantra in Silicon Valley was “move fast and break things.” Now it’s “try and fuckin’ stop us.”

LIFESTYLES OF THE ELDRICH AND SHAMELESS

One theory I have about the strange stickiness of discontent in society—the growing disjunctures between individual sentiment and shared reality, material interests and voting choice—is that social media has severed the linkages.

Readers already know I think social media has much to do with the crises of democracy in America and elsewhere in the world. For most democratic citizens, the world as experienced through algorithm is more enraging and perilous than the material one. Bad actors use media platforms to sow and reap propaganda.

But I’m not talking about those things, here—at least not exactly.

Quite apart from its utility to manipulators, social media makes strange neighbors. Tenement and trailer-park dwellers can peer like voyeurs into the lives of the fabulously rich. They spend time, virtually, with one set of fabulously rich people who claim (from their yachts) to care about regular Joes, and another set of fabulously rich people who claim (also from their yachts) that Donald Trump and his oligarchs will make regular Joes rich, too.

The former are hypocrites, the latter are con artists, and for now, the con appears to be working.

But it might not work for much longer. If our warped virtual reality is driving political instability, part of the reason is that it’s stretched the concept of relative deprivation.

Yes, before the internet, there was television, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. There were (and remain) glossy magazines, many of which depict the ruling classes in all their lavishness.

But today the glamor (or supposed glamor) of physically distant people is perhaps the main genre of “content” regular people consume, and the characters themselves are mostly unmediated. There’s no place for a Robin Leach to remind us all that we’re peering into a fantasy. It’s just Jake Paul in a Ferrari, mainlined, until, by the alchemy of the internet, you form a friendship with him in your head, and he starts talking up how good things will be now that Trump’s back in charge.

“Thank you America. It's the era of truth. It's the era of good. There's a shift in the world and good is rising, the truth is rising. I'm just honored to be a part of America and it feels like we’re back, baby.”

That reflects the entertainment experience of millions of Americans. Suddenly their most animating concern isn’t whether their mayor and city council, or governor and state legislature, or president and Congress are doing things to make their communities more prosperous. It’s whether those people standing in the way of working-class Pennsylvanians becoming as wealthy and carefree as influencers and celebrities and the power elite appear to be on the small screen.

These strange, parasocial relationships with the super rich (or the pseudo rich) aren’t likely to fizzle absent a collapse of the platforms, or a cultural rebellion against social media. But those relationships could sour.

If the Trump-aligned aristocracy takes Medicaid and Social Security and veteran’s benefits away, the extravagances we watch them revel in might not seem so enviable anymore. Their riches might start to seem more like plundered goods.

Imagine the Vanderbilts, but instead of living at a great remove from the hoi polloi, they’re posting Reels and TikToks from the Biltmore and the Metropolitan Club, reveling in their decadence as you lose your health insurance, or your life-savings to a crypto scam. Well, that’s more or less what Mar-a-Lago is.