We’re living in a second Gilded Age of extreme inequality. Kamala Harris’s campaign should strike a more populist note
‘Because Democrats – with some notable exceptions – have not embraced economic populism, the only version of populism available to angry voters has been the Republican’s cultural one, which is utterly fake.’‘Because Democrats – with some notable exceptions – have not embraced economic populism, the only version of populism available to angry voters has been the Republican’s cultural one, which is utterly fake.
More than a century ago, in the US’s first Gilded Age, the idea that someone running for president would feature at a rally the richest person in the country, let alone the world, would have been absurd. At that time, even Republican candidates sought to distance themselves from the robber barons. In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt thundered his warning that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” could destroy US democracy. Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was eventually enacted in 1916, and the capital gains tax in 1922.
On the eve of his 1936 re-election, he told the American people that big business and finance were determined to unseat him: “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.”
There was a second reason for the Democrats’ increasing unease with populism. The civil rights struggle and the Vietnam war had spawned an anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian New Left that distrusted government as much if not more than it distrusted Wall Street and big business. It’s the giant upward shift in the distribution of income and wealth; in the power and status that accompany it; and the injuries to pride, status, and self-esteem suffered by those who have lost it.
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