Two Gilded Ages

Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, by Larry M. Bartels, Princeton University Press.

Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900, by Jack Beatty, Knopf.

The Politicos, 1865-1896, by Matthew Josephson, Commons.

The Genesis of Industrial America, 1870-1920, by Maury Klein, Cambridge University Press.

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, by Kevin Phillips, Viking.

RED-BAITING HAS once again become a weapon of choice on the American political battlefield. John McCain called Barack Obama a socialist, when after all the new president is really a liberal and more a neoliberal than a New Deal one at that. Not so long ago it would have been enough to declare him anathema on those grounds alone. McCain's resort to the "s" word signals that, thanks to the recent collapse of our "second Gilded Age," matters of economic justice, inequality, class conflict, the relationship between democracy and concentrated wealth, and the efficacy and credibility of the freeenterprise system are rising to the surface of public life after a long hibernation. Even that system's patron saint, Alan Greenspan, has abandoned the faith. Hallelujah!

Omens appeared before the Crash of 2008, even before the first intimations of the subprime mortgage meltdown nearly two years ago. References to our "second Gilded Age" were already in the air well before the turn of the new century and became commonplace thereafter. At first they carried with them a certain Marie Antoinettelike playful insouciance about the exhibitionism of the super rich. After the dot-com bust of 2000-2001 and the avalanche of Wall Street and corporate scandals that followed, the mood grew more somber. If talk about our second Gilded Age at first evoked comparisons to the masked balls of the "gay nineties," in time the emphasis shifted to recovered memories of stark inequality, to Jacob Riis's late-nineteenth-century world inhabited by have-nots as well as haves.

One small but telling sign that the Zeitgeist is changing is the reissuing of The Politicos by Matthew Josephson. Written in the 1930s and once considered a classic history of the political economy of the first Gilded Age (at the time many thought it a more important book than The Robber Barons, which made Josephson famous), it...