Second Gilded Age

The Second Gilded Age is a proposed time period of United States history that is debated to have begun between the 1980s and 2010s up to the current day. The Second Gilded Age is so named for its resemblance to the Gilded Age of the 1870s to 1890s, a period marked by laissez-faire capitalism, political corruption, and wealth inequality. Different authors disagree over what time period constitutes the Second Gilded Age, while others argue that no such period exists.

Proposals of the Second Gilded Age started with the implementation of neoliberal policies along with the junk bonds scandal of the 1980s, the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, the collateralized-debt obligations of the 2000s, or the 1 percent of the 2010s. These proposals largely agree that wealth inequality and political corruption were as rampant as in the First Gilded Age. Others argue that race relations and civil rights comparisons are more apparent.

Critics of the Second Gilded Age often argue that the similarities are largely surface level. Critics argue that the underlying causes differ, and thus the underlying solutions must differ as well.

Causes

Authors and historians often cite shareholder primacy as one of the main factors of the Second Gilded Age. Shareholder primacy has been criticized for putting the needs of owners over the needs of workers.

Comparisons

Economics

The Second Gilded Age has seen an increase in wealth inequality due in part to the Great Recession and in part due to deregulation stemming from the Reagan era. According to Henry Giroux, the United States has entered a Second Gilded Age "more savage and anti-democratic than its predecessor" as a result of the implementation of neoliberalism and contemporary market fundamentalism.

Many authors draw comparisons between the obscene fortunes of Gilded Age figures such as William Randolph Hearst and Second Gilded Age figures such as Elon Musk, both men who took control of media empires in order to push political agendas. Where Hearst took control of newspapers, Musk took control of the platform formerly known as Twitter. Hearst and Musk have both been criticized for using their newly acquired empires to spread misinformation and antisemitism.

In his farewell address, U.S. President Joe Biden warned that an emerging American oligarchy and tech-industrial complex posed risks to America in what Politico described as "echoing Roosevelt's language in calling out the 'robber barons' of a new dystopian Gilded Age". These comments were made in the context of several tech billionaires who made large donations to the 2024 presidential campaign of Donald Trump and his second inauguration. It also came in the context of surging stock prices of "The Magnificent Seven", seven tech companies whose combined value rose 46% in 2024, vastly beating the S&P 500 share index.

Politics

The Gilded Age was a time of rampant political corruption, and many authors have compared it to the corruption of the modern day. "Bailout billionaires" have been accused of purchasing politicians, using dark money and super PACs as vehicles for buying elections.

Civil Rights

Some authors have pointed out comparisons between the loss of civil rights after the Reconstruction Era and the stripping of civil rights in the modern day. The Supreme Court gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 in 1883, just as they gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in 2013, in both cases helping to strip Black Americans of the right to vote. While the legal discrimination of Jim Crow has been overturned, still today, a de facto racist criminal justice system still overlooks or enables police racial discrimination.

Xenophobia continued to gain legal protections in the First Gilded Age, finally culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, fully banning immigration from most of East and South Asia until being overturned during the civil rights era. This approach has been compared with Obama, Trump, and Biden era policies on immigration through the US-Mexico border such as Remain in Mexico. Trump further instituted travel bans from 15 countries, until they were overturned by Biden.

Public response

According to The New Hampshire Gazette, the response from more radical elements of the general public to the excesses of the First Gilded Age are similar to what is emerging in the Second Gilded Age with the Killing of Brian Thompson, in particular the anarchist tradition of propaganda of the deed.

Debate and discourse

Some authors argue that the Second Gilded Age is misnamed, and that these comaprisons are unfounded or only surface-level.

The First Gilded Age coincided with America's Second Industrial Revolution, as America moved from the use of coal to being powered by oil, thanks in large part to the efforts of captains of industry such as John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. Some authors have argued that the Second Gilded Age remains a time of deindustrialization, as working-class wages continue to fall and workers turn to the gig economy.

Historian Julie Greene argues that while the First Gilded Age and Second Gilded Age "share certain important characteristics, these are profoundly different historical moments." She says that while during the First Gilded Age there were serious attempts to mitigate the worst excesses of the new industrial capitalism of the time, the Second Gilded Age has seen almost the exact opposite, "as capitalists and their ideological and political supporters push to see how far they can go to ensure the unchallenged hegemony of corporate and property rights." She attributes this to several factors, including the neoliberal era starting in the 1970s, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and China's move towards economic liberalization. Greene argues that the Soviet collapse and Chinese liberalization represented the collapse of the two biggest alternatives to capitalism and permitted fundamental rights and protections to disappear. She concludes ultimately that "the slow climb toward a more humane capitalism and the rapid descent away from it constitute two very different experiences."