Page 2 of
3 The
great silence of a Gilded
Age By Steve
Fraser
bandits are, once in a while,
arrested by a sheriff. Some ministers, even
born-again ones, do still preach the Social
Gospel. But all this seems a pale shadow of what
was. Something fundamental about the metabolism of
capitalism has changed.
Perhaps the answer
is simple and basic. The first Gilded Age rested
on industrialization; the second on
de-industrialization. In our time, a new system of
dis-accumulation looted American industry,
liquidating its assets to reward speculation in
fictitious capital. After all, the rate of
investment in new plant, technology, and research
and development all declined during the 1980s. For
a quarter-century, the fastest growing part of the
economy has
been the finance,
insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector.
De-industrialization has set off an
avalanche whose impact is still being felt in the
economy, in the country's political culture, and
in everyday life. It laid the industrial working
class and the labor movement low, killing it twice
over. This, more than anything else, may account
for the great silence of the second Gilded Age,
when measured, at least, against the raucous noise
of the first. Labor was mortally wounded by direct
assault, beginning with President Reagan's
decision in 1981 to fire all the striking air
traffic controllers. His draconian act licensed
American business to launch its own all-out attack
on the right to organize, which continues to this
day.
In itself, however, resorting to
coercion to deal with the opposition hardly
distinguishes our own gilded elite from the first
one. If anything, we live in less savage times, at
least here at home. More fatal by far was the
arrival of a new mode of capital accumulation,
starkly different from the one that had prevailed
a century ago. It eviscerated towns, cities,
regions, and whole ways of life. It demoralized
people, hollowed out popular institutions that had
once offered resistance, and stoked the fires of
resentment, racism, and national revanchism. Here
was the raw material for mean-spirited division,
not solidarity.
Dis-accumulation
transformed the working class into a disaggregated
pool of contingent labor, contract labor,
temporary labor, and part-time labor, all in the
interests of a new "flexible capitalism".
Ideologues gussied-up this floating workforce by
anointing it "free agent" labor, a euphemism
designed to flatter the free market homunculus in
each of us, and, for a time, it worked. But the
resulting reality has proved a bitter pill to
swallow. To be a "free agent" today is to be free
of health care, pensions, secure jobs, security in
every sense. In our gilded era, downward mobility,
lasting a quarter-century and still counting, has
marked the social trajectory of millions of people
living in the American heartland.
Dis-accumulating capitalism also
undermined the political gravitas of poverty. In
the first Gilded Age, poverty was a function of
exploitation; in the second, of exclusion or
marginalization. When we think about poverty, what
comes to mind is welfare and race. The first
gilded age visualized instead coal miners, child
labor, tenement workshops, and the shantytowns
that clustered around the steel mills of Aliquippa
and Homestead.
Poverty arising out of
exploitation ignited widespread moral revulsion
and a robust political assault on the power of the
exploiters. The perpetrators of the poverty of
exclusion of our own time have been trickier to
identify. In his 1962 book The Other
America, Michael Harrington noted the
invisibility of poverty. That was half a century
ago and misery still lives in the shadows. Helped
along by an ingrained racism, poverty in the
second Gilded Age was politically neutered, or
worse.
Decline, dispossession, and
marginalization: a grim scenario. Yet the new
political economy of finance-based
dis-accumulation also announced itself as the
second coming of democratic capitalism. And in the
realm of the collective imaginary, if not in
reality, it convinced millions.
The myth of democratic
capitalism Aristocrats don't exist
anymore, but it is remarkable how long they lasted
as major actors in the country's political
dramaturgy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was still
denouncing "economic royalists" and "tories of
industry" at the height of the New Deal. The
struggle against the counter-revolutionary
aristocrat, seen to be subverting the institutions
of democratic life, piling up unearned riches,
supplied the energy powering American reform for
generations. In real life, the robber baron
industrialists and financiers of Wall Street were
no more aristocrats than my grandma from the
shtetl. They were parvenus.
For
their own good reasons, however, they actively
conspired in this popular misperception by playing
the aristocratic role for all it was worth. In
hindsight, what looks like one of the silliest
utopias of the first Gilded Age was enacted by
these nouveaux riches, performing in tableaux
vivants at gala balls dressed in aristocratic
drag, or cavorting in the castles and villas they
had transported stone by stone from France and
Italy, or showing off at the weddings of their
daughters to the offspring of bankrupt European
nobility, or parading to New York's Metropolitan
Opera in coaches driven by liveried servants and
embossed with their family's "coat of arms,"
complete with hijacked insignia and faked
genealogies that concealed their owners' homelier
origins.
We may laugh at all this now.
Back then, for millions, these aristocratic
pretensions confirmed an ancient Jeffersonian
suspicion: capitalists were nothing more or less
than camouflaged aristocrats. Mobilizing to rescue
the republic and democracy from such a danger was
practically an indigenous instinct. However,
pushing beyond this horizon of political democracy
in the direction of social democracy is a
different matter entirely, arousing anxiety about
threatening the understructure of private property
which is, after all, also part of the American
dream. Having an aristocracy to kick around, even
an ersatz one, can be politically empowering.
Minus the oddball exception or two, the new
tycoonery of the second Gilded Age does not fancy
itself an aristocracy. It does not dress up like
one or marry off its daughters to fortune-hunting
European dukes and earls. On the contrary, its
major figures regularly dress down in blue jeans
and cowboy hats, affecting a down-home populism or
nerdy dishevelment. However addicted to the
paraphernalia of flamboyant excess they may be,
the new capitalist elite does not pretend these
are the insignia of ruling class entitlement.
Once upon a gilded time, the lower orders
aped the fashions and manners of their putative
betters; today it's the other way around. Indeed,
it is no longer even apt to talk of a "leisure
class" since our moguls of the moment are
workaholics, Olympians of the
merger-and-acquisition all-nighter.
Although the economic and political
throw-weight of our gilded elite is at least as
great as that of its predecessors in the days of J
P Morgan and John D Rockefeller, an American fear
of a moneyed aristocracy has subsided accordingly.
Instead, from the Reagan era on, Americans have
been captivated by businessmen who took on the
rebel role against a sclerotic corporate order and
an ossified government bureaucracy that, together,
were said to be blocking access to a democracy of
the bold.
Often men from the middling
classes, lacking in social pedigree, the overnight
elevation of people like Michael Milken, Carl
Ichan, or "greed is healthy" Ivan Boesky,
flattered and confirmed a popular faith in the
American dream. These irreverent new
"revolutionaries," intent on overthrowing
capitalism in the interests of capitalism, made
fun of the men in pin-striped suits.
When
the captains of industry and finance lorded it
over the country in the late 19th century, no one
dreamed of calling them rebels against an
overweening government bureaucracy or an
entrenched set of "interests". There was then no
government bureaucracy, and tycoons like Russell
Sage and Jay Gould were "the interests". They
worried about being overthrown, not overthrowing
someone else.
Our corporate elite are much
more adept than their Gilded Age predecessors were
at playing the democracy game. The old "leisure
class" was distinctly averse to politics. If they
needed a tariff or tax break, they called up their
kept Senator. When mortally challenged by the
Populists and William Jennings Bryan in 1896, they
did get involved; but, by and large, they didn't
muck about in mass party politics, which they saw
as too full of uncontrollable ethnic machines,
angry farmers and the like. They relied instead on
the federal judiciary, business-friendly
presidents, constitutional lawyers, and public and
private militias to protect their interests.
Beginning in the 1970s, our age's business
elite became acutely politically minded and
impressively well-organized, penetrating deeply
all the pores of party and electoral democracy.
They've gone so far as to craft strategic
alliances with elements of what their 19th century
predecessors, who might have blanched at the
prospect, would have termed the hoi polloi. Calls
to dismantle the federal bureaucracy now carry a
certain populist panache, while huffing and
puffing about family values has, so far, proven a
cheap date for a gilded elite that otherwise
generally couldn't care less.
Moreover,
the ascendancy of our faux revolutionaries has
been accompanied by media hosannas to the stock
market as an everyman's Oz. America's long
infatuation with its own democratic-egalitarian
ethos lent traction to this illusion.
Horace Greely's inspirational admonition
to "go West young man" echoed through all the
channels of popular culture in the 1990s, from
cable TV shows and mass circulation magazines to
baseball stadium scoreboards and Internet chat
rooms. Only now Greeley's frontier of limitless
opportunity had migrated back East to the stock
exchange and into the ether of virtual or dot.com
reality. The culture of money released from all
ancient inhibitions enveloped the commons.
"Shareholder democracy" and the "ownership
society" are admittedly more public relations
slogans than anything tangible. Nonetheless, you
can't ignore the fact that, during the second
Gilded Age, half of all American families became
investors in the stock market. Dentists and
engineers, mid-level bureaucrats and college
professors, storekeepers and medical technicians -
people, that is, from the broad spectrum of
middle-class life who once would have viewed the
New York Stock Exchange with a mixture of awe,
trepidation, and genuine distaste, and warily kept
their distance - now jumped head first into the
marketplace, carrying with them all their febrile
hopes for social elevation.
As Wall Street
suddenly seemed more welcoming, fears about
strangulating monopolies died. Dwindling
middle-class resistance to big business accounts
for the withering away of the old anti-trust
movement, a telling development in the evolution
of our age's particular form of "big-box"
capitalism. Once, that movement had expressed the
frustrated ambitions not only of smaller
businessmen but of all those who felt victimized
by monopoly power. It embodied not just the idea
of breaking up the trusts, but of competing with
or replacing them with public enterprises.
Long before the Reagan counter-revolution
defanged the whole regulatory apparatus, however,
the "anti-trust" movement was over and done with.
Its absence from the political landscape during
the second Gilded Age marks the demise of an older
middle-class world of local producers, merchants,
and their customers who were once bound together
by the ties of commerce and the folk truths of
small town Protestantism.
Big-box
capitalism, the capitalism of Wal-Mart, still
incites local uproars that carry a hint of that
anti-trust past, but opposition forces are
divided. The capitalism of which Wal-Mart is
emblematic generates a dissonant universe of
political and cultural desires. It appeals, first
of all, to instincts of individual and family
material wellbeing, which may run up against calls
for a wider social solidarity.
Moreover,
in its own everyday way consumer culture, more
far-reaching than anything imaginable a century
ago, channels desire into forms of expressive
self-liberation. Grand narratives that tell a
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