A Response to Robert Reich
January 3, 2025
LES K. WRIGHT
In his column posted today on Substack Robert Reich uses his best cheerleading voice to rally the troops to end our current Second Gilded Age. My postwar generation was taught about the first Gilded Age back in high school history class. We learned about the robber barons, the monopolies, the vast personal wealth of the creators and owners (John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, J.P. Morgan).of new technologies (telephones, automobiles, motion pictures, electricity, railroads), how corporations bought the government, the exploitation of workers, the resultant widespread squalor the working class lived in, and voter suppression. As Reich states, “it seemed as if American capitalism was out of control, and American democracy couldn’t do anything about it because it was bought and paid for by the rich.”
Social reform and political resistance began with journalists and writers. Author and journalist Mark Twain gave a name to what was beginning to happen in the United States, this calling his satire novel The Gilded Age (1873). Nathaniel West lampooned the consequences of this era in his satire A Cool Million (1934). Muckrakers and social reformers blew the lid off the widespread devastation caused by unbridled greed. In 1904 Sinclair worked incognito in the meatpacking plants of the Chicago stockyards. He depicted working-class poverty, dangerous working conditions, and the hopelessness that created among the exploited working poor by the deeply rooted corruption of the robber baron class. He published this as The Jungle in 1906. Photojournalist and writer Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York in 1890. His photographs stood as undeniable documentation of the shocking squalor of the exploited urban working class in New York City. In her book The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) she exposed Rockefeller’s ruthless and exploitative practices in building Standard Oil into one the world’s largest business monopolies. (All of these books have been part of my home library for decades.)
These are all parts of the historical context in which progressivism and socialism emerged. Karl Marx spelled out how capitalism operates—its end goal is always monopoly control. Idealists, such as the Utopian socialists, envisioned a just society. Step by step the heartless wielding of power was reined in incrementally, culminating in FDR’s New Deal in 1933, in the depth of the Great Depression, a direct result of unbridled greed of the wealthy few. In 2008 a Second Great Depression triggered by the collapse of the housing market was narrowly averted by the bailout of greedy capitalists with taxpayers’ money. The wealthy had removed many regulations put in place because of the Great Depression to prevent them for doing this again. Not one of them has been held accountable and none of the removed regulations have been reinstated. On the contrary, the current oligarch class is working relentlessly to remove remaining regulations, such as the FDIC (to prevent banks from collapsing), for personal gain. No wonder the uberwealthy upper class and its egomaniacal leader, Donald Trump, turn the exploited against each other and spread fear simply by calling everything that threatens their pursuit of ever more personal wealth and personal power “socialism,” “communism,” even, absurdly, “fascism.”
In our current Second Gilded Age there are numerous more challenging differences. The government itself is corrupt to the core. It is fruitless to make any ethnical appeal for decency from leaders in government who have sold their souls to fall in line with Trump’s fascism, with Trump’s call to save America from the very apocalyptic demise he is driving America to (while blaming it on imaginary enemies), and with a much more complex and unregulated propaganda environment. Social media spreads and amplifies disinformation and misinformation. Dark forces operate in the anonymity social media operates in. AI is already magnifying the power and reach of this undermining of the ability to discern truth or reality.
Reich’s cheerleading includes calls to strengthen antitrust laws, taxing the uberwealthy, protecting democracy from Big Money, defending and expanding voting rights, protecting the rights of workers to organize, to invest in social safety nets, and revive guardrails to protect against the abuse of great wealth and power. Feudal capitalism has found its insidious way into the fabric of our society—for-profit healthcare, for-profit prisons (rendering the imprisoned, mostly black men, into slaves), expanding homelessness because it’s also profitable, and reducing the former middle class to wage slavery, with more and more workers being one paycheck way from homelessness.
Reich is proposing we use the antiquated weapons of a past war. We must do better and different. We need new thinking. No doubt this will start, as it always does, with the thinkers, the writers, the artists who are already imagining in new and different ways. If all else fails, capitalism operates in the mode of never-ending expansion in a finite world. Left unchecked, it will implode as the inevitable result of its structure. Otherwise, as Kurt Vonnegut is attributed to having said, “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”
Les K. Wright 