Conservatives have a lot to lose in America's 2nd 'Gilded Age': analysis

03 March

During the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee (RNC) claimed that then-Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats were obsessed with culture-war issues when they needed to be focusing on the economy, inflation and the working class. A GOP ad famously said, "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you."

Harris' campaign pushed back, warning that Trump's economic policies — from aggressive tariffs to tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires — would be terrible for the working class. But Trump's messaging worked: Trump won the popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent.

When Trump was inaugurated on Monday, January 20, 2025, however, he was surrounded by tech billionaires — an image that, critics argued, was inconsistent with the message of economic populism he pushed during his campaign.

In an article published on March 2, Politico's Joshua Zeitz draws a parallel between "growing wealth inequality" in 2025 and the Gilded Age of the 19th Century — and lays out some reasons why conservatives should be worried about this disparity.

"At his second inauguration, as President Donald Trump promised to usher America into a new 'golden age,'" Zeitz observes, "he was surrounded in the Capitol Rotunda by a handful of tech billionaires whose companies account for roughly one-fifth of the market cap of U.S. public equities. It was a not-so-subtle sign that the second Trump Administration will be staffed, advised and led by titans of wealth. Which means that Trump's golden age looks an awful lot like a new Gilded Age."

Zeitz continues, "The Gilded Age was the era in the late 19th Century when business and industry dominated American life as never before or since. It was a period of unprecedented economic growth and technological progress, but also, of economic consolidation and growing wealth inequality. Titans of industry enjoyed enormous control over political institutions, while everyday Americans buckled under the strain of change. As the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened, political culture ultimately grew coarse — and violent. Then as now, growing income and wealth inequality opened a rift in American society, with a small group of elites amassing substantial power and influence."

The elites of the Gilded Age, Zeitz notes, included "industrial magnates like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie" — whereas in 2025, they include Amazon's Jeff Bezos (who owns the Washington Post) and Tesla/SpaceX/X.com CEO Elon Musk.

"Despite Trump's mass appeal among white working-class voters — and the fact that he performed better with working-class voters of other races than ever before — his coziness with billionaires like Musk and his pursuit of an economic agenda that focuses on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans both suggest that his presidency will be more of a boon to modern-day tycoons than the average working person," Zeitz explains. "That could mean that the coming of America's second Gilded Age carries with it a warning for the GOP."

Zeitz adds, "By the 1890s, the pendulum had swung so hard in the direction of wealth and industry that America's brittle social compact threatened to come undone. In response to the extremes of the Gilded Age, a wave of progressive reform swept the nation from the 1890s to the 1910s, fundamentally reordering the social compact between citizens and their government."

Joshua Zeitz's full article for Politico is available at this link.

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