Trump And GOP Want To Return To The "Gilded Age" Of Greed And Corruption

 

The following is part of a post by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

The America they actually seek is the one we last had in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

“We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept,” Trump said in January. 

Yes, we had tariffs during that Gilded Age. It was also an era when the nation was mesmerized by the doctrine of free enterprise, although few Americans actually enjoyed much freedom. 

Robber barons such as financier Jay Gould, railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, and oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller controlled much of American industry.

 

They corrupted American politics. Their lackeys literally deposited sacks of money on the desks of pliant legislators.

The gap between rich and poor turned into a chasm. Urban slums festered. Women couldn’t vote. Black Americans were subject to Jim Crow. 

Most tellingly, it was a time when the ideas of William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, dominated American social thought. 

Sumner brought Charles Darwin to America and twisted him into a theory to fit the times.

Few Americans living today have read any of Sumner’s writings, but they had an electrifying effect on America during the last three decades of the 19th century.

To Sumner and his followers, life was a competitive struggle in which only the fittest could survive — and through this struggle, societies became stronger over time. 

A correlate of this principle was that government should do little or nothing to help those in need, because that would interfere with natural selection.

Trump and his Republicans on Capitol Hill not only echo Sumner’s thoughts but mimic Sumner’s reputed arrogance. They say we must reward “entrepreneurs” (by which they mean anyone who has made a pile of money) and warn us not to “coddle” people in need (for example, they want to put work requirements on Medicaid). 

They oppose extending unemployment insurance because, they say, we shouldn’t “give people money for doing nothing.”

Sumner, likewise, warned against handouts to people he termed “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.”

Trump and other Republican lawmakers are dead set against raising taxes on billionaires, relying on the standard Republican trickle-down rationale that billionaires create jobs.

Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late 19th century — the era when, according to Trump, “we were richest.”

Social Darwinism allowed John D. Rockefeller to claim the fortune he accumulated through his giant Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest.” It was, he insisted, “the working out of a law of nature and of God.”

Social Darwinism also undermined all efforts at the time to build a nation of broadly based prosperity and rescue our democracy from the tight grip of a very few at the top. It was used by the privileged and powerful to convince everyone else that government shouldn’t do much of anything.

Not until the 20th century did America reject Social Darwinism. Instead of Social Darwinism, we created an inclusive society. We created the largest middle class in the history of the world — which became the core of our economy and democracy. 

We built safety nets to catch Americans who fell downward through no fault of their own. We designed regulations to protect against the inevitable excesses of free-market greed.

 

We taxed the rich and invested in public goods — public schools, public universities, public transportation, public parks, public health — that made us all better off.

In short, we rejected the notion that each of us is on his or her own in a competitive contest for survival. We depended on one another. 

But now America is in its Second Gilded Age, and its new robber barons have found the same rationale as they did in the First. 

Under Trump and his lapdogs in the House and Senate, Social Darwinism is back.