In 2018, we aren’t witnesses to a new industrial revolution, but we are experiencing a digital one. The new monopolies live in Silicon Valley. While their advances aren’t as tangible as the westward march of the railroads and the early growth of mass production, they have reshaped our lives, and the consequences are newly apparent. Amazon will deliver most anything to your door within two days—or perhaps even two hours, if you live in one of the wealthiest cities in America—but doesn’t pay many of its workers a living wage. Uber will pick you up within minutes and take you anywhere for the fraction of the cost of a taxi cab, but its drivers are treated as disposable. Facebook and Google have made the world more interconnected and informed, but at the cost of users’ privacy (and sometimes the truth).
Historical comparisons are rarely precise. Income inequality today is indeed at levels that recall the Gilded Age. But labor conditions don’t compare to those depicted in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and the legalized political corruption encouraged by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision isn’t nearly as brazen as the machine politics of the late 1800s. The key difference, however, is that there was no welfare state back then: It took the grotesque inequalities of the era to inspire the necessary social reforms.
“The Gilded Age also saw ideas that challenge the conflict between economic growth and political institutions,” said Fink. Reformers and revolutionaries both forced these issues into the public square: Fink cites the socialist movement, which picked up momentum in the late nineteenth century, and the Knights of Labor, a radical labor organization whose affiliates organized black workers along with white workers. The Knights of Labor in particular risked violence to unite workers across racial lines in opposition to low wages, inhumane working hours and other indignities. The late nineteenth century was an era of corruption and inequality, sure, but it also produced the Haymarket riot.
The welfare state eventually emerged from this struggle.