The Second Era of No Decision

[Valin]

Washington Free Beacon

Column: How stagnation, inequality, and immigration create unstable majorities

Matthew Continetti
March 9, 2018

I had to travel to Silicon Valley to be reminded of how much our time resembles the late nineteenth century. Visiting the Stanford campus this week on a Hoover Institution media fellowship, I spoke to professors who view D.C. politics from a distance both critical and geographic. I was startled by how often the Gilded Age came up, unprompted, in my conversations. It was helpful to be reminded that, while the Beltway is obsessed with personalities—Stormy Daniels, Gary Cohn, Robert Mueller, Jared Kushner, and above all Donald Trump—the structural forces that have brought us to this moment are more important and more enduring.

Niall Ferguson mentioned a lecture he first delivered in 2016 on the five ingredients of a populist backlash. Recalling the Gilded Age of robber barons, bimetallism, the Panic of 1873, and Yellow Journalism, Ferguson pointed to income inequality, immigration, elite corruption, financial crisis, and demagogues as commonalities between that distant era and our own.

In an excellent 2017 presentation, D.C. consultant Bruce Mehlman noted further parallels. Both epochs had massive changes in employment. During the Gilded Age, agricultural jobs disappeared as workers poured into manufacturing. Today, manufacturing jobs go missing as workers enter the service sector. Disruptive technologies and the men who amass fortunes from innovation also define both periods. Then it was Carnegie and steel, Rockefeller and oil, Vanderbilt and railroads. Now it is Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and web search, Jeff Bezos and e-commerce, Mark Zuckerberg and the social network.

 

(Snip)

Still, as I write, the most probable scenario is that Democrats will win the 24 seats necessary to take over the House, and the Second Era of No Decision will continue indefinitely. But this is just one scenario. Historical analogies cannot tell us how to act. They do not reveal how things will end. What history does is enlarge our sense of the possible—and remind us that human nature is tragic and cyclical rather than therapeutic and progressive.