WHEN WAS AGAIN?

“It’s like déjà vu all over again.” Yogi Berra

I never understood what period in American history Donald Trump was referring to with his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”. When was “again”? Some people suggested it was the Reagan ‘80s. Others thought it might be the Eisenhower ‘50s. I lived through both those periods and they didn’t bear much resemblance to the America Mr. Trump seems to be talking about. Except for the paranoia and abuse of power, even the Nixon years didn’t look much like Trump’s America. Nixon did, after all, normalize diplomatic relations with China and create the Environmental Protection Agency, both of which accomplishments Mr. Trump seems determined to reverse.

So I did some research. I looked at Mr. Trump’s tweets and the Executive Orders he signed. I also looked at the backgrounds of the people he appointed to run the federal government and at the legislative proposals being put forth by his Republican cronies in Congress. Then I compared this composite picture of Trump’s America to various periods in American history. I had to go back more than a century to find a match - the late1880s to early 1900s.  Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age (glittering on the outside but corrupt underneath). It is more commonly known as the Era of the Robber Barons (i.e., Rockefeller, Carnegie, Astor, Mellon, Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, Hearst, etc.) – an era of unbridled, unhindered, unobstructed, rapacious capitalism with no liberal, “bleeding-heart”, social issues to get in the way of progress and profit.

There were no racial issues in the Gilded Age. “Negroes” lived under Jim Crow laws, which essentially neutralized the freedoms and opportunities that were given to them by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and confirmed with the blood of the Civil War (it’s called the War of Northern Aggression in the South). There were also no women’s issues. Women had very few rights until they got married and then they became their husbands’ property and had no rights at all. Children didn’t have any rights either, but then they didn’t have to go to school so they could start working 10-18 hour days for the Robber Barons when they were 10 years old.

The Gilded Age also saw the final solution to the “Indian” problem that had been a thorn in the side of westward expansion. They put all the Native Americans they hadn’t already killed on reservations and then broke all the treaties they had signed granting the tribes the power of sovereign nations, which is what persuaded the Native Americans to move to the reservations in the first place. They also resurrected the concept of indentured servitude from its medieval origins with “The Company Store”. There was no health insurance. The rich hired physicians to treat them when they got sick or injured and everyone else just used some narcotic based elixir (think Snake Oil) to numb their pain so they could keep working for the Robber Barons. The average working male in the Gilded Age could only expect to live to 48, but that wasn’t a problem because the Robber Barons threw open the doors to the country and that produced an endless flow of immigrants coming to America from all over the world who were more than willing to do the Robber Barons’ bidding for the promise of the American Dream, which turned out for most them to be an empty promise.

There were no labor laws, no occupational safety laws, no environmental protection laws (and no National Parks), no product safety laws, no enforceable anti-trust laws or banking regulations, no truth in advertising laws, and no social safety net (no social security, unemployment insurance or food stamps.) The Robber Barons owned the ships, the railroads, the mines, the mills, the factories, the banks, the newspapers, the cops, the courts, and most of the government officials at the local, state and national levels. So, basically, they could do whatever they wanted to do. If workers tried to resist the Robber Barons or organize to improve their working or living conditions, they were immediately and violently crushed. As a result, the Robber Barons had everything and everybody else had nothing.

The ultimate conceit of the Robber Barons was convincing historians that they were American heroes whose vision and fierce determination transformed the United States of America from the backwoods novelty it had been into the world power it would become. Unfortunately, the reality is the Robber Barons were selfish, greedy, corrupt, ruthless, racist, misogynistic, narcissistic, egomaniacs and it has taken us more than 100 years to only partially undo the damage they did to our “inalienable rights”, our representative democracy and our planet.  Now, Donald Trump and his new breed of Robber Barons want to take America back to the Gilded Age, an age when rampant bad behavior dominated every aspect of American life.

Think about that very carefully. If you still support Mr. Trump, are you sure his vision of America is the America you want – where the Robber Barons have everything and everybody else has nothing? Because, if you are reading this, I can almost guarantee you are not going to be one of the “have everythings”. If Donald Trump is allowed to carry out his agenda and take us back to the time he believes America was at its greatest, the Gilded Age, you can bet the farm that you, your children, your grandchildren and their children are going to suffer unimaginable hardships along with the rest of us ‘have nothings.” That assumes, of course, that the human race doesn’t make itself extinct, which, with nuclear weapons in our arsenal, climate change at our doorstep, and the new Robber Barons in control of everything, is entirely possible. Of course, the new Robber Barons will become extinct along with the rest of us, but they’ll die with the most toys, so they win.