Donald J. Trump, inaugurated on Monday as the 47th President of the United States of America, pledged in his inaugural address to take the nation into a new “Golden Age.” While unclear what time period exactly President Trump wishes to emulate as he Makes America Great Again, his words invoke a new coming of prosperity and security for each and every American, under the watchful eye of a strongman leader. But those wishing to locate the true center of newfound power in this “golden” era would be wise to cast their gaze to Trump’s right and find in the audience three men, all at least 15 years younger than the President. There sit Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. This troika of technology and wealth opposed the 45th President, but as he returns as No. 47, these magnates form a chorus of Silicon Valley support for President Trump and his conservative policies. To them, a golden age means unimpeded technological development, lower corporate taxes and carte blanche to form monopolies.
In his farewell address to the nation, outgoing President Joe Biden warned of a developing “oligarchy” that is threatening American freedom and equality. Data on the subject supports his grave warning. According to some estimates, income equality in the U.S. is the highest since 1928, before the Great Depression. In 2019, the richest 10% of families in the United States controlled 76% of all household wealth, leaving the bottom 50%—more than 60 million families—just 1%. In 2020, the richest 400 individuals in the United States—a number so small they would barely fill half of the Capitol Rotunda—jointly held 3.2 trillion dollars in wealth, more than 15% of the U.S. gross domestic product. The incoming Trump administration has moved to take steps that will only inflate the enormous wealth of today’s oligarchs. Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, has emphasized the importance of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy. His choices for Federal Trade Commission Chairman and chief of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division have signaled that they will refrain from aggressively pursuing corporate consolidation and monopolistic practices, putting an end to the historic lawsuits filed by the Biden Administration against tech giants like Google and Apple. With the enthusiastic support of billionaires behind these pro-wealthy policies, it’s no wonder that some have taken to calling Trump’s election the beginning of not a golden, but a gilded, age.
While “gilded” is a close cousin of golden, it carries a connotation of superficiality, of a shiny exterior concealing a deep depravity beneath. This word is often used to refer to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a time when the U.S. was home both to magnates such as Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, as well as sprawling slums and hulking factories where workers labored under dangerous conditions without the right to organize. The rich elite of the time, sometimes called “robber barons”, protected their wealth by cultivating influence within the government and preventing action against corporate excess. For example, until the “trust-busting” of President Theodore Roosevelt, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company held a vertical monopoly over the American petroleum industry, meaning that Standard Oil controlled its entire supply chain. These giants also leveraged their influence to win massive government contracts, a strategy which has been mirrored in the present day: almost all of Elon Musk’s wealth can be attributed to government assistance that helped build his companies.
Like in the nineteenth century, today’s age can be referred to as “gilded” by virtue of the deep divide between the superficial excess of the era and a more sobering reality. While we might think of our moment in history through the lens of TikToks, Mr. Beast and the ubiquitous presence of technology, we also live in an age of increasing global instability where for many in Gen Z, homeownership is little but a dream. The common thread is that the divide between wealth and reality has grown well outside what might be explained by merit alone: it would be ludicrous to argue that Mr. Musk works around 400,000 times harder than the average American, or is 400,000 times smarter. And, again similarly to the original Gilded Age, the oligarchs are convinced of their own superiority and inevitability: one only has to read the deranged manifesto of billionaire investor Marc Andreessen to witness the hubris of our new tech overlords.
America and the world may be slipping into a new era of tech-addled oligarchy, but there is still time. The reins of power held by Musk and Zuckerberg reach us through the social media apps on our phones; if we take a principled stand against technology that is making us dumber and subtly influencing our opinions, we can disarm one of the oligarch’s key points of social, and therefore political, control. We can vote for candidates who will ensure that billionaires and companies are held accountable to the law. We can frequent local bookstores, helping them resist Amazon’s near-monopoly on the book delivery business. We have a wide variety of options as citizens and consumers to keep a check on the power of wealth. Now is the time to use them.
