this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2024
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The gilded age never ended we just stopped calling it that
That's not correct, there was a correction from the '30s to the '60s. It's just we stopped caring in the 60s.
Yeah there was a correction but not one big enough to not call America gilded. The civil rights movement was a step forward but not everyone took that step willingly and some harbored resentment.
That's what gilded means. It's fake. Looks nice on the surface then you see the details.
They were talking about before the Civil Rights movement, FDR's New Deal and stronger unions from the 30s-50s brought economic inequality way down. It started to go up again after that, and the current out of control situation really began in the 80s with Reagan's awful tax policies that we're still facing the consequences of
They're only awful policies for 99% of the population. Their amazing policies for the 1%.
You have a very interesting definition. I'm not going to call it incorrect but I will call it based.
https://youtu.be/HCBEi59DaHw
Isn't that why it was called the gilded age? The point was that it looked superficially great but hid a ton of inequality and problems underneath. It was taken from a Mark Twain quote iirc
It didn't look superficially great though. There were people and estates that looked and were fabulously wealthy. But in the context of the country just coming out of reconstruction.... It's not really so much that things were terrible and getting worse. It's that things were terrible. Got better and then stagnated. Instead of the entire country developing economically in equal measures a select few entities were sucking up all of the resources.
To put it another way in the year 2024 our policies are very heavily driven by the Reaganomics policies of the 1980s. Just like the early 1900s were very heavily driven by the end of the civil war reconstruction Policies knock on effects.
It's not that people stopped caring. It's more that people got fairly comfortable, and the greedy fucks at the top never stopped trying to hoard all of the money and power. So while most people had stopped fighting for better conditions, since conditions got pretty comfortable for a lot of people, the misers were actively working for decades to undermine all of society for their own selfish benefit. After decades of incremental enshitification, it has once again risen to a level where it can no longer be ignored. People have always cared about their own welfare, but they had their QOL slowly stolen while taking a much deserved breather.