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With the current bountiful crops of outrages, provocations, and howlings, there is a temptation to evaluate everything in terms of our own Gilded Moment.1 The temptation needs to be resisted. Our Gilded Moment might be Trumpian, but it draws its fuel from a rebellion against a much lengthier and more complicated era that began in the late 1970s and runs into the present. Asking whether this era is a Second Gilded Age comparable to the First Gilded Age, which began at the end of the Civil War and extended into the early twentieth century, creates a blind man and the elephant problem. Examining different parts of the era can yield disparate conclusions. My task is to comprehend each era as a whole; I think that there are structural similarities stronger than particular differences.
Explaining my logic demands a brief aside. In emphasizing structures, I am not returning to crude economic determinisms or an antique mid-twentieth-century structuralism; instead I want to underline a set of concerns that has preoccupied scholars over the last generation. In my terms, if something can be discussed in terms of a single person or discrete group of people, it is part of the world of events. Structural elements, of course, also include people, but when people replicate the structures of a society, they do so largely anonymously, en masse, and without giving the repetitive actions that maintain or change structures much conscious thought. In terms of the First Gilded Age, elections and politics were part of a world of events; governance and democracy were structural. The organization of workers and strikes were part of the world of events; the rise of wage labor and returns on capital were structural. Particular technological innovations and inventions were part of the world of events; the change in energy regimes from wood, wind, and animal power to steam and coal were structural. The rise of the Farmers’ Alliance was an event; changes in world markets for wheat, cotton, and other commodities were structural.
Events are not epiphenomena. Structures do not dictate them, and I agree with Monica Prasad that contingent responses to structural conditions produce historical change. Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration, which emphasizes how structures need to be constantly re-created, remains a persuasive...