Will our Hyper-Gilded Age Usher in Genuine Populism?

The tech bros are worse than the robber barons ever were — and voters are catching on

Elon Musk is no Andrew Carnegie

America used to be a middle-class society. But income and wealth disparities began rising rapidly during the Reagan years, and by the late 80s many observers began drawing parallels between the new era of inequality and the Gilded Age.

At this point, however, it’s clear that we are not experiencing a mere replay of the reign of the robber barons. We are living through something much worse. The tech bros make the “malefactors of great wealth” called out by Theodore Roosevelt look benign by comparison.

Some widely used measures of inequality suggest that income disparities, which soared in the 1980s and 1990s, have plateaued since then. But the concentration of wealth at the top is continuing to soar. Today’s oligarchs control a huge share of America’s wealth — much larger than their share even at the end of the 1980s:

The growth in wealth concentration is even more extreme if we look at the very, very top. Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s leading experts on wealth and income inequality, argues that the concentration of wealth is now much higher than it was at the peak of the Gilded Age:

Source

Tellingly, unlike the robber barons of yore, many modern plutocrats show little sense of gratitude for their good fortune, little inclination to give back to society by devoting a significant part of their wealth to good works. Forbes reports that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have devoted almost none of their wealth to philanthropy, while Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are only slightly better.

More important than the stinginess of the superrich, however, is the fact that their wealth has brought great political power, arguably more than the robber barons ever possessed — power that they abuse on an epic scale.

Thanks to the Roberts Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling, plutocrats are able to pump vast amounts of money into elections. Here’s a recent headline from the New York Times:

One example of many: Peter Thiel bankrolled J.D. Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign, burying his Democratic populist rival under a flood of PAC money. Without Thiel’s big bucks, J.D. Vance would not now be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

And Elon Musk actually controlled a significant part of U.S. government operations in 2025 — control that he used, among other things, to eviscerate foreign aid. Those aid cuts have already led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, mostly children, with millions more deaths likely to come.

The big political question going forward is whether there will be a significant backlash against the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small number of mean-spirited men.

I believe that there will be such a backlash, indeed that it is already starting, and that there is a political opening for some genuine populism if politicians have the courage to take a stand.

Polling suggests that an overwhelming majority of Americans — roughly speaking, almost everyone except MAGA Republicans — now consider the gap between rich and poor a major problem:

Source: YouGov

And anger over the Trump administration’s corruption — which isn’t the same as anger over the power of the superrich but overlaps with it — is clearly on the rise, becoming a major issue for the midterms.

What we need to push back against 21^st century oligarchy are political figures who won’t let themselves be intimidated by the hysteria the wealthy always exhibit at any hint of an effort to limit their privileges. That hysteria is on full display right now in New York City, where some of the wealthy are crying persecution over a planned tax on expensive pieds-a-terre — apartments owned by nonresidents. It’s even more extreme in California, where a proposal for a one-time wealth tax has led Google’s Sergey Brin to compare the state to Soviet Russia.

What politicians and pundits need to understand is that while the ultrawealthy would like us to believe that concern about their excessive power and privileges is a radical, left-wing, anti-centrist position, it isn’t. It is, in fact, a view shared by a large majority of Americans. And in any case, as G. Elliott Morris has shown, few voters, even those who describe themselves as moderate, really support what pundits call “centrism.”

It’s true that any politician who proposes a pushback against modern American oligarchy will face a tidal wave of lavishly funded venom. But given the realities of who today’s plutocrats are and what they do, there are big opportunities for leaders willing to pull an FDR and declare, “I welcome their hatred.”

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