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From the First Gilded Age to the Second: Alternative Coalition Strategies for a Transformed Party and Policy System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2020

M. Elizabeth Sanders
M. Elizabeth Sanders*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: mes14@cornell.edu
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Extract

Historians and social scientists have for years identified the current era as a new capital-dominant Gilded Age on the basis of economic trends (particularly rising inequality, now at a higher peak than in the early twentieth century), the coalescence of political elites (this time on a neoliberal, rather than protectionist agenda), and speculations about political upheaval on the horizon.

Information

Type
Special Issue: A Second Gilded Age?
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 2020, pp. 296 - 304
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2020

Historians and social scientists have for years identified the current era as a new capital-dominant Gilded Age on the basis of economic trends (particularly rising inequality, now at a higher peak than in the early twentieth century),Footnote 1 the coalescence of political elites (this time on a neoliberal, rather than protectionist agenda),Footnote 2 and speculations about political upheaval on the horizon.

If the United States is on the verge of a party coalitional and policy transformation, a political regime change, what can be learned about social movement activism and coalition alternatives in the First Gilded Age that might help us move beyond the Second? Can past cycles give insights into future political change, given a continued two-party system? Can we, with adjustments for economic change, voting rights, and class and ethnic demography, anticipate the range of available alternatives for elite-mass relationships at the end of the Second Gilded Age?

In Stephen Skowronek's regime theory, American political history has been shaped by party regimes. “Regimes” are defined by their policies, institutional modus operandi, coalition groups, and public philosophies. In each long regime (usually named for their inaugurating presidents), there are two major challenges from the opposition party (the second stronger than the first), followed by restoration of the regime-dominant party, then a “crisis of legitimacy” that produces a critical election bringing in a new long-term regime. Think Cleveland and Wilson interruptions in the Lincoln regime, regime restoration with Harding/Coolidge and Hoover, followed by depression crisis and Roosevelt's founding of a new regime in the 1932 election. In 1980, the Reagan regime was inaugurated, with subsequent challenges by Clinton and Obama, succeeded by Bush and Trump restorations. After two serious challenges, political scientists begin to anticipate a realigning election and a new regime.Footnote 3

Skowronek has not had much to say about the conditions that lead to regime replacement, but since the Civil War they have been likely to involve challenges to capitalist dominance from working- and middle-class dissidents threatened by unbridled capitalism, or the reassertion of capitalist prerogatives after decades of expanding government. More recent authors have explored the emergence of social movements and changes in demography and electoral geography that bring forward new leaders and challenges to the old regime.Footnote 4 In a two-party system, it is probably more likely than in other democratic systems that patterns of history will repeat themselves, and the gains of one long party regime be strongly challenged by the next one. Still, it is not easy to anticipate the regime details of coalition, policy, and philosophy, since they are so affected by global economic change and national social movements with varying grievances and mobilization/alliance capabilities.

The earmarks of the original Gilded Age are well known. The U.S. economy in the last three decades of the nineteenth century was transformed into an industrial powerhouse, creating great wealth but also great instability and differential class and regional effects. And exceptionally, in a world-historical context, rapid industrialization took place within a robust democracy. The secret of this anomaly, according to Richard Bensel, was the clever coalition building (with discrete policy benefits) of the Gilded Age Republican Party. The GOP coalition brought together industrialists and finance capitalists, northern farmers eager for cheap land, African Americans in the South dependent on federal protection, and industrial workers who could be convinced that tariff protection raised wages and reduced unemployment.Footnote 5 The icing on the cake for Republican strategists was that they could make the agricultural, trade-dependent South pay the costs of the party agenda through an interregional transfer of wealth that depressed the quantity and price of southern agricultural exports and raised the cost of manufactured goods the region imported.Footnote 6

But this party coalition was challenged in the 1880s and ‘90s by growing dissatisfaction with the pains of the business cycle, the rise of monopoly pricing and worker exploitation, and farmers’ increasing debt burden and fall into tenancy, all in a dynamic democratic polity that virtually assured the rise of protest movements.Footnote 7

The National Labor Union was organized in 1866, the Grange in 1867, the Knights of Labor—the largest, most diverse, and inclusive labor union in U.S. history—in 1869. The year after the Panic of 1873, the Industrial Brotherhood was organized, and the Socialist Labor Party was formed by German immigrants in the mid-1870s. The first great national railroad strike took place in 1877, and spurred Greenback-Labor Party activism in the 1878 elections; in the same years, the Farmers’ Alliance took form in North-Central Texas. Anti-monopoly and diverse farmer-labor parties entered state and national elections in 1878–80, and farmer-labor activists came together to form the Populist Party in 1892. The most severe national depression before the 1930s started with the Panic of 1893. The Populists did very well in 1894, paving the way for the great Populist-Democratic fusion that nominated presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896.Footnote 8

Populism was a biracial, cross-regional movement of struggling farmers and workers (including supporters of women's suffrage and assorted socialists) united in support for equal citizenship, collective organizational rights, government regulation of corporations (especially antitrust policy), government-created money, an income tax in lieu of high tariffs, anti-corruption, anti-militarism, and anti-elitism generally. Populists believed in small-scale production or, where the scale must be large, as in industries like transportation and warehousing, policy solutions ranged from member-run cooperatives to government ownership.Footnote 9

The actual American Populism that so terrified elites in the First Gilded Age (and again in the pluralist historical revisionism of the 1950s and 1960s)Footnote 10 was a far cry from the European anti-immigrant parties given a Populist label today. As Charles Postel, a leading historian of Populism, writes:

The 1890s Populists drew from multiple reform impulses, from women's suffragists to urban supporters of Henry George's Single Tax. But at its core it represented interest-based and class-based farmer-labor politics. In comparative transatlantic terms, the Populist vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” to be realized by way of majoritarian electoral democracy, shared ideological terrain with other labor and evolutionary socialist movements. By the turn of the century, as the People's Party collapsed, ex-Populists forged a key constituency of the Socialist Party. Other ex-Populists helped to consolidate factions that pursued labor, farmer, and other reform agendas within both the Democratic and Republican Parties. These farmer-labor and social–democratic traditions played a critical role in early twentieth-century state building and in the development of the New Deal, and they continued to be felt in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and beyond.Footnote 11

The last two decades of the nineteenth century were a very creative time for social movements, given the scale of grievances, relatively few legal impediments to (male) voting, and the widespread late nineteenth-century possibility of “fusion” that allowed minor parties to endorse a major party nominee and get credit for their support, while maintaining organizational integrity.

However, in part because the first “Long Depression” came during a Democratic administration, in part because the farmer-labor alliance was too weak to persist in the face of an intense Republican campaign of threats and promises to northern workers and physical intimidation by southern Democrats, and because the Populist-Democratic program was just too radical for the Gilded Age capitalist elite who pulled out all the stops to frighten workers attracted to the ticket, Bryan lost the election of 1896 and Republican dominance was restored.

But the Bryanization of the Democratic Party, the defection of northern hard-money advocates to the Republicans, and the expansive, congressionally nurtured farmer-labor reform legislation of the Progressive Era prepared the way for the next regime change in 1932.Footnote 12 In that election, despite the voting restrictions erected to thwart Populism and other radical threats, the Democratic Party expanded from its farmer-labor base to include the new urban lower-middle classes. It took a thorough repudiation of finance capitalists and other monopolists to achieve a strong new regulatory and social welfare state in the 1930s, but the New Deal regime was able to complete much of the farmer-labor agenda and expand it with the revival of Populist era cooperatives to carry electricity to rural areas, a much stronger legislative commitment to labor unions and raising wages, replacement of the domestic gold standard with soft money, and the addition of middle-class benefits like mortgage subsidies and university education financed by new taxes on the wealthy.Footnote 13

That pro-government public philosophy and associated policies that ended conservative dominance in 1932 remains a model for a future reconstructed Democratic Party in our current Gilded Age, as Senator Bernie Sanders and other “New Deal revivalist” Democrats have argued since 2015. They see the Clinton era transformation of the Democratic Party away from its old working-class base and toward business and the new professional classes as a costly error.Footnote 14

President Clinton, a classic “preemptor” in Skowronek's scheme, presented himself in 1992 as a “New Democrat” with a strategy of “triangulating” between his own and the opposition party. He supported the dismantling of the New Deal regulatory and welfare state, and implemented an ambitious program to privatize government functions. With Republican help, Clinton persuaded Congress to ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The consequences for American manufacturing workers of NAFTA and the Clinton-supported entry of China into the World Trade Organization were severe.Footnote 15 Then, when NAFTA in its early years proved devastating to the Mexican agricultural economy, millions of undocumented Mexicans emigrated to the United States (ultimately contributing a second issue to the 2016 Trump campaign).Footnote 16 Clinton's preemptive strategy was also implemented in the administration's support for deregulation of telecommunications and finance, deep structural changes in New Deal policies on welfare and agriculture, and a tough-on-crime stance.

Clinton's trade and deregulation policies were continued by the George W. Bush administration. The two presidents’ financial deregulation policies contributed to the financial crash of 2008 and the worst recession since the Great Depression, accelerating working-class decline.Footnote 17 In 2016, the effects of financial deregulation were still strongly felt at the lower rungs of the class ladder and were materially evident in the backlog of foreclosed houses that represents almost two hundred billion dollars of lost wealth for working-class and lower middle-class Americans.Footnote 18

These Clintonian decisions and their neoliberal inspirations had profound effects on the Democratic Party that had presumably begun as the party of the common man. The party began in the 1980s and ‘90s to reconfigure its base by courting upper-income professionals, women and LGBT groups, and paying much less attention to the working class. Bill Clinton was the first Democratic presidential candidate to drop references to the “working class” and to talk instead about the problems of the “middle class.”Footnote 19

The party had begun to lose working-class Democrats in the late 1970s as it adopted liberal positions on social issues that were unpopular with people holding traditional religious values. Until the 1970s, federalism helped both parties avoid dealing with conservatism on moral issues by keeping divisive social issues like alcohol and religion confined to the states where they posed less threat to national party unity. The nationalization of moral issues gained momentum in the same decade as the change in party nomination rules that transformed delegate selection for presidential nominating conventions. The new primary rules of the early 1970s increased Democratic success with socially liberal women, particularly after the institution of a gender quota system for Democratic convention delegates and the emergence of campaign funding groups like Emily's List that supported only women candidates who backed abortion rights. With the two parties increasingly tied on economic policy, many working-class whites moved to the Republican Party after the mid-1990s. A modest Democratic recovery in 2006–2008 was followed by resumed working-class losses after 2010).Footnote 20

Democratic Party elites during and after the Clinton administration had calculated that they could afford to let much of the white working class go if they could attract more upper middle-class professionals and women; and replace lost southern and midwestern working-class support with the votes of Hispanics (a vote exchange proposed by political scientist Thomas F. Schaller in his book, Whistling Past Dixie).Footnote 21

Responses To The Second Gilded Age: Alternative Party Coalitions

The Clintonian Democratic program for a continued Gilded Age would thus support large-scale immigration with a fast track to voting citizenship; enactment of “free trade” agreements unpopular with workers but embraced by elites in both parties; and perhaps supply an increment of welfare, funded by higher taxes on the very rich, to ensure quiescence among downwardly mobile workers while waiting for economic and demographic trends to diminish their numbers. In the growing cities carried by Clinton in 2016, the advantage of large-scale immigration to professional couples (low-cost housework and child care), and to city and state officials worried about loss of population and political representation, was obvious.

The most ambitious party transformation envisioned by Democratic think tanks and media projected a party of college graduates (Brookings labels them “high output Americans”) that abandons globalization's losers—the poorly educated and downwardly mobile “low output” Americans.Footnote 22 It is unclear how the party of successful college graduates could reach (or maintain) a majority if it eschewed any significant cultivation of the working classes via policy benefits. As the First American Gilded Age illustrated, elite-led parties need a working-class clientele to succeed. However, with continued shrinkage of the white portion of the working class, the Democratic establishment has reason to hope that immigrants and minorities can fill the gap, their loyalty won by identity-focused outreach in the form of civil rights protections and paths to citizenship that would not entail costly New Deal forms of redistributive assistance.

The Republican Party model for the modern Gilded Age might combine the original nineteenth-century forms (which, after all, kept the Lincoln regime in power for the better part of seventy-two years) with current Trump experiments. The Gilded Age Republican coalition yoked capitalists, the growing urban middle classes, and a base of workers content with protection of U.S. industry from foreign competition but demanding little in terms of distributive benefits.Footnote 23 Donald Trump has abandoned the Gilded Age Republican policy on immigration, which welcomed new immigrants for their low-wage costs and controllability (aided by the fact that up to a third intended to make some money and return to the old country).Footnote 24 The contemporary Republican version of that Gilded Age coalition would leave capitalists in control of essential economic policies (taxes, social spending, and regulation); revive its Gilded Age commitment to protectionism (albeit considerably below the original high levels); and hope to maintain considerable working-class support through trade and immigration restrictions, continuing the Trump experiments. The new Republican Party would probably need to soften its resistance to reproductive rights, or continue to transfer (via Supreme Court decisions) more power over moral issues to the states.

Of course, these two-party models for linking elites and masses do not exhaust future possibilities. Rather than two elite-led parties devoted to neoliberal policies, Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other left Democrats appear committed to a re-Populization of the Democratic Party, a movement toward revived class politics that would build a working-class/middle-class coalition across racial, ethnic, and gender lines, emphasizing issues like health care, education (and reduction of college debt), a higher minimum wage, the rebuilding of trade unions, infrastructure revival, assistance for alternative energy and home insulation, and lower military expenditures to free up funds for new policies.

This new party would not reflect the muddled and defamatory discourse about “populism” still current today, but would be more in line with the original Populist Party's commitment to economically focused issues more than identity politics (though protecting voting rights).

Conclusion

In a democratic two-party system that discourages minor parties, elites need substantial working class or petit bourgeois “clients” in their coalitions. The GOP in the First Gilded Age was strongly opposed to trade unions, but yoked economic elites with northern industrial workers by supporting tariff protection; it appealed to immigrants (when they could vote) via inclusion/open door policies, and potential jobs (providing cheap labor for elites). It mobilized African Americans (where they could vote) with support for voting rights and some other civil rights protections.

Donald Trump today is imitating the original nineteenth-century GOP protection strategy vis-à-vis industrial workers, but not, of course, including African Americans, or new immigrants seen by workers as competitors for jobs in a situation of declining industrial employment.

Gilded Age trade unions were also skeptical of immigration, but many workers were themselves immigrants, and the Knights of Labor tried to enroll immigrants at European ports even before they embarked. That strategy, along with the GOP pledge to protect industrial jobs for northern workers, and the rebellious farmers’ desire for an alliance with labor (mostly through the KOL) reduced native-immigrant conflict in the First Gilded Age.

A hundred years later, the Clintons worked to build an elite-led party of college graduates, professional women, and suburbanites with a clientele of minorities and immigrants attracted by identity-based protections and modest social welfare. That continues to be the project of the Clintonian faction of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The abandonment of the white/native working class was an entirely new Democratic Party option, based on the belief that enlargement of the college graduate/professional population would allow the Democratic Party to seduce those sectors away from the GOP, and replace lost blue-collar voters with immigrants and native minorities.

These two options for the current Gilded Age would leave no genuine left party, of course.

Elites in the Democratic Party seem to expect that constructing a “party of college graduates and their minority clients” would require only minimal redistribution via modest tax increases on the rich to fund social welfare policy for low-income natives and new immigrants. It is assumed that low-income minorities will not make strong redistribution demands on the elite-led government, or come to oppose large-scale immigration. There is reason to doubt these assumptions (for example, consider the opposition of Caesar Chavez and Barbara Jordan to large-scale immigration in the 1960s–‘70s; analyses suggesting that almost 30 percent of Hispanic voters backed Trump in 2016; and the fact that large-scale immigration imposes significant income costs on low-skilled Hispanic and African American citizens).Footnote 25

But two elite-dominated party coalition models are not the only possibilities. The third is the radical reform alternative introduced in the First Gilded Age: Populism.

Populism was a broad, democratic, redistributive (of both power and wealth) class-focused coalition of have-not and have-less Americans against elites of both parties. A similar strategy characterized the Bernie Sanders campaign in the 2016 Democratic primaries, as he sought to transform the Democratic Party into a left party quite different from the regime imagined by the Clintons. It was defeated by the opposition of the Clinton-controlled DNC, allied national media, and state parties dominated by Clinton allies.Footnote 26 But the Populist option came close to victory in the Democratic primaries, and, particularly in the case of another economic downturn, might still have a chance despite the derogatory labeling by pundits and conventional liberals around the democratic world alarmed by the prospect of widespread rebellion against globalizing elites.

The actual historical party that crossed ethnic, gender, party, religious, and regional lines to propose drastic changes in opportunity structures within democratic capitalism suffers from poor understanding of its agenda and strategy, perhaps a result of its state/regional variations, and the fact that its candidate in 1896 was a Democrat who arguably became a more genuine Populist after the party itself was finished. Bryan's religious orientation and political radicalism provoked contempt among earlier historians and moviemakers that obscured the extensive reform contributions of Bryan and the Gilded Age Populist movement to the Progressive Era and New Deal.Footnote 27

Whatever the new reform movement is called, it will, of course, face a very difficult path, as did the original Populist challenge. That coalition was greatly outspent in the 1896 election, ridiculed and condemned in national media, and struggled to unite ethnic and occupational groups and committed partisans. However, Bernie Sanders and other reform candidates have shown that alternative media and internet fundraising based on small donations can (at least in the primaries) overcome the abundant resources of a relative handful of business and billionaire donors. If a Populist reform coalition could overturn the Citizens United decision by constitutional amendment, and persuade party nominees in the general election to return to the public funding system abandoned by Barack Obama and subsequent presidential contenders, campaign financing, at least, might not be an insurmountable obstacle. Putting together a multiethnic, class-based coalition would still be difficult, given the polarized debate over immigration, which is a greater obstacle for the Populist alternative today than it was in 1896.

Scholars are beginning to recognize that inequality and downward mobility have probably contributed more to rebellion against European and U.S. Democratic Party elites than “resentments” based on racism and cultural change.Footnote 28 Real deterioration in economic circumstances, and the decline of democratic policy-making influence for the working and middle classes as a result of decades of neoliberal globalization across the developed democracies, could more productively be addressed by moving away from derogatory labeling and focusing on new domestic economic policies and democratic political reforms. New American foreign policies could recognize and remedy the consequences of past military interventions that are largely responsible for the desperate migrations of today. The goal of reformers in today's Gilded Age should be, in the words of Piketty and Vauchez, “to [achieve] more fiscal and social justice, and to effectively address … environmental and migration emergencies.”Footnote 29

References

Notes

1 Estelle Sommeiller and Mark Price, “The New Gilded Age: Income Inequality in the U.S. by State, Metropolitan Area, and County,” Economic Policy Institute, July 19, 2018; UBS, “New Value Creators Gain Momentum: Billionaires Report 2017,” https://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealth-management/uhnw/billionaires-report/new-value.html. According to Swiss banking giant UBS, the new billionaire class (with a collective fortune of more than $3.6 trillion) has led us into a new Gilded Age comparable to (or even more extremely unequal than) the First Gilded Age, https://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealth-management/uhnw/billionaires-report/new-value/master-architects.html.

2 On the rise of neoliberalism, see Slobodian, Quinn, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Far from discarding the regulatory state, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand project of protecting capitalism on a global scale,” argues the author (front cover).

3 Stephen Skowronek, “Barack Obama and the Promise of Transformative Leadership.” Foundation des Etats-Unis Universite Paris Diderot & Larca, Paris, Dec. 12, 2016. Skowronek predicted here that Trump's “disjunctive” presidency would end in 2020, and a new regime—the sixth in American history—would take the place of the Reagan regime of 1981. Skowronek's books on regimes, the presidents associated with them, and the challenges created across time by the situations of each regime stage, are The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997); and Presidential Leadership in Political Time, Reprise and Reappraisal, 2nd Edition, revised and expanded (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011).

4 See especially Schlozman, Daniel, When Movements Anchor Parties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 109–19Google Scholar; and Jusko, Karen, Who Speaks for the Poor? Electoral Geography, Party Entry, and Representation. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Bensel, Richard F., The Political Economy of American Industrialization 1877–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bensel writes, “The highest priority for the Republican Party was winning elections and the package of developmental policies was the optimal way to do that because of the distributional consequences for their coalition.”(Private communication, Jan 1, 2018).

6 Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 2.

7 Some historians slide over the dynamic, full male suffrage and active social movement democracy of the 1880s–‘90s, implying that the Jim Crow system of black oppression and the disfranchisement of African Americans and poor whites closely followed the retreat of Reconstruction, but this was not the case. Average (male) voter turnout reached its historic high in the 1884–96 period—61 percent in the South, 85.4 percent in the non-South. Burnham, Walter Dean, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review 59:1 (Mar. 1965): 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chs. 3–4Google Scholar; Greenwood, Janette Thomas, The Gilded Age: A History in Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 180–81Google Scholar.

9 On Populist era cooperatives, see Goodwin, Lawrence, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; and Schwartz, Michael, Radical Protest and Social Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

10 Anton Jaeger, “The Myth of ‘Populism’: It's the Transatlantic Commentariat's Favorite Political Put-Down. It's Also Historically Illiterate,” Jacobin, Jan. 3, 2018, https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/populism-douglas-hofstadter-onald-trump-democracy.

11 Postel, Charles, “The American Populist and Anti-Populist Legacy, in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas, eds. Abromeit, John, Chesterton, Bridget, Marotta, Gary, and Norman, York (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 116Google Scholar. See also Goodwyn, Democratic Promise; and Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties, 109–19.

12 Sarasohn, David, The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989)Google Scholar; Nugent, Walter, Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 35–107Google Scholar; Sanders, Roots of Reform, 164–77.

13 Davis, Kenneth S., FDR: The New Deal Years 1933–1937 (New York: Random House, 1979)Google Scholar; Leuchtenburg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 1932–1940 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), esp. 157–58Google Scholar.

14 Sanders, Elizabeth, “The Meaning, Causes, and Possible Results of the 2016 Presidential Election,” The Forum 15:4 (2017): 711–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Jeff Faux, “NAFTA's Impact on U.S. Workers,” Economic Policy Institute, Dec. 9, 2013, http://www.epi.org/blog/naftas-impact-workers/; Robert E. Scott, “Manufacturing Job Loss: Trade, Not Productivity, Is the Culprit,” Economic Policy Institute, Aug. 11, 2015, http://www.epi.org/publication/manufacturing-job-loss-trade-not-productivity-is-the-culprit/.

16 George J. Borjas, “The Immigration Debate We Need,” New York Times, Feb. 27, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/opinion/the-immigration-debate-we-need.html.

17 Neil Irwin and Josh Katz, “The Geography of Trumpism,” New York Times, Mar. 12, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/upshot/the-geography-of-trumpism.html?&moduleDetail=section-news2&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article; Larissa MacFarquhar, “In the Heart of Trump Country: West Virginia Used to Vote Solidly Democratic. Now It Belongs to Trump.” The increasing working-class struggle was cross-racial, but notable for the accelerated decline in prospects for the non-college educated white working class.

18 On the continuing effects of mortgage foreclosures and the weak government effort to ameliorate the losses, see Laura Kusisto, “Many Who Lost Homes to Foreclosure in Last Decade Won't Return—NAR,” Wall Street Journal, Apr. 20, 2015, 12:50 p.m. ET, http://www.wsj.com/articles/many-who-lost-homes-to-foreclosure-in-last-decade-wont-return-nar-1429548640.

19 Gwen Ifill, “Whose Welfare? The Poor, They Are Different, and in ‘92, Ever More Invisible,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/19/weekinreview/whose-welfare-the-poor-they-are-different-and-in-92-ever-more-invisible.html.

20 For longer-term data on class voting (back to the Eisenhower years), see Stonecash, Jeffrey, “The Puzzle of Class in Presidential Voting,” The Forum 15:1 (2017): 29–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the graph of Democratic Party identification of whites (by educational level) in Rob Griffin, Ruy Texeira, and John Halpin, “Voter Trends in 1916: A Final Examination,” Center for American Progress, Nov. 1, 2017, 32, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2017/11/01/441926/voter-trends-in-2016/.

21 Schaller, Thomas F., Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008)Google Scholar.

22 Mark Muro and Sifan Liu, “Another Clinton-Trump divide: High-output America vs Low-Output America,” Brookings, Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2016/11/29/another-clinton-trump-divide-high-output-america-vs-low-output-america/.

23 However, In the First Gilded Age there were some substantive benefits in the form of Union veterans’ pensions and land distribution.

24 Wyman, Mark, Round Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

25 George J. Borjas, “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers,” Politico, Sept./Oct. 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinton-immigration-economy-unemployment-jobs-214216.

26 Sanders, Elizabeth, “The Meaning, Causes, and Possible Results of the 2016 Presidential Election,” The Forum 15:4 (2017): 711–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Kazin, Michael, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Random House, 2007)Google Scholar.

28 Thomas Piketty and Antione Vauchez, “Manifesto for the Democratization of Europe, Social Europe, Nov. 12, 2018, https://www.socialeurope.eu/manifesto-for-the-democratization-of-europe.

29 Piketty and Vauchez, “Manifesto for the Democratization of Europe.”