Second Gilded Age

The Second Gilded Age is the publication’s frame for the contemporary American economic-political moment: an era of concentrated wealth, corporate scale, and political capture that parallels — though does not exactly repeat — the original Gilded Age of 1870s–1900s America.

The original Gilded Age was the period between Reconstruction and the Progressive Era when industrial fortunes (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan) reshaped American politics. The top 1% wealth share peaked near 30%; corporate trusts dominated rail, oil, steel, and banking; political party machines were openly funded and directed by the same industrial interests. The populist response (1880s–1890s) lost at the ballot box; the progressive response (1900s–1910s) eventually produced antitrust enforcement, the Federal Reserve, and the income tax.

The publication’s argument is that the US has returned to comparable conditions in measurable ways — the top 1% wealth share is again around 30%, corporate concentration has risen across most industries, political donations are dominated by a small donor class — and that the political response is the open question of the 2020s. The parallel is structural, not literal. The cleavages, the technology, and the demographic composition of the country are completely different. What is similar is the underlying dynamic of concentration.

The publication is named for the Gilded Age frame: thin gold, the surface gilt over the steel-industrial reality, was the specific 19th-century critique of the era’s appearance. The 2026 midterms are the publication’s most immediate chapter and the most legible test of whether economic populism — in the structural sense — can end the Second Gilded Age.