The Inner Monologue

History doesn’t always repeat itself in brass bands and gold leaf. Sometimes it creeps back through loopholes, budget riders, and agency memos no one reads. The United States may not yet be gilded, but it’s beginning to shimmer with that same strange luster that marked the 1890s: the glow of concentrated wealth against a darkening democratic sky.

I. The Structural Drift

A century ago, America’s wealth sat in steel, railroads, and oil. Today, it lives in cloud servers, algorithms, and ETFs. The mediums have changed, but the logic has not. In both eras, a handful of private empires built on public infrastructure became too large, too vital, and too politically protected to fail—or even to challenge.

We are now seeing policy and politics bend back toward that model. It isn’t the work of one administration or one ideology; it’s the slow sedimentation of decades of deregulation, campaign-finance erosion, and corporate lobbying. The once-bright line between private wealth and public policy has smudged. The revolving door between Congress, regulators, and corporate boards spins faster than ever, and the courts increasingly view economic regulation as government overreach rather than democratic housekeeping.

The tax code, the invisible architecture of modern inequality, has been quietly redrawn to reward rent-seeking over risk-taking. Carried interest loopholes persist. Step-up in basis and dynasty trusts allow the wealth of one generation to compound almost tax-free into the next. Corporate profits soar while the effective tax rate paid by multinational giants drifts ever lower. The IRS, chronically underfunded, audits the working class at higher rates than the wealthy.

That’s not policy drift—that’s policy design. And it’s precisely how the last Gilded Age began.

II. The Political Alchemy of Concentration

The modern American economy runs on a peculiar paradox: the rhetoric of free markets coexists with the reality of cartel-like concentration. In the 1890s, monopolists justified their power as “efficiency.” Today, the buzzwords are “innovation,” “scale,” and “network effects.” Amazon, Meta, Google, and Apple occupy a position eerily similar to the industrial trusts of old: indispensable, politically influential, and embedded so deeply into the fabric of daily life that meaningful competition feels almost unthinkable.

Meanwhile, Wall Street has perfected the quiet art of common ownership. A handful of asset managers—BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street—hold controlling stakes across entire industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals. The result isn’t the dynamic competition economists once idealized but a soft oligopoly governed by spreadsheet diplomacy.

Yet this new concentration rarely ignites outrage. The American public has been taught to conflate wealth with virtue and power with efficiency. When a billionaire builds a rocket, he is hailed as a visionary; when a worker demands a living wage, she is scolded for threatening inflation. This moral asymmetry is the psychological fuel of the neo-Gilded Age: inequality rebranded as aspiration.

III. The Hollowing of the Counterweights

The Progressive Era that followed the original Gilded Age arose precisely because the machinery of democracy had atrophied. The same is happening now, albeit in subtler ways. Unions, once a cornerstone of middle-class power, represent fewer than one in ten workers. Collective bargaining has been replaced by “terms of service.” The social contract now comes pre-clicked.

Regulators, the public’s line of defense against corporate excess, are outgunned. The average antitrust attorney in government earns less in a year than the private counsel they face earns in a month. Enforcement budgets stagnate while markets globalize. Even when the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission acts boldly—suing Google, challenging Amazon—the cases drag on for years, outlasting political cycles and public attention spans.

At the same time, the Supreme Court has signaled skepticism toward the very idea of a robust regulatory state. By weakening the Chevron doctrine (which once gave agencies deference in interpreting laws), the Court has tilted the field toward corporate plaintiffs eager to litigate every new rule. The message is subtle but profound: the government should be small, predictable, and deferential to capital.

IV. Taxation Without Redistribution

In 1960, the top marginal tax rate in America stood at 91%. Today, it is 37%, with enough carve-outs to make that theoretical. The top 0.1% of households now control more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. Yet calls for higher taxation of capital or inheritance are painted as class warfare rather than civic maintenance. The politics of envy have replaced the ethics of equity.

Every dollar diverted from the public treasury is a dollar that must be borrowed, cutting the fiscal oxygen available for infrastructure, healthcare, education, and climate resilience—the very investments that sustain long-term prosperity. It’s a feedback loop: inequality erodes state capacity, and weak state capacity entrenches inequality.

The irony is painful: America funds its public goods with debt issued by the same financiers who benefit from the tax code that starves them.

V. The Cultural Cover

Every Gilded Age needs a mythology to hide behind. In the 1890s, it was Social Darwinism—the belief that wealth proved moral fitness. Today’s version is technocratic inevitability. We are told that data monopolies are “natural,” that AI dominance is destiny, and that billionaires are the only ones moving fast enough to “save humanity.”

This ideology of inevitability cloaks choice. It obscures the reality that markets are not laws of nature but human constructs, governed—or neglected—by human decisions. When policymakers gut antitrust enforcement, or Congress cuts IRS funding, or courts equate money with speech, they are not obeying an invisible hand. They are guiding it.

VI. The Emerging Countercurrent

And yet, history also teaches that gilding never lasts forever. The public, eventually, sees the tarnish. The original Gilded Age birthed the Progressive movement, the income tax, the antitrust laws, the New Deal. Each was a democratic immune response to plutocratic overreach.

Signs of a modern immune response are emerging:

Antitrust agencies have rediscovered their backbone.

Some states are experimenting with privacy and data-rights laws.

Public sentiment toward unions, especially among young workers, is at a fifty-year high.

Politicians across the spectrum—yes, even some conservatives—speak of “economic nationalism” and “antimonopoly capitalism.”

The question is whether these scattered antibodies can coalesce into a systemic cure before the disease of inequality becomes terminal.

VII. The Stakes

A neo-Gilded Age is not just an economic condition; it’s a civic one. When wealth hardens into caste, democracy becomes performance art. Campaigns turn into fundraising contests. Policy becomes a commodity traded between lobbyists and legislators. Citizens retreat into cynicism, and the republic becomes a brand.

We’ve been here before. The gilding looks glamorous from a distance—mansions, markets, megaprojects—but up close it’s corrosion: child poverty, political capture, and a middle class that can no longer afford the dream it built.

The United States still has time to choose differently. But choice requires clarity. And clarity begins with admitting what we see: an economy that rewards capital over work, a government hesitant to tax the untaxable, and a culture that confuses celebrity with success.

That combination doesn’t just resemble the Gilded Age. It is one—this time plated in silicon instead of gold.

Epilogue: The Gilding and the Tarnish

If the first Gilded Age ended when citizens demanded fairness louder than tycoons demanded tribute, then the only question that matters now is whether Americans still have that voice. Because gilding, by its nature, is thin. It takes only a little friction—economic shock, political awakening, collective action—for the gold to flake away and reveal the base metal beneath.

The United States can either polish the gilding or strip it off and build something stronger. History will be written by which choice it makes.