Whenever Bill Clinton opens his mouth, he’s accused of saying something dishonest, self-serving, or at best politically unwise. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I think this has less to do with any difficulty that Clinton has had in accommodating himself to the You Tube era--which is not, after all, such a quantum leap away from the 24/7 news environment in which he successfully conducted his presidency--than with a desire on the part of the Washington media panjandrums to exact some revenge.

For example, in The New Yorker today there is a dig at the former president that repeats Barack Obama’s false claim that jobs “fell through the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration.” Oddly, the piece--by Ryan Lizza, late of this magazine, and by all accounts a fair and careful reporter--fails to state explicitly, as a factual matter, that Obama was simply wrong about this claim. (See Paul Krugman.) Lizza leaves it to Bill Clinton to do say merely, “Now, if you believe that, you should probably vote for [Obama], but you get a very bad grade in history.” But since the piece generally paints Clinton as concerned only with burnishing his own record, it leaves readers who don’t know better unaware that unemployment really did fall under Clinton, across the board.

The article then moves on to refer to "the mysterious theory that Obama had played the race card against" Bill Clinton. Yet no one who has followed the campaign closely can believe there’s anything “mysterious” about this "theory." Do we need to be reminded of the Obama campaign's well-known memo seeking to construe innocent remarks by Bill and Hillary and their supporters as racist? Indeed, Sean Wilentz documented the effort to unfairly tarnish the Clintons at length in TNR many weeks ago. Now, I realize Wilentz’s case was not convincing to everyone--though even if one strips away Wilentz’s overall argument, one has to contend with the several pieces of hard evidence that he adduced to show how Obama’s team injected allegations of racism into the campaign. So while this “theory” may be unconvincing to some--especially to those predisposed to think highly of Obama--it's certainly not "mysterious."

Meanwhile, TheNew York Times reviews a new book by Carol Felsenthal, whose biographies were once described by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in TNR as “pathography” (the term is Joyce Carol Oates’s). The target: Bill Clinton in his post-presidency. To her credit, reviewer Janet Maslin thinks little of the book. But she allows Felsenthal to get away with the claim that "all the wondrous works in the years ahead may enhance his reputation as an ex-president but not as a president"--another historically false claim, insofar as it suggests that Clintons’ impeachment (by a Republican-controlled House) and subsequent acquittal (by a Republican-controlled Senate) will come to reflect worse on him than on his Republican and media persecutors. In fact, the opposite has already proven to be the case.

Even more astonishing, Felsenthal approvingly quotes Don Hewitt of “60 Minutes"--why Hewitt has any authority on this matter is not explained--saying that if not for Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, "there’s not one kid who has died in Iraq who wouldn’t be alive today." Not only is the claim based on so many flawed assumptions of causality as to be absurd as a matter of logic; it is also simply vile to blame Bill Clinton's marital infidelity for the deaths of 4000 Americans in a war launched by George W. Bush. Does Monica Lewinsky therefore have their blood on her hands as well?

Someone will have to write a long piece on the resurgent antipathy of late toward Bill Clinton, who after all left the White House with the highest approval ratings of any departing president in Gallup polling history. The new hostility goes beyond the lingering sore feelings among media types about having been bested during the impeachment struggle, or among leftists for his New Democratic heresies. Unintentionally, Hewitt's comment may provide some of the answer, insofar as it suggest that some of this anger is a displacement of hostility toward Bush. But whatever its sources, the newfound Clinton-hatred is most assuredly not a product of the former president's purported negative campaigning against Obama. Quite the contrary, the idea that he has campaigned with particular negativity against Obama is itself the product, in part, of the Clinton-hatred coursing anew through the Washington establishment.

The Democratic contest goes on, but as I predicted in my post two months ago, it is essentially over (“Is the Democratic Race Over?” February 19, 2008). To win the nomination, Hillary Clinton must win both North Carolina and Indiana on May 6. This is a nearly impossible task given the very favorable demographics for Barack Obama in North Carolina. Indiana remains a toss-up.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, however, an ongoing nomination fight that may continue until the last contest in June, when the superdelegates will weigh in and settle the matter, should not hurt the Democrats in the fall campaign. Analysts have failed to distinguish between the party that holds the White House and the challenging party. A bitter, lasting battle hurts the incumbent party because it indicates problems with governing. Examples include Ronald Reagan’s challenge to President Gerald Ford in 1976, Ted Kennedy’s challenge to President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Pat Buchanan’s challenge to President George H. W. Bush in 1992.

In contrast, struggles within the challenging party often indicate that the prize of the nomination is worth winning. The three greatest victories posted by challenging party candidates in American history all came after nomination struggles that lasted until the party convention. Warren Harding who won 60 percent of the popular vote in 1920 was nominated on the tenth ballot. Franklin Roosevelt who won 57 percent in 1932 was nominated on the fourth ballot and Dwight Eisenhower who won 55 percent in 1952 was nominated only after the convention seated his Texas delegation as opposed to a competing delegation pledged to his rival Robert Taft.

The fundamentals of election 2008 strongly favor a Democratic victory this fall as I explained in my post on the Keys to the White House (“The 13 Keys to the White House: Why the Democrats Will Win,” October 4th, 2007). However, presuming that Obama become the Democratic nominee it remains an unsettled question as to whether the nation is ready to elect an African-American president. According to exit polls, about a fifth of white voters in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary said that race influenced their choice of candidates; these voters backed Clinton by 3 to 1 over Obama.

Unfortunately, it appears clear that some Republicans will launch a “Swift Boat” style campaign of vilification against Obama with a thinly coded racial animus. This campaign will not come directly from John McCain or Republican leaders. Rather, it will come from “independent groups” like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth or the National Security Political Action Committee that made Willie Horton the most familiar face of the 1988 campaign.

Already, the scurrilous attacks on Obama have begun. Floyd Brown, who created the Willie Horton ad, has put together a new ad that openly associates Obama with allegedly murderous gang members in Chicago. It features a roll call of gang victims and extensive footage of bleak and devastated ghetto neighborhoods in Chicago. It asks “can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?”

It would be a tragedy if voters gave a very unpopular Republican Party another four years in the White House because of the skin color of the Democratic nominee. But I have enough faith in the American people to believe that this will not happen, no matter how many Willie Horton type ads the Republican surrogates chose to run in 2008.

Political pundits have likened Obama's oratory, its style and content, to that of Abraham Lincoln. Most recently, Gary Wills has compared Barack Obama's speech on race in America,"A More Perfect Union," with Abraham Lincoln's 1860 Cooper Union address. In fact, like most of Lincoln's great speeches, Obama's speech evokes history and broader political principles to address contemporary racial divisions. Its title too, which calls on ordinary American citizens to perfect their Union, is reminiscent of Lincoln's Civil War speeches. Like Lincoln, who was dismissed for being a"Black Republican" for opposing racial slavery, Obama ironically stands accused of playing the race card by Sean Wilentz, the Clintons' historian in residence, because he opposes the divisive politics of race.

More interestingly, the Democratic presidential nomination contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton bears some startling similarities to the 1860 Republican presidential race between Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and William Henry Seward of New York. In a series of strange historical coincidences, not only do the leading Democratic contenders for the presidency hail from the same states as their Republican predecessors but their political resumes are analogous too. Like Lincoln, who was a one term Congressman and who opposed the Mexican War of 1846-1848 as a land grab for slavery, Obama is a one term Senator and is known for his early opposition to the Iraq war. Like Lincoln, Obama is known for his soaring oratory and vision of change at a moment of crisis. Like Lincoln, voters view Obama as an unknown quantity but are inspired by him. Physically too, the tall and lanky Obama might well be an African American version of the man whose legacy he explicitly invoked when announcing his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois.

Clinton, on the other hand, looks a lot like Seward did in 1860. If anything, he was even more tested by national politics than she. Seward had been Governor of New York, the man behind the short-lived presidency of Zachary Taylor (1848-1850), and the Senator from New York in the 1850s. He was a leading voice of antislavery in Congress and reviled by southern Democrats on a regular basis. Compared to Lincoln, a small town lawyer, Seward, like Clinton, had been close to the White House, Congressional politics and was the more experienced and allegedly able candidate.

In 1860, however, the Republican nominating convention dumped Seward for the dark horse candidate, Abraham Lincoln. Seward commanded the loyalty of the party faithful but his lieutenants in the convention were completely out maneuvered by Lincoln's supporters from Illinois. The unexpected success of Barack Obama's presidential campaign strongly resembles the ultimate triumph of the Lincoln forces. Lincoln came from behind to defeat the front runner whose candidacy, like Clinton's, had an aura of inevitability about it until the very eve of the Republican convention.

A majority of Republicans in the convention viewed Seward, a veteran of many battles over slavery expansion in Congress, as too polarizing a figure. One of the biggest arguments against Hillary Clinton is precisely that she is too polarizing a figure. Over the years, Seward, like the Clintons, had made many political enemies, some within his own party. Some Republicans voted for Lincoln simply because they would rather not vote for Seward. Most Republicans went for Lincoln in 1860 because they wanted to broaden their party base and appeal to the less antislavery lower north. The solidly antislavery upper north was already in their column. That is same the argument that the Obama campaign is making now. No matter who is the Democratic presidential nominee, the reliably blue states will vote Democratic. But Obama might bring some red states and less partisan voters into the Democratic column. Here is the potential to create a new progressive majority that can shift the terms of political debate and transcend the politics of race. Just as Lincoln's election brought decades of slaveholder dominance of the federal government to an end, Obama can turn the tide on conservative dominance of political discourse in this country. Indeed, the Democratic party today is a counterpart to the mid-nineteenth century liberal Republican party, the party of Lincoln, and the Republican party today is a lot like its historical predecessor, the conservative Democratic party with its political base in the solid south.

During the Civil War, the tried and true Seward recommended negotiations with southern secessionists. It was the political novice, Lincoln, rather than Seward who comprehended the momentous nature of the war and moved toward emancipation, the arming of former slaves, and black citizenship. In the end, Seward and his pro-slavery southern Democratic detractors shared a common political world that Lincoln rejected. While John McCain and Hillary Clinton can vouch for each other's jingoistic patriotism, political experience and military toughness, Obama appeals in Lincoln's words, which Senator Edward Kennedy repeated in his endorsement of him, to the"better angels of our nature." Given the historical record, that might just be the quality that makes a great president.

Because it was a beautiful day, I came about an hour earlier so I could walk around the Columbia campus, which unlike Fordham, allows anyone, student or not, to stroll through its gates or sit on the wide, manigificent concrete steps in front of the main administration building, Low Library

For a moment, I thought I was in utopia. The campus was filled with thousands of people of every race and nationality walking to class, taking tours of campus, playing soccer, frisbee and football, sitting, lying in the sun, having conversations and reading books, even participating in a large and passionate anti-war rally. There were people of every conceivable color and complexion, most under thirty, and a proliferation of languages being spoken.

I was dazzled and moved by the spectacle. Here, I thought, was a university that brought together the global community in all its glorious variety.There were far more students- and people- of Black, Asian and South Asian descent that I was accostomed to seeing at Fordham or in my own increasingly gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. Columbia had come a long long way from that fall day in 1962 when the Columbia College class of 1966, of which I was part, arrived on campus, with only 6 Black students out of 660, and an equal, or lesser number of Latinos and Asians

But the longer I stayed on campus, the more my pride in having contributed to this glorious diversity, as a participant in the 1968 protest, turned to dismay. What was missing from this multinational utopia, not only on the campus, but on the surrounding streets, was any working class presence. Of the thousands of people I saw on that glorious afternoon, there wasn't a single person I saw, either on Broadway or the Columbia campus who looked like the people I regularly encountered in the Bronx, whether it was walking up Fordham Road to the "D" train, droving down the Grand Concourse or leading walking or van tours of the Bronx.neighborhoods

There wasn't a single person I saw, male or female, whose faces bore the stress of working two jobs to make sure their families weren't evicted, or who displayed a survivors pride in triumphing over whatever hardtimes came their way. No women under twenty shepharding three or more children to or from school or a trip to the store. No men outside bogegas sipping beer or playing dominos. No girls in tight skirts, wearing bright lipstick and hoop earings, raising their voices in laughter. No tall boys in doo rags walking down the street dribbling a basketball. No Mexican or Salvadorian men congregating on street corner before or after a hard days work. no grandmothers sitting on benches exchanging gossip or watching children play. No SUV's or jeeps driving slowly down the street with rap music blaring at full volume. No men in their early twenties walking slowly with their pit bulls, wearing sleeveless tee shirts tee shirts to show off their muscles. No church ladies talking in animated fashion about Bible study or their preacher's latest sermon. No groups of teenagers, just released from school, gathering in a circle, clapping hands, while one of their number started "Getting Lite," the latest version of a street dance that was sweeping through the Bronx.

These visual symbols of a working class, immigrant presence, which you could see on any spring day outside Fordham's Bronx campus, had been magically excised from the Columbia campus and its surrounding neighborhood, turning it into a place that was as homogenous in class as it was diverse in race.

The process of driving out working class people from anywhere near the Columbia campus, which had begun well before I arrived at the school in 1962, and which I had hoped the 1968 uprising would halt, had been completed with a thoroughness that was truly chilling. By systematically excluding affordable housing from any off campus construction projects, by making sure that no public high school or middle school was built anywhere near the campus, and by allowing market forces to drive rents in the neighborhood so high that immigrant and working class families, and the stores serving that population, could never pay them,, Columbia had created a place where its students and faculty were in no danger of interacting on a regular basis with working class New Yorkers.

The nearest working class families were now living more than ten blocks from the campus, in five story walkups in West Harlem and Manhattan Valley and in housing projects on 125th street and along Columbus Avenue. And these enclaves were in danger as a result of Columbia's new expansion plan.

This was not the community I thought we were creating when we occupied four buildings in the spring of 1968. Columbia is still following the same policies it did when it tried to build a gym in Morningside Park.

Although I got an amazing education at Columbia, I am not proud to be an alumnus of the school. When it comes to dealing with issues of poverty and inequality in New York City, Columbia, 40 years after the historic strike, is still much more part of the problem than part of the solution.

Google"second Gilded Age" and you will get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can learn more about what you already instinctively know. That we are living through a gilded age has become a journalistic commonplace. The unmistakable drift of all the talk about it is a Yogi Berra-ism: it's a matter of déjà vu all over again. But is it? Is turn-of-the-century America a replica of the world Mark Twain first christened"gilded" in his debut bestseller back in the 1870s?

Certainly, Twain would feel right at home today. Crony capitalism, the main object of his satirical wit in The Gilded Age, is thriving. Incestuous plots as outsized as the one in which the Union Pacific Railroad's chief investors conspired with a wagon-load of government officials, including Ulysses S. Grant's vice president, to loot the federal treasury once again lubricate the machinery of public policy-making. A cronyism that would have been familiar to Twain has made the wheels go round in these terminal years of the Bush administration. Even the invasion and decimation of Iraq was conceived and carried out as an exercise in grand-strategic cronyism; call it cronyism with a vengeance. All of this has been going on since Ronald Reagan brought back morning to America.

Reagan's America was gilded by design. In 1981, when the New Rich and the New Right paraded in their sumptuous threads in Washington to celebrate at the new president's inaugural ball, it was called a"bacchanalia of the haves." Diana Vreeland, style guru (as well as Nancy Reagan confidante), was stylishly blunt:"Everything is power and money and how to use them both… We mustn't be afraid of snobbism and luxury."

That's when the division of wealth and income began polarizing so that, by every measure, the country has now exceeded the extremes of inequality achieved during the first Gilded Age; nor are our elites any more embarrassed by their Mammon-worship than were members of the"leisure class" excoriated a century ago by that take-no-prisoners social critic of American capitalism Thorstein Veblen.

Back then, it was about masquerading as European nobility at lavish balls in elegant hotels like New York's Waldorf-Astoria, locked down to forestall any unpleasantness from the street (where ordinary folk were in a surly mood trying to survive the savage depression of the 1890s). Today's"leisure class" is holed up in gated communities or houseoleums as gargantuan as the imported castles of their Gilded Age forerunners, ready to fly off -- should the natives grow restless -- to private islands aboard their private jets.

The Free Market as Melodrama

At the height of the first Gilded Age, William Graham Sumner, a Yale sociologist and the most famous exponent of Herbert Spencer's theory of dog-eat-dog Social Darwinism, asked a good question: What do the social classes owe each other? Virtually nothing was the professor's answer.

As in those days, there is today no end to ideological justifications for an inequality so pervasive that no one can really ignore it entirely. In 1890, reformer Jacob Riis published his book How the Other Half Lives. Some were moved by his vivid descriptions of destitution. In the late nineteenth century, however, the preferred way of dismissing that discomfiting reality was to put the blame on a culture of dependency supposedly prevalent among"the lower orders," particularly, of course, among those of certain complexions and ethnic origins; and the logical way to cure that dependency, so the claim went, was to eliminate publicly funded"outdoor relief."

How reminiscent of the"welfare to work" policies cooked up by the Clinton administration, an exchange of one form of dependency -- welfare -- for another -- low-wage labor. Poverty, once turned into the cultural and moral problem of the impoverished, exculpated Gilded Age economics in both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries (and proved profitable besides).

Even now, there remains a trace of the old Social Darwinian rationale -- that the ascendancy of"the fittest" benefits the whole species -- and the accompanying innuendo that those consigned to the bottom of the heap are fated by nature to end up there. To that must be added a reinvigorated belief in the free market as the fairest (not to mention the most efficient) way to allocate wealth. Then, season it all with a bravura elevation of risk-taking to the status of spiritual, as well as economic, tonic. What you end up with is an intellectual elixir as self-congratulatory as the conscience-cleansing purgative that made Professor Sumner so sure in his cold-bloodedness.

Then, as now, hypocrisy and self-delusion were the final ingredients in this ideological brew. When it came to practical matters, neither the business elites of the first Gilded Age, nor our own"liquidators,""terminators," and merger and acquisition Machiavellians ever really believed in the free market or the enterprising individual. Then, as now, when push came to shove (and often way earlier), they relied on the government: for political favors, for contracts, for tax advantages, for franchises, for tariffs and subsidies, for public grants of land and natural resources, for financial bail-outs when times were tough (see Bear Stearns), and for muscular protection, including the use of armed force, against all those who might interfere with the rights of private property.

So too, while industrial and financial tycoons liked to imagine themselves as stand-alone heroes, daring cowboys on the urban-industrial-financial frontier, as a matter of fact the first Gilded Age gave birth to the modern, bureaucratic corporation -- and did so at the expense of the lone entrepreneur. To this day, that big business behemoth remains the defining institution of commercial life. The reigning melodrama may still be about the free market and the audacious individual, but backstage, directing the players, stands the state and the corporation.

Crony capitalism, inequality, extravagance, Social Darwinian self-justification, blame-the-victim callousness, free-market hypocrisy: thus it was, thus it is again!

At the end of the Reagan years, public intellectuals Kevin Phillips and Gary Wills prophesied that this state of affairs was insupportable and would soon end. Phillips, in particular, anticipated a populist rising. It did not happen. Instead, nearly 20 years later, the second Gilded Age is alive, if not so well. Why such longevity? The answer tells us something about how these two epochs, for all their striking similarities, are also profoundly unalike.

Missing Utopias and Dystopias

As a title, Apocalypse Now could easily have been applied to a movie made about late nineteenth century America. Whichever side you happened to be on, there was an overwhelming dread that the nation was dividing in two and verging on a second civil war, that a final confrontation between the haves and have-nots was unavoidable.

Irate farmers mobilized in cooperative alliances and in the Populist Party. Farmer-labor parties in states and cities from coast to coast challenged the dominion of the two-party system. Rolling waves of strikes, captained by warriors from the Knights of Labor, enveloped whole communities as new allegiances extended across previously unbridgeable barriers of craft, ethnicity, even race and gender.

Legions of small businessmen, trade unionists, urban consumers, and local politicians raged against monopoly and"the trusts." Armed workers' militias paraded in the streets of many American cities. Business and political elites built massive urban fortresses, public armories equipped with Gatling guns (the machine guns of their day), preparing to crush the insurrections they saw headed their way.

Even today the names of Haymarket (the square in Chicago where, in 1886, a bombing at a rally of rebellious workers led to the legal lynching of anarchist leaders at the most infamous trial of the nineteenth century), Homestead (where, in 1892, the Monongahela River ran red with the blood of Pinkerton thugs sent by Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick to crush the strike of their steelmaking employees), and Pullman (the company town in Illinois where, in 1894, President Grover Cleveland ordered Federal troops to put down the strike of the American Railway Union against the Pullman Palace Car Company) evoke memories of a whole society living on the edge.

The first Gilded Age was a moment of Great Fears, but also of Great Expectations -- a period infatuated with a literature of utopias as well as dystopias. The two most successful novels of the nineteenth century, after Uncle Tom's Cabin, were Edward Bellamy's utopian Looking Backward and the horrific dystopia Caesar's Column by Populist tribune Ignatius Donnelly. The latter reached its denouement when Donnelly's fictional proletarian underground movement, the"Brotherhood of Destruction," marked its"triumph" with the erection of a giant pyramid composed of a quarter-million corpses of its enemy,"the Oligarchy" and its minions, cemented together and laced with explosives so that no one would dare risk removing them and destroying this permanent memorial to the barbarism of American industrial capitalism.

This end-of-days foreboding and the thirst for utopian release were not, moreover, confined to the ranks of agrarian or industrial trouble-makers. Before"Pullman" became a word for industrial serfdom and the Federal government's bloody-mindedness, it was built by its owner, George Pullman, as a model industrial city, a kind of capitalist utopia of paternal benevolence and confected social harmony.

Everyone was seeking a way out, something wholly new to replace the rancor and incipient violence of Gilded Age capitalism. The Knights of Labor, the Populist Party, the anti-trust movement, the cooperative movements of town and country, the nation-wide Eight-Hour Day uprisings of 1886 which culminated in the infamy of the Haymarket hangings, all expressed a deep yearning to abolish the prevailing industrial order.

Such groups weren't just angry; they weren't merely resentful -- although they were that, too. They were disturbed enough, naïve enough, desperate enough, inventive enough, desiring enough, deluded enough -- some still drawing cultural nourishment from the fading homesteads and workshops of pre-industrial America -- to believe that out of all this could come a new way of life, a cooperative commonwealth. No one really knew what exactly that might be. Still, the great expectation of a future no longer subservient to the calculus of the marketplace and the capitalist workshop lent the first Gilded Age its special fission, its high (tragic) drama.

Fast-forward to our second Gilded Age and the stage seems bare indeed. No great fears, no great expectations, no looming social apocalypses, no utopias or dystopias -- just a kind of flat-line sense of the end of history. Where are all the roiling insurgencies, the break-away political parties, the waves of strikes and boycotts, the infectious communal upheavals, the chronic sense of enough is enough? Where are the earnest efforts to invoke a new order which, no matter how sketchy and full of unanswered questions, now seem as minutely detailed as the blueprints for a Boeing 747 compared to"yes we can"?

What's left of mainstream populism exists on life-support in some attic of the Democratic Party. Even the language of our second Gilded Age is hollowed out. In a society saturated in Christian sanctimony, would anyone today describe"mankind crucified on a cross of gold" as William Jennings Bryan once did, or let loose against"Mammon worship," condemn aristocratic"parasites," or excommunicate"vampire speculators" and the"devilfish" of Wall Street? If nineteenth century evangelical preachers once pronounced anathema on capitalist greed, twenty-first century televangelists deify it. Tempers have cooled, leaving God, like many Americans, with only part-time employment.

The Great Silence

I exaggerate, of course. Movements do exist today to confront the inequities and iniquities of our own Gilded Age. Wall Street bandits are, once in a while, arrested by a sheriff. Some ministers, even born-again ones, do still preach the Social Gospel. But all this seems a pale shadow of what was. Something fundamental about the metabolism of capitalism has changed.

Perhaps the answer is simple and basic: The first Gilded Age rested on industrialization; the second on de-industrialization. In our time, a new system of dis-accumulation looted American industry, liquidating its assets to reward speculation in"fictitious capital." After all, the rate of investment in new plant, technology, and research and development all declined during the 1980s. For a quarter-century, the fastest growing part of the economy has been the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector.

De-industrialization has set off an avalanche whose impact is still being felt in the economy, in the country's political culture, and in everyday life. It laid the industrial working class and the labor movement low, killing it twice over. This, more than anything else, may account for the great silence of the second Gilded Age, when measured, at least, against the raucous noise of the first. Labor was mortally wounded by direct assault, beginning with President Reagan's decision in 1981 to fire all the striking air traffic controllers. His draconian act licensed American business to launch its own all-out attack on the right to organize, which continues to this day.

In itself, however, resorting to coercion to deal with the opposition hardly distinguishes our own gilded elite from the first one. If anything, we live in less savage times, at least here at home. More fatal by far was the arrival of a new mode of capital accumulation, starkly different from the one that had prevailed a century ago. It eviscerated towns, cities, regions, and whole ways of life. It demoralized people, hollowed out popular institutions that had once offered resistance, and stoked the fires of resentment, racism, and national revanchism. Here was the raw material for mean-spirited division, not solidarity.

Dis-accumulation transformed the working class into a disaggregated pool of contingent labor, contract labor, temporary labor, and part-time labor, all in the interests of a new"flexible capitalism." Ideologues gussied-up this floating workforce by anointing it"free agent" labor, a euphemism designed to flatter the free market homunculus in each of us -- and, for a time, it worked. But the resulting reality has proved a bitter pill to swallow. To be a"free agent" today is to be free of health care, pensions, secure jobs, security in every sense. In our gilded era, downward mobility, lasting a quarter-century and still counting, has marked the social trajectory of millions of people living in the American heartland.

Dis-accumulating capitalism also undermined the political gravitas of poverty. In the first Gilded Age, poverty was a function of exploitation; in the second, of exclusion or marginalization. When we think about poverty, what comes to mind is welfare and race. The first gilded age visualized instead coal miners, child labor, tenement workshops, and the shantytowns that clustered around the steel mills of Aliquippa and Homestead.

Poverty arising out of exploitation ignited widespread moral revulsion and a robust political assault on the power of the exploiters. The perpetrators of the poverty of exclusion of our own time have been trickier to identify. In his 1962 book The Other America, Michael Harrington noted the invisibility of poverty. That was half a century ago and misery still lives in the shadows. Helped along by an ingrained racism, poverty in the second Gilded Age was politically neutered… or worse.

Decline, dispossession, and marginalization: a grim scenario. Yet the new political economy of finance-based dis-accumulation also announced itself as the second coming of democratic capitalism. And in the realm of the collective imaginary, if not in reality, it convinced millions.

The Myth of Democratic Capitalism

Aristocrats don't exist anymore, but it is remarkable how long they lasted as major actors in the country's political dramaturgy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was still denouncing"economic royalists" and"tories of industry" at the height of the New Deal. The struggle against the counter-revolutionary aristocrat, seen to be subverting the institutions of democratic life, piling up unearned riches, supplied the energy powering American reform for generations. In real life, the robber baron industrialists and financiers of Wall Street were no more aristocrats than my grandma from the shtetl. They were parvenus.

For their own good reasons, however, they actively conspired in this popular misperception by playing the aristocratic role for all it was worth. In hindsight, what looks like one of the silliest utopias of the first Gilded Age was enacted by these nouveaux riches, performing in tableaux vivants at gala balls dressed in aristocratic drag, or cavorting in the castles and villas they had transported stone by stone from France and Italy, or showing off at the weddings of their daughters to the offspring of bankrupt European nobility, or parading to New York's Metropolitan Opera in coaches driven by liveried servants and embossed with their family's" coat of arms," complete with hijacked insignia and faked genealogies that concealed their owners' homelier origins.

We may laugh at all this now. Back then, for millions, these aristocratic pretensions confirmed an ancient Jeffersonian suspicion: Capitalists were nothing more or less than camouflaged aristocrats. And mobilizing to rescue the republic and democracy from such a danger was practically an indigenous instinct. However, pushing beyond this horizon of political democracy in the direction of social democracy is a different matter entirely, arousing anxiety about threatening the understructure of private property which is, after all, also part of the American dream. Having an aristocracy to kick around, even an ersatz one, can be politically empowering.

Minus the oddball exception or two, the new tycoonery of the second Gilded Age does not fancy itself an aristocracy. It does not dress up like one or marry off its daughters to fortune-hunting European dukes and earls. On the contrary, its major figures regularly dress down in blue jeans and cowboy hats, affecting a down-home populism or nerdy dishevelment. However addicted to the paraphernalia of flamboyant excess they may be, the new capitalist elite does not pretend these are the insignia of ruling class entitlement.

Once upon a gilded time, the lower orders aped the fashions and manners of their putative betters; today it's the other way around. Indeed, it is no longer even apt to talk of a"leisure class," since our moguls of the moment are workaholics, Olympians of the merger-and-acquisition all-nighter.

Although the economic and political throw-weight of our gilded elite is at least as great as that of its predecessors in the days of J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, an American fear of a moneyed aristocracy has subsided accordingly. Instead, from the Reagan era on, Americans have been captivated by businessmen who took on the rebel role against a sclerotic corporate order and an ossified government bureaucracy that, together, were said to be blocking access to a democracy of the bold.

Often men from the middling classes, lacking in social pedigree, the overnight elevation of people like Michael Milken, Carl Ichan, or"greed is healthy" Ivan Boesky, flattered and confirmed a popular faith in the American dream. These irreverent new"revolutionaries," intent on overthrowing capitalism in the interests of capitalism, made fun of the men in pin-striped suits.

When the captains of industry and finance lorded it over the country in the late nineteenth century, no one dreamed of calling them rebels against an overweening government bureaucracy or an entrenched set of"interests." There was then no government bureaucracy, and tycoons like Russell Sage and Jay Gould were"the interests." They worried about being overthrown, not overthrowing someone else.

Our corporate elite are much more adept than their Gilded Age predecessors were at playing the democracy game. The old"leisure class" was distinctly averse to politics. If they needed a tariff or tax break, they called up their kept Senator. When mortally challenged by the Populists and William Jennings Bryan in 1896, they did get involved; but, by and large, they didn't muck about in mass party politics which they saw as too full of uncontrollable ethnic machines, angry farmers, and the like. They relied instead on the Federal judiciary, business-friendly Presidents, constitutional lawyers, and public and private militias to protect their interests.

Beginning in the 1970s, our age's business elite became acutely politically-minded and impressively well-organized, penetrating deeply all the pores of party and electoral democracy. They've gone so far as to craft strategic alliances with elements of what their nineteenth century predecessors -- who might have blanched at the prospect -- would have termed the hoi polloi. Calls to dismantle the federal bureaucracy now carry a certain populist panache, while huffing and puffing about family values has -- so far -- proven a cheap date for a gilded elite that otherwise generally couldn't care less.

Moreover, the ascendancy of our faux revolutionaries has been accompanied by media hosannas to the stock market as an everyman's Oz. America's long infatuation with its own democratic-egalitarian ethos lent traction to this illusion.

Horace Greely's inspirational admonition to"go West young man" echoed through all the channels of popular culture in the 1990s -- from cable TV shows and mass circulation magazines to baseball stadium scoreboards and Internet chat rooms. Only now Greeley's frontier of limitless opportunity had migrated back East to the stock exchange and into the ether of virtual or dot.com reality. The culture of money released from all ancient inhibitions enveloped the commons.

"Shareholder democracy" and the"ownership society" are admittedly more public relations slogans than anything tangible. Nonetheless, you can't ignore the fact that, during the second Gilded Age, half of all American families became investors in the stock market. Dentists and engineers, mid-level bureaucrats and college professors, storekeepers and medical technicians -- people, that is, from the broad spectrum of middle class life who once would have viewed the New York Stock Exchange with a mixture of awe, trepidation, and genuine distaste, and warily kept their distance -- now jumped head first into the marketplace carrying with them all their febrile hopes for social elevation.

As Wall Street suddenly seemed more welcoming, fears about strangulating monopolies died. Dwindling middle-class resistance to big business accounts for the withering away of the old anti-trust movement, a telling development in the evolution of our age's particular form of"big-box" capitalism. Once, that movement had not only expressed the frustrated ambitions of smaller businessmen, but of all those who felt victimized by monopoly power. It embodied not just the idea of breaking up the trusts, but of competing with or replacing them with public enterprises.

Long before the Reagan counter-revolution defanged the whole regulatory apparatus, however, the"anti-trust" movement was over and done with. Its absence from the political landscape during the second Gilded Age marks the demise of an older middle-class world of local producers, merchants, and their customers who were once bound together by the ties of commerce and the folk truths of small town Protestantism.

Big-box capitalism, the capitalism of Wal-Mart, still incites local uproars that carry a hint of that anti-trust past, but oppositional forces are divided. The capitalism of which Wal-Mart is emblematic generates a dissonant universe of political and cultural desires. It appeals, first of all, to instincts of individual and family material wellbeing which may run up against calls for a wider social solidarity. Moreover, in its own everyday way consumer culture -- more far-reaching than anything imaginable a century ago -- channels desire into forms of expressive self-liberation. Grand narratives that tell a story of collective destiny -- Redemption, Enlightenment, and Progress, the Cooperative Commonwealth, Proletarian Revolution -- don't play well in this refashioned political theater.

The End of the Age of Acquiescence?

However, the wheel turns. The capitalism of the Second Gilded Age now faces a systemic crisis and, under the pressure of impending disaster, may be headed back to the future. Old-fashioned poverty is making a comeback. Arguably, the global economy, including its American branch, is increasingly a sweatshop economy. There is no denying that brute fact in Thailand, China, Vietnam, Central America, Bangladesh, and dozens of other countries and regions that serve as platforms for primitive accumulation. Hundreds of millions of peasants have become proletarians virtually overnight.

Here at home, something analogous has been happening, but with an ironic difference and bearing within it a new historic opportunity. One might call it the unhorsing of the middle class.

During the first Gilded Age, the sweatshop seemed a noxious aberration. It lawlessly offered irregular employment at sub-standard wages for interminable hours. It was ordinarily housed helter-skelter in a make-shift workshop that would be here today, gone tomorrow. It was an underground enterprise that regularly absconded with its workers' paychecks and made chiseling them out of their due into an art form.

Today, what once seemed abnormal no longer does. The planet's peak corporations depend on this system. They have thrived on it. True enough, it has also encouraged the proliferation of petty enterprises -- sub-contractors, consulting firms, domestic service companies -- fertilizing the soil in which our age of democratic capitalism is rooted. But the ubiquity of the sweated economy promises to alter the nation's political chemistry.

Many of the newly flexible proletarians working for Wal-Mart, for auto parts or construction company sub-contractors, on the phones at direct mail call centers, behind the counters at mass market retailers, earn a dwindling percentage of what they used to. Even new hires at the Big Three automobile manufacturers will now make a smaller hourly wage than their grandfathers did in 1948. So too, the relative job security such employees once enjoyed is gone, leaving them vulnerable to the"lean and mean" dictates of the new capitalism: double or triple work loads; or, even worse, part-time work, work always shadowed by indignity and fear; or, worse yet, no work at all.

Meanwhile, the white collar Tomorrowland of"free agent" techies, software engineers, and the like -- not to mention a whole endangered species of middle management -- lives a precarious existence, under intense stress, chronically anticipating the next round of lay-offs. Yet many of them were once upon a time members in good standing of the"middle class." Now, they find themselves on the down escalator, descending into a despised state no one could mistake for middle class life.

"Flexible accumulation" joins this dispossession of the middle class to the super-exploitation of millions who never laid claim to that status. Many of these sweated workers are women, laboring away as home health care aides, in the food services industry, in meat processing plants, at hotels and restaurants and hospitals, because the arithmetic of"flexible accumulation" demands two workers to add up to the livable family wage not so long ago brought home by a single wage earner.

Millions more are immigrants, legal as well as undocumented, from all over the world. They live, virtually defenseless, in a twilight underworld of illegality and prejudice. Thanks to all this, the category of the"working poor" has reentered our public vocabulary. Once again, as during the first Gilded Age, poverty seems a function of exploitation at work, not only the lot of those excluded from work.

Might these developments augur the end of our second Gilded Age; or rather the end of the age of acquiescence? No one can know. Yet anger and resentment over insecurity, downward mobility, exploitation, second-class citizenship, and the ill-gotten gains of our Gilded Age mercenaries and their political enablers already rippled the political waters during the mid-term elections of 2006. This primary season has witnessed a discernable leftward shift of the center of gravity within even the cowed leadership ranks of the Democratic Party, a shift driven in large measure by the sub-prime mortgage collapse and the ominous rumblings of severe recession.

Anger and resentment, however, do not by themselves comprise a visionary alternative. Nor is the Democratic Party, however restive, a likely vehicle of social democratic aspirations. Much more will have to happen outside the precincts of electoral politics by way of mass movement building to translate these smoke signals of resistance into something more muscular and enduring. Moreover, nasty competition over diminishing economic opportunities can just as easily inflame simmering racial and ethnic antagonisms.

Nonetheless, the current break-down of the financial system is portentous. It threatens a general economic implosion more serious than anyone has witnessed for many decades. Depression, if that is what it turns out to be, together with the agonies of a misbegotten and lost war no one believes in any longer, could undermine whatever is left of the threadbare credibility of our Gilded Age elite.

Legitimacy is a precious possession; once lost it's not easily retrieved. Today, the myth of the"ownership society" confronts the reality of the"foreclosure society." The great silence of the second Gilded Age may give way to the great noise of the first.

Ed Kilgore's fascinating and widely read post here at TPM examines Barack Obama's prospects after the Pennsylvania primary by comparing Obama in some ways to George McGovern and proposing, with commenters, a number of strategic alternatives.

The discussion is refreshing but also disconcerting, because, not once in the post or in the 15 astute comments I'd read by the time I wrote this is there any mention that Obama is black. (One commenter did note that Obama took 90% of the black Pennsylvania primary vote, but that's it.)

It's refreshing because Obama's self-understanding and his campaign give race its due while pointing beyond it. But it's also pretty strange to see no mention of race in a discussion of Obama's prospects just after Pennsylvania reminded us of racism's depth and obstinacy among working-class whites in industrial states -- an obstinacy I illustrated here shortly before the primary.

Nixon carried the industrial states against McGovern in 1972, except Massachusetts, not only because he was the incumbent but because too much was being made of race then, in the streets and in McGovernites' color-coding of the Democratic convention. Subtle appeals to racist backlash worked. And McGovern wasn't even black.

The Clintons have made a lot of race this year, too, reminding everyone that Obama is black -- from Bill's bringing up Jesse Jackson's past South Carolina victory when Obama won there, to Sean Wilentz's falsely accusing Obamaites of playing the race card, to Hillary's jumping into the Rev. Wright loop a week late, and so on.

But there's a way that Obama could turn what the Clintons and some Republicans consider a winning issue into a cornerstone of his own strong victory.

So writes Richard Kahlenberg, who has long campaigned for a shift from race-based affirmative-action to class-based preferences that might mitigate the growing inequalities that have left working whites, as someone put it, bitter.

In the current (April 25) Chronicle of Higher Education, Kahlenberg reprises some racial history to argue that Barack Obama's candidacy could show"how to remedy the history of discrimination.. without creating new inequities and divisions. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a strong supporter of race-and gender-based affirmative acion preferences and has shown little openness to new ideas on that front.

"By contrast, Obama... emphasizes [as did Martin Luther King, Jr.] common ground among races.... Nothing would galvanize white working-class voters more than a rejection of... racial preferences in favor of King's Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged.

"Obama appears open to that approach. In his Philadelphia speech,.... he observed: 'Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race...' Their resentment builds 'when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed.' He warned against seeing those resentments as 'misguided or even racist' without understanding that they are 'grounded in legitimate concerns.'

"Moreover, in response to a reporter's question last May, Obama said that his own relatively privileged girls don't deserve affirmative-action preferences, but poor minority and white students do. Emphasizing class would remove such preferences for upper-income members of minority groups -- treatment that Obama concedes makes little sense -- and would, for the first time in 40 years, benefit the vast majority of working-class black people who have been helped little by affirmative action programs....

"It also would be politically popular: While racial preferences are strongly opposed by Americans, income-based preferences are supported by a two-to-one margin.The move would be transformative," Kahlenberg concludes,"recapturing not only the colorblind character of King's vision but also its aggressive assault on class inequality."

But since Obama holds the views Kahlenberg reports, why don't working-class whites know it?

One reason they don't is that some can't see far enough past Obama's blackness to hear anything he's saying. But another is that Obama hasn't spoken all that clearly against racial preferences. No surprise there: He has to play the hand he's been dealt as a black man running for president: He needs to avoid igniting racial controversies. He's understandably reluctant to descend to what might seem like pandering to racists, drawing the inevitable assaults from black Clinton"race industry" loyalists and the worst of the so-called civil-rights establishment.

Another reason whites haven't heard Obama on this is that the Clintons do remind whites that he is black, and they don't take issue with him on racial preferences. After all, the more openly the Clintons defended racial preferences, the more white votes Hillary would lose.

They'd rather remind us that Bill stagily rebuked Sister Souljah (who deserved it) and Jesse Jackson while styling himself a"New Democrat" in 1992. That worked for them then, too, even though no one black was running.

The Clintons' very real racism is the underside of their penitential, preferential color-coding -- a highly symbolic, cheap, and hypocritical handling of race that Obama opposes. The irony and tragedy is that, as I showed yesterday, playing the race card puts Clinton hand-in-glove with those Republicans who endorse her now only because they want to have her to demolish in the fall.

It's a reasonable risk now for Obama to flush her out on this issue of preferences and compulsive color-coding. No one could do it more truthfully or eloquently than he. Whites would hear him, for sure. Blacks wouldn't desert him, because they'd catch every nuance in his presentation.

He might lose a few upscale white liberals who like to indulge racial symbolism in order to feel good about their privileged selves far more than they'd like to make the sacrifices and do the heavily lifting that equality of opportunity really requires. But it's unlikely they'd desert him for Clinton now, and he'd gain tremendous credibility among working-class whites for being substantively trans-racial, in ways that actually benefit them, rather than symbolically trans-racial in color-coded gestures that make the pursuit of equality seem a zero-sum game.

Giora Eiland rightly assumes that an Israeli-Palestinian final status agreement is unfeasible in the foreseeable future. This is not because of the weakness of the present Palestinian leadership and its inability to deliver the goods, or the lack of viability of a Palestinian state, as he suggests. It is for the simple reason that there is no fundamental difference between the ultimate goals of Hamas and the PLO vis-à-vis Israel. Neither accepts the Jewish state’s right to exist and both are committed to its eventual destruction. The only difference between the two groups lies in their preferred strategies for the attainment of this goal. Whereas Hamas concentrates exclusively on “armed struggle,” a convenient euphemism for its murderous terror campaign, the PLO has adopted since the early 1990s a more subtle strategy, combining intricate political and diplomatic maneuvering with sustained terror attacks (mainly under the auspices of Tanzim, the military arm of Fatah, the PLO’s largest constituent group and Arafat’s alma mater).

Eiland is also correct about Jordan’s abhorrence of an independent Palestinian state, though this is by no means their worst possible nightmare, as he tends to believe. That would be the incorporation of a huge “fifth column” of some two to three million Palestinians into their kingdom: an assured prescription for Hashemite demise.

From the early 1920s to this very day, the Palestinian leadership has been antagonistic to Hashemite rule in Transjordan (later Jordan) and committed to the vision of “Greater Palestine” comprising both banks of the Jordan River. In 1951, King Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian militant, and while successive attempts on the life of his erstwhile successor, King Hussein, came to naught, as did the September 1970 putsch, the Hashemites have never lost sight of the mortal danger to their throne attending the reincorporation of the West Bank into their kingdom. This was especially so after the Oslo accords transformed the area into a full-fledged terror state. Their best hope, therefore, would seem to lie with Israel’s continued security control of this territory, which would leave them to pay the customary lip service to Palestinians’ rights and to bemoan their “oppression,” without incurring the detrimental consequences of renewed annexation.

As for Israel, one need look no further than David Ben-Gurion’s justification (in December 1948) of his preference for an independent Palestinian state over the annexation of Judea and Samaria (the term West Bank was not born yet) to Transjordan: “An Arab state in western Palestine [i.e., west of the Jordan] is less dangerous than a state that is tied to Transjordan, and tomorrow—probably to Iraq [then ruled by the Hashemites].”

Of course, the international circumstances have changed dramatically since then, but the gist of Ben-Gurion’s rationale remains very much intact, albeit in the opposite direction. That is: a Palestinian-dominated militant entity on both banks of the river would pose a far greater threat to Israel’s national security than a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, or perhaps two smaller states in each of these areas.