The Age of Acquiescence
My friend Steve Fraser has a book coming out called The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. Comparing our contemporary Gilded Age to the original, Steve asks why in the late 1800s, the concentration of wealth and extremes of inequality sparked an explosion of mass rebellion that lasted well over a half-century, whereas today, with some isolated and episodic exceptions, we see, well, acquiescence. Not consent, not apathy, but acquiescence. It’s a word that makes me shudder. As Steve says, the men and women of the nineteenth century witnessed the violence of capitalist development and managed, out of that hellhole, to conjure and wage war on behalf of an entirely different vision of society. But we live in a “windowless room,” where we it’s difficult to see beyond capitalism. Part of that, he says, has to do with the “fables of freedom” we’re told, where freedom is equated with, reduced to, the free market. At the dawn of the Cold War, he points out, the US claimed it was defending freedom, not capitalism, because capitalism was still in such bad odor. Now the two are considered identical. But another part, he adds, is that the first Gilded Age was a society developing itself through accumulation, while today’s is a society that is de-developing itself through disaccumulation. (In his blurb for the book, Greg Grandin calls it “Piketty with politics.”)
Just before the holidays, Steve was on the Bill Moyers Show, talking about the book. Have a watch here, then buy the book. Once I get my copy, I’ll be blogging about it some more.