Ask Lemmy

Agreed. I think this is more specifically it rather than the 50s.

• Unfettered domestic commerce devoid of worker protections.
• International trade viewed as zero-sum and managed using blunt instruments like tariffs.
• America as a rising manufacturing power.
• Nominally speaking there is no slavery, but Reconstruction is "done" and Southern elites have been rehabilitated and reintegrated without having to give up their power.
• Foreign policy built on late-stage colonialism where areas within a great power's sphere of influence are silently allowed to be dominated so as not to antagonize other great powers. Relations handled by a stupid nest of ad-hoc limited-party treaties.
• No effort is given to contextualizing what the American experiment has meant, and who it has harmed, just literally a "manifest destiny" from god to fill the land.

Ignore that the era was laissez-faire with immigrants actually arriving (though of course the robber barons who were working their laborers to death were okay with this... until they began to unionize), and it's a remarkably apt analogy. I'm pretty sure you can see Trump openly pining for The Gilded Age from time to time, though that may literally just be because he thinks gilding things is awesome.