Garrison Davis

Because in the Gilded Age, we had an oligarchy.

There was no income tax.

The Rockefellers.

There was so much corruption at every level of government.

Jim Crow was on the rise, was being born out of that era.

Labor unions were coming online and all of that.

There are so many parallels, but we made so many mistakes then.

We let the Klan come back.

Our labor unions were segregated, purposefully segregated.

Yes.

We got lots of things like the FDA and government regulations and things like that that were born out of all this corruption.

But then we went way too far into scoldy moralizing and got prohibition, which was a terrible idea.

So we need to avoid that.

We need to avoid leaving behind people like we did during the Gilded Age because that's what Americans tend to do.

We like momentum.

We like forward.

We like progress.

And we leave behind all these people who have been oppressed and marginalized and we just ignore them.

So we need to look at our own history.

And learn not just from the effective resistance of the past, but the mistakes we made in the past.