I think it can be reasonably argued that the disparate excesses of the Gilded Age ushered in the labor movement and eventually made the elevation of the American working class possible.

So I hear you.

But I’m also cautious, because I understand the temptation to look back at history with the eye of inevitability.

No one living during the Gilded Age would have assumed that things were going to get better for America’s desperately poor working people. And things almost didn’t get better.

I’m not trying to be pessimistic, I believe there are very positive roads forward for us. But I’m not sanguine about finding them.