MICHAEL BARONE ON TECH OLIGARCHS: Today’s Turn-of-the-Century Problems.

Is America in a new Gilded Age? That’s the contention of Republican political consultant Bruce Mehlman, and in a series of 35 slides he makes a strong case.

In many ways, problems facing America today resemble those facing what we still call “turn-of-the-century” America from the 1890s to the 1910s. Just as employment shifted from farms to factories a century ago, it has been moving from manufacturing to services recently.

Financial crashes are another point of resemblance, coming precisely one hundred years apart. The panic of 1907 was resolved when J. P. Morgan locked his fellow financiers in his library and required them to pony up funds to save failing banks. Something similar happened in 2007, this time with Ben Bernanke in the bowels of the Federal Reserve.

Technological advances providing new products, and threatening incumbent businesses, is a feature of both epochs: huge steel mills and automobile factories then, tiny smartphones and mouse clicks today. Monopoly power also reared its ugly head then and now. Railroads and steel and oil muscling potential regulators then, retail-dominating Amazon and political communication censors Google and Twitter now.

Income inequality was greater in the 1920s (and probably earlier, but the statistics are incommensurate) than today. Immigration as a percentage of pre-existing population was three times as high in peak year 1907 than in peak year 2007.

In all these respects, the problems—or perceived problems—of Americans today more closely resemble those facing the Americans of 100 years ago than the problems of the era that is generally taken as a benchmark, especially by commentators of a certain age (including me), the two postwar decades after World War II.

But Mehlman’s list is not exhaustive. And the items omitted are perhaps even more troubling than those already mentioned.

The Gilded Age yielded Teddy Roosevelt’s trustbusting. Will we see something similar from President Trump?