Thomas Frank: Hillary Clinton forgets the ’90s: Our latest gilded age and our latest phony populists

The gilded age Clinton now laments had its roots in the dark side of Bill's economic record. So why trust her now?

A few weeks ago I was surprised to read that Hillary Clinton acknowledged the current economy to be “a throwback to the Gilded Age of the robber barons.” It wasn’t the comparison itself that astonished me. That we are living in a “new Gilded Age” is a commonplace that is rapidly becoming a cliché. The former senator and secretary of state’s words affected me because they reminded me of the days when talking about a “New Gilded Age” was the opposite of trite; when it was an affront to what every responsible person knew to be true. Specifically, I thought of the mid-1990s, when my colleagues and I at The Baffler magazine used the phrase to describe the era presided over by Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill. We inscribed the expression in the subtitle of our 1997 anthology, “Commodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age.”