Gilded Age industrialism was the irresistible and empyrean story of the forces of production in the hands of great men

Once in the United States, they joined their efforts with homegrown superannuated farmers and handicrafters displaced by the machine and the factory’s finely reticulated division of labor

It penetrates the lowest depths of proletarian life: that is, its seductions inveigle even the working poor

the most august financiers had been paraded before congressional investigating committees where their helplessness, ignorance, and multifarious schemes of self-enrichment had been made public and excoriated

the Reagan era ushered in a new age of Mammon-worship

In real life, the robber-baron industrialists and financiers of Wall Street were no more aristocrats than my grandma from the shtetl. They were parvenus.

After the dolorous 2010 midterm elections, a certain gloomy apprehensiveness about the stunning triumph of Tea Party resentments has settled in.

what John Kenneth Galbraith characterized as the “New Class”—deracinated, upwardly mobile professionals, technocrats, midlevel “financial engineers,” new-media makers, and liberal academics

what really bothered the country’s elites was his fulsome assault on the plutocracy.

put truculent labor unions in their place