Steven Rattner, working class hero

“A working class hero is something to be.” — John Lennon

The speed in which Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) ascends today is almost breathtaking, perhaps because we have reached a clear political turning as per the Nov. 4 election and the Democrats have no place else to go. She runs now against a generation which has passed its prime and faces a future of nostalgia, while a new generation rising asks: How did it get to this and who did this to us? As they ask the same question on other seemingly related issues, even between plays at NFL games yesterday afternoon: Why did it take us so long to find out, and what are we going to do about it?

Still, until today, Warren appeared to lack back-up. Former Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia (D), too, perhaps, who may have been the first to raise the populist call against “Wall Street robber barons” in his response to President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech in 2007.

{mosads}”When one looks at the health of our economy, it’s almost as if we are living in two different countries,” he said then. “Some say that things have never been better. The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it’s nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that the boss makes in one day.”

Warren is perhaps more succinct. “The game is rigged,” she said recently at a campaign event for Sen. Al Franken (D) in Minnesota. “And the Republicans rigged it.”

These two might have been voices crying in the wilderness; merely piano players in a empty theater, waiting for the play to be written.

Today, in a New York Times essay titled “Inequality, Unbelievably, Gets Worse,” Wall Street executive Steven Rattner brings back-up.

“[T]he prospect of addressing income inequality grows dimmer, even as the problem worsens. To only modest notice, during the campaign the Federal Reserve put forth more sobering news about income inequality: Inflation-adjusted earnings of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell between 2010 and 2013, with those near the bottom dropping the most. Meanwhile, incomes in the top decile rose.”

Giving an impressive array of easy-to-understand graphs and statistics, he concludes: “Perhaps income disparity resonated so little with politicians because we are inured to a new Gilded Age.”

This looks like a job for Warren and Webb.

Through a glass darkly, we begin to sense a change ahead of historic proportions. It might be useful to look to the last Gilded Age, when the last such change began. Three books mark the era: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which marks well the fall and rise of the era as it falls into disintegration and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which through the sheer poetic power of Hemingway’s prose personified the darkening soul of post-World War I Paris and what Gertrude Stein called the “Lost Generation,” by what could be seen in hindsight as the end of the world; a world that America had just barely entered. The former was published in 1925, the latter in 1926.

These books prophetically marked the age. But not all were drinking absinthe at Les Deux Magots with Hemingway and James Joyce. Adolf Hitler had just published his treatise on political religion, the first volume of Mein Kampf in 1925, the second in 1926.

As Einstein said, historians must be attentive when things go in two directions at once.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.