Coda Election Fatigue

2018 ◽  
pp. 150-158
Author(s):  
Nathan Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Gilded Age ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Emotions ◽  
Twenty First Century

If preceding chapters employed an atmospheric metaphor for thinking about politics’ affective environments the Coda argues that recent theories of temporality provide another important model for understanding Gilded Age political emotion. The chapter examines Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Washington novel Through One Administration (1881), whose title invokes a unit of official time that also bookends the novel’s love plots. Like Whitman’s neologism “presidentiad,” Burnett’s “administration” privileges the rhythms of electoral politics while also imagining that such timeframes could organize alternative forms of intimacy. This chapter argues that Burnett’s tale of Washingtonians moving alongside but not fully in step with administrative time suggests a rubric for revising recent queer theories of temporality which often valorize asynchronous sociality as necessarily radical. The chapter concludes by noting that in twenty-first-century vernacular “election fatigue” offers a related diagnosis of negative political emotions as indexes of the public’s fraught engagement with politics.

Gender and Electoral Politics in the Twenty-First Century

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Susan J. Carroll ◽  
Richard L. Fox ◽  
Kelly Dittmar
Keyword(s):  
Electoral Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century

Imagining Equality in a Gilded Age: Edward Bellamy’s Radical Utopian Critique of Progressivism

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 639-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Cadle
Keyword(s):  
Gilded Age ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
First Century ◽  
Full Extent ◽  
Progressive Reform ◽  
Utopian Vision ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Economic Inequalities

Abstract Equality (1897), Edward Bellamy’s sequel to his bestseller Looking Backward (1888), has received significantly less critical attention than its predecessor has, with scholars often dismissing it as a minor extension or revision of the author’s utopian vision. Situating Bellamy’s sequel alongside his growing disenchantment with the pace of Progressive reform, this essay argues that Equality radically reframes Bellamy’s utopian project as an extended critique of the economic inequalities of capitalism and the putatively democratic processes that sustain those inequalities. Recovering the full extent of Bellamy’s radicalism during the Gilded Age and the rise of Progressivism offers twenty-first-century readers the opportunity to rethink the range of possible responses to present-day economic inequality.

Piketty and the Gilded Age

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-234
Author(s):  
Monica Prasad
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Free Market ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Progressive Movement ◽  
Current Period ◽  
Twenty First Century

After Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, comparing our era to the Gilded Age is no longer just a metaphor: Piketty argues that we never actually left the Gilded Age. The mid-twentieth-century period of lower inequality was a massive and perhaps unrepeatable exception to what Piketty sees as the natural tendencies toward inequality inherent in capitalist societies. But comparing our current period of relentless cuts in taxes and rising inequality to the Gilded Age shows why our period cannot be a repeat of the Gilded Age: the Gilded Age itself led to so many transformations to capitalism that inequality no longer leads to the political outrage that could anchor a broad-based progressive movement. The Gilded Age led to policies that made capitalism bearable, and that is precisely what is leading now to a situation in which Americans identify their success with the free market, and resist policies to lower inequality.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document