I Don't Mourn for the Second Gilded Age

Curtis’s argument strongly implies that Americans accepted a kind of bribe, but not a literal payoff. He frames it as a psychological and political bargain: consumer pleasure in exchange for political disengagement.

Curtis’s thesis in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘭𝘧 is that elites — corporate and political — used Freudian-derived PR techniques (via Edward Bernays) to redirect public energy away from collective political action and toward private consumption. The bribe is metaphorical.

Consumer goods and lifestyle fantasies were offered as compensation for giving up deeper forms of democratic participation. Engineered desire replaced civic agency. Americans were encouraged to see themselves primarily as consumers, not citizens.

This is supported by Curtis’s depiction of the 1920s shift from needs-based consumption to desires-based consumption, driven by Bernays’s techniques He argues that this shift helped stabilize society by channeling potentially disruptive mass impulses into buying things rather than demanding structural change.

How the bribe works in Curtis’s narrative. Elites feared the masses. Curtis explicitly says the series is about how those in power used Freud’s theories to “control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy”. Bernays offered a solution. If you can satisfy unconscious desires through products, people will feel gratified and less politically volatile. The public accepts the trade. Americans embrace the pleasures of consumerism — cars, cosmetics, cigarettes, suburban homes — and in doing so, accept a system where political life is hollowed out. Later decades deepen the pattern: Focus groups, lifestyle marketing, and self-actualization culture further reinforce the idea that personal feelings matter more than collective politics.

Curtis never uses the word "bribe", but the structure of his argument is unmistakably that of a quid pro quo. You get endless personal gratification; in return, you stop demanding systemic change.

Curtis’s story isn’t just about Bernays or mid‑century PR. It’s about a long Anglo‑American tradition of elites fearing what they called “public distempers” — sudden eruptions of mass emotion, crowd irrationality, moral panics, or political turbulence — and developing techniques to manage them. Curtis is not aware that his thesis is really about the latest refinement of that older elite impulse.

Beginning in the 17th–18th centuries, Anglo‑American political thinkers used the term “distemper” to describe moments when the public became volatile, unpredictable, or politically dangerous. They feared:

Crowd passions

Factionalism

Moral panics

Populist surges

Mass irrationality

This fear runs through:

Hobbes — the crowd as a beast needing containment

Burke — the “swinish multitude” prone to frenzy

Federalist writers — Madison’s fear of factional contagion

Victorian administrators — anxieties about mob politics and mass agitation

Curtis’s documentaries inadvertantly show how these older anxieties mutate into modern forms. He faithfully presents history as a series of psychological bargains. He's an Institutionalist (or Macrohistorian) without realizing it, the way Rachel Maddow is. In this case:

- The elite motive is stability and control.

- The public motive is comfort, identity, and emotional satisfaction.

- The result is a depoliticized society where consumer choice replaces political choice.

This is why commentators often describe Curtis’s view as suggesting Americans were “bought off” by consumerism — a metaphorical bribe that trades political agency for personal pleasure.

The Anglo‑American elite project evolves roughly like this:

1. Early modern political theory

The public is dangerous when emotionally aroused.

Solution: constitutional design, institutional buffers, moral education (the Methodist Church was part of this, so don't vote for Pastor Adam).

2. 19th‑century industrial society

Masses become more politically active; elites fear strikes, riots, populism.

Solution: paternalistic social control, moral uplift, managed information.

3. 20th‑century mass democracy

The public becomes a mass electorate with unpredictable desires.

Solution: propaganda (WWI), advertising, psychological conditioning.

4. Bernays and the PR revolution

Curtis shows Bernays taking Freud’s ideas and turning them into a scientific technique for managing public emotion — a modern answer to the old fear of “distemper.”

5. Late‑20th‑century refinement

Focus groups, lifestyle marketing, therapeutic culture, and identity politics become new tools for channeling public feeling away from collective politics and into private consumption.

You know what? The Anglo-American Establishment adopted this when weapons became cheap and easy to use. Athens faced a similar situation in ancient times, only it was swords instead of guns. This was the era of the citizen-soldier. For this reason, the franchise was extended (in both the ancient and the modern case). However, Charles de Gaulle observed a tendency back toward professional specialists (mercenaries, if you like).

The psyops technique the technique worked for decades — until a specific subset of Americans (later called MAGA) became immune to it because their sense of grievance (ressentiment), dispossession, and identity-threat grew stronger than the sedative effects of consumerism. Once that happened, the old Anglo‑American method of managing “public distemper” through comfort, consumption, and psychological pacification stopped functioning.

For many MAGA supporters, the consumer bargain no longer delivered because:

wages stagnated

manufacturing collapsed

rural and exurban economies hollowed out

opioids ravaged communities

status and identity declined

When the “bribe” is material comfort, and material comfort erodes, the bargain collapses. Once people feel cheated, the psychological sedative becomes a stimulant for anger.

You ought to blame neoliberalism for this.

Ressentiment is extremely powerful. Somewhat perversely, so is a sense of belonging. This must be a new feeling for them. J6 closeups let me hear some of the conversations.

Hitler mixed these same ingredients. Modern politics is driven by emotion, not ideology.

The MAGA base developed:

a sense of humiliation

a belief that elites despise them

a narrative of cultural displacement

a mythic story of betrayal

These emotions are collective, not private. Consumerism is private, not collective.

The old technique works only when people prefer private pleasure over collective identity. MAGA flips that: collective identity becomes more emotionally rewarding than private consumption.

The Anglo‑American elite historically controlled:

newspapers

broadcast media

official narratives

cultural gatekeeping

Curtis shows that this control was essential for managing “distemper.”

But with:

social media

algorithmic outrage

fragmented information ecosystems

conspiratorial communities

alternative media personalities

the elite lost the ability to contain emotional contagion.

The public could now generate its own “distemper” without elite mediation.

Curtis argues that late‑20th‑century elites encouraged people to see themselves as:

autonomous

self‑expressive

emotionally authentic

suspicious of institutions

This was meant to depoliticize people — to turn them inward.

But MAGA repurposed this inwardness into:

distrust of institutions

distrust of experts

distrust of media

distrust of government

distrust of traditional elites

But Curtis left out one little detail. There is more than one elite in America. When the South rose again as the New South (owing to defense spending), the post-Civil-War coalition began to crumble.

This morning on Xitter I called Nazi Germany a dress rehearsal for what America would look like when the partly adopted Keynesian order cracked. Hitler was supported by businessmen who feared any organization not motivated by profit, so they turned control of the state to gangsters and lunatics. But it's a rule of Institutionalism that such tools can take on aims and purposes of their own.

MAGA was a Koch (Neoconfederate) creation. I believe that Trump was sent in to neuter it. He turned out to be a loose cannon, so for now MAGA is his. Greene, Carlson, Musk and the Dark Enlightenment are playing out a scenario Peter Turchin calls elite overproduction, a game of musical chairs played in deadly earnest. It's too volatile to track.