“How the 1 Percent Always Wins”: Interview

A timely and engaging new book by the labor historian Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence, contrasts the way Americans responded to the first Gilded Age — with protests, class rhetoric, even violence — to the situation today, where movements like Occupy come and go and populist energy is directed not against capital but against… poor people.

Meanwhile we adore heroic CEOs, scorn sensible regulation that keeps businesses from abusing workers and the environment, and aim to become “free agents” with no ties at all.

I spoke to the author the other day for a Salon Q+A. Here it is.

We talked about Adam Smith, the truth and myth behind the American Dream, the worship of wealth, and our inability to remember a world before full-bore capitalism.