Throughout the two debates, Democrats didn’t just echo Roosevelt in their diagnosis for what’s wrong with the nation, but they also echoed him on the solutions.There was a Republican on the Democratic Party debate stage – a Progressive Republican who sometimes liked to “speak softly, and carry a big stick.” Did you notice him?“When I say that I am for the square deal,” said the politician, “I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity.”You would be forgiven if you confused President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech for something said by one of the candidates running in the Democratic Party presidential primary in 2019.Ours is the New Gilded Age of ostentatious, unaccountable wealth and growing inequality, and current politicians sound a lot like their predecessors. The Gilded Age – the name given to the period after the Civil War to about 1900 – was characterized by massive industrialization and wealth accumulation in the hands of the few and at the expense of the many. “Robber barons” like J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew W. Mellon and John D. Rockefeller controlled entire segments of the economy and were answerable to no one. Roosevelt sought to reign them in.There are generational and policy differences between today’s Democratic candidates, but all 20 who made it onto the debate stage over two nights in Miami professed a Rooseveltian understanding of the ills facing the nation.And – though no one used the term exactly – all promised Americans what Roosevelt promised the country: a new “square deal.”Control ‘the mighty commercial forces’According to Democrats, the ills of America today, like the ones in Roosevelt’s era, can be traced to unrestrained capitalism and corruption.
