An American Fin de Siècle?

There are any number of good reasons to watch the popular PBS series, “Downton Abbey,” not least for the simple pleasure of enjoying Maggie Smith’s portrayal as the Dowager Countess of Grantham (photo). The Edwardian tale offers viewers a fictional, but largely accurate, glimpse into the end of an era, that age when Britain’s landed aristocracy ruled not only the nation but also the empire and therefore much of the world.

The upstairs/downstairs gap between wealth and poverty, power and subservience, is being turned on its head by World War I during the drama’s second season—and it’s probably a good thing. The war, abetted by the advent of the Industrial Age, accomplished in Britain a socioeconomic transition that was achieved elsewhere by revolutions. The disparity between rich and poor had spurred Britain’s near neighbor to the French Revolution only slightly more than a century earlier. And the Russian revolution was fermenting during the First World War as Britain looked on, and worried.

The fin de siècle for the British aristocracy was cinched by the rise of a corporate-industrial elite. In recent years Britain has again become keenly aware of a growing gap between wealth and poverty, particularly in light of recent global economic woes. As I write this the New York Times has reported on the “rising outcry over executive pay” by lower-wage workers (and the unemployed), as reflected by the Occupy London movement.

In the United States, as conservatives have pushed this country increasing away from democracy toward corporate oligarchy, the gap between the moneyed elites and the rest of us has grown alarmingly. Between 1997 and 2007 the top one percent of Americans saw their incomes rise 275 percent, while the bottom fifth gained only 20 percent. The Huffington Post, reporting on a historical study, recently headlined: “U.S. Income Inequality Higher Than Roman Empire’s Levels.”

Such disparity, in concert with the generally depressed economic climate, in part, gave rise to the Occupy Wall Street movement that spread across the nation and internationally during 2011. While the Occupy movement seems to have had its fifteen minutes in the spotlight, it is by no means defunct. Nor are the feelings of outrage that gave rise to it less intense. Economists such as Jared Bernstein and Paul Krugman have termed America’s income gap “unsustainable” and “incompatible” with democracy.

One wonders, given this dynamic, whether the United States is heading for a fin de siècle for its corporate artistocracy. And how will the transition occur? Will television viewers a century from now be watching a mirror version of “Downton Abbey,” perhaps called by some fictional version of “Trump Tower”? That the tower must fall is assured. The question is how. And will the nation fall with it or survive, and in what form?