Category: Backtrack to the Gilded Age

The Broligarchs are not the first bunch of billionaires that have tried to control the American government Iand imperialist aspirations are nothing new for the US either. We have been here before, during the Gilded Age, and back then, most people didn’t like it very much. Some of the sharpest critiques of unbridled power were made by brilliant cartoonists of that era who attacked the greed and corruption of the powerful, exposed their xenophobia and prejudice and lampooned their imperial ambitions. Their recipe for success was precision and acuity -they named names and visualized imbalances of power using scale and fine detail. In this issue, we’ve chosen to share some of the finest examples of those political cartoons from a bygone era. May they serve as a reminder that art can help to shape a vision of a different future than the one that our current Broligarchs are building.