Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

...We remember Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson because they were reformers with progressive tendencies.

But go back a few years. Take a look at the behavior of such persons as William McKinley (a total fraud -- campaigned on a populist platform, governed as a lackey of the 0.1%), Grover Cleveland (for 'good government' but happy to use the military to crush strikes)... or Schulyer Colfax, James Blaine, and the entire gang involved in the Credit Mobilier scandal.... These guys would fit in well in the current Gilded Age. Particularly the super-corrupt McKinley, who seems to have been one of the most terrible men ever to be President.