Latest news with #classconflict
Forbes
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Season Three Of ‘The Gilded Age' Is Rife With Power Shifts Among Society's Elite
Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector star in "The Gilded Age" as Bertha and George Russell. Photograph by Barbara Nitke/HBO 'I think thematically the whole season [is] about who's in charge; who is in charge in society, who's in charge of marriages, who has the power. I think the power shift is relevant to all the stories and all the characters,' says Sonya Warfield, the co-writer and executive producer, about the new season of The Gilded Age . Set in the United Stated during the 1880s, the series follows several families navigating the social landscape of a city undergoing rapid change, rife with conflict between old and new money. The Gilded Age explores themes of social mobility, wealth, class, and the changing American society during a time of immense industrial growth. The series stars Carrie Coon, Morgan Spector, Cynthia Nixon, Christine Baranski, Louisa Jacobson, Taissa Farmiga, and Denee Benton. Along with Warfield, Julian Fellowes is the creator, the executive producer, and the co-writer of The Gilded Age. Coon and Spector play Bertha and George Russell who are very concerned with the trajectory of their daughter, Gladys (played by Farmiga), hoping to marry her off to an appropriate suitor, which Fellowes says is accurate for the time period. However, he points out that, 'Marian is resistant to the idea of simply settling down. She wants her life to be something. She wants to do something that adds up to more than getting dressed for the opera or not being late for dinner. But in that society, it was very difficult for women who weren't content to simply run the house and run the children and say, 'Have you had a good day dear.' That was not enough for them.' He adds, of Gladys' story, much of which centers around her reluctance to adhere to the will of her parents, 'I think that one of the key moments of growing up, for all of us, is when you realize you don't have to follow your parents' prejudices. You've loved them, and that's great, but I [think this] is also what young people have gone through always. It's not disloyal, it's just an acceptance that you are a different person from your parents.' Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski star in "The Gilded Age" as Ada Brook and Agnes Van Rhijn. Photograph by Karolina Wojtasik/HBO Bertha's drive to secure what she sees as the ideal future for her daughter causes issues in her relationship with George, Spector explains, saying, 'The rift that develops between them is not a minor one. They see the situation of Gladys' marriage in a fundamentally different way. And so, yeah, they're pulling with all of the might of their separate identities in opposite directions.' Coon jumps in to say that, 'George can't really understand the stakes for a woman. The woman's purview is very different. He doesn't understand our instinct for survival, which is, in this case, through marriage, so there really is a huge lack of psychological understanding between them that's quite sad.' As for what's happening with sisters Agnes and Ada, played by Baranski and Nixon, respectively, Nixon, pipes in to reveal — just a bit — saying that things won't be 'status quo' by any means for the pair. "It is really fun to put these characters in different situations, [because] it's not interesting to watch the same character do the same thing over and over again. It's fun to take them and put them in a wildly different situation and watch them flounder and scramble and try and fake it until they make it.' Playing Peggy Scott, Agnes' secretary, and often confidante, Denee Benton, feels that her storyline, which features a look at Black society at the time, is helping people to understand the past in an unique way. Jordan Donica and Denée Benton star as Dr. William Kirland and Peggy Scott in "The Gilded Age." Photograph by Karolina Wojtasik/HBO 'I think that Julian planting the seed of this Black elite world in our show and it getting to blossom into this garden with all of us watering it is just astounding to me. I'm learning history and I feel like I'm getting to embody something really important and I want to know more and more.' While The Gilded Age features wealthy characters and problems that might seem outdated, this isn't exactly the case, says Warfield, '[These] are universal themes for human beings, whether it's love, death, marriage, all of that. And so, even though those people were around in the 1880s, those are still the themes that we live out today.' Season three of 'The Gilded Age' premieres Sunday, June 22nd at 9 e/p on HBO Max. The series is also available for streaming on the HBO Max app.
Telegraph
20-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
The Republican party is being torn apart by Trump's new tax bill
Class conflict has erupted in Trump's America – within his own Republican Party. The party controls both houses of Congress, as well as the presidency. But their struggle to agree upon tax legislation shows that Republicans in Washington are challenged by the clashing interests of their traditional wealthy constituents and their new working-class base. For decades, the Democratic Party, once the party of labour and farmers, has been losing white working-class and white rural voters to the Republicans. In the last decade and a half, working-class whites have been joined by growing numbers of Hispanic and black voters in the exodus to the GOP. Meanwhile, college-educated professionals and high-income voters – once the core of the Republican coalition – have migrated in the opposite direction to the Democratic Party. The results of this realignment were dramatically evident in the election of 2024. Kamala Harris won voters from households earning more than $100,000 a year – roughly the top third of the population – along with low-income voters making less than $30,000 a year. At the same time, Trump enjoyed a 20 percentage point improvement in support among voters from households earning between $50,000 and $100,000 a year. This long-term class realignment of the parties has caused a crisis for the winners, the Republicans, as well as the losers, the Democrats. Affluent, college-educated 'country club' Republicans, no longer dominant, are forced to share the party with working-class, less-educated 'country music' Republicans. The tensions between the country club and country music wings of the party have erupted in debates over the tax bill that Congressional leaders and President Trump seek to pass by Memorial Day, May 26. State and Local Tax deduction One source of tension involves the State and Local Tax (Salt) deduction in the federal tax code, which allows taxpayers to deduct state and local taxes like property taxes and sales taxes from their federal income tax liability. The Salt deduction has indirectly subsidised the richest households who reside in places with the highest state and local taxes, like the New York and San Francisco metropolitan areas. The Joint Committee on Taxation in 2014 found that only 1 per cent of households earning less than $50,000 benefited from the Salt deduction, while 88 per cent of the benefit went to households with income above $100,000. And for decades there was no cap to the deduction that the rich could claim. This changed in 2017, when the Republican Congress in the first Trump administration capped the Salt deduction at $10,000 per household in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017. That Republicans, not Democrats, imposed the cap was shocking proof of how much the party had changed since the Reagan era. Members of the country music wing of the party asked: why should taxpayers in lower-income, less-educated states like Missouri and Montana subsidise millionaires and billionaires in high-tax, big-government coastal states like New York and California? The fate of the Salt cap in the Republican tax bill has provoked furious controversy. The dwindling number of Republicans from Northeastern and West Coast 'silk stocking' districts have insisted that the cap must be raised to benefit their constituents. One of the most vocal is Representative Nick LaLota. He represents Suffolk County, New York, the fourth wealthiest county in New York State. Nationwide, however, few benefit from the Salt deduction – only 9.5 per cent of taxpayers claimed it in 2022. Medicaid Another flashpoint of conflict between the country club and country music factions of the Republican Party involves Medicaid, the joint federal-state programme of health insurance for low-income Americans. Back in the Reagan era, calls to cut spending on Medicaid and other social insurance and welfare programmes, whose recipients mostly voted for Democrats, were uncontroversial in a Republican party dominated by upscale voters angry at their tax bills. But many of the Republican Party's new working-class and rural voters depend on Medicaid and other programmes like food stamps. This explains why some populist Republicans like Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri oppose cuts in Medicaid. In addition, some Republicans fear that Democrats will claim that they cut spending on working-class and poor Americans to reduce taxes on the rich. To immunise themselves from Democratic attack ads, Republicans in Congress have included measures that benefit ordinary Americans and retirees in the bill, including an increase in the standard deduction for all taxpayers, an increase in the child tax credit to $2,500 until 2028, when it would revert to $2,000, a new $4,000 deduction for Americans over 65 (instead of the elimination of taxation on Social Security that Trump favoured), and the elimination of taxes on tips, one of Trump's campaign promises, but only until 2028. Having criticised President Biden's policies of forgiving student loan debts of some college graduates as elitist, Congressional Republicans would allow car owners of all classes to deduct up to $10,000 in interest on car loans. Slowly but surely, then, the Republican Party is responding to its newly-important working-class voters by letting them share – if only a little – in the tax-cut largesse given to its traditional affluent supporters. Balance of power But the existing Republican budgetary approach is threatened by the overhang of the national debt from the Great Recession and massive Covid-era federal spending. In 2024, the federal government spent more on interest payments on the national debt than on defence. Concerns about the US debt and deficit have led Moody's to downgrade America's credit rating. Republicans want to increase spending on defence and border security. At the same time, attempts to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for working-class voters would be politically disastrous. For decades, the party has reconciled high levels of government spending with tax cuts that chiefly benefit the rich by means of deficit spending. But no realistic amount of economic growth or inflation can get the debt and deficit within reasonable bounds without raising federal taxes overall. Recognising this, President Trump, a billionaire himself, has said that he is open to higher taxes on the richest Americans. According to Pew, nearly half of all Republicans – 43 per cent – favour raising taxes on households making more than $400,000 and large corporations. But tax increases on the rich are bitterly opposed by many Republican donors, as well as by Republican office-holders who came of age during the Reagan era, when tax cuts were the be-all and end-all of Republican domestic policy. The final version of the Republican tax bill in Congress, if it survives to passage, will reflect the balance of power within the party between its upscale and downscale constituents. Whatever happens to the bill, the long-term evolution of the Republican party from a country-club establishment party to a country-music populist party is unlikely to be reversed.
