The 2024 presidential campaign, we were told endlessly, was “unprecedented.” Given the unusually advanced ages of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the multiple assassination attempts on Trump, Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race after already having secured the nomination, and the abrupt substitution of Kamala Harris, it’s easy to understand why many pundits thought the country was headed into uncharted territory.

That diagnosis, however, had one crippling defect: it was wrong. The current state of American politics is aggressively precedented; it’s just that the historical touchstones lie in one of the most poorly understood periods of American history: the so-called Gilded Age that followed the Civil War and endured into the early twentieth century.