How Americans Caught Gold Fever Again
“I mean, it’s just bullshit,” Slobodian, who teaches at Boston University, told me. “But the ‘great replacement’ theory requires a means of payment.” The Goldbug ideology has received an intellectual spotlight at places like George Mason University, a libertarian stronghold, where the Koch brothers have invested millions of dollars in research, including gold and cryptocurrencies. Today’s goldbugs commune at the annual FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas, which features panels such as “Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin.” Gold.”
When Trump was running for president in 2016, he said GQ“Bringing back the gold standard would be very difficult to do, but my God, it would be wonderful.” This is unlikely to happen, but Trump’s erratic policies and trade wars have given gold a different kind of currency. Barry Eichengreen, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and author of “Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto,” said central banks in developing countries tend to buy gold when they lose confidence in the U.S. dollar: “They question whether the United States is a reliable economic, political and financial partner. » But this is not enough, he warns, to explain the stratospheric rise of gold. “I would say no one knows why the price of gold has risen so much over the last couple of years, but people tell stories,” he said.
Trump’s right-wing political allies, here and abroad, have capitalized on gold’s history as a safe haven in a world threatened by money-printing globalists. In the UK, attendees at last year’s Reform Party conference were greeted by a cardboard silhouette of party leader Nigel Farage holding up a gold coin as a spokesman for precious metals trader Direct Bullion. In the United States, Donald Trump, Jr., a first son and host of the podcast “Triggered,” has partnered with a company called Birch Gold Group, which helps you “convert your 401(k) to gold.” She sells a gold bar engraved with an image of a miner in overalls panning for gold in a river; on the back it reads “Credit Suisse”.
Beyond branding, what does a gold bar have to do with the California gold rush today? I couldn’t imagine that any of these people, much less someone whose diapers were probably changed on a gold changing table, knew what a valve was. But the Wild West offers what Harvard scholar Svetlana Boym has called a “usable past.” Boym, born in Russia, argued that Vladimir Putin and his political allies came to power by harboring nostalgia for an orderly Soviet superstate after the economic turmoil of the 1990s. The Forty-Niner is essential to our identity as a nation of courageous and rugged individualists. Even Luke Skywalker dons a pair of beige Levi’s, transformed from a miner’s uniform to a symbol of rebellious cool by the likes of James Dean, to blend into the desert sands of Tatooine, a former mining outpost. Slobodian told me that 21st-century gold prospectors, who mingle with tech founders and bitcoin barons, “fetishize the idea of a supposedly lawless West,” a place without pesky government regulations. The amateur miners I spoke with also idealized the Wild West, but they saw its lack of rules as a chance to shake up the status quo. Johnson, of 530 Mining, said he believed the gold rush was “the first time in human history that ordinary people could touch gold. Before that, it was only for kings.” Industrial gold mining, a $43 billion market in North America, has also realized the power of nostalgia. This year, three mining companies looking to expand their operations sponsored, for the first time, Calico California Days, a festival in Calico Ghost Town featuring mock gold panning and gun drawing competitions.
“Honestly, I only asked you out because I freaked out and forgot what to do when you encounter a bear on a trail. »
Cartoon by Avi Steinberg
It’s not a story that everyone is nostalgic for. In 2022, a pair of 1980s Levi’s, discovered in a mine shaft in New Mexico, was sold at auction; a label inside said “the only type made by white work.” During the Gold Rush, politicians stoked xenophobia and pitted workers against each other, leading to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which effectively banned immigration from China to the United States for sixty-one years. The James Marshall monument was built at the request of Native Sons of the Golden West, a fraternal organization dedicated to preserving California’s settler past; members had to be white men born in the state.
