The bottom line for Gilded Age business elites was that the most effective way to protect the original sin of that economic era was, as David Nasaw put it, “to circumscribe democracy.” They did this by lavishly funding their own political candidates as well as through the careful honing and aggressive dissemination of an ideological attack on the very notion of democracy’s right to interfere in the economic realm. Their industries were to be “self-regulating”: free to follow their own evolutionary laws. “Democracy,” they preached, “had its limits, beyond which voters and their elected representatives dared not trespass lest economic calamity befall the nation.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 343