Evil Geniuses
The Unmaking of America – A Recent History
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How an elite cabal rewrote the American dream for their gain – and left the rest of world behind.
Evil Geniuses is the secret history of how, over the last half century, from even before Ronald Reagan through Donald Trump, America has sharply swerved away from its dream of progress for the many to a system of unfettered profit and self-interest for the few.
As the social liberation of the 1960s finally ended in the chaos of Vietnam and Watergate, a cabal of rich industrialists, business chiefs, wide-eyed libertarians and right-wing economic radicals were waiting, determined to claw back everything they saw as rightfully theirs.
Largely out of sight, they rapidly built and funded a new empire of think tanks and academic institutions and professional organisations, lobbying and political groups, using them to transform politics, media, finance, the legal system and US laws to reinvent and control the political economy. A throwback to the robber barons of a century earlier, they sold the remade system to the people as a nostalgic return to traditional American values. Within a decade, America’s flourishing forward-thinking vision was incarcerated by the unchecked financial accumulation and political power of the super-rich.
Now, the moneymen are running the show.
In this hugely entertaining and deeply researched cultural and economic exposé, New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen maps the rich history of intricate networks, unlikely connections and dark truths which are controlling a nation, revealing how on earth America got to where it is now – and what it might do to win its progressive future back.
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In this sweeping jeremiad, journalist Andersen (coauthor, You Can't Spell America Without Me) traces the origins of today's economic inequality and political dysfunction to "the quite deliberate reengineering of our economy and society since the 1960s by a highly rational confederacy of the rich, the right, and big business." This reengineering, Andersen contends, was aided and abetted by a more spontaneous cultural trend: "a wholesale national plunge into nostalgia" in TV (Happy Days), movies (Grease), music (Bruce Springsteen), and design (New Urbanism). Right-wing politicians and economists exploited this "nostalgia boom," Andersen writes, by pitching regulatory rollbacks, tax cuts, and small government as a return to a more "rugged" and "frontiersy" America. Andersen also blames the Clinton administration's deregulation of financial markets and the Supreme Court's gutting of campaign finance laws for contributing to today's "extreme insecurity and inequality," and holds out tentative hope that the coronavirus pandemic and protests against racial injustice will shock the country out of its economic, political, and cultural stasis. Much of Andersen's material will be familiar to newshounds, but he arranges it into a cohesive argument backed by hard data and stinging prose. Readers will get a clearer picture of how the U.S. got to where it is today.
