Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

During the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled. The clock was turned back on a century of economic progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market all-powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, lifting up an oligarchy that served only its own interests, and leaving the huge majority of Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope.

Why and how did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt Andersen offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America’s undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame—to the radical right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal “useful idiots,” among whom he includes himself.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Economics, Audiobook, American History, Business

Audiobook

First published August 11, 2020

About the author

Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels Turn of the Century, Heyday, and True Believers, and and, with Alec Baldwin of You Can't Spell America Without Me. His non-fiction books include Fantasyland, Reset and The Real Thing.

He is also host of the Peabody Award-winning weekly public radio program Studio 360,.

Previously, Kurt was a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine Spy, editor-in-chief of New York magazine, a columnist for New York, staff writer at The New Yorker, and design and architecture critic for Time.

Reviews

[Mario the lone bookwolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neoliberalism is no science, but one of the most dangerous, destructive, and inhumane ideologies ever created.

Andersen expands the thoughts of Chomsky, Klein, Ziegler, Crouch, Graeber, etc., and capitalism and globalization criticism to a big history tour of how the US (and thereby indirectly Europe, that got brainwashed too) was ruined by bad science, lying with statistics, economics, dogmas, useful idiots, conservative right wing superrich, think tanks, and other usual suspects.

What a lesson, what an amazing story of how the ideals of a nation were corrupted, how the once United States of America were defragmented, backlashed to a feudalistic new aristocratic age with inequality so enormous to be one of the rare democracies with such devastating numbers. Because it seems as if, duh, that all European, strong eco social Keynesian welfare states with high taxes and regulated markets, free education, health care, strong social nets, etc. generate happy people, no matter what quality of life index is used for comparison, the US fails terribly.

When a state cares for its citizens and has (somewhat) control over its corporations, conglomerates, and other super entities, there are no medieval dystopic nightmare hellhole slums, industrial military complexes, extremism, dozens of millions of people left to fight to survive. Each neoliberal economist, sociologist, or politician should maybe spend 1 unprotected hour in a hood or prison, it´s not as if she/he would survive it, but before dying, she/he would possibly realize the stupidity of fringe science. Those are no scientists, but bought, demagogic apologists.

But what flies too deep under the radar and is hardly ever asked is the question: What were the democrats, green, left, progressives (I was and still kind of am in this camp too, although highly disillusioned and frustrated) doing all the time and why did nothing change when they were in power? Well, let´s see.

It´s irritating that this realistic view of how our current world with all its horrors was formed is completely underrepresented, if not even censored, in close to all media, no matter if left or right. Who dares to criticize the system, the consent, who wants to speak up, to start the radical necessary change for people and the planet? Well, nobody, because everyone is concerned about the main topics given to the people by controlled propaganda media and well, it was me and, as he mentions, the author too.

And don´t get me wrong, but just as the author concludes and realizes for himself, we are sold, lost, and all hope is gone, because the "good" left, liberal, progressive, democratic, eco social, environmental, etc. side has been bought and sold, is manipulated without noticing, to just talk about and concentrate on irrelevant topics that don´t change the system or don´t even realize that there is still an immense problem. Because they are living in their ivory towers, secure suburbs, and fantasy lands with imaginary visions of how the world really works. And I was one of them, which makes me feel kind of ashamed, which is usually a rare thing, because I´m quite a bigoted fellow.

Just as Andersen, which makes this work even more precious than the other books describing the self destructive potential of our current system: He realizes the blind spots, cognitive biases, hidden lunacies, etc. of mentioned "good" activities and how they brainwashed him with feel good propaganda made influenced by the code of conducts, corporate responsibility, and whitewashing political feelgood drivel.

One thing I just don´t get about people is how nonfiction could get so infested with anecdotal, autobiographical, and thereby often completely irrelevant topics and persons. Don´t get me wrong, great inventions, great leaders, everything fine, but they are nothing and unimportant in comparison to the development of the whole humans' species. But the real deal, heavy, difficult books have the problem of being very nasty to read, attacking things and ideas one loves, being filled with loads of facts, history, and general more boring stuff than the glorious life of whoever just wrote about what she/he did for a living.

Imagine just one of the really important, critical thinkers being sold and reviewed like a billionaire's way to wealth or superstar or ex president anecdotes (or at least instead of terrible, apologetic Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling propaganda). That would make a real impact, initialize some change but nope, even the rare people that read books prefer to stay in their comfort zone and be not that dangerously progressive with their reading choices. Not that the neighbors, friends, family, say that they are dirty leftist communists or something, reading such bad, dangerous books that should best be burned. Regarding sacrificing everything to fire: The witch hunt started against the poorest and keeps expanding towards middle and upper middle class, until nothing will be left except of the elite owning everything.

But enough of self criticism of the high handed do gooders, SJWs, and political overcorrect bigoted hypocrites, back to the show.

It´s completely understandable that people revolt and troll against the descriptions of the real life offered in this book and by mentioned authors, because everyone hates to accept that ideology and world view, given in schools and universities, beloved newspapers full of empty pseudo fringe pop psychology sociology economy, etc empty drivel, is just plain wrong, mumbo jumbo, yadda yadda, empty drivel, closer to crazy cults and sects than anything substantial, über ultra replication crises, a world built on wacky scheme snake oil salesman mentality.

It will take decades and longer to change anything substantial and until then, we will have erased up to anything above 90 or even 95 and more percent of all lifeforms on earth, the human era, the Anthropocene, will forever be archeologically seen as the time of the greatest mass killing of species just for profit. Before we go to another world and do the same there, of course, maybe even just preemptive, you know, sterilize the whole Goldilock zone planet for convenience, because it´s cheaper or because the megacorporations controlling everything in the solar systems don´t want to bother with indigenous people and stuff.

Try to calculate how many people will have unnecessarily and preventably suffered and died until then, because the most dangerous entities humans ever created, corporations, are just lifting off. So, take all the victims of already half a century of exploitation and natural destruction and add, what? 30, 50, 125 more years of this lunacy, and the death toll is what? A 1 or 2 digit billion number? What is talked about in this book are first world country problems, one of the richest states in the world is doing these terrible things with its own people, we don´t even know how much suffering has been caused by this in the Southern hemisphere over the last decades. After colonialism and slavery ended, neoliberalism and neocolonialism came to continue business as usual.

To quote George Carlin:

“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that've long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.”

Personal, irrelevant, boring, anecdotal, empty drivel:
I really wanted to leave the nonfiction reading boat after
White fragility
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...
and
Why I am no longer talking to white people about race
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
destroyed everything about the green left ideology I tended to surf on for decades, but I just couldn´t resist the temptation to get this ingenious infodump. Hopefully, I will be stronger in the future. However, spread the word, the only thing left to perfectly self deceit oneself into believing that it´s not far too late, especially for close to all species on earth.

I´ve read similar descriptions of the immense perversion, inhumanity, and madness of our current system, to find in the social criticism shelves.

A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrop...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_His...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodive...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultura...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrim...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarce...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrohi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocolo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolibe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restora...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retribu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you read *no other book* prior to Election Day, read *this one*!

I'm thinking this could easily be the best book I have read all year. And it took me a little while - about 3 weeks, apparently - to get through it. I had read Andersen's terrific 'Fantasyland' - which came out a year or two ago - but, as good as that book is (and it's terrific; I read that one fairly quickly), it didn't prepare me for the second half of the author's one-two punch.

'Fantasyland' is an overview which concentrates on the history of the American people. But 'Evil Geniuses' goes much deeper; it digs down into not only the source of modern American angst (our government - and the rich who now largely control it) but it throws the doors open wide on the staggering number of shadow figures who have managed to closet themselves away throughout decades, throwing their energy (and their millions or the millions they have access to) into their single-minded purpose: killing America and its democracy.

From my previous reading of such books as 'Dark Money', 'Democracy in Chains', 'Kochland', etc., I was already familiar with many of the leading villainous players who are also in the headlights in 'EG' - but those other books (each of them required reading, imo) tend to focus on smaller / concentrated areas of political / social sabotage. ~ which makes the scope of 'EG' remarkable.

Andersen begins by taking us back 50 years, to the seeds of destruction. From there we move through time to the present day (right up to the current COVID crisis), as Andersen - seemingly effortlessly - lays out the detailed specifics of just how pissed-off and bent-on-revenge the privileged and the [R]s have been... since the '60s!

The amount of research Andersen undertook is mind-boggling. (When I think of the number of books he read - and synthesized - in order to come up with this report, my mind reels. Fortunately, Andersen also took care of reeling my mind in.) Although I took my time in reading 'EG', that doesn't mean it was a difficult read. It's actually very accessible in its language (for the layman, like myself). But there were times when the amount of information pouring out was a little overwhelming for my bowled-over brain. There were days when I had to put the book down for 24 or 48 hours... because the shock of knowledge (esp. the bits I was, until now, totally unaware of) was pummeling me.

~ which is not to say that 'EG' is a depressing book... necessarily. It just has bombshells on just about every page. It's all vital information - it's stuff you need to know if you have been wondering daily (as I have) what exactly is at the root of all of this CHAOS! Andersen offers up the facts with clear-eyed insight and cautious optimism. He even (surprisingly) manages some humor from time to time (but, of course, not all that much; this is a deadly serious work).

As with some other books I've read of late, I had my post-its handy, to make note of paragraphs that I wanted to be sure to find later. But, in a way, they weren't necessary. This book is now seared on my consciousness. In other words, I feel prepared. Exactly for *what*, I'm not sure. America has become such a political / economic free-for-all that all we can do is be ready for *anything*.

This book helps immensely in that regard. Yes, it's dark stuff - but it's also empowering ammunition (which includes guidelines and even hope for our future). If you've read this far, go that next imperative step - and read this book!

[Chad Alexander Guarino da Verona · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the few different dictionary definitions for "leviathan" is "a thing that is very large or powerful", a term of literal Biblical proportions that in 2020 seems to be the best term for the USA's capitalist system and mindset. A leviathan of a system requires a leviathan of a book and Kurt Andersen has obliged with Evil Geniuses, an expose of America's wrong turn from New Deal to Raw Deal and the dismantling and disempowerment of the American middle class.

Andersen takes readers on a short journey through America's history from the founding fathers to the Covid-19 pandemic, and along the way details the various methods that "big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots" have used to consolidate and maintain financial power. Major focus is given to the "politics of nostalgia" and the argument that major cultural shifts have largely been stifled since the 60s leading to a jaded society that no longer expects major change to ever realistically occur.

This is a heavy book in both subject matter and length, but Andersen does an admirable job spelling most things out in laymen's terms which means you won't need a double major in history and economics to digest his explanations as to how exactly we got to this point. While you'll learn a lot, you may leave feeling a bit surprised and depressed by just how intelligently these "evil geniuses" have plotted the course of America's history for the last few decades. Required reading in this bizarro year of 2020!

**I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to Random House**

[Wick Welker · Rating 5 out of 5]

The neoliberal experiment should end.

This was my first Kurt Andersen read. I was a little hesitant going in as the title and cover art made this appear somewhat of a conspiratorial work. However, I was pleased to find an engaging, poignant and well-researched catalogue of the events leading to modern America and how we can get out of this mess.

The bulk of this book addresses the elephant in the room: big business control since the 1980s has lead to ballooning wealth concentration and disparity not seen since the 1920s. Andersen gives a welcomed but brief history of America from the 1700s to the 1960s and then really zooms in on the recent 50 year decades and the crucial events, culture and decisions that were made which have steered us toward a real dystopia.

Andersen has brought a timely phrase into my mind: the political economy. That is, how the existing economy is shaped, molded and codified by whoever is in control regardless of actual economic metrics. The changes wrought in the 1960s brought America into a cultural and economic flux. Turnover of ideas, fashion, tastes and television became an expected part of American life. At this time, overt greed and big business take over was something generally abhorred by the public particularly with the rejection of Goldwater, the fringe libertarian presidential candidate who lost to LBJ. By the time the 1970 rolled around, the "business round table", business elites including the Kochs, Coors, Scaife and others put forth a unified effort to normalize big business once more by way of influencing politics and culture through the proliferation of political think tanks which behaved as tax shelters. The Powell memo provided the manifesto for this group from which has also borne Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Kavanaugh.

The plan came to fruition with the very deliberate offering of Ronald Reagan to the public who condemned big government and executed unfettered deregulation of big business through various policies. The rightward shift into deep neoliberalism dragged the entire country, including liberals, to the right. What follows is a pandering class of politicians, be it democratic or republicans, who now court the American public through the 1990s and into the 2000s with ideas normalizing big business take over of American politics. Needless to say, the pro-business policy making for the last 40 years has completely undermined the working class while they enjoy no appreciable gains in median household income in the same amount of time. All the while, the ONLY people that have profited are the mega rich. There is NO evidence from the last 40 years that trickle down economics is a viable model of prosperity. The experiment is over.

Andersen touches on the Trump administration, the tax plan of 2017 which is a neoliberal tour de force that balloons public debt without seeing long term gains for the average American. Trump is in both ways more of the same but with a demagogic twist. He is clearly perpetrating the corporate self interests of his predecessors while more blatantly using the tried and true scapegoats of nativism and racism to garner public support. It goes without saying that libertarian policy making has left us ill-prepared for COVID 19 pandemic.

Besides the expert cataloging of the above events, Andersen puts forth some interesting theories. He posits that America has been in cultural stasis for 20-30 years without changing tastes. As opposed to the 1960s, Americans actually fear the future now and are very easily manipulated by the powerful force of nostalgia. Nostalgia for the imagined yesteryear of prosperity and stability. Marketers and politicians know this and capitalize on this nostalgia effect.

I was pleased to find that Andersen offers some pretty good solutions. He argues that 2020 is indeed an inflection point but it's not the first inflection point we've ever had. We very clearly mirror conditions of the 1920s. There is no doubt that if the political economy doesn't have deliberate change, this system will break off. Andersen offers some familiar solutions such as a much needed wealth tax, increase estate taxes (which 2017 tax plan slashed) and increase corporate taxes. He mentions universal basic income (UBI) and how Alaska has been thriving off of a corporate-oil subsidy and has been doing just fine with production.

The most poignant solution Andersen offered me was this: the public MUST change from a binary ideological system. It's not that all regulation is BAD or that all socialism is GOOD, or vice versa. Thriving modern societies live on a spectrum of both capitalistic and socialistic ideas that reign in one another. We must embrace ideological nonbinary decision making. That is the key, and young people clearly think in more nonbinary ways than their parents.

I learned a TON from this book. Andersen also does an fantastic job of keeping you engaged. If you enjoyed books such as Dark Money, Shock Doctrine or anything by Chomsky, I highly recommend.

[Mikey B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Page 75 (my book) Walter Lippmann

The American temperament leans generally to a kind of mystical anarchism.

Author/journalist Kurt Andersen takes a hard look at the radical changes in economic policy that the U.S. has undergone since the ascent to the Presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Right-wing capitalists (referred to as “Evil Geniuses” as per the books’ title) had become severely disgruntled by the constant growth of unions, of environmental regulations, of workers’ rights, and social programs that had sprung up since Franklin Roosevelt’s Presidency took charge in 1933.

During the early 1970s, a group of wealthy conservatives coalesced and used their enormous funds to whittle away at this growth of “socialism”. Over the decades, they succeeded beyond their wildest expectations and used the Republican Party to achieve their goals politically. The Democrats and liberals were totally blind-sided by the emergence of this right-wing agenda. In fact, they themselves added to this growth during the Clinton years by assimilating free-market capitalism into their own Democratic programs.

Page 74 mid-1970s

Once a large majority of Americans came to believe that the federal government was uninspiring or incompetent or corrupt or evil, as they rapidly had over the previous decade, it was going to be a lot easier for the economic right to persuade people that regulating big business and taxing the rich was just plain wrong.

Ronald Reagan with his pronouncements like:

- The top nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
- Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

This enforced the view as government being ineffective in administering the country, and that it should be placed more in the hands of private enterprise. Shortly into his first term Reagan fired all the striking air traffic controllers. This was the beginning of the dismantling of unions.

Rich business owners used the Republican Party to remove the “social contract” of government serving the people – to a government serving private enterprise. The market would now rule, with shareholder and stock value becoming prime directives. This took precedence over employee rights and environmental concerns.

CEOs in the 1980s started to be paid (or rewarded) by company shares. This reinforced what exactly they were working for – the price of company stocks.

Page 117

[In the 1980s] our long-standing consensus about acceptable and unacceptable conduct by big business was changed.

Page 182

The market and only the market must be the supreme authority… Thus began America’s radical increase in economic inequality.


There was a move away from a regulated economy (regulations were seen by conservative businessmen as anathema) to a libertarian market. CEO salaries sky-rocketed – the rich got richer – and the poor had to make due with a never-changing minimum wage.

Page 71

In 1971 about 175 big companies had full-time lobbyists… By 1978 five hundred did, and … in the second Reagan year nearly 2,500 corporations employed Washington lobbyists. While today a majority of senators and congresspeople become lobbyists when they leave Congress.

Right-wing groups also allied themselves with religious organizations. They encouraged science denial – more so on global warming, where they used the less provocative “climate change”. They also set up law departments in universities to promote the free market economy.

Page 135 from conservative donations

From 1980 on, Law and Economic [School] arguments power both the subversion of antitrust enforcement and the new mania for deregulation.

Page 171

Milton Friedman’s 1970 announcement of the new American gospel that maximizing profits was the one and only responsibility of people running a business… [page 173] all became focused on shareholder value.

Page 204 Adam Cobb

“In the 1980s, you started to see healthy firms laying off workers. Mainly for shareholder value.”

The author constantly harps on how Americans have become a nostalgic society – instead of looking forward as Americans use to. This became somewhat tiresome. But he does score points by intimating that this nostalgia is also anti-science and now permeates the Republican Party with many fundamentalist true believers. And this may also be part of the reason that facts have become “relative”. This led to global warming denial and had an egregious affect in the pandemic where over a million died because regulations were constantly under question by libertarian freedom lovers. American society has lost the communitarian responsibility that is needed for a functioning society. In a book titled “Why Nations Fail” the author [page 280] quotes that “successful countries keep greedy elites from exercising too much control of their economies and government.”

The author tends to draw too much attention to himself. And the book is long – by at least one hundred pages. The overall emphasis is on the economy. There is no discussion of the Supreme Court and its decisions that border on sheer madness – like gun control and deregulation (this book was published in 2020). There is nothing on the structural ineffectiveness of the U.S. government where Senators from rural states block progressive legislation. Why do Senators from thinly populated rural states have the ability to block legislation that would be useful for a state like California (population over 39 million)?

I wish the author would have delved more into the weird alliance between the moneyed-class and the religious-right.

This book was not as effective as his previous work,Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. However, it is convincing on how affluent conservative market libertarians took control of government. The author states his country is starting to resemble a Latin American oligarchy, with an extreme division between a small minority of super wealthy and the disenfranchised poor.

Page 300 Francis Fukuyama

“This extended period, which started with Reagan, in which a certain set of ideas about the benefits of unregulated markets took hold, in many ways it’s had a disastrous effect. It’s led to a weakening of labor unions, of the bargaining power of ordinary workers, the rise of an oligarchic class that exerts undue political power… you’ve got to regulate the [financial] sector like hell because they’ll make everyone else pay. It seems to me that certain things that Karl Marx said are turning out to be true … in that workers would be impoverished.”

Page 370-71

Providing good social safety nets to try to protect everyone from economic disaster is simply what governments do.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fascinating , well written, informative, thought provoking and , unfortunately, scary and depressing. The story of how the far right since about 1980 has deliberately take over the political economy of our country using culture wars as a stalking horse of sorts is fascinating. These people are truly evil and are ruled by money. And they are relentless. And trump is thr culmination of that evil. One large talking point for the ultra rich. Anderson , who makes complicated stuff digestible, argues that the pandemic which exposed the the perils of income equality and money as god, may cause a change in the American political economy with an eye towards democratic socialism. If it doesn’t , we are in for either a revolution or dictatorship. Read this and learn.

[David Kamp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclosure: I know this author, and used to work for him. “Evil Geniuses” is a book that should, in theory, be a slog and a downer, but Kurt Andersen turns it into an invigorating call to action. The big question it poses: How did we go from a period of relative prosperity, progressivism, and high standards of middle-class living (from the late 50s to mid 70s) to a society of acute political polarization and income inequality? Andersen shows that it wasn’t a mere matter of societal drift, but of a concerted effort by a handful of cynical bad actors to MAKE America move in such a direction. Andersen’s being a funny, lively writer (of Spy magazine pedigree) makes this big book a fast, pleasurable read, and near its end prescribes remedies for reclaiming a society that aspires to fairness and kindness.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better than his previous book. A fairly thorough and concise timeline laid out in a comprehensive manner. Less political bias...or is it just becoming less debatable about the political assessments of our current environment.

4.5ish Stars

Listened to the audiobook. Kurt Anderen narrated his book. He was very good.

[Gary K Bibliophile · Rating 5 out of 5]

“ Plus ca change - Plus c'est la meme chose” (the more things change the more they stay the same) A recurring theme in this brilliantly researched book... and how often do I get to reference Rush’ lyrics from the book in my reviews 😜

“In the 1960’s, IBM’s president and CEO until 1971, the son of the founder, published a book all about his earnest vision of virtuous capitalist stewardship. The company’s official “basic beliefs” were to treat individual employees respectfully, provide great customer service, and achieve “excellence” — plus to act in society’s general interest, all balanced to make a reasonable profit. “

Yes... truly a model for most corporations from this point on and many mission statements use (and follow) these same principles.

Ha - if only this were true. How far we have sunk. The deterioration of the ‘employer / employee’ contract is one of many themes covered in this thoroughly researched book. I saw a review on Amazon that (I’m paraphrasing) “A leftist hit job - where are his sources?” ... Well, I can help with that . The very first line (of 14 pages of sources) in the Bibliography is “All sources and citations are online at https://www.kurtandersen.com/evil-gen... “ followed by - I repeat... 14 pages of sources.

The nice thing about the online sources is that more than half of them are hyperlinked to the source content for additional research for those so inclined.

The main theme of the book is how economic policies, changes in social thinking, and political polarization has led to a dramatic shift of wealth to those at the very top of the economic pyramid. Andersen doesn’t try to oversimplify the problem, but systematically peels the onion back decade-by-decade highlighting relevant events, legislation (both big and small), political appointments, cultural shifts, introduction of language to make this all sound normal, and the aforementioned shift of companies putting profit and stock price above all else.

Kurt starts the book contrasting the positive first half of the 1960s with the contentious latter half. One of those recurring themes was that the late 60s led to many of the cultural divides we see today - with the conservative view that the changes had gone too far - too fast - and we need to get back to the ‘good old days - when times were simpler and the government left us alone’.

One of my favorite reads from last year was Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “The Bully Pulpit - Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism”. Long title... I know... long book too, but a fascinating look at that period of time in US history. Here’s a good quote from Roosevelt...

“It is imperative to exercise over big business a control and supervision which is unnecessary as regards small business. All business must be conducted under the law, and all business men, big or little, must act justly. But a wicked big interest is necessarily more dangerous to the community than a wicked little interest. 'Big business' in the past has been responsible for much of the special privilege which must be unsparingly cut out of our national life.“

Thus began a series antitrust legislation and legal decisions and reforms that started a major shift in US economic policies.

So when I think of “the good old days” does anyone think of this period... with 16 hour work days, horrible working conditions, no child labor laws, businesses squashing competition using unfair business practices, senators highly in the pocket of big business (they weren’t even popularly elected back then), no social safety net, women without the right to vote, and rampant unapologetic racism that divides in the nation.

Oh wait... that’s not the things the ‘Evil Geniuses’ mean when they think of “the good old days” ?? Well what do they mean? An interesting question pondered in the book. Most folks are nostalgic for something. Those same folks also tend to forget the ‘bad stuff’ that unfortunately goes along with it. Part of the ‘genius’ part is the slow framing of social thinking to go along with changes to roll back much of the progress made starting with Roosevelt and Taft... leading up to (the other Roosevelt) with The New Deal.

A lot of attention too is paid to a notable lack of enthusiasm for past government programs and/or labor practices that have had their successes. Why support such programs? These are things of the past... solving problems of the past. Today they are just examples of government overreach and or whiny workers that should just shut up, go to work, and collect their paychecks. These attitudes have been so ingrained into modern thinking that public support has waned and it’s not surprising that it is easy to weaken such institutional protections.

A big section goes over the slow erosion of labor unions. I must admit - I am not a big fan of labor unions and I don’t belong to one. Things like ‘everyone gets the same pay raise’ seems very unAmerican to me and leads to a workforce that offers little incentive to work any harder than your peers. Not everyone contributes equally - so those that work harder and contribute more should be rewarded. I’m not talking 300x’s like CEOs, but more. I also think some protections afforded by unions set a bad example. A bad employee should not bump a good employee on seniority alone... that just seems wrong to me. Having said that... I’m not stupid either. Without labor unions we would probably still have 16 hour works days and all kinds of crazy disparities.

But these problems have all been solved right? Labor unions have served their purpose and thanks to Reagan busting the air traffic controllers in the early 80s we pushed them back down - right? Kurt makes a good case that this is not at all true. Given my experience with big business I think unionizing might not be such a bad thing to keep businesses in check. Things like union workers make 25% more than comparable non union in the same craft. Nearly all union workers get healthcare through their jobs. Two thirds of union workers have some kind of retirement pension compared to 13% of non union workers. Inconvenient facts like that.

I mentioned the normalization of euphemistic language into the mainstream to make things seem natural - yet if translated to say what they meant you would likely make you cringe. Things like ...
- “Shareholder Value” - raise the stock price above all else - irrespective of if the short term gains benefit the company in the long term (every time I hear this it makes me want to hurl - this one has always pissed me off)
- “Strict Constructionist” we understand the constitution better than you do... any change is liberal bullshit
- “On climate change the science is inconclusive” - we don’t want to come out and say changes will hurt the bottom line. (I always think of this as “my scientist can beat up your scientist”). The idea is to delay the changes to make it someone else’s problem (devised by Evil Genius John Sununu)
- Pretty much any name for a political action committee- partisan big money drives our actions, but we want to sound like we represent your values
- “Right to work state” - screw your union and don’t dare unionize
- “Government overreach” - any regulatory policy - no matter how small or what the benefits are to society- clearly unneeded as “the invisible hand” is all that is necessary to keep things on track.
- “Supply side economics” - also known as trickle down economics or voodoo economics- enable policies that shift money to the rich knowing that they will distribute the money downwards by applying calculated and careful investments and allowing for a flowering of entrepreneurial ventures 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 really ? You believe that after 40 years of this not working?

Per the last bullet Kurt goes over a stunning amount of data to show how the “trickle down” & “business friendly” policies have not worked and have tilted the scale against all but those at the very top. This really accelerated in the 80s and hasn’t slowed much since. My CEO - after the Trump “Jobs Jobs Jobs” tax plan was implemented was asked why the majority of the $$$ went to raising the dividend and stock buybacks. His reply was (I’m paraphrasing) that the only folks that got a pay raise out of this were in low paying jobs - you make pretty good money - and don’t have anything to complain about.

Kurt unabashedly goes after right wing policy (referring to himself as a “useful liberal idiot”), but doesn’t hold back in his criticism of Democrats as well. He levels a lot of blame at the business friendly Clinton policies of the 90s that set the stage for the economic collapse of 2007-08. As well as Chuck Schumer’s lack of aggression in going after the Wall Street power players that shamelessly contributed to the collapse (literally his district).

Much of this I am familiar with - as I lived through it and tend to follow the news. Over the same time I have seen myself drift from center-right to center-left, but still pretty close to center. Like Kurt - who brings this up in the book - much of this kind of snuck by me... with a lot of the changes not seeming that important. He says that while researching the content it all seemed to make sense. He lays out his case brilliantly.

Kurt mentions early in the book that an ‘Evil Genius’ is still ‘genius’. Kurt expresses an optimism that this is correctable... I’m not so sure. To steal a phrase from Neil deGrasse Tyson... we need to “Make America Smart Again” - that’s going to be really tough. A few things to consider... don’t vote on strict party lines... don’t get your news from one source... never get your news from social media... take the time to learn the issues and... vote.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America by Kurt Andersen turned into one of my rare dnf books at around the halfway point. The author makes many good points but too often refers to conservatives and those on the right in disparaging terms that I found childish and annoying. As long as arguments are based on logic and generally can avoid name calling, I'll stick with it because I can learn something even from people that I disagree with. This one was not one of those...

[Lance L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm. So, apparently corporate and ultra-rich interests have been using their power and influence to corrupt the legal, political and economic systems and reengineer society as a dystopian nightmare of inequality and stagnation. In other breaking news, something seems to be going on with the climate lately... I mean, fine, all for the most part true but come on - to quote Officer John McClane “Welcome to the party, pal!”

This book is filled with useful factoids that told me not one single thing I didn’t already know. It reads as if it were a freshman survey class “Intro to Wealth Inequality” which I guess would be a useful primer if you have read absolutely nothing by Paul Krugman, Naomi Klein, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Jane Meyer, Thomas Picketty, Matt Taibbi, or hell, a newspaper or magazine in the last decade. The author in fact references almost all of those journalists and economists.

The author’s other premise is a little trickier, and more fraught. He posits that sometime in the 1970s, America lost its defining characteristic - its appetite for the “new”. This is supposed to have been a reaction against the cultural dislocations of the 1960s, and was used by the evil Machiavellians busily reengineering society to their benefit by keeping the newly screwed-over working and middle classes so focused on nostalgia and distracted by culture wars that they did not pay attention to their screwing-over. This argument did not flow as smoothly or coherently (perhaps because it wasn’t so thoroughly based on the work of others?) but that was not the biggest problem with it. It seems pretty clear that the “new” thing in the 1960s that caused such a radical and seemingly permanent reaction amongst middle America wasn’t long hair on men or short skirts on women. It was the civil rights movement. Pure and simple. This book has a very curious blind spot when it comes to race. The author makes much of the American tendency for false nostalgia, but repeatedly indulges in a longing for the good old days of labor movements and everybody getting their fair share of the economy. I’m here to tell you, not everyone DID get their fair share, in fact a whole lot of that egalitarianism was based specifically and even explicitly on the exclusion of an entire group of citizens from those benefits. It was just jarring that the author repeatedly invoked the Good Ole Days without honestly and coherently dealing with this discrepancy.

Finally, the book just seemed to slowly fizzle out during the far weaker last section, which is meant to suggest ways out of the current mess. The absolute final section reads like an extended newspaper article, laying out the history of the current administration’s response to Covid (?). In any case, it will take strong medicine, not the weak tea served up in the last section of this book. Strong measures like ending lifetime appointments for an increasingly morally corrupt and intellectually bankrupt federal judiciary (explicitly including the Supreme Court). Like gathering the political will to end the corrupt practices of gerrymandering and voter suppression which enable a minority party of the rich to subvert democracy and maintain control. Like actual enforcement of fraud, securities and antitrust laws, backed by aggressive prosecution of violators. Rather than pitchforks, we need prisons, in the form of a Financial Kingpin Law that includes such penalties as lifetime imprisonment and forfeiture of all assets. If we are serious about addressing the dire crisis described in the early sections of this book, we need to get serious - not (ironically) nostalgically pine for the good old days when white people had labor unions.

[Elizabeth Stolar · Rating 5 out of 5]

6/7. This was a terrific book. I was thinking that it reminded me of some of the same issues that were discussed in Anand Giridharadas' book, and then I saw later on that he had reviewed this book in the NYT, so I guess I was correct on that one. This book synthesizes some of the changes and the history of how we got here -- this idea that America has always been looking for something "new" that has stagnated over the last 30 years is an interesting one, but really, just an idea that overlays the change in our overall social contract that had existed prior to 1980. It's interesting that Americans had been more or less on board with the New Deal, and it was dismantled beginning in the 1980s, which has brought us to the point that New Deal ideas seem radical and impossible to implement. Yet, what was really radical was the departure from those ideas. Our country would benefit immensely if everyone read this book. Highly recommend.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is the story of how America lost its way and came to elect a man who rejects democracy itself.

For nearly half a century, the broad-based liberal consensus that grew out of the New Deal produced robust economic growth, rich corporate profits, and an expanding middle class enabled by a powerful labor movement. But it all started fraying in the 1960s with the ascendancy of the civil rights movement, women’s rights, and opposition to the war in Vietnam. The backlash was severe. And beginning around 1970, Big Business and the wealthiest beneficiaries of the US economy resolved to upend the consensus.

Acting alone at first but increasingly in coordination, they undertook a massive campaign to reverse the liberal tax, social welfare, consumer protection, and environmental policies on which American society had come to be based. In Evil Geniuses, author Kurt Andersen dives into the history of this campaign and names the names of the men—they were all men—who pandered to the backlash. He details how they were so successful that the US economy returned to levels of economic inequality not seen for more than a century. And, in cynically indulging the worst impulses unleashed in the backlash to the 60s, they enabled the election in 2016 of a man who revels in the racism, misogyny, authoritarianism, and reactionary policies that even so many of them deplore.

The men responsible for how America lost its way

So, who are these evil geniuses of Andersen’s title? At no point does he list the names, but they emerge clearly enough along the way as he tells the profoundly sad story of the price American society has paid for their folly. These are the principal architects of the winner-take-all economy that gave rise to today’s extreme economic inequality and the madness that placed Donald Trump in the Oval Office:

** Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006), who led the way toward shareholder primacy that has so tragically distorted the conduct of business in the United States

** Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. (1907-98), author of the now-famous thirty-four-page memo to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce that set off the rush by the ultrarich and Big Business to destroy the labor movement and seize the reins of government

** Charles Koch (1935-), David Koch (1940-2019), and their billionaire brethren, Richard Mellon Scaife (1932-2014) and John M. Olin (1892-1982), whose “philanthropy” funded the right-wing infrastructure of think tanks and “conservative” university institutes that moved public opinion and the nation’s courts sharply to the right over the past half-century

** Federal judge Robert Bork (1927-2012), who put originalism on the map in legal circles, imposing sophistry on the deliberations of thousands of federal jurists

** Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes (1940-2017), whose unabashed Republican editorializing on-air fostered and sustains today’s sharply polarized political climate

** Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich (1943-), the take-no-prisoners leader of the Republican Right whose legacy is the ongoing partisan dogfight in Washington

** Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist (1956-), whose single-minded, decades-long campaign against raising any taxes is expressed in the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that virtually all Republicans running for federal office are forced to sign

** Ronald Reagan, the 40th President, whose easygoing manner persuaded millions of Americans to accept economic policies that were demonstrably harmful to all but the rich

** Former President Bill Clinton (1946-), a “New Democrat” whose administration enacted neoliberal economic and criminal justice policies virtually indistinguishable from those of the Radical Right

Obviously, America didn’t lose its way through the efforts of a few men alone. None of these individuals operated in a vacuum. Most exercised their influence through a raft of Right-Wing institutions that proliferated beginning in the late 1960s. In fact, they themselves created many of these entities. Among them were, most notably, the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Business Roundtable, Federalist Society, Club for Growth, Fox News, George Mason University, and ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) as well as older, established groups including the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, American Enterprise Institute, and the Wall Street Journal.

So, what did these men accomplish?

Others have written extensively about the economic inequality that these Right-Wing activists engineered. Andersen pays lip service to the statistics, but he is at his best in characterizing the changes. “America’s boats stopped rising together; most of the boats stopped rising at all,” he writes. “But along with economic inequality reverting to the levels of a century ago and earlier, so has economic insecurity, as well as the corrupting political power of big business and the rich . . . while economic immobility is almost certainly worse than it’s ever been.”

All of which pretty much sums up the dilemma we face today: without material change in these facts, American democracy may be unsustainable. In other words, America has lost its way, and without radical change to overturn the Right-Wing revolution that culminated in the election of Donald Trump, we may not be able to find it again. A moderate Democrat with four years in the White House surely cannot turn the tide any more than could King Canute.

A sudden total national immersion in nostalgia?

From the perspective of the “evil geniuses,” the most important changes they’ve wrought are economic. After all, they undertook their campaign a half-century ago to free themselves from labor unions, government regulation, and taxes they regarded as confiscatory. However, Andersen views the history of this period through the lens of social history as well. “One of the ideas underlying this book is that until recently the look and feel of American life dramatically changed every couple of decades, making the world seem continuously new.” He argues—unsuccessfully, in my view—that this is no longer the case and that this has somehow come about as a corollary of the economic and political changes he documents. Implying that America hasn’t just lost its way economically and politically but culturally as well.

Andersen rests his argument on the “sudden total national immersion in nostalgia” for the fashions and popular music of earlier decades. But in a time of constant, seemingly accelerating change, it’s hard to make sense of this perspective. “A nation which always looked forward is now in the process of looking backward,” he writes, “with considerable longing for the real or imagined comforts of the past.” But outside the confines of the fanatics who attend Donald Trump’s rallies and actually believe he wished to “make America great again,” I see little evidence of this. It’s not nostalgia that drives the Right Wing. It’s greed and other, less savory impulses.

What does the future hold?

Andersen professes to be optimistic that over the long term—apparently, a matter of decades—the American people will come to their senses, realize the country has lost its way, and reverse the dystopian course set by the Right beginning in the the 1970s. His optimism seems to rest on two pillars.

Demographics

“Since the 1970s the giant U.S. supermajority of white people without college degrees has shrunk by more than half, down to about 35 percent. They constitute a shrinking fraction that’s now the same size as the fraction of college graduates and the fraction of people of color, both of which are growing.” In other words, Andersen implies, demographics may save our bacon. I just wish I could be convinced that either college graduates or people of color could be counted on to rush to the banner of progressive change. Neither group is in any way monolithic, and the results of the 2020 election suggest cause for concern despite Joe Biden’s seven-million-vote victory. Andersen’s optimism flies in the face of the natural tendency of people to disagree with one another and the vote suppression and other manipulative tactics employed by today’s Republican Party.

Conservative reassessment

Andersen quotes at length from an editorial in that bastion of the conservative economic establishment, the Financial Times (April 3, 2020). The essay was headlined “Virus Lays Bare the Frailty of the Social Contract: Radical Reforms are Required to Forge a Society That Will Work for All.” And the essay is worth reprising at length:

"As western leaders learnt in the Great Depression, and after the second world war, to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone. Today’s crisis is laying bare how far many rich societies fall short of this ideal . . . Better paid knowledge workers often face only the nuisance of working from home [while] economic lockdowns are imposing the greatest cost on those already worst off. . . Radical reforms—reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades—will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities . . . Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. . . Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix."

If this astonishing reversal by one of the world’s leading conservative papers represents a sea change in the making and not just an aberration, perhaps there is hope and America will find its way again. And Andersen cites as supporting evidence the widely publicized declaration by the Business Roundtable on the”Purpose of a Corporation” (August 19, 2019) that “companies should serve not only their shareholders, but also deliver value to their customers, invest in employees, deal fairly with suppliers and support the communities in which they operate.” Let’s hope.

About the author

Kurt Andersen (1954-) is the author of three novels, three nonfiction books, and five humorous books. He won the Peabody Award for his long-running program on public radio. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the author Anne Kreamer.

[Victor Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a septuagenarian (like both current presidential candidates) and thus can vouch the validity of Kurt Andersen's incisive reprise of the impact of the political economy on politics over the last seventy years. It made me consider that Orwell's 1984 is not about the future any more, but it rather it started right on time, about where Orwell's title said it would. Forty years later "double-speak" has been sharpened into one of the few remaining Fine Arts.

Re today's politics there is some sensible simple advice like "Follow the money," and Andersen does a lot of that, but sometimes it is considerably more complicated and made intentionally so by the perpetrators. Conspiracy-theorizing, he says, "became an American bad habit, a way our chronic mixing of fiction and reality got the best of us." But then, he cautions, "there are secretive cabals of powerful people who work to make big bad things happen, actual conspiracies, but the proliferation of conspiracy theories since the 1960s, so many so preposterous, had the unfortunate effect of making reasonable people ignore real plots in plain sight."

Books like Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History will not suddenly make the nation whole again or turn politicians honest, but they do provide insight into how things went so very wrong and reduce some of the mystery about the source of our current mess.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“… when we were promised in 1980 the wonderful old-fashioned life of Bedford Falls, we didn’t pay close enough attention to the fine print and possible downsides, and forty years later here we are in Pottersville instead, living in the world actually realized by Reaganism, our political economy remade by big business and the wealthy to maximize the wealth and power of big business and the well-to-do at the expense of everyone else.”

This book was published mid-2020. Since it was written, the U.S. has had two transfers of presidential power. One, rather than peaceful as usual, was dangerous and deadly. The next, while peaceful, has brought fear and foreboding. So as bad as things come across in this book, they’ve gotten even worse, and reading this did nothing for my chronic depression about the state of my country and the world. It did provide me with a number of useful facts--the why and how of things I’ve experienced. And knowledge is power, so I hear.

Andersen’s general premise is that there was a turning point in the 1980’s, and, thanks to some evil geniuses, we were talked into/ignorantly walked right into the treacherous situation we’re in now. At the beginning of the 80’s I was still in the early days of my adulthood, so for me all of this rings very true as lived experience.

Some points:
• “Blue Cross (1929) and Blue Shield (1939) were founded as national nonprofit associations to provide inexpensive medical insurance at one rate for anybody who wanted to sign up, regardless of their age or health or how they earned a living.”
• Before the 1960’s, we were used to major changes every decade or so. In the 60’s, we overloaded on change, pushing people toward a nostalgia in the 70’s that has never really left.
• “In 1971 about 175 big companies had full-time lobbyists--that is ‘public affairs officers’--in Washington. By 1978 five hundred did, and just four years later, in the second Reagan year, nearly 2,500 corporations employed Washington lobbyists.”
• The Reagan revolution convinced the powers that be to go with supply-side economics and reduce the tax rate for the richest. Lobbyists multiplied. The recession ended, the stock market skyrocketed and it was morning in America. The far-right became mainstreamed. They got rid of the Fairness Doctrine, keeping media from having ideological or partisan focuses. Rupert Murdoch started buying newspapers.
• The top income tax rate for the wealthiest cut from 70 to 50 percent in 1982. In Reagan’s second term to 38.5 percent and then to 28 percent.
• Social Security. People’s incomes over a certain amount aren’t subject to Social Security tax. Before the 1980’s, Congress regularly raised that amount, to keep up with growing incomes. They stopped raising it. Rich got richer. Social Security fund shrunk.
• In the 80’s: women in the workforce jumped from 47-75%; cable TV and 24 hour news; personal computers; increase in deregulation of business; decline of labor unions; disappearance of fixed pensions; begin to hear denials of previously-accepted climate crisis.
• Greed is Good-- the movie Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko became the hero instead of the villain he should have been. There was a general glorification of ripping people off and getting away with it.
• Democrats evolved into center-right party, compared to 1930’s proposals of universal basic income and powerful labor unions. As Andersen puts it: “socially liberal, fiscally conservative, generally complacent.”

Some of Andersen’s Evil Geniuses:
• Lewis Powell, Philip Morris lawyer, warned against left extremism in 1970. Wrote a manifesto, the “Powell Memo,” in 1971 attacking academia, the media, politics and the legal system and laying out a comeback for big business. Said capitalists needed to cultivate political power, harness the judicial system, and be confrontational. He was nominated and confirmed to Supreme Court under Nixon.
• Grover Norquist, who came up with a Taxpayer Protection Pledge in 1986 that became a Republican requirement for legislators and governors to sign to be against tax increases.
• Paul Weyrich, cofounder of the Heritage Foundation, who helped spread the right’s power to his fellow Christian extremists. Wanted an America of the past, business unregulated, rich untaxed, and an explicitly Christian culture.
• Koch brothers, coal billionaires who, working with Exxon Mobil and right-leaning foundations, funneled hundreds of millions into organizations against climate change mitigation efforts. This was at the same time Al Gore came out with An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It in 2006.

Their results
• “… in forty years, the share of wealth owned by our richest 1 percent has doubled, the collective net worth of the bottom half has dropped almost to zero, the median weekly pay for a full-time worker has increased by just 0.1 percent a year, only the incomes of the top 10 percent have grown in sync with the economy …”
• “More and more of our politics has devolved into battles among nostalgias, fights over which parts of the past should or shouldn’t and can or can’t be recycled or restored.”

I’ll share a final point. If we divided up money equally in our society, “… the total income of $19 trillion (according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis) and the U.S. personal wealth of about $100 trillion (according to the Federal Resreve), all parceled out equally to each of the 129 million U.S. households … every household has a net worth of $800,000 and an annual income from all sources of $140,000.” It’s not just that nobody would be poor. It’s that everybody would be upper middle class.

I want to believe we can turn this around, but … I don’t know. Maybe there is fight in us yet. I hope so, because we’re going to need it.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughts soon.

[Kressel Housman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a follow-up to Andersen's 2017 book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, and while I found that one an easier read (its focus was cultural and not economic), together they're a comprehensive look at why we're in the mess we're in now. When the universities of the future want to teach about how the hypercapitalism of the eighties culminated in the Trump presidency thirty years later, these books will be on the syllabus.

Early on in the book, Andersen comes up with an analogy that sums up our political economy perfectly: it's like the mad dash in the game Musical Chairs, except the winners get all the ice cream and the losers don’t even get a ride home. Another analogy: it's like the sinking of the Titanic, but the rich took a safe boat home and left everyone else to drown.

Trump, he argues, was not the beginning of this. He points to Milton Freedman's 1970 article arguing that corporations' main responsibility is to their shareholders and not their customers or employees, also cited in This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World, and discusses the rise of the Federalist Society, which has schooled all three of Trump's appointed Supreme Court justices. He cites plenty of shocking statistics about economic inequality, and some even more surprising ones in an American alternate universe if we hadn't made the 1980's hypercapitalistic turn away from the New Deal.

Depressing as all this sounds, he ends on a hopeful note. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, I recommend you read this book.

[Gabrielė Bužinskaitė · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top-tier. It’s one of those rare books that are interesting, rich in studies, and perspective-changing all at once.

The author covers the cultural and economic changes in the U.S. from Roosevelt to Trump, although mainly focusing on Nixon, Carter, and Reagan. Heavy on Ronald Reagan. Something I exactly wanted, for his presidency interests me the most.

I am non-American, so the amount of things I learned from this book feels like I took a university course. I understand now why there’s such wealth inequality, why labor unions collapsed and strikes no longer succeed, why younger Americans earn less than their grandparents (at the same life stage).

Some of my highlighted quotes:

1. “And the intensified, all-encompassing individualism that blew up during the 1960s and then continued—I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations—wasn’t a mindset or temperament that necessarily reinforced feelings of solidarity with fellow workers or romantic feelings about unions.”

2. “And when new machines couldn’t do the work more cheaply than people, then people in poor countries could become our slavish machine equivalents as never before. Starting in the late 1980s and especially the 1990s, more and more of our manufacturing work was done in China and other poor countries. Between 1990 and the early 2000s, the annual value of things made in China and bought by Americans increased twelvefold.”

3. “These days, if you grow up poor in America, you have less than a one-in-four shot of becoming even solidly middle class—one in three if you’re white, one in ten if you’re black. If you grow up right in the economic middle, the chances are you won’t move up at all.”

[W.D. Clarke]

DNFed at p40.

Might be the right match for a younger person/someone without much background in political economy, but for me this one was a bit too breezy/lightweight.

Thomas Frank and Chris Hedges walk a similar fine line between the scholarly and the popular, but while as easy to read as Andersen, to me they seem to put more of the odd and unexpected into their work, meaning that if you have some background in the subject you still get something out of the book's plowing of a familiar furrow.

I may be completely wrong in all of this, of course.

[Steven Maimes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well Worth the Time to Read this Book

It was a journey reading this book, but worth the time. Most of us have a poor understanding of economics and capitalism. We grew up getting by, participating in our own culture, work, and family. We hardly noticed that we are living in a time of extreme political economics and political capitalism.

Kurt Andersen has written a wonderfully useful book to educate us about the unmaking of America since the 1960s. The main subject of the book is the excessive power granted to big business starting in the 1970s. The book provides detailed information on free-market political economics in America and the many evil geniuses that made it happen.

Andersen explains how our downfall began with a complete restructuring of our political economy. Topics such as supply-side economics, tax cuts, deregulation, anti-trust enforcement, labor, law, and everything imaginable to benefit the rich and big business. Those in control told us that big business and greed are good, big government is bad.

The theme of nostalgia and cultural nostalgia was woven throughout the book illustrating how we long for the past, and what nostalgia does to us by shaping our present.

The review of history from the 1960s to the present made me think: where was I when all this happened. I like most people have been ideologically inconsistent and ignorant of what was happening to our economy. Read this book to find out what we missed the past 40 years and to see how things have come together looking back through history.

I especially liked Part One - A Brief History of America through the 1960s. The 1970s and 1980s are discussed in much detail with background information and quotes from the evil geniuses that led us astray.

The conclusion of the book is simply: do we move forward toward a better more equitable society or do we remain in some sort of stasis. Hopefully, the pendulum will start to move from the right to the center.

388 pages of text; plus, introduction, bibliography, and an especially useful index. Recommended.

[Diogenes Grief · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, as if we thought “next week can’t be any worse”, the sedition and treason of this past week has pushed the GOP from the crazed wilds of Fantasyland into the dark recesses of Insanityland. This country is in deep trouble. I don’t know what makes sense anymore. It seems as though the evil geniuses of GOP greed have mutated into a party of evil imbeciles supported by the most deplorable in the realm, with a demented ass-clown at the helm spewing seditious words and creating the greatest stress-test on this republic since the Civil War. What happens to the GOP now will remain to be seen. A schism seems likely though. What is indisputable though is that the filthy-rich have used Trump for their own advantage, completely unconcerned about anyone else. Anyway, about the book . . .

Kurt gave a glimpse into his personal struggles with complicity to vampiric capitalism in The Atlantic back in AUG 2020 as a lead-in to this book (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc...), and how so many “blue-collar” joes saddled onto the GOP horse of “trickle-down economics” only to see their occupations, facilities, unions, benefits, and industries flushed down the toilet, or sent off to other countries with cheaper labor to abuse and laxer environmental protections:

“I really hadn’t known all the crucial advance work done by big business and the economic right during the 1970s—the decade of strategizing, funding, propagandizing, mobilizing, lobbying, and institution-building. My initial underemphasis was due to a different kind of ignorance. Because I’d lived through the 1980s and definitely noticed in real time, plain as day, the rapid and widespread uptick in deference to business and the rich and profits and the market, I’d neglected afterward to take a close, careful look at the various pieces of that shift.”

Andersen, like so many other Dems, capitulated to Friedman-esque Neoliberal policies because of the beautiful delusions manufactured by its puppeteers. Of course articles in the Wall Street Journal and other defenders of Mammon just fortify their ivory defenses and yell “whiny libtard” over the battlements, because that’s all they can do to defend the almighty gods of Greed and Profit anymore. We have decades of facts on our side now. The GOP has been waging a class-based war on the middle-class and the struggling poor for the sake of their own insatiable greed, using women’s wombs and assault weapons and disinformation campaigns as distractions from their consolidation of wealth. Period. The fact that the top wealthy 10% of the US population owns 84% of all stock should illustrate everything well enough. The bottom 80% of Americans owns 6.7% of all stocks (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks...). The United States is a huge plutocracy that infects both political parties deeply, but the GOP and its donor base are by far the most egregiously rapacious. The events of 2020 demonstrate the 50-year-old playbook woefully: Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect. All hail big business. Protect the economy at all costs. Short-term profits are everything. Inequality’s not so bad. Systemic racism doesn’t exist. Universal healthcare is tyranny. Entitled to your own facts. Anderson connects the dots in Evil Geniuses to show the “not-quite-an-organized” conspiracy that has evolved over the past 50 years, where “[k]ey intellectual foundations of our legal system were changed. Our long-standing consensus about acceptable and unacceptable conduct by big business was changed. Ideas about selfishness and fairness were changed. The financial industry simultaneously became reckless and more powerful than ever. The liberal establishment began habitually apologizing for and distancing itself from much of what had defined liberal progress” (p. 156). Robert Reich reinforces this book talking about the latest study from the London School of Economics (https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...

“In a new study, David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London lay waste to the theory. They reviewed data over the last half-century in advanced economies and found that tax cuts for the rich widened inequality without having any significant effect on jobs or growth. Nothing trickled down. (The emphasis is mine.)

Meanwhile, the rich have become far richer. Since the start of the pandemic, just 651 American billionaires have gained $1 tn of wealth. With this windfall they could send a $3,000 check to every person in America and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic. Don’t hold your breath.”

Obviously McConnel’s GOP-led Senate wouldn’t even gift a $2,000 check to every citizen making under $75K during a crippling pandemic, idiotically calling it “socialism”, but he’s a multi-millionaire so why would he care about you. It’s all about the “economy”, meaning their stock portfolios. The London study is here (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/107919/1/Hop...) and the results are stated thusly: “Overall, our analysis finds strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment” (p. 6), and that “[o]ur results have important implications for current debates around the economic consequences of taxing the rich, as they provide causal evidence that supports the growing pool of evidence from correlational studies that cutting taxes on the rich increases top income shares, but has little effect on economic performance” (p. 21). Never mind the Panama Papers from 2016 (https://www.icij.org/investigations/p...), and the FinCEN Files of 2020 (https://www.icij.org/investigations/f...), or the Gini Index, which measures income inequality by nation and has the US at 41.19—in-between Togo and Iran (https://www.statista.com/forecasts/11...).

Of course there was no blueprint scrawled in a secret bunker by a cabal of robed priests for how to do what was done . . . and yet there is a convincing, damning forensic trail of thoughts and theories, memos and actions, articles and legislation which Andersen takes us down, starting with Milton Friedman and the libertarian acolytes of Ayn Rand, propelled by Lewis Powell, Charles Koch, Dick Cheney, and many other familiar names (Welch, DeVos, Kavanaugh, Mercer, Stone, Ailes, etc.), Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Plan”, the huge seeding of lobbying groups spending billions each year, partisan “think tanks” which have grown exponentially thanks to billionaire supporters, to the manipulated elected officials and the agencies they oversee, to the planting of Neoliberal judges in the federal courts—including the Supreme Court (Citizens United), to the bribing of scholars to publish propaganda (just like Big Tobacco and Big Oil and Big Coal and Big Pharma and Big Ag) such as Charles Murray and George Gilder, to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and Rupert Murdoch’s fledgling media empire (this was all done before the internet). The “freedom” of the Internet has now allowed every tinfoil-hat-wearing redneck to find one another.

“So what if millionaires would start paying a little less too? So what if big business was relieved of some government red tape everybody hates? And as for cutting government programs, people understood that Reagan was only going to get rid of the things that didn’t benefit them—all the waste and fraud, all the foreign aid, all the giveaways for all the lazy bums and welfare queens” (p. 140). These ideas echo Trump and his cronies and their sweeping nostalgification—some of them actors of this grand scheme since the 1970s—and despite the overwhelming evidence against such foul logic. “Drain the swamp!” was a rallying cry of Trumpers, like it was for Reagan, and they added $7 trillion to the national debt while padding their own coffers even more in a lucrative “tax relief” bill that just made the filthy-rich even wealthier while the rest of us got a cash prize of a few hundred bucks (I gave mine to the local food bank, on behalf of Trump.) Osita Nwanevu complied an incomplete list of all the corporations supporting the GOP (https://newrepublic.com/article/16080...), and found:

The discourse surrounding money in politics can at times obscure as much or more than it reveals—the nearly exclusive focus on campaign finance and direct lobbying oversimplifies the myriad and diffuse ways that the wealthy influence and manage our politics, and it is an inescapable fact that the right wins in large part because millions of geographically well-distributed Americans simply support right-wing rhetoric and policy. That said, turning those preferences into actual political power does take money. And the Republican Party gets its money not only from the individual villains who’ve soaked up the most progressive outrage and attention—the Kochs, the Mercers, Sheldon Adelson, and all the rest—but from a number of companies familiar to the American public. Don’t worry, she lists them.

The point is that the GOP is soulless, feeding their plebeian followers with abject propaganda, baseless lies, and easily deconstructed smoke & mirrors, wrapping themselves up in flags while screwing over the lower classes at every opportunity so they can capitalize on everything possible, including a pandemic. Automation is increasing and it's all those low-wage jobs that will vanish first. NPR’s Hidden Brain show recently talked about the subject of “double standards” in people (https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/the-d...), wonderfully discussing naive realism, cognitive dissonance, magical thinking, and all the other defense mechanisms a brain can manufacture to protect one from reality. Of course we’re all biased, but we also truly live in a PSYOPed world now, and I’m uncertain if we can get out of it. The terrorist insurgency on the Capital this week, and the utter lack of police enforcement (https://theintercept.com/2021/01/07/c...), never mind the seditious and treasonous acts of those involved, are a perfect highlight to the hypocrisy of it all. This is the new norm, and it won’t be getting any better unless severe accountability is enforced.

“Most Americans, even those to the left, have been reluctant to subscribe fully to Marx’s basic big idea, that modern society is shaped by an endless struggle between capital and labor, owners and workers, the rich and powerful versus everyone else” (p. 135). Too many have been drinking the toxic kool-aid for far too long. Bernie Sanders has been railing against this sadistic behavior only to be mocked and jeered by disinformation and dusty Cold War propaganda while the new Robber Barons make off with the loot, in DC, on Wall Street, and in Silicon Valley. All the brainwashed “white national” groups are their moronic thugs taking selfies while they plant pipe bombs in the Capitol wearing viking cosplay garb and waving Confederate flags.

Jeremy Adam Smith penned a nice piece for the Greater Good Science Center (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/arti...) analyzing the science and psychology of lying, citing a 2017 study published in the journal Advances in Political Psychology. The results are dour. Not only have we become terribly tribalistic, where “[s]cientists call this kind of reasoning ‘directionally motivated,’ meaning that conclusions are driven by feelings, not facts—and studies find that this is our default mode”, but that anger further fuels such mindless adherence to misinformed idiocy, and nothing short of a manufactured messiah could alter the untruths already sown within the minds of millions by Trump and his treasonous sycophants and the media networks, social media podiums, and entrenched echo chambers they all feed from. NPR was kind enough to compile a list of all the elected GOP officials who fomented sedition and supported treason upon the Rule of Law (https://www.npr.org/sections/congress...), while Stephanie Kirchgaessner gives us a run-down of the billionaires who supported their sedition and treason (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...). How much evidence do we need to prosecute the bulk of the entire GOP? People should be in prison for this egregious violation of the law. Otherwise this nation is doomed to fall into sectarian factionalism and dysfunctional chaos where the lower classes will take the brunt of it (like they always do), if not outright terrorism. The Intercept's Mike Giglio was embedded with the wingnuts (https://theintercept.com/2021/01/10/c...) and surmised this:

I witnessed successful coups in two countries, and the conspirators came heavily armed with well-laid plans so that by the time people realized what was happening, it was done. I’ve also seen a country tipped into civil conflict by people who just kept taking that next blind step until they were trapped in their own momentum. But it’s naive to see America’s worst failings through the lens of foreign nations. What I saw in all the pained and screaming faces in the Capitol — in the half-naked QAnon disciple dressed in furs and also in the state lawmaker and sheriff’s deputy and schoolteacher and disenchanted veteran — was uniquely American. It wasn’t the start of something or the end of something, just the next step.

America is definitely Great Again. Thank you DJT, and every person that supported him.

For everyone else—be safe out there.

[Mary Books and Cookies]

it took me a couple of months to finish this, but here i am

i enjoyed it, but i'm guessing i only understood like 25% of it, because i don't have the knowledge and also i'm dumb

but it was *incredibly* well researched and, despite the fact that i was unfamiliar with a lot of what was discussed, it was still enjoyable

also, man's religion is greed and this book is proof of that

[Avid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some parts of this book were 5 stars; others varied between 3 and 4 stars. Early on, there was a lot of overlap with jane mayer’s “dark money”, and the author’s earlier work, “fantasyland”. The references were numerous enough to make me want to not continue reading this one, but i pressed on, hoping for some new material eventually.

I’m glad i did; some of the new material made me so angry at the current administration (as if i wasn’t already angry!), and its supporters/enablers that i’m more determined than ever before to work for change. Unfortunately, there were also some areas where the author really got bogged down with particulars of names and relationships, economic concepts and historical applications that my eyes sort of glazed over for a bit before i mercifully reached a more engaging chapter. Another NF book where we throw in all the research, rather than maintaining a single focus. (Sigh). But if you have the time and temperament to see it through to the end, there are plenty of bright spots (in terms of interesting new analysis/research, sadly not in terms of hope for a rosy future) that will reward you in the end. I recommend this to everyone, but only expect the more progressive set to actually read it.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a political/economic non-fic about how Republicans broke American dream since the 1980s, written by a leftist journalist. I read is as a part of monthly reading for May 2021 at Non Fiction Book Club group.

The author starts from an observation, which seems unrelated to neither politics nor economics, namely that
Looking at a photo in the newspaper taken twenty years earlier of a large group of very stylish people on a U.S. city street, I closely examined the way each of them looked, their clothes and hair and makeup. They were virtually indistinguishable from people of the present day. I thought about that, conducted some research, and realized it was a broad phenomenon, true throughout the culture—music, design, cars, more. Apart from cellphones and computers, almost nothing anymore that was new or just a bit old looked or sounded either distinctly new or distinctly old.

According to him, this lack of change is the result of a myth about good old days of the 50s and early 60s when everyone knew their place and all looked happily into the future. This myth was forced by US Right in order to pick up restrictions on business and lower taxes for the richest, who actually (according to him) bankrolled the project.

He sees that one of the forefathers of such changes was Milton Friedman, an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, who was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics. In his series of essays Capitalism and Freedom he stated among other things (but what was singled out by this author) that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Actually in that article Friedman only shows that within the explicitly set constraints other counterexamples bring worse results. Instead of questioning these constraints, the author declares Friedman an ‘avatar of that ultra-conservative economic strain’. Fer example behavioral economics (which came later) makes great critique of a rational economic agent without branding opponents.

Then the author mentions Arthur Laffer ‘a young economist at the University of Chicago business school—ambitious, eccentric, second-tier’ simplifying famous among economists Laffer’s curve to
‘a particular brand of old wine in a new bottle was the idea that by dramatically slashing tax rates on big business and the rich, you’d make people work and earn and invest more, producing such fountains of prosperity that tax revenues would grow enough to prevent excessive federal deficits or draconian budget cuts.’
Which is not correct, for actually it states that there can (not must) be a range (not 0-100% but smaller) of tax rates, where lowering taxes increases tax income. Since the formulation, there were several case studies that show that such effect exists (but which author omits as irrelevant).

To shorten the rest of the book, he states that think-tanks financed by big business led to deregulation and lower taxes, which led to growing inequality in the US and the fact that they are not another Denmark or Sweden. And despite my disagreement on how he shows it, I actually agree that there are cases where deregulation went too far or were link between big companies funding and support of alt-right (often also anti-vaxxers and similar fringe) led to Trump presidency. However, I see his text as quite biased and not always a correct depicting of reality (e.g. downplaying stagflation of the 1970s or blaming credit-default swaps [CDS] or mortgage-backed securities in ‘turning business into a casino, where losses ought to be picked up by a public’).

[Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A companion book of sorts to Fantasyland on how the rich have gamed the American economic and political system since 1980. The breadth of the research is impressive, though I think the book leans on pop culture a bit too much. The inequality is crazy.

[Shan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readable and not as disheartening as it could have been. It was actually oddly comforting, in that it recognized and articulated things I noticed while living through the 1980s.

Another reviewer pointed out that it's pretty basic for people who've read a lot of other books on the subject, but it was at the right level for me. My tolerance for reading about this kind of thing is usually at the long magazine article level. I confess I read the last two-thirds of this very quickly so I could get it back to the library on the due date.

It's about how we got to the current political and economic situation in the U.S.; specifically, how we got here from the decade of hope and progress and prosperity that was the 1960s. The main driver he explores is deliberate action taken by the evil geniuses of the title, but he also discusses the cultural shift from embracing the new to longing nostalgically for an imaginary past as well as some world events that made ordinary Americans and the liberal establishment allow them to do their dirty work of dismantling the New Deal and taking us back to the bad old days of the robber barons.

It was interesting to me that capital b Business was playing a long game starting in the 1970s, when I've always attributed a lot of corporations' bad behavior to their narrow short-sighted focus on the next quarterly reports. I learned the actual source (Milton Friedman) of some things that were taught as carved-in-stone gospel when I was in college business classes--the idea that corporations' sole function is to increase shareholder value was a given in those classes. Anderson does a good job of clarifying how distrust of the establishment on the left in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate bolstered the pro-business forces' ability to convince a big chunk of Americans that Reagan's statement was true (the one about government is the problem). There are some choice words about the cynical libertarians--the ones who don't actually care at all about the issues so crucial to their evangelical bedfellows as long as businesses can do whatever they want--and their fantasies that they're action heroes and self-made men who've never benefited from anyone or anything else (94% of them are white, 68% are male, and 62% are in their 40s or younger; you do the math).

Financialization has done what people back in the 1950s and 60s and 70s worried and warned that the Communists would do if they took over: centralize control of the economy, turn Americans into interchangeable cogs serving an inhumane system, and allow only a well-connected elite to live well. Extreme capitalism resembles communism: yet another whopping irony...[The political right] have brilliantly managed to redirect the anger of most of the (white) left-behinds to keep them voting Republican by reminding them that they should resent the spoiled college educated liberal children and grandchildren of the acid amnesty abortion liberal elite who turned on them and their parents and grandparents in the 1970s.

The last chapters focus on the future; they propose that the current crisis is an opportunity to make big changes. There's a bit about an idea I've run across in science fiction before--that we're going to have to find a different way to live when we don't need human labor anymore.

[Andrew Shaw · Rating 1 out of 5]

Review disclaimer: if you are not well-read in the field of progressive social commentary and economic study this book may be more interesting to you as an introductory work.

Oh boy, this book wiped out all of my reading momentum for 2021 and I'll include a few reasons below.

1) The author's use of "reaching peak new and settling into nostalgia is the cause of everything" as a frame was a terrible choice insofar as it isn't even causally correct (which he inadvertently points out multiple times in the book). Yet Anderson wastes roughly 150 of 400 pages on this theme. The last chapter should have been the frame of the book - i.e. how the incompetence and malice of the Trump administration during COVID were the result of the previous 50 years of right-wing shenanigans.

2) Anderson has this grating tendency to relate everything to something in his past, which doesn't engender the same kind of empathy or "relatableness" as when authors use the stories of other real people as case studies in an academic topic. It's just not the same effect when someone with a stable journalistic career tries to hold themselves up as an example; "when I was the editor of Inside..." is not particularly relatable.

3) Lastly, I gained nothing from this book that I didn't know before from other important works of social commentary and economic analysis. "Dark Money" by Jane Mayer did a much better job illustrating the extent to which private wealth has inflitrated higher education and co-opted public discourse. "The Entrepreneurial State" by Mariana Mazzucato did a much better job analyzing the role of government in economic success. Thomas Piketty, in "Capital in the 21st Century," makes extremely cogent agruments on the causes of wealth inequality and Anderson eschews them in favour of far more spurious claims. I could go on and on with this list and, while Anderson includes many of these in his bibliography, Anderson doesn't properly cite any of these (or any other of the works in the bibliography) in the text. This may seem like a small quibble, but when you write a literature survey, which is what I'd classify Evil Geniuses as, you better properly cite the works you draw upon so your readers can follow-up with these more important works. Even Wikipedia has mastered this.

[Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much like his last book of his that I read (Fantasyland), Evil Geniuses does a very good job capturing the current malaise facing the US, showing the track from the Posner / Powell / right reaction in the 60’s and 70’s through to the upheavals instituted by Reagan and continued with the Clinton administration, and the cultural shifts that were undertaken during this time. The topic of the politics of nostalgia and stagnation has much to it and definitely resonates, but it seems like there’s a bit of over reliance here on the personal feeling that Andersen has about the culture stagnating and perhaps being out of the loop on actual changes and updates going on outside of his purview. I do hope his thesis about 40 year cycles is correct and we will see some change. Overall enjoyable and thought-provoking.

[Crystal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Non-Fiction> Modern US Politics

I'm going to start at the end with this one. He ends the book with 6 FIXES to the crossroads we're at. This pretty much sums up his ideas.
The quotes are his headlines, the further notes are my summaries of what he's saying.
1) "Mistrust of the federal government is the effect of conservative politics as much as its cause"
>Realize the good that government does--New Deal, public utilities, financial assistance, development of tech like touch screens and solar panels--social democracy is real and we need to overuse the word socialist more to neutralize it.

2) "On economics Americans have been leaning pretty Left"
>He states we don't really have a problem with unequal economy but we do have a problem with how unequal and unfair it is

3) "Resetting the balance of power in a big way in the favor of the majority of citizens and employees versus businesses and the rich must be the big goal"
>We need more labor unions.

4) "Left of Center Americans allow themselves to get played by the Right"
>centrism is a bad compromise

5) "Be nonbinary"
male/female, mind/body, sane/crazy--these have been recently shown to be continuum more than binaries
>Politics is the same way. Stick to goals even if they are radical and don't count on the bigger tent of centrism.
"purposeful behavior requires a single valued objective function" points to both Roosevelts as understanding this to protect capitalism

6) "Or else we could head straight for communism"
Alaska is a prime example of distributing wealth of the state to the individuals. He talks about the fuel from Alaska earning every citizen dividends as long as they aren't in jail that year.
He presents that $13 billion paid for use of US public land right after introducing the system in Alaska....but that divided by US citizens is like $40/person and he doesn't share that math.


So he harps against nostalgia for bygone eras that didn't really exist the way we imagine they did...he mostly accuses right-leaning people of doing this. BUT he wrote a whole book about how the economy went to trash after the 80s but he was born in the 50s and seems to have that bias himself by saying that everything went downhill after his 30s. Yes, yes, you're from Nebraska not the coasts...that doesn't make your liberalness any less annoying. He also thinks that music from the early 2000s is unimaginative and that fantastic TV shows of the modern era are just a happy coincidence due to new media. That's not exactly a new perspective from old people regarding pop culture. So...enough about him personally. Let's look at some of his ideas.

Now, I am an argumentative person by nature. I have tried to "sleep on this" but I still have some issues with his arguments. That being said, he isn't crazy or saying things that aren't true or are made up. I just disagree with his focus in most cases. Until the end it's really an enjoyable book with some good lessons regarding the US economy.

He talks in detail about the changes in cost:benefit of a college degree in US. He describes the changes in the advantage for degree earners and also the changes in cost of that education. He beats around the point that less state sponsored funds going to universities/colleges changes the dynamic of those institutions to be ran more like the greedy businesses. He doesn't really touch on the fact that there is so much more student debt because there were federally funded programs to allow people who would otherwise not qualify for a loan to borrow money regardless of any real plan or ability to pay it back. At some point, we have to start taking personal responsibility for buying into this debt cycle and not just blaming the entities that lend us money that we ask for.

He does tend to build strawman arguments against Libertarians. Much of his criticism is based on something real but he simplifies Libertarianism to a caricature and takes it down every time. I've never heard so many Ayn Rand references in a single text before. Not all of the Libertarian ideas are meant to keep the working poor 'in their place' and are usually geared toward keeping non-working poor from benefiting from the looting of the working middle class.

He talks about Whole Food white people vs Dollar Store white people lol!!

To be fair, he does make some good points that should concern American citizens:
>>He does criticize Dems for the elite leaders being too tied to banks and finance "Wall Street"

>>$130 billion extra spending per year on healthcare due to laws like patent holding, setting prices, anti trust for large med facilities

>>Concentration of companies with oligopolies might cost avg households 5k per year (cable, phone, food, healthcare)

>>The average household should have $800k net worth with annual income $140k but these stats are currently only true for top 1/5 and is solidly upper middle class.

He discusses the problem of disappearing jobs because of tech and the further discrepancies between the rich and the poor. He goes through the argument that the economy is being 'hollowed out'. He doesn't address the idea that while we're making labor more efficient and more access to better healthcare is increasing life expectancy we are also increasing the world population--by a lot. This is a big HUGE factor he doesn't address.

He describes how we are not Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden...this theme comes up in a few chapters. There is more to comparing two cultures or countries or societies than looking at their political and/or economic systems. There are traditional values and popular opinions regarding work, religion, humanity, etc that lead different cultures to choose different paths for their government. "You get the leaders you deserve" might be a bit harsh but it does nicely sum up that there are cultural differences that determine what governments will be tolerated by different peoples. It is not a simple matter of copying an economy that 'works' onto our own. The Left is great at understanding that what works for US doesn't work for, say, Afghanistan but not so great at applying the same principles the other way around.


I think that income inequality is not all about rich people not working hard taking advantage of poor people toiling away all day in hot, sweaty factories. The author does a pretty poor job of addressing the core of resistance to redistribution of wealth by taxes---why should someone working for $40k-60k/yr give money (via taxes to programs) to someone who doesn't want to work? Or doesn't want to work full time? Or didn't want to invest in their education to have a career path? Or decided to have children they can't afford? If I spent my money and my time getting a degree to earn a little more (and I'm not talking millions of dollars) then shouldn't I get to enjoy it? No, I don't think that someone who isn't working deserves to make the same as me just for breathing.

I appreciate that he addresses how inflation skews our idea of past large numbers and he did attempt to even out his stats by adjusting to today's money. Related to this is that there is also a difference between comparing rates of things and comparing amounts of things. This is something that I think journalists are really good at--flipping back and forth between the two to make their point more salient depending on which numbers sound worse (or better, depending on what they're going for).

[Mark Rayner · Rating 5 out of 5]

On Tumblr, the kids are calling it “late-stage capitalism.”*

Unlike other late-stage diseases – syphilis springs to mind — there is still hope for saving the patient that is our political economy. But we have to act soon, and if we don’t, the outcomes don’t look rosy. And there’s one outcome in particular that should haunt your dreams – revolution.

In Kurt Andersen’s wonderful follow-up to Fantasyland, he explains how one idea has led America (and the rest of the developed world, I’d argue) into what is starting to look like a dystopian hellscape.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, chronicles how the idea that “greed is good” should be the only moral. Beginning with Milton Freeman, this notion is treated like the law of the land in the USA now. Making money is what matters. Not what you can do for others. Or your country. It is the best thing you can do for your country. Many argue it is the only thing a corporate executive should – and some case law backs this up – care about. But it wasn’t always so. In the 40s, 50s, 60s and even into the 70s, Americans shared in their growing national wealth. There was a healthy middle class of blue collar workers, who were members of unions and who were paid fairly. CEOs rarely made more than 20 times what an average worker in their company did. At many companies now that gap is well over 1000 times.

Andersen, in a meticulously researched book, explains how all this came to pass. It is deliciously ironic, that after poking fun at the American instinct for conspiracy theories throughout Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, he then has to spend an entire book documenting an actual, real, provable conspiracy. The conspiracy is evil in its conception and brutal in its process. It has left America with a destabilizing income disparity, a political system mired in corruption, and its people divided.

So, maybe it is time for a revolution? Oh, I hope not.

Though revolution might seem like the most likely outcome, it’s still the most dangerous. There is no telling where a revolution is going to lead, and from my cursory review of history, most of them don’t go so well. As satisfying as it might be to imagine the resurrection of the Madame Le Guillotine, try to remember the thousands of ordinary and innocent people who were drowned, or burned alive during the worst years of the Terror, in the French Revolution. The millions who died of starvation in Russia. The even greater number of millions killed in China’s Maoist revolution. I’m not going to give exact figures, because there’s some debate over how many millions, but it’s millions. Millions.

And that is what is at stake. The rich have gotten even richer, reaching the same levels of income inequality that occurred in the Gilded Age. The poor have gotten poorer, and the middle hasn’t seen a practical increase in income in decades, despite huge increases in productivity.

Andersen’s book explains how the far right economic and political geniuses managed to make all of this happen. Right under everyone’s nose! And you might think that a book about political economy would be a hard go, but Andersen keeps it readable, genial and entertaining. (I listened to the audio book because I enjoy his avuncular style of narration.)

As a side note, the book is really about the USA’s political economy, and it is there where the plot was hatched and executed, but other capitalistic democracies have not been immune to these forces. Though I will say, many other countries have curbed some of the most cruel excesses. Most developed countries have some form of universal health care, for example, while in the USA, a serious illness can leave one either bankrupt or dead.

And that’s exactly where it’s headed, argues Andersen. I don’t want to spoil the other revelations – though I will mention that his take on the development of AI, universal basic income, and other topics are all food for thought.

My one critique: he never mentions the environment nor how capitalism has exploited it as though there were no costs to anyone.

Highly recommended!

*I recognize that referencing Tumblr may make you ignore this entire article, but I must acknowledge my sources and inspiration.