Book review: Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America by Kurt Andersen
First the caveats: Andersen's summary of American history up to the 20th century is…pretty glib, which he'd probably cop to and is not surprising coming from him. He really glosses over the role of colonial extraction and slavery in the U.S.'s upward trajectory of wealth and power. And even when he gets to his real subject, the second half of the 20th century, he's lacking in this area: even though he does acknowledge the role that racism and backlash against feminism played in the rightward turn of the U.S., he doesn't emphasize that enough.
But both of those things are more minor complaints than they would be in any other book, since the brief history of the U.S. is basically just a single-chapter rushed backdrop for the rest of the book and his focus in the rest of the book is less on the psychological mechanisms by which the ~elite~ convinced Americans to turn against their own interests and more on the political and economic process. So I can overlook it.
Because otherwise, this really is the best popular overview I've ever found of the way in which the capital class and their allies dismantled the U.S. regulatory state and the social safety net, as well as rigging the economy in order to protect and grow their own wealth. Our entire society, both politically and economically, is designed at this point to benefit the rich and ensure that they never have to contribute to the common good. Andersen proves that this was intentional, citing the movers and shakers in their own words (some of the memos he unearths are jaw-dropping in their cynicism), and provides a tsunami of data to show how this has hollowed out the American middle class and made life harder for everyone who isn't wealthy. There are several chapters that are basically just comparing all kinds of statistics today to statistics from the post-war period and it's both incredibly validating to have it all in one place so that it's impossible to ignore and incredibly infuriating.
He sees all this--correctly, I believe--as both an intentional political project and the result of eroding social norms. I do not at all want to glorify the past, but I do think he's correct that U.S. society used to have more of a ethos of social responsibility (at least between white people) and that the "greed is good"/"money is the only thing that matters"/"get yours and screw everyone else" ethos has completely replaced it. I think that latter, selfish spirit was always, always present in the U.S., but it was mostly aimed by white Americans at people of color, particularly black and indigenous people, and white people were such a large majority of the population that it wasn't as visible. Starting in the late 70s and especially in the 80s and 90s, the expectation that everyone would at least pretend to care about the good of society eroded till now it's almost nonexistent for many Americans and pretty much all of the people who hold most of the wealth of the U.S.
(Again, this is where the racism and backlash things come in: once we at least started trying to ensure that the benefits the U.S. government offers were available to people regardless of race or gender and once the majority of new immigrants stopped being white, people immediately turned on those benefits after some considerable race-baiting and woman-hating of the "Welfare Queens" type. But again: it's not really his project in this book to explore that and he does at least acknowledge it.)
I don't think there's any doubt that the hard-won victories of the Labor Movement in the Gilded Age/Progressive Era and then the New Deal were systematically and intentionally rolled back by ideologues and their millionaire/billionaire donors--but if you needed convincing, this book will do it. I didn't really think I could hate Reagan and his puppet-masters more than I did, but turns out I could!
Woven into all of this is Andersen's theory that post-'60s, Americans became tired of novelty and began to fear the new and instead to take comfort in nostalgia, and that this tendency was stoked by the economic elite as they pursued their own interests. I find this a fairly compelling take, though I'd like to read a book focused on just that if anyone is ever interested in writing it.
This is a class warfare book in the best sense, in that it is both incredibly angry (though that anger is communicated with a light touch as is Andersen's wont; this was, after all, the guy who founded Spy magazine) about everything that has been stolen from the 99% and an account of how the capital class very intentionally waged war on the rest of us.
Andersen doesn't use much of that language; this guy is not a strident Marxist and he seems pretty moderate in temperament and politics, actually. I think even people who are resistant to the class struggle framing of things would be willing to follow along with how he actually frames things, which is very populist in the best sense of the word. But he very clearly does believe that governments shape the market, that laissez-faire capitalism has completely failed the majority of Americans, and that we can build a better society if we just get off our asses and start doing what our great-grandparents did during the Labor Movement. I also appreciate that he admits that he didn't take all this seriously as it was happening, that he downplayed the things that were going on, and that he's only lately realized how wrong he was. A person who can still change their mind in a major way in the latter half of their life is a person I can respect.
All in all, highly recommended, and I can attest that the audiobook is a solid option: Andersen is a great reader of his own work, conversational in tone without taking it too far and becoming annoying. I think he's also got a background in radio, which would certainly explain that.
