Evil Geniuses

As I was working on Fantasyland, reading and thinking about American history, I noticed more connections between the two phenomena between our simultaneous switch in the 1970s and 80s to a grisly old-fashioned political economy and to a strenuously, continuously familiar culture. Which led me to spend a couple of years reading and thinking more deeply about both.

A lot more deeply about the economics and politics. That s what I d mainly studied in college, but since then I d mostly just read the news, skimmed along day to day and month to month like anybody whose job never required knowing a lot about deregulation, antitrust, tax codes, pensions, the healthcare industry, the legal fraternity, constitutional law, organized labor, executive compensation, lobbying, billionaires networks, the right wing, the dynamics of economic growth, stock buybacks, the financial industry and all its innovations so many subjects of which I was mostly ignorant.

My immersion was revelatory. Reading hundreds of books and scholarly papers and articles and having conversations with experts made me more or less fluent in those subjects and, more, taught me many small things and one important big thing: what happened around 1980 and afterward was larger and uglier and more multifaceted than I d known. Inequality is the buzzword, mainly because that s so simple and quantifiable: 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, and so on. Americans boats stopped rising together; most of the boats stopped rising at all. 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, oligarchy, while

Kurt Andersen

This is the one book everyone must read as we figure out how to rebuild our country. With lucid writing and head-snapping insights, Kurt Andersen explores how a confederacy of the right and big business, with unabashed greed, deliberately reengineered our economy. To fix that will require understanding the roots of the problem. A triumph. Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

Nostalgia is the antithesis of history. Andersen brilliantly exposes how nostalgia the strategic oversimplification of our past has erased complexity and friction from our country s narrative to serve a single goal: to preserve the status quo for the benefit of those in power. Evil Geniuses documents how history and nostalgia are engaged in hand-to-hand combat that may determine our future. Ken Burns, director of The Civil War and The Roosevelts: An Intimate History

How did the United States turn from its longstanding egalitarian ideals to its present course of socially and morally catastrophic inequality? Kurt Andersen interrogates the past half century with characteristic intellectual ambition and literary bravado to find out. At once cultural history, memoir, and riff, Evil Geniuses explains how our country found its way into this predicament, and how we might yet get out of it. Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy and Ronald Reagan

Evil Geniuses is a vivid catalog of American sociopolitical history a dedicated deep dive into this country s paradoxical legacy of innovation and ego, with Andersen as its clear-eyed, masterful archivist. Rebecca Carroll, WNYC cultural critic and host of the podcast Come Through

Back when the idea of President Reagan still seemed a stretch and President Trump was barely a joke, some serious, smart, committed people with vast appetites and little shame right-wing intellectuals and