Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

For Greenspan, however, the problem isn’t extreme inequality per se, or the newly extreme inequality between the great majority and the rich, but rather the envy of the poor for the middle class. And his proposed solution to that, honest to God, was to contrive to pay middle-class workers even less, to bring their incomes down closer to those of the poor.

When the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight. The only question is when. Learning to love change is an unnatural act in any century-old institution.

Overton Window is now shorthand for that process of normalizing the ideologically wild-and-crazy.

1. Mistrust of the federal government is an effect of conservative politics as much as its cause.

Every time people on the right say that centrists like Barack Obama are socialists, or that “our public education system is a socialist institution” (Milton Friedman, 1999), or that “the state university system is as close to a socialist program as we have” (a National Review conservative in 2018), it actually reduces the stigma of the word and helps redefine social democracy as familiar and desirable. We can argue whether and how some proposed big new social program is or isn’t affordable or wise, but the instantly demonizing power of calling it socialism is weaker than it has been in nearly all our lifetimes, especially among people who didn’t grow up when the two huge countries that called themselves socialist were dysfunctional nuclear-armed tyrannies.

government-funded private winners get almost all the public credit and the profits, while the government takes financial losses and gets the political blame for the inevitable losers—in other words, Mazzucato writes, “risks in the innovation economy are socialized, while the rewards are privatized.”

“America today is not a center-right country,” the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr wrote in 2018, but rather “a country with a center-right economic elite” that has dominated both political parties for a long time, “and a polarized electorate torn between parties on the far right and center left.”

The withering of workers’ power in the United States since the 1970s was mainly the result of the right’s brilliant, relentless crusade to minimize and where possible eliminate it.

without effective counterweights to the power of big business and the rich, the United States will continue morphing into a superautomated plutocracy, and that how people work and get paid needs to become a primary subject of our politics.

In the spring of 2020 we urgently increased the total federal debt by 13 percent. Watch: if Democrats get more power in Washington anytime soon, there will be a new Republican outbreak of mock fiscal panic and insistence on restraint—hysterical in both senses, overwrought as well as darkly funny. It’s past time to resist that trap, to dial back the excessive liberal aversion to risk, where habitual fear of political counterreaction to transformative new policies and programs prevents them from even having a chance at getting popular and enacted.

Running a society well and fairly requires optimizing more than maximizing, going for the greatest happiness of the greatest number and the smallest possible number being screwed. Single-minded maximization of any one thing turns into crazed binary thinking—maximum profits are everything, regulations are all bad or all good

Among the great examples of nonbinary thinking are the efforts of both presidents Roosevelt: they got the federal government to intervene in the free-market system in the early 1900s as it never had before in order to save the free-market system, to keep out-of-control capitalists from wrecking capitalism. The year upper-class FDR said of the forces of “business and financial monopoly” and “organized money” that he “welcome[d] their hatred” was the same year F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.”

“those of us in the Republican Party built this moment,” because “the failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party….Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect.” He could have also listed Believe in our perfect mythical yesteryear, All hail big business, Short-term profits are everything, Inequality’s not so bad, Universal healthcare is tyranny, Liberty equals selfishness, Co-opt liberals, and Entitled to our own facts as operating principles of the Republican Party and the right.

From the start in 2020, the reckless right, with the president in the lead, encouraged Americans to disbelieve virologists, epidemiologists, and other scientific experts, because trusting them would be bad for business and stock prices.

The health risks and the economic burdens are borne disproportionately by people near the financial edge, black and brown people, people with low-paying jobs that can’t be done from home. And on the other hand, we see more clearly than ever how the lucky top tenth, the people who own more than 80 percent of all the stocks and other financial wealth, inhabit an alternate economic universe.

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change, because only then does the politically impossible become the politically inevitable,

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….We are not really all in this together….Better paid knowledge workers often face only the nuisance of working from home….Radical reforms—reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades—will need to be put on the table….Redistribution will again be on the agenda….Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.