Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Of course, Ronald Reagan didn’t cheerfully announce in 1980 that if Americans elected him, private profit and market values would override all other American values; that as the economy grew nobody but the well-to-do would share in the additional bounty; that many millions of middle-class jobs and careers would vanish, along with fixed private pensions and reliable healthcare; that a college degree would simultaneously become unaffordable and almost essential to earning a good income; that enforcement of antimonopoly laws would end; that meaningful control of political contributions by big business and the rich would be declared unconstitutional; that Washington lobbying would increase by 1,000 percent; that our revived and practically religious deference to business would enable a bizarre American denial of climate science and absolute refusal to treat the climate crisis as a crisis; that after doubling the share of the nation’s income that it took for itself, a deregulated Wall Street would nearly bring down the financial system, ravage the economy, and pay no price for its recklessness; and that the federal government he’d committed to discrediting and undermining would thus be especially ill-equipped to deal with a pandemic and its consequences.

That cultural stasis, almost everyone and everything looking and sounding more or less the way they did a generation ago, provided daily reinforcement of the sense that the status quo is permanent and unchangeable across the board—in other words, a kind of fatalistic hopelessness of the kind that was standard before democracy existed, before revolutions, before the Enlightenment. We’ve thus been discouraged by the culture as well as by much of politics from imagining that the economy might be radically redesigned and remade once again, encouraged to think that fundamental change is either no longer possible or no longer desirable or both. If the present is more or less indistinguishable from the recent past, why won’t the future be pretty much the same as the present but with more robots?

Thirty years ago my friend Paul Rudnick and I wrote a cover story for Spy about how the recent spate of “Hollywood nostalgia productions [had] portrayed the fifties and early sixties as something to be pined for, something cute and pastel colored and fun rather than racist and oppressive.”

respectable opinion, having spent a century trying to make ethnic tribalism seem anachronistic and wrong, began accepting and embracing a lot of it. “One of the central themes in the culture of the 1970s was the rehabilitation of ethnic memory and history as a vital part of personal identity,” the leftist professor Marshall Berman wrote in his wonderful 1982 book All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. “This has been a striking development in the history of modernity. Modernists today no longer insist, as the modernists of yesterday so often did, that we must cease to be Jewish, or black, or Italian, or anything, in order to be modern.”

Paradoxically, the other big reason President Nixon got reelected by such an enormous margin in 1972 was because on policy he did not swim against the lingering, dominant leftward ideological tide. Unlike Goldwater, he wasn’t committed to a superaggressive global anti-Communist crusade but instead oversaw the slow-motion U.S. surrender in Vietnam (“peace with honor”) and the remarkable U.S. diplomatic opening to Communist China and détente with the Soviet Union. Unlike the Goldwater right (as I’ll discuss in the next chapter), he definitely did not try to roll back Johnson’s Great Society social welfare programs, let alone FDR’s New Deal. His administration actually built upon them. He wasn’t a liberal, just a canny, stone-cold cynic going with the liberal flow.

During his five and a half years in office, federal spending on social services doubled. He would have gone even further if Congress had cooperated. Democrats controlled the House and Senate, but with smaller majorities than during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Nixon proposed a universal health insurance plan not unlike Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which Republicans forty years later would call socialism. Still more remarkably, his administration pushed a grand welfare reform plan that would have provided a guaranteed basic family income equal to around $16,000, thereby tripling the number of Americans receiving public assistance and quadrupling federal social welfare spending altogether.*2 I’ve catalogued this despised Republican president’s leftish policies in the early 1970s to suggest how accustomed Americans had become over the previous forty years to their national government cushioning them from some of the sharpest insecurities and injustices of raw capitalism. During the more conservative 1950s, President Eisenhower, who fashioned himself a “modern Republican,” had said that “only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice” and “hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass.”

It was a cousin of the preexisting American economic fable, that we were a society where practically everybody was middle class, a fantasy that still felt plausible, just barely. And Americans’ founding attraction to the excitingly untrue had been growing like mad since the 1960s. The early 1980s were thus an ideal moment for selling this new fantasy of painless big change in the political economy—that the experts had finally figured out a way to have no losers at all and no fights over deciding who gets how much.*2

Like so many of the hundreds of changes instituted in the 1980s, the practice of replacing staff with contract workers was too arcane and tedious for many of the rest of us to care or even know about. But imagine the thousands of companies and cities and schools and cultural institutions all over the country that have delegated so much of this kind of work to contractors, thereby making the treatment of all those eleven-dollar-an-hour workers somebody else’s problem. According to a 2018 study by five major-university economists, a full third of the increase in American income inequality over these last forty years has been the result of just this one new, dehumanizing labor practice.

antitrust laws were enacted to make sure that businesses compete in every way—not just as sellers setting the prices they charge for products and services, but also as buyers of labor setting the salaries they pay. The appeal of antitrust for citizens was to make sure competition kept prices lower and salaries higher. Enforcement of our antitrust laws, however, has come to focus entirely on consumer prices, particularly since the definitive Borking of the field in the late 1970s.

Companies don’t even need to merge in order to pay workers less than they’d have to pay in a truly free labor market. I’d assumed only high-end employees were ever required to sign noncompete contracts—an HBO executive prohibited from going to work at Netflix, a coder at Lyft who can’t take a job coding for Uber. But no: shockingly, noncompetes have come to be used

just as much to prevent a $10-an-hour fry cook at Los Pollos Hermanos from quitting to work for $10.75 at Popeyes. Of all American workers making less than $40,000 a year, one in eight are bound by noncompete agreements. As another way to reduce workers’ leverage, three-quarters of fast-food franchise chains have contractually prohibited their restaurant operators from hiring workers away from fellow franchisees.

The Friedman Doctrine in 1970 begat the shareholder supremacy movement in the 1980s, which begat an unraveling of all the old norms concerning loyalty and decency of businesses toward employees. Loyalty implies treating employees better than the law requires, which was at odds with the new mandates of shareholder supremacy. Replacing strikers was a shock-and-awe swerve, outsourcing work to low-wage contractors a less dramatic form of cold-bloodedness. Both were highly effective means of scaring workers in order to reduce their power and keep their pay lower. But once the norms changed and a higher stock price became every public company’s practically exclusive goal, companies that weren’t facing strikes or financial problems also embraced the new ruthlessness. In addition to GE and its rank-and-yank corporate copycats continually, automatically firing a fixed quota of employees, profitable corporations began firing workers in bulk simply to please the finance professionals who constitute the stock market. “In the 1980s,” says Adam Cobb, a University of Pennsylvania Wharton School business professor who studies this sudden change in norms, “you started to see healthy firms laying off workers, mainly for shareholder value.” IBM, for instance, abandoned its proud de facto promise of permanent employment—starting in 1990, it got rid of 41 percent of its workers in five years, at first softly, pensioning off people fifty-five and over, then after that using straight mass firings.

The faction that was now dominant in the Democratic Party had been pushing for a more centrist economic and social welfare policy since the 1970s, but the Republican Party after 1980 had no comparable moderating faction—which in a two-party system meant that Democrats kept moving toward a center that kept moving to the right.

affluent college-educated people, liberals and otherwise, didn’t disagree very ferociously about politics in the 1980s and ’90s, and certainly not about economics. In retrospect, that rough consensus looks like the beginning of an unspoken class solidarity among the bourgeoisie—nearly everyone suspicious of economic populism, but some among us, the Republicans, more suspicious than the rest. Affluent college-educated people, Democrats as well as Republicans, began using the phrase socially liberal but fiscally conservative to describe their politics, which meant low taxes in return for tolerance of…whatever, as long it didn’t cost affluent people anything.*

In 1980, concerning the greenhouse effect, as it was then called, the “main scientific questions were settled beyond debate,” Nathaniel Rich writes in his book Losing Earth: A Recent History. “As the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences” to solutions, how to reduce carbon emissions. In 1981 a study by NASA scientists confirming this consensus was front-page news, recommending that the United States continue burning oil and gas and coal only “as necessary.”

in 1988, the dangers of the greenhouse effect, and the decisive use of government to stop it, was one of George H. W. Bush’s big presidential campaign talking points. Ten days after his inauguration, his secretary of state, James Baker—a smooth former Houston oil and gas lawyer who had also been his campaign manager—gave a speech about global warming. Baker apparently hadn’t gotten the memo, because he argued for urgently reducing CO2 emissions, reforestation, the works.

The White House chief of staff promptly went to see the secretary of state. “Leave the science to the scientists,” Sununu told Baker, according to Rich’s Losing Earth. “Stay clear of this greenhouse-effect nonsense. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Baker did as he was told, and Sununu kept riding his hobbyhorse. During a meeting with the head of the EPA and an Energy Department bureaucrat, a staff member made the mistake of referring to a climate change initiative to discourage the use of fossil fuels. “Why in the world would you need to reduce fossil-fuel use?” Sununu snapped at her. “I don’t want anyone in this administration without a scientific background using ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ ever again.” By the end of the first year of that first Bush presidency, Sununu had almost single-handedly halted the political momentum in Washington, turned climate change into a partisan issue, and put denial of the science on its way toward Republican orthodoxy.*3

With each passing year of stagnation, every kind of stagnation seemed less strange, more natural. It is what it is, everyone started saying in the 1990s. A cultural diet of reboots and revivals on an endless loop habituates people to expect and put up with the same old same old forever and to lose their appetite for the new, for change, for progress.

I’m not suggesting that the evil geniuses who pulled off the remarkable political and economic transformation from the 1970s through the ’90s also planned or executed our cultural U-turn. In this respect, they were mainly just shrewd and lucky. Rather, it’s like when two different chronic illnesses tend to appear in the same people at the same time—like arthritis and heart disease, or depressive disorders and anxiety disorders, or COVID-19 and type 2 diabetes. The medical term of art is comorbidity. The outbreak of mass nostalgia in the 1970s that then developed into a general cultural listlessness, in other words, is comorbid with what happened to our political economy. One illness didn’t exactly cause the other illness, but each made the other more serious, and harder to cure.

Alan Greenspan has concerns about extreme economic inequality for that same reason, but in a somewhat different spirit. In the 2000s he was asked about the problem. “Inequality is increasing,” he said. “You cannot have the benefits of capitalist market growth without the support of a significant proportion and indeed virtually all the people, and if you have an increasing sense that the rewards of capitalism are being distributed unjustly, the system will not stand.” 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. We pay the highest skilled-labor wages in the world. If we would open up our borders to skilled labor far more than we do, we would…suppress the wage levels of the skilled….If we bring in a number of workers to suppress the level of wages [of the skilled] relative to the lesser-skilled, we will reduce the degree of inequality.

The central problem is that since the 1980s, jobs with good salaries and benefits in the great big middle, both blue-collar and white-collar—machine operators, mechanics, clerks, assistants, bookkeepers, salespeople—have disappeared ever faster. And 90 percent of those jobs, according to a new study, disappeared right after recessions, each recession the prod or pretext for businesses not only to get rid of some current employees but also to eliminate those positions permanently. (Watch for that to happen again in 2021 and 2022.) That sloughing of routine jobs has been accelerated by computers. The impact of automation so far hasn’t much reduced the overall number of American jobs, but it has forced redundant millions into worse jobs—jobs that require fewer skills and pay less,

Believe in our perfect mythical yesteryear. The right twisted and exploited nostalgia in the 1970s and ’80s to get its way, selling people on a restoration of old-time America with storybook depictions that omitted all the terrible parts of the past—including the epidemics we had before we built a public health system and before governments required citizens to get government-funded vaccines; the economic panics and collapses we had before government intervened to help unemployed workers; the phony miracle cures that charlatan showmen marketed to us before government put a stop to them.

But we really don’t know where the experience of the pandemic and the protests of 2020 will lead us—the overnight upendings, the long traumas, judging how individuals and institutions and ideologies and systems worked or failed. People in 1918 and 1929 and 1970 (and 1347) had no clue what was coming next, either. Will my hypothetical grandchildren grow up as ignorant of these events as I was of the global viral pandemic that my grandparents survived and of the 1919 “race riots” that included the lynching of a black man in my hometown? For Americans now, will surviving a year (or more) of radical uncertainty help persuade a majority to make radical changes in our political economy to reduce their chronic economic uncertainty and insecurity? Will we summon the necessary will to achieve racial fairness? Like Europe six hundred years ago after the plague, will we see a flowering of radically new creative works and the emergence of a radically new economic system? Or will Americans remain hunkered forever, as confused and anxious and paralyzed as we were before 2020, descend into digital feudalism, forgo a renaissance, and retreat into cocoons of comfortable cultural stasis providing the illusion that nothing much is changing or ever can change?