Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

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?