Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

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.”