Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Earlier I called the rich right and big business and libertarian ideologues highly rational. Selfishness is rational up to a point, even extreme and cruel selfishness, and this elite confederacy won its war by means of cold-blooded rationality. On the other hand, their increasingly essential political allies in this project are among the most irrational, emotional, unreasonable, and confused Americans of all—religious nuts, gun nuts, conspiracy nuts, science-denying nuts, lying-blond-madman-worshiping nuts. The response to the pandemic showed vividly how this unholy alliance operates: for months early in 2020, right-wing media and the president pursued a two-track propaganda effort that made a catastrophe worse. Fantasyland’s magical thinking and conspiracism and mistrust of science fueled the widespread denial of and indifference to the crisis, and fused with the evil geniuses’ immediate, cold-blooded certainty that a rapid restoration of business-as-usual must take precedence over saving economically useless Americans’ lives.