Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

The countervailing powers that we built into our free-market political economy from 1880 until 1980 did not amount to an anticapitalist conversion. Rather, it was really the opposite, essential to the system’s evolution and renewal, making our version of capitalism more fair, less harsh, and politically sustainable, a robust foundation for a growing middle class whose spending fueled more economic growth and a society that made most of its citizens reasonably content and proud. “The economic philosophy of American liberals had been rooted in the idea of growth,” the influential sociologist Daniel Bell wrote in the 1970s, around the time he taught a seminar I took in college. “One forgets that in the late 1940s and 1950s,” it was labor leaders “and other liberals [who] had attacked the steel companies and much of American industry for being unwilling to expand capacity. The idea of growth has become so fully absorbed as an economic ideology that one realizes no longer how much of a liberal innovation it was.” Even as Democratic president Harry Truman was launching the Cold War in 1950 to protect capitalist America from foreign Communists, he emphasized in his State of the Union speech that the country needed an even tougher antitrust law to protect our system from falling “under the control of a few dominant economic groups whose powers will be so great that they will be a challenge to democratic institutions.” Restraining excessive business power was a bipartisan consensus...