Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Very few people I knew voted for Reagan, but given that he didn’t do anything crazy and started making peace with the Soviet Union, 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.* It was a libertarianism lite that kept everything nice and clubbable and, unlike Republican conservatism, at least had the virtue of ideological consistency.