Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

That’s because the successful and comfortable social contract that had been in effect in America from the 1930s was replaced by a new one. Social contracts are unwritten but real, taken seriously but not literally, which is their beauty and their problem. They consist of all the principles and norms governing how members of society are expected to treat one another, the balance between economic rights and responsibilities, between how much freedom is permitted and how much fairness is required. All the formal rules specifying behavioral constraints and responsibilities, the statutes and bureaucratic codes, are distinct from the social contract but overlap with it, because lots of the specific rules—tax rates, minimum wages, environmental regulations, the cost of education—are codifications of the social contract. Contracts are negotiated, ideally in a way that all the signatories feel fairly treated. In the evolving American social contract, the balance among the competing demands of liberty and equality and solidarity (or fraternité) worked pretty well for most of the twentieth century, the arc bending toward justice. But then came the ultra-individualistic frenzy of the 1960s, and during the 1970s and ’80s, liberty assumed its powerfully politicized form and eclipsed equality and solidarity among our aspirational values. Greed is good meant that selfishness lost its stigma. And that was when we were in trouble.