Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

A half-century of life is enough to provide some panoramic perspective, letting you see and sense arcs of history firsthand, like when an airplane reaches the altitude where the curvature of the Earth becomes visible.

Unlike longing for a fairer economy of the kind we used to have, which would require a collective decision to bring back, the itch of cultural and social nostalgia is easy for individuals to scratch and keep scratching. So for many Americans, who spent several decades losing their taste for the culturally new and/or getting screwed by a new political economy based on new technology, fantasies about restoring the past have turned pathological. Thus the angriest organized resistance to the new, the nostalgias driving the upsurge of racism and sexism and nativism—which gave us a president who seemed excitingly new because he asserted an impossible dream of restoring the nastily, brutishly old. The recent wave of politicized nostalgia is global, of course, taking over governments from Britain to Russia to India. But those countries at least have the excuse of being ancient.

The United States was a self-consciously new species of nation, the first one invented from scratch and based on new conceptions of freedom and fairness and self-government and national identity. Our story at its best was a process of collectively, successfully imagining, embracing, and exemplifying the new—then gloating whenever the rest of the world followed our lead. Of course, that process of perpetual reinvention and refreshment always involved tension between people pushing for the new and people resisting it, sometimes with existential ferocity: irreconcilable differences over status quos resulted first in the American Revolution and then in the Civil War and then the politics of the Depression. In our history so far, at the critical junctures, the forces of the new have eventually triumphed over the anciens régimes. Almost a half-century ago, the country began a strange hiatus from its founding mission of inventing and reinventing itself in pursuit of the new and improved. Since then Americans have gotten variously confused and contentious and paralyzed concerning the old days, about which parts of the American past can or can’t and should or shouldn’t be restored.

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.

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.

Ours was a nation built from scratch meant to embody the best Enlightenment principles and habits of mind. Freedom of thought and speech. Embrace of reason and science. And most importantly for this discussion, a foundational belief in the idea of human progress. The United States was a self-conscious incarnation of the modern idea of purposeful, rapid progress—that is, of seeking and expecting one’s life and society to be perpetually new and improved.

Karl Marx never visited America, and as a young man at a moment of political fervor in quasi-feudal Europe, he could not foresee the resilience of new, industrializing political economies like ours to adapt and thrive for another century or two. But in 1848 he absolutely nailed the new condition of perpetual, contagious reinvention that America most purely exemplified. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish [this] epoch from all earlier ones,” twenty-nine-year-old Marx and his twenty-seven-year-old co-author Friedrich Engels wrote in their Manifesto. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life.

Our forefathers created a nostalgia industry that fictionalized our recent past, turning Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill Cody into living celebrity-hero artifacts and reenactors of the frontier days, in the nineteenth century devouring James Fenimore Cooper’s romantic stories of the untamed eighteenth century. Walden was driven by Henry David Thoreau’s nostalgia for the era of his childhood in the 1820s and ’30s, before railroads and the telegraph, and his dreamy wish “not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century.” As that century turned into the even more restless, nervous, bustling twentieth, the United States relentlessly modernized and urbanized. Then came our biggest act of national nostalgia, creating and moving en masse to suburbs, brand-new green and peaceful simulations of old-time American towns and villages and homesteads.

America’s tragic flaw is our systemic racism, and it’s a residue of a terrible decision our founders made to resist the new and perpetuate the old: the enslavement of black people. Slavery had ended in most of Europe by the 1500s, but not in its colonies in the New World and elsewhere. France and Spain and Britain outlawed their slave trades and slavery itself decades before the United States did, and they found it unnecessary to fight civil wars over the issue. Tsarist Russia emancipated its serfs before democratic America emancipated its slaves. On abolition we were not early adopters.

In Capital, Marx reviled various kinds of capitalist middlemen as “parasites” (as well as “vampires”), and near the end of the final volume, published in the 1890s, he discussed “a new kind of parasite in the guise of company promoters, speculators, and merely nominal directors; an entire system of swindling and cheating with respect to the promotion of companies, issue of shares and share dealings.” Blame Marx for the horrors of Communism if you want, but the guy had some prescient insights about the capitalist future.

Until 1980, a more reasonable metaphor than Marx’s parasite for our financial industry was the remora. Those are the fish that attach themselves to sharks and whales for the bits of leftover food and the essential oxygen that the free ride provides.