Evil Geniuses Quotes

“In 1910 President Theodore Roosevelt, a rich Republican, said that “corporate funds” used “for political purposes” were “one of the principal sources of corruption” and had “tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“For most of us insist that somewhere in the past there was a golden age. But people who are forever dreaming of a mythical past are merely saying that they are afraid of the future. The past which men create for themselves is a place where thought is unnecessary and happiness is inevitable. The American temperament leans generally to a kind of mystical anarchism. In 1976 the Republicans were not yet the party of unhinged mystical anarchism they became over the next four decades. Rather, after the unhappiness, unfriendliness, cynicism, paranoia, and finally the high crimes of Richard Nixon, Americans were eager to install Mr. Rogers”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“As the 1990s began, the right stayed angry and upset and kept growing in size and power thanks to the primitives, the bigots, the Protestant fundamentalists and cowboy commando conspiracy fantasists. But the grown-ups on the right, the economic right, corporate leaders and the rest of the rich, kept their eye on the prize—less taxation, less regulation of business, greed is good—and they maintained control of the party.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“The federal minimum wage is frozen for the entire decade, longer than ever, which translates to an effective pay cut of one-third for America’s lowest-paid workers.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“...The economic right was shrewd enough to understand that the issues they didn't care much about--abortion, gay rights, creationism--did matter to liberals, and that those culture wars drew off political energy from the left that might otherwise have fueled complaints and demands about the reconstructed political economy. And Establishment Republicans could keep reassuring themselves that when push came to shove, their culture-warrior political partners didn't ever actually wind, that abortion was still legal, gay and lesbian rights expanded, creationism kept out of the public school curricula.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“...In all this, financialization has done what people back in the 1950s and '60s and '70s worried and warned that the Communists would do if they took over: centralize control of the economy, turn Americans into interchangeable cogs serving an inhumane system, and allow only a well-connected elite to live well. Extreme Capitalism resembles Communism: yet another whopping irony.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“...Libertarians fantasize that they're action heroes and entirely self-made. They tend to exempt themselves from the truism that there but for the grace of God goes each one of them, because an implicit premise of their ultra-individualism is that anybody in America can make it in their own and that unfair disadvantages either don't exist or can't be helped. I have a hunch that the demographic profile of self-identified libertarians--94 percent white, 68 percent male, 62 percent in their forties or younger--has something to do with those beliefs and fantasies.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Productivity isn’t everything,” the Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman has written, “but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to raise its standard of living depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.” A country’s willingness to raise the majority of its people’s standard of living in sync with increasing productivity and growth—to share the good fortune fairly—depends, of course, on politics.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes,”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“During the 1980s, prudent New Deal rules concerning mortgage loans were repealed, allowing people to get home loans with too little money down and interest rates that would “adjust” to unaffordable heights. So during the 1980s, the average price of a house in America doubled.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“People’s incomes over a certain level aren’t taxed to pay for Social Security at all.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“When I started this book, I worried that my strong sense that we’d arrived at a historic crossroads equivalent to the 1770s or 1860s or 1930s, America’s Fourth Testing, might seem like a stretch. By the end, I was no longer concerned about overstatement, particularly after the pandemic arrived—a new virus requiring new behaviors and policies, work and life suddenly more than ever dependent on the Internet, government failure by leaders ideologically dedicated to undermining government, maximizing corporate profit at all costs, and an American hyperindividualism whipped up by the right that makes a huge common problem harder to solve.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Looking back now, it’s hard not to conclude that the anxious nominal party of the economic left, Democrats, was magnificently played by the committed and confident economic right, Republicans, for forty years. I’m not saying the shift in popular sentiment wasn’t partly organic. But Democrats, after the Republican presidential landslides of 1972 and 1984, remained too dazed and confused and scared for too long.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“In 1982 I reported and wrote a Time cover story called “Inmate Nation” about what’s now called mass incarceration, because the number of U.S. inmates had just started to increase sharply and, to my editor and me, alarmingly—that year by 43,000 to 412,000. The total number of inmates today is 1.5 million, of whom 130,000 are in privately run prisons.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“In the spring of 1972, the 535 members of Congress passed the ERA with only thirty-two nay votes. Just a week later the legislature of Republican Nebraska, where I still lived, became the second state to ratify that amendment to the Constitution—unanimously, 38–0—and by summer it had been ratified by another nineteen, including Idaho, Texas, Kansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Hard-core cultural conservatives, who hadn’t been much of an organized national political force, were suddenly galvanized to stop this new abomination.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“During the more conservative 1950s, President Eisenhower, who fashioned himself a “modern Republican,” had said that “only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice” and “hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Nixon proposed a universal health insurance plan not unlike Obama’s Affordable Care Act,”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“If more Americans were to learn of the large body of research showing that higher inequality in rich countries isn’t just unfair but actually slows down economic growth—by a fifth since the 1980s, according to a 2014 study by the OECD—the remarkably strong support for Robin Hoodism might get even stronger.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“the choice isn’t between automation and non-automation,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the MIT economists focused on digital technology and work. “It’s between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“* The founder of Citizens United, a right-wing political group, became Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2016 and has been credibly accused of operating a scam to rip off MAGA donors. A right-wing legal group that for a decade laid important groundwork for the Citizens United case was the James Madison Center, founded in 1997 by Senator Mitch McConnell with funds provided by Betsy DeVos.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“however, the problem isn’t extreme inequality per se, or the newly extreme inequality between the great majority and the rich, but rather the envy of the poor for the middle class. And his proposed solution to that, honest to God, was to contrive to pay middle-class workers even less, to bring their incomes down closer to those of the poor. We pay the highest skilled-labor wages in the world. If we would open up our borders to skilled labor far more than we do, we would…suppress the wage levels of the skilled….If we bring in a number of workers to suppress the level of wages [of the skilled] relative to the lesser-skilled, we will reduce the degree of inequality.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Of the 100 groups that spend the most, 95 mainly represent business interests, and of the 20 biggest spenders of all, 19 are corporations or business groups, dominated by finance and healthcare. None are unions. The ugly, corrupting frenzy that the Reagan administration unleashed in 1981 and that ostensibly stunned its budget director—“Do you realize the greed that came to the forefront? The hogs were really feeding. The greed level just got out of control”—never stopped.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“LOL and touché, clever contemporary conservative, for using nostalgia as a political pejorative, the way liberals have always done, the way a lot of us got into the bad habit of doing in the 1970s and ’80s about FDR and organized labor and antitrust and thereby became useful idiots for you and the evil geniuses of the right.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“The bad habit that liberals and other Democrats had learned was this: be restrained when it comes to spending to help the less fortunate but simultaneously be reckless when it comes to helping business and the rich.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Norquist is known for his jokey line about his wish to make the federal government smaller—“to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), funded over the years by the familiar (Koch, Olin, Scaife) right-wing foundations.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Norquist’s stroke of evil genius was to dream up at age twenty-nine the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which in 1986 made the Republicans’ antitax fixation official.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“age twenty-nine the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which in 1986 made the Republicans’ antitax fixation official.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“oppose net tax increases,” “any and all” of them, for as long as they’re in office.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America