Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

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In the Postlude to Good People, Evil Society, I briefly describe my own theory of how Lobaszewsky’s ponerization process manifested in the United States. For those who would like a more thorough documentation of how this happened, one of the best I’ve seen is Kurt Andersen’s Evil Geniuses.

Although Andersen focuses his analysis on events of the latter half of the twentieth century, he begins with the proposition that America has historically been the “land of the new.” As European settlers began to arrive, the territory was called the “New World.” In the beginning, when the primary source of wealth was land, the arriving Europeans saw a lot of it—and it seemed to be available for the taking. The European settlers were able to secure their own piece of it and begin the process of building wealth free from the strictures of the feudal system (which itself was beginning to be transformed by industrialism) and the landed aristocracy of Europe. Andersen contrasts the historical American association with frontier and newness with a form of stagnation that seems to have become pervasive beginning in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Even in the early heyday of American freedom and seemingly limitless possibilities, Andersen suggests that the seeds of future degradation could be found in the new corporate forms of businesses—which were centralized, extractive, exploitative and undemocratic. This was compounded by a system of slavery. While the single homesteader was able to manage and control only as much land as he and his family could work themselves, huge plantations could accumulate significantly more wealth because the enforcement of free labor allowed them to expropriate that much more from the land.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, America was characterized by alternating periods of exploitation by the rich and powerful and progress for the rest of us. The excesses of the Gilded Age were followed by the Progressive Era, which saw the development of antitrust law and the science of public administration—a new paradigm that challenged political cronyism and urged professionalism and ethics in public service. The wealthy regained political control, and so we had the “Roaring Twenties” followed by the Great Depression and President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Even some of Roosevelt’s opponents conceded that the social safety net constructed through New Deal policies likely “saved capitalism from itself.”

The period following World War II was an era of American ascendency on the international scene, widespread prosperity (America had not been decimated by the war), and a growing middle class. This resulted not simply from New Deal policies (although these were helpful, especially for workers), but a culture that truly valued a rising tide that lifted all boats. New freedoms and political access were expanded to include people (Blacks, women, LGBTQ) and issues (the environment and consumer safety) that had previously been left out of more general prosperity and power-sharing. The Dixiecrat Lyndon Johnson ushered in civil rights legislation, and the Republican Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency. It looked like the foundational promise of America was finally going to reach all of its citizens, and not just those who had been traditionally privileged.

Andersen argues that the seeds of the atavistic current “counter-revolution” were sowed in the 1960s. Although the United States was prosperous and ascendant internationally, the drive for “newness” manifested in the expansion of rights and voices of previously marginalized individuals—Blacks, women, LGBTQ, immigrants. However, the expansion of rights to previously marginalized groups came at the cost of civil unrest. Because most people for the most part were economically comfortable (or could see a viable way to economically better themselves), there was a certain complacency around economic issues, even while social and cultural issues were experiencing turmoil. The business community grew concerned about a generalized anti-business (especially anti-big-business) and anti-Establishment zeitgeist. And so began the great conspiracy behind the Reagan revolution and subsequent “greed is good” ethos.

Andersen details the evolution of the Friedman Doctrine and the metastasizing effects of the now-infamous Powell memo, which advocated for a war against progress on the four fronts of academia, media, politics, and the law. The objective of this war was that the interests of capital had to aggressively usurp political power, and its proponents exhorted the contribution of generous financial support to make it happen. Here we see the same list of usual suspects that we saw in Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: Koch, Coors, Olin, Scaife.

The objective of total domination of the legal, political, academic, and cultural landscape required tapping into a narcissistic nostalgia. This was facilitated by an undercurrent of discontent among white male heterosexuals, who felt threatened by “others” asserting rights. The “good old days” were so last century—when government was small, women and Negroes didn’t vote, and businesses were allowed to grow ever larger and exploit workers. This manipulation of cultural norms was fortuitously able to bootstrap onto the “feel good” and personal freedom messages of the 1960s. Which then morphed into the “Me Decade” of the 1970s and creation of a fantasy-industrial complex that celebrated the ostentatious lifestyles of the über-wealthy.

As the Regan campaign was touting “morning in America,” Reagan’s own Director of OMB, David Stockman, was lamenting that “Laffer sold us a bill of goods,” and “the greed level” of big business and the rich had “just got out of control.” This segued into the 1987 movie Wall Street, in which the character of Gordon Gekko delivers his infamous “greed is good” speech to a crowd of cheering stockholders. Instead of viewing Gekko as the parody he was intended to be, the coked-up masters of the universe learned to recite Gekko’s speech verbatim.

Andersen then documents the details of deregulation—of banking, finance, the media—along with the concurrent ascendance of Wall Street. For the rest of us, this manifested as a devastating loss of middle-class jobs, unions, worker power and security. The inevitable result was increasing concentrations of wealth, increasing inequality, the drive to create monopolies (or oligopolies) at the cost of true competition and opportunity for all, and the casino-like culture of Wall Street and finance, where gains were expropriated by those at the top and risk was shifted to everyone else. The other big losers in this shift were workers. Not only did pay stagnate, but working folks lost power by the deliberate decimation of labor unions—which traditionally provided an avenue for the voices of working people into the corridors of political power.

In the beginning, this sharp right turn looked like the more typical “correction” that tended to cycle through politics. There was a series of small but relentless changes that favored the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. These changes were piecemeal and incremental, and so did not appear to be part of some dramatic revolution. However, the propaganda machine created by the “evil geniuses” permanently enshrined the Reagan revolution, where regulation and taxes were always deemed “bad,” no matter the issue. Government (essentially anything that was intended to serve regular people or—God forbid—those who were struggling) was to be shrunk down to a size where it could be drowned in a bathtub.  “The simplicity and absolutism…are both its genius and its evil.”

The economic elite was able to solidify its power not only by rigging the rules to make itself even wealthier and more powerful, but by forging a (sometimes uneasy) alliance with the disaffected rabble. They could whip up resentment based on the shared characteristic of whiteness, mainly by appealing to a romanticized and jingoistic history. So long as the country-club, Harvard-and-Yale-educated “respectables” like the Bushes and Romneys remained in charge, they could work around the radical Christian fundamentalists and “cowboy commando conspiracy fantasists.”

Andersen describes the evil genius phenomenon as someone who lived through it and not as someone who is dispassionately analyzing a historical record—although he does a good job of documenting the story. He admits his own “obliviousness” to the “unfairness that had been built into the economy since 1980.” He describes the effect of September 11^th: Then-President George Bush urged everyone to “get over it and go shopping,” while his administration was busy creating the surveillance state and involving America in another forever war. Here we also see the beginning of the “overcompensating USA! USA! belligerence,” along with a “disastrous war and new focus for bigotry.”

If there is one common thread or theme that runs throughout, it is the schizoid fetishization of the past (along with the “unhinged right’s…nostalgia for the scientific ignorance of the old days”) at the same time there is a desperate yearning for newness. There was evidence of this in the Obama-Trump crossover voters—folks were not rigidly partisan, but who clearly favored “the most unlikely and unconventional candidate.” Both Obama and Trump ran on promises of change, but only Trump also appealed to the nostalgic impulse.

Toward the latter part of the book, Andersen addresses the class war and the new tech oligarchy, the takeover of the federal judiciary by the Federalist society, and the huge amounts of money spent on lobbying, which results in policies that further disempower and impoverish the rest of us. His economic arguments are sound (i.e., supported by real data) without being too geeky or academic. He points out that the United States spends less on its own citizens than 90% of other developed countries, with only Chile, Mexico and Ireland spending less than we do.

When Andersen finally gets to “the plague year,” we receive this gem:

“Today’s evil geniuses find [Trump] embarrassing and tiresome. All they and their predecessors ever really wanted was a system permanently guaranteeing them inordinate fortunes and power, with a clubbable Bush or Romney at the helm.  Over the decades, however, as they decided again and again that their ends (money, supremacy) always justified any and all means (stoking racism and other hatreds, spreading falsehoods, rousing their rabble while also rigging the system against them), it was bound to end somewhere in this horrid vicinity. In 2016, as the current generation of Fausts made their darkest bargain yet, surely some of them smelled a whiff of sulfur or heard a demonic cackle as they signed away whatever remained of their souls.”

The evil geniuses have thus created a Frankenstein they can no longer control. When you create a culture where greed is good and the drive for power subsumes any consideration of the public interest, it should be no surprise when you find yourself ruled by a psychopath. To Andersen’s credit, he traces the current evil (which many people like to blame solely on Trump, white supremacy, the Republicans, or social media) to the original economic agenda. He doesn’t necessarily sound the alarm of fascism, but rather predicts…

”without effective counterweights to the power of big business and the rich, the United States will continue morphing into a superautomated plutocracy, and that how people work and get paid needs to become a primary subject of our politics.”