Recommendation: Andersen’s somewhat polemic style may not be for everyone however I do think it is worth reading, particularly for a) anyone younger who does not have a sense that capitalism has not always looked like this and b) anyone who wants to make the country “great again” by electing conservative populists who love corporations
Where to read: On the way to your corporate job upholding the neo-conservative economic status quo…
Read with: Get some champagne, you socialist you
In brief: Evil Geniuses begins with the premise that the United States once enjoyed broadly bipartisan consensus around the role of government in the economy, the importance of regulation and a general idea that societies have economies, not the other way around. Andersen then charts how this consensus was blown up, collapsing into the laissez-faire economic hellscape we are all currently suffering under. It is truly depressing stuff, but there is an excellent article in The Atlantic adapted from it which is well worth reading if you do not have the emotional energy to commit to the full book.
I am a Kurt Andersen groupie from way back – I read his article in The Atlantic ‘How America Went Haywire‘ more times than I care to admit and devoured Fantasyland when it came out. Fantasyland grappled with the increasing irrationality of the American public and the age of truthiness, and is wildly entertaining in its broad portrayal of American hucksterism and lunatic tendencies.
Evil Geniuses is initially less inviting (and is certainly less entertaining) but it covers darker topics across a far more limited time period and in a more disciplined way. The essential question Anderson is seeking to answer here is how the political consensus in the US shifted so rapidly and with so little discussion from almost universal acceptance of the role of government in providing services and and regulating industry to ‘I don’t want to abolish government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub’. In the 60s and 70s, or so goes Andersen’s story, there was a general acceptance of the need to balance between labour and corporations, a general cultural suspicion of business and a widespread understanding that corporations had a duty to society (from employees, to the towns in which they were based, to the country at large) and were not obliged only to maximise shareholder profits. This consensus was broadly bipartisan, with Democrats and Republicans alike sharing values that would be branded “socialist” today.
Andersen’s task, then, is to chart how the ideological centre has shifted, or should we say been shifted, markedly rightwards in the last couple of decades. In essence, according to Andersen, it was the result of a coordinated campaign by business interests and a coterie of conservative think tanks (founded and funded by people like the Koch brothers) and scholars at places like the University of Chicago who pushed pro-business, anti-regulation, “trickle down” economic theories. As Andersen writes:
What’s happened since the 1970s and ’80s didn’t just happen. It looks more like arson than a purely accidental fire, more like poisoning than a completely natural illness, more like a cheating of the many by the few—and although I’ve always been predisposed to disbelieve conspiracy theories, this amounts to a long-standing and well-executed conspiracy, not especially secret, by the leaders of the capitalist class, at the expense of everyone else.
It starts in the 1970s, when the writings of Milton Freidman (who argued that businesses had no duties other than to make the most money possible) provided a permission structure for the new wave of business leaders to junk the social contracts between themselves and their workers and society at large. With trust in government crippled by the Vietnam War and with the US facing a series of economic and social shocks, the time was ripe for political change. Unions were undermined by a lack of solidarity from richer liberals as well as by the machinations of the right and were unable to counterbalance this new, rapacious philosophy of business. Pension plans, decent health care, labour standards and wages were slashed, and jobs were sent off-shore and rich America were assured this was merely the price of progress and prosperity. Similarly, trickle-down economics provided governments an ideological basis to cut taxes on businesses and the wealthy and the resurgent emphasis on ‘the market’ as the most efficient way of distributing and managing everything supported an agenda of deregulation. Wall Street cashed in, turning everything and anything into a financial product and, crucially, breaking the link between the financial system and the American economy at large.
This ideological project had legal and social elements as well. Responding to a lack of “sound” conservative jurists and the historic “activism” of the Supreme Court, the Federalist Society was established in 1982 and spread to law schools across America (all funded by right wing organisations and donors such as, once again, the Koch brothers). Its task was to swing American jurisprudence, particularly constitutional law, to the right and it has achieved this mission with with astonishing and profoundly destructive success. On the modern Supreme Court, Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanagh and Coney Barrett were all Federalist Society members and all were nominated in large part because of that affiliation (being Catholic to an unhinged degree also assisted in a few cases). Chief Justice Roberts also appears to have some sort of affiliation, although . And as we know, that conservative majority is currently hard at work setting both the Constitution and the legitimacy of the Supreme Court on fire in order to advance conservative interests.
Similarly, conservative think-tanks were set up in American universities to pump out policy documentation and “evidence” in support of deregulation. Some of this thinking had a certain amount of sense but some of it, like the famous Laffer Curve, was incredibly pernicious. Conservative ideas about taxation, appropriate management of capital and labour relations are now widely accepted in the United States, driving spiraling inequality and the creation of a profoundly corrupt and selfish plutocracy. The cultural corruption has been equally marked, exemplified by the “I don’t give a fuck about you or your kids (or my kids apparently)” philosophy of the NRA, an extraordinarily bratty idea of libertarianism that prioritises a particular brand of freedom enjoyed by a particular brand of white, Christian man over literally anything else and (as far as I can tell) most AITA Reddit comments sections.
Helpfully, Andersen offers some suggestions about pushing back on central pillars of this colossally fucked conservative consensus (and some of what Bill Maher calls “zombie lies”):
- Understand that mistrust of government is often the result of conservative fuckery, rather than its cause. The US deficit is fucked not because the government is a bloated monstrosity, but because Republicans trash the budget every time they are in power with tax cuts and welfare for the rich – they only pretend to care when it gives them an excuse to cut programs Democrats champion.
- Centre-left economic ideas are a loser at the ballot box. Andersen argues that polling suggests building popular support for more regulation of Wall Street and much higher taxes on the very wealthy.
- The majority of Americans are employees, not employers. Labour, organised or otherwise, is an essential counterweight to big business and it must be empowered.
- The Republicans must be called on their bad faith bullshit and the center left should resist the urge to tack to the right in the name of bipartisanship or needing to appeal to a “center” that is defined as halfway between a moderate Democrat and malignant lunacy.
- Chill the fuck out with the partisanship. If someone on the left is suggesting something absurd, you are not obliged to defend it. Nor are you a traitor for thinking that some conservative ideas might be useful. Equally, and noting the above comment about “the centre”, half way between the unhinged right and the unhinged left is not necessarily the right place to be – do not fetishise moderation.
- Perhaps quixotically, consider communism. Not in the Soviet sense, but in the Andrew Yang, universal basic income, sovereign wealth fund sense. As it stands, corporations and oligarchs are allowed to turn public goods into unfathomable private wealth, driving people into poverty. That should not stand.
Andersen is a little vague on how the above might be implemented, or how the liberal fight back might be arranged but Evil Geniuses is a useful exploration of the underlying problem. And with any luck, understanding how we got here might help us get out of this mess.
Bookshelves & Bourbon 