kurt anderson Evil geniuses

amanpour walter I

scaife memo kicked off fedsoc?

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https://www.kurtandersen.com/evil-geniuses

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/books/review/evil-genuises-by-kurt-andersen-an-excerpt.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/

laffer w/ hart and later dems cans

...

Although very few people I knew voted for Reagan, affluent college-educated people, liberals and otherwise, tended not to disagree ferociously about politics in the 1980s and ’90s, and certainly not about economics. In retrospect, the rough consensus about economics looks like the beginning of an unspoken decades-long class solidarity among the bourgeoisie. Affluent college-educated people, Democrats as well as Republicans, began using the phrase socially liberal but fiscally conservative to describe their politics, which meant low taxes for higher-net-worth individuals (another new term) in return for tolerance of . . . whatever, as long as it didn’t involve big new social programs that affluent people would have to pay for. It was a libertarianism lite that kept everything nice and clubbable and it did at least have the virtue of ideological consistency.

When Gary Hart ran a second time for president, in 1988, one of his tax-policy advisers was Arthur Laffer, Reagan’s inventor of supply-side economics. When Jerry Brown ran for the 1992 Democratic nomination, he too sought Laffer’s help, to devise some kind of tax scheme “that was clear and easy to articulate,” and Laffer himself says he voted for Bill Clinton. (He’s now a Trump adviser.) The Democratic Leadership Council, co-founded by Clinton in 1985, became a think-tankish anchor for Democrats who didn’t disagree with Republicans that pretty much the only acceptable new solutions to any social problem were market based.*

For the remainder of the century, no candidate from the Democratic left became a plausible finalist for the nomination. In 1992, when Clinton won the nomination, his only serious competitors were two fellow New Democrats, Brown and Tsongas. Democrats had settled into their role as America’s economically centrist party. There was no organized, viable national economic left in the vicinity of serious power. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Communism at the beginning of the 1990s was very good news, but it had the unfortunate effect of making almost any left critique of America’s new hypercapitalism seem not just quixotic but also kind of corny and quaint.

Not everybody in the 1990s was sanguine about the emerging future, or as oblivious as I still was to the multi-faceted unfairness that had been built into the economy, or as complacent as I was about the millions of Americans losing out in the go-go globalizing digitizing frenzy. Around this time, a middle-aged law-school professor and bankruptcy expert, until recently a registered Republican who’d been affiliated in the late 1970s with the conservatives’ hugely influential new Law and Economics movement, began to see the light.

Elizabeth Warren has said that she realized only in the ’90s that “starting in the ’80s, the cops were taken off the beat” in financial services. “I was with the GOP for a while,” she has said, “because I really thought that it was a party that was principled in its conservative approach to economics and to markets. I feel like the GOP just left that. They moved to a party that said, No, it’s not about a level playing field. And they really stood up for the big financial institutions when the big financial institutions are just hammering middle-class American families.”

I’m betting that at the end of 1999, Warren didn’t feel complete solidarity with all the thousands of demonstrators in Seattle outside the biannual World Trade Organization meeting. Their grievances were various—from AFL-CIO folks pissed off about U.S. companies manufacturing more and more things overseas to anarchists smashing store windows and otherwise acting out their hatred for the System.

I know I rolled my eyes at the Gen-X kids in Seattle chaining themselves together and getting off on tear gas; at their lack of a feasible agenda or nuance or even coherence; and at the belief of so many of them in a shadowy, multi-tentacled conspiracy of the omnipotent elite to tyrannize the little people and subvert democracy. It took me a few more years to realize that their caricature of the new economic paradigm was closer to right than wrong. What that new paradigm ultimately brought us, of course, is Donald Trump....

The obeisance of the rich right and their consiglieri to Trump for the past four years has exposed more nakedly than ever their compact—everything about money, anything for money—and the events of 2020 pushed that along to an even more hideous crescendo. In early spring, when COVID-19 had killed only dozens of Americans, Stuart Stevens, a strategist for the four previous Republican presidential nominees, wrote that “those of us in the Republican Party built this moment,” because “the failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party … Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect.”

Norm Ornstein: I’ve witnessed the decline of the Republican Party

Entirely apart from this administration’s unique incompetence and Orwellian denial of facts, while its handling of the pandemic may wind up as a political failure for them, every piece of the crises’ exacerbation came directly out of the right’s playbook of the past four decades. Stevens could have also listed Believe in our perfect mythical yesteryear, Short-term profits are everything, Inequality’s not so bad, Liberty equals selfishness, and Entitled to our own facts.

Government is bad.A Republican administration uniquely unsuited and unready and unwilling to deal promptly and effectively with such a national crisis? Decades before this latest show-business president defamed his entire executive branch as a subversive “deep state,” the co-creator of late Republicanism announced in 1981, a few minutes after becoming the first show-business president, that “in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” and then made a shtick out of warning Americans to consider any offers of help from the government “terrifying.”

[explication]

A New World Again

Before this fresh hell, our political economy and society were already at an inflection point, Americans stuck uncomfortably and often dysfunctionally on the cusp between searching for lost times and imagining a better future. We have now arrived at a scarier place. But it’s not exactly unprecedented. We’ve been here before.

We were in a place like this when my grandparents were young, in the 1910s.

There was the global influenza epidemic, of course, which killed one in 150 people in the United States, the equivalent of 2 million Americans now. But in many other ways, those early 1900s look remarkably like the early 2000s.

Read: How the pandemic defeated America

Corporate mergers and consolidation had accelerated and political corruption by the rich and powerful had become extreme at the end of the 19th century. A Wall Street crash occurred in 1907. Americans experienced an extraordinary period of technological change—electrification, telephones, movies, airplanes, and cars, all at once. The foreign-born population of the United States reached 15 percent, up from 5 percent just a half century earlier. The influx of non-Protestant foreigners and the mass migration into U.S. cities of Black people, accompanied by skillful racist fictions in a riveting new medium (The Birth of a Nation), prompted a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Political engagement was high: The big turnout in the midterm elections of 1914 wasn’t exceeded until … 2018.

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https://lithub.com/kurt-andersen-on-the-corrosive-politics-of-nostalgia/

tyler c?!]

...Nostalgia is not always wrong or all bad. Almost all of us are nostalgic for something, if only for our childhoods. Almost everyone likes new things as well as old and familiar things, each of us choosing different combinations from the menu. For instance, a lot of habitués of those supermodern Apple stores, shopping for an iPhone 12 or AirPods and adoring their regular visits to the high- production-value future promised in the past, go home to make-believe-old-fashioned lives—a new gingerbread cottage or an apartment in a renovated former factory, beer gardens, greenmarkets, local agriculture, flea markets, tattoos, lace-up boots, suspenders, beards, mustaches, artisanal everything, all the neo-19th-century signifiers of state-of-the-art American cool.

Beyond the charming surfaces and styles of the past, it’s essential as well to look at history carefully for deeper lessons and models, inspirations and cautionary tales for the present and future.

Nostalgia starts getting problematic only when it becomes reflexive and total, congealing into an automatic antagonism to the new or unfamiliar. Nostalgia is problematic when it becomes the fuel for a politics based on fantastical or irrecoverable or unsupportable parts of the past. And that current American political movement, consisting of pathological nostalgias centered on race and ethnicity and religion and gender and sexuality, Trumpism, has as its avatar a quintessentially 1980s creature, living proof of my ’90s theory that the decade never did end....

The biggest (but not only) reason for national disunity the last dozen years or more is that a quarter or third of Americans and one political party have explicitly given themselves over to malignant nostalgia—nostalgia for a country with much larger and more dominant majorities of white and native-born and Christian people, and for a time when people who weren’t white or male or straight had fewer rights and less stature. That’s a lost cause for them—the United States will never be as white or Christian as it was, nor a country where women and people of color are oppressed like they were when I was young.

That nostalgia is also a revival of the Lost Cause from a century and a half ago— post–Civil War white Southerners’ self-pitying, self-flattering nostalgia for the wonderful Old South (which happened to include the enslavement of black people) and the Civil War they started and fought to preserve it.

Our 21st-century political fight over immigration is a case of dueling nostalgias over the same subject. It’s Build the wall nostalgia for the mid-20th century, when our foreign-born population shrank to less than 5 percent, versus Ken Burnsian nostalgia for a half-century or century earlier, huddled masses sailing in to breathe free, become new Americans, and continue the building of a new nation. Back in 1855, when young Walt Whitman described us as “not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations,” America’s foreign-born population had exploded since he was a boy from 2 percent to more than 13 percent, where it remained through the 1920s. Since we reopened the gates in the late 1960s, our immigrant fraction has tripled, reaching nearly 15 percent, back to what it was when the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island were new.

There was always plenty of bigotry against immigrants—for being Catholic, Jewish, poor, foreign, swarthy— but historically a negligible fraction of immigrants were not white. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, 98 percent of Americans outside the South were white. For all of America’s defining embrace and embodiment of the new, for more than two centuries our society was unchanging in its basic racial makeup—overwhelmingly white and very consistently so.

From the first census in 1790 through the one in 1970, the national population was 85 percent white and non-Hispanic, give or take a couple of percentage points from decade to decade, and it was still at 80 percent in 1980. But as a result of the latest immigrant influx from Latin America and Asia, today barely 60 percent of us are non-Hispanic white people.

It is an unprecedented American metamorphosis. As a white person delighted to live in a thriving city with low crime rates where white people became a minority just after I arrived forty years ago and the foreign-born population has since doubled, I say: Good job, United States! Obviously not all my fellow white Americans agree, especially not my fellow white men, and more especially my fellow old white men, many of whom also feel diminished by the simultaneous rise of women. Those transformations of American society have reduced some of their privileges.

To me, the most striking metric of female empowerment concerns women’s higher education: in the early 1970s, almost twice as many men as women in America had graduated from college, but today more women than men have BAs, and they earn most of the advanced degrees as well.

The large social and political consequences of lots more people having college degrees extend beyond equality for women. In 1970, when the hard hats and other angry blue-collar patriots were hating and beating on uppity college-kid protesters, only a small minority of American adults, 11 percent, were college graduates.

Back then, 88 percent of Americans were white and 95 percent were not Hispanic and 89 percent lacked a college degree—in other words, non-Hispanic white people who had no more than a high school diploma made up three-quarters of Americans. (And if their kids wanted to go to college, it cost a fraction of what it costs now.) That majority, naturally, felt as if in every way they ruled.

Since the 1970s the giant U.S. supermajority of white people without college degrees has shrunk by more than half, down to about 35 percent.

They constitute a shrinking fraction that’s now the same size as the fraction of college graduates and the fraction of people of color, both of which are growing. Thus a lot of less-educated white people, especially older ones, feel nostalgic for the old days. Yet while it’s understandable that such nostalgia zeroes in on race and ethnicity, it’s inexcusable when it’s politicized—and by my moral calculus, even more so for affluent white people with no screwed-by-a-rigged-system economic excuse for resentment and racism.

Since the 2016 presidential election, scholars and journalists have debated which type of unhappiness more importantly drove a majority of white people to support Donald Trump. Was it all about America’s new racial and ethnic character, or was it all about America’s new economic character? Was it nostalgia for a whiter, more sexist society or for more fairly shared prosperity, security, and economic mobility or for the time before America was awash in the meritocratic hubris of the liberal social winners?

Of course it was all of those different versions of nostalgia for the past and of resistance to the new. It’s another clear case of social and political and economic comorbidity: different chronic conditions with intertwined causes and symptoms that make both more debilitating and harder to treat.

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‘Evil Genuises,’ by Kurt Andersen: An Excerpt

Aug. 11, 2020

Introduction

When you reach your fifties, it gets easier to notice the big ways in which the world has or hasn’t changed since you were young, both the look and feel of things and people’s understandings of how society works. A half-century of life is enough to provide some panoramic perspective, letting you see and sense arcs of history first hand, like when an airplane reaches the altitude where the curvature of the Earth becomes visible.

Some of the arcs of historical change are obvious, their paths as well as their causes. The equality and empowerment of women is one of those big duh ones. But other important historical arcs, more complicated or obscure, have to be figured out.

That’s how I came to write my last nonfiction book, a not-so-obvious American history called Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire. I’d noticed that in so many ways, as Stephen Colbert joked on the first episode of his old nightly show, America had become increasingly “divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.”

From the 1960s and ’70s on, I realized, America had really changed in this regard. Belief in every sort of make-believe had spun out of control— in religion, science, politics, and lifestyle, all of them merging with entertainment in what I called the fantasy-industrial complex. In that book I explained the deep, centuries-long history of this American knack for creating and believing the excitingly untrue. As soon as I finished writing Fantasyland, we elected a president who was its single most florid and consequential expression ever, a poster boy embodying all its themes.

[ Return to the review of “Evil Genuises.” ]

But that long-standing, chronic American condition that turned into an acute crisis is just half the story of how and why we’ve come to grief these last few decades. This other part concerns the transformation of our social system that started in the 1970s and ’80s, helped along by a simultaneous plunge into compulsive nostalgia and wariness of the new and unfamiliar. Whereas Fantasyland concerned Americans’ centuries-old weakness for the untrue and irrational, and its spontaneous and dangerous flowering since the 1960s, Evil Geniuses chronicles the quite deliberate reengineering of our economy and society since the 1960s by a highly rational confederacy of the rich, the right, and big business.

From my parents’ young adulthood in the 1930s and ’40s through my young adulthood in the 1970s, American economic life became a lot more fair and democratic and secure than it had been when my parents were children in the 1920s and early ’30s. But then all of a sudden around 1980, that progress slowed, stopped, and in many ways reversed.

I didn’t start fully appreciating and understanding the nature and enormity of that change until the turn of this century, after the country had been transformed. In 2002, when several spectacular corporate financial frauds were exposed and their CEO perpetrators prosecuted, I published a long screed in The New York Times blaming Wall Street. “If infectious greed is the virus, New York is the center of the outbreak,” I wrote, because it

is also, inarguably, the money center of America and the world, the capital of capitalism. . . . It was New York investment bankers who drove the mergers-and-acquisitions deal culture of the 80’s and 90’s and who most aggressively oversold the myth of synergy that justified it. . . . It was they . . . who invented the novel financial architectures of Enron and WorldCom. It was the example of New York investment bankers, earning gigantic salaries for doing essentially nothing— knowing the right people, talking smoothly, showing up at closings— that encouraged businesspeople out in the rest of America to feel entitled to smoke-and-mirrors cash bonanzas of their own.

A few years later, one very cold morning just after Thanksgiving, I had another slow-road-to-Damascus moment from whatever I had been (complacent neoliberal?) to whatever I was becoming (appalled social democrat?). I was actually on the road to Eppley Airfield in Omaha after my first visit to my hometown since both my parents had died, sharing a minivan jitney from a hotel with a couple of Central Casting airline pilots— tall, fit white men around my age, one wearing a leather jacket.

We chatted. To my surprise, even shock, both of them spent the entire trip sputtering and whining— about being baited and switched when their employee ownership shares of United Airlines had been evaporated by its recent bankruptcy, about the default of their pension plan, about their CEO’s recent 40 percent pay raise, about the company to which they’d devoted their entire careers but no longer trusted at all. In effect, about changing overnight from successful all-American middle-class professionals who’d worked hard and played by the rules into disrespected, cheated, sputtering, whining chumps.

When we got to the airport, I said goodbye and good luck and, at the little bookstore there that contains a kind of shrine to the local god Warren Buffett and his company Berkshire Hathaway, bought a newspaper. In it I read an article about that year’s record-setting bonuses on Wall Street. The annual revenues of Goldman Sachs were greater than the annual economic output of two-thirds of the countries on Earth— a treasure chest from which the firm was disbursing the equivalent of $69 million to its CEO and an average of $800,000 apiece to everybody else at the place.*

This was 2006, before Wall Street started teetering, before the financial crash, before the Great Recession. The amazing real estate bubble had not yet popped, and the economy was still apparently rocking.

I was writing a regular column for New York magazine, so after reading and thinking some more, I summarized my understanding of how an egregiously revised American social contract had been put in place, take it or leave it, without much real debate.

“This is not the America in which we grew up,” I wrote.

By which I meant America of the several very prosperous decades after World War II, when “the income share of the superrich was reasonably cut back, by more than half. The rich were still plenty rich, and American capitalism worked fine.”

I wrote about how, since the 1980s, “the piece of the income pie taken each year by the rich has become as hugely disproportionate as it was in the 1920s,” how “an average CEO now gets paid several hundred times the salary of his average worker, a gap that’s an order of magnitude larger than it was in the 1970s,” and how most Americans’ wages had barely budged. I wrote that “during the past two decades we’ve not only let economic uncertainty and unfairness grow to grotesque extremes, we’ve also inured ourselves to the spectacle.” By we I meant the mostly liberal, mostly affluent New Yorkers and other cosmopolites who read New York.

After this twenty-five-year “run of pedal-to-the-metal hypercapitalism,” I wrote, it was “now time to ease up and share the wealth some. Because the future that frightens me isn’t so much a too-Hispanic U.S. caused by unchecked Mexican immigration, but a Latin Americanized society with a . . . callous oligarchy gated off from a growing mass of screwed-over peons.” We needed to take seriously the rising anger and disgust about an American economic system that seems more and more rigged in favor of the extremely fortunate.

*Historical sums of money are pretty meaningless because of inflation— $1,000 in 2020 is the same as $850 in 2010, $500 in 1990, $150 in 1970, and so on. So throughout this book, unless I specify otherwise, all dollar amounts are inflation-adjusted, even when I don’t mention that I’ve rendered a historical sum in “today’s dollars” or that it was “equivalent to” the larger present-day amount.

Populism has gotten a bad odor, and not just among plutocrats— for most of the political chattering class, it is at least faintly pejorative. But I think that’s about to change: When economic hope shrivels and the rich become cartoons of swinish privilege, why shouldn’t the middle class become populists?

I remember thinking, This was why my professors in college had used the terms political economics and the political economy as distinct from simply economics and the economy. For one thing, economics has the connotation of pure science, suggesting that organizing production and pay and investment and taxes and all the rest is just . . . math. Whereas political economics contains the crucial reminder that real-life societies and economies are the result of all kinds of fights and negotiations and feelings and choices about the rules of the game, what’s fair, what’s not, what to maximize, how to optimize for the majority instead of maximizing only for some powerful minority.

It’s fine to call it the economy when we’re discussing what’s happening month to month or year to year— the ups and downs in the stock market and rates of employment and inflation and growth. Whereas if we’re talking about the whole megillah, the way we’ve structured our capitalism versus the versions in Canada or Denmark or Russia or China, I think political economy is much better. The economy is weather, the political economy is climate.

[ Return to the review of “Evil Genuises.” ]

I also thought: Mea culpa. For those last two decades, I’d prospered and thrived in the new political economy. And unhurt by automation or globalization or the new social contract, I’d effectively ignored the fact that the majority of my fellow Americans weren’t prospering or thriving.

I seldom have epiphanies, but a few months later, in 2007, I happened to have another, this one concerning the culture, and it would eventually cross-fertilize with my new sense of the hijacked, screwed-up political economy. This second aha moment started with an observation I had one morning concerning personal style. Looking at a photo in the newspaper taken twenty years earlier of a large group of very stylish people on a U.S. city street, I closely examined the way each of them looked, their clothes and hair and makeup.

They were virtually indistinguishable from people of the present day. I thought about that, conducted some research, and realized it was a broad phenomenon, true throughout the culture— music, design, cars, more. Apart from cellphones and computers, almost nothing anymore that was new or just a bit old looked or sounded either distinctly new or distinctly old.

This was not only not the America in which I’d grown up, when the look and feel of things changed a lot every decade or so, it wasn’t the way things had worked in the modern age, for a century or two. In the past, certainly in my lifetime and that of my parents and grandparents, over any given twenty-year period, whenever you glanced back, you’d notice how culture and what was deemed current changed unmistakably from top to bottom.

Since the dawn of the modern, ordinary people could date cultural artifacts and ephemera of the recent past and previous eras. During the twentieth century, each decade had its own signature look and feel. By the late 1960s, the 1950s looked so ’50s, and by the early 1980s, the 1960s looked so ’60s. But then, starting in the 1990s, that unstoppable flow of modernity— the distinctly new continuously appearing and making styles seem old— somehow slowed and nearly stopped. The dramatic new change in the culture seemed to be that things were no longer dramatically changing.

How strange.

And why? The shortest and simplest answer is that a massive counter-reaction to multiple overwhelming waves of newness on multiple fronts, one after another, sent all sorts of Americans, for all sorts of different reasons, to seek the reassurance of familiarity and continuity wherever they could manage to find or fake it.

The first wave was in the 1960s, a decade in which everything seemed relentlessly new new new. Which for several years felt exciting and good to most Americans, and the novelty glut seemed under control by the forces of reason and order. But then came the upheavals of the second half of the 1960s, when society and culture changed startlingly in just a few dozen months. In the early 1970s, exhausted by that flux, still processing the discombobulating changes concerning gender and race and sex and other norms, people all at once started looking fondly back in time at the real and imaginary good old days.

Enough with the constant shocks of the new! Hollywood revived and celebrated the recent past in a big way, right away, with nostalgia-fests like American Graffiti, Happy Days, and Grease. Soon nostalgia for all periods kicked in throughout all media and all cultural forms with a breadth and depth that were unprecedented in America.

As people gave themselves over to finding and fondling quaint things that had been stored away in the national attic during the century of novelty and progress, we inevitably amended our view of the entire American past, romanticizing and idealizing it, tending to ignore the bad parts. As it turned out, curating and then reproducing pieces of the past extended beyond pop culture and style into politics and the economy. I’m not saying the freshly nostalgia-swamped culture of the 1970s and ’80s caused people to become more politically conservative. But it wasn’t a coincidence that the two phenomena emerged simultaneously. They operated in tandem.

The political right rode in on that floodtide of nostalgia, and then, ironically, the old-time every-man-for-himself political economy they reinstalled, less fair and less secure, drove people deeper into their various nostalgic havens for solace. This new fixation of the culture on the old and the familiar didn’t subside. It became a fixed backward gaze. Then almost without a pause came another wave of disruption and uncertainty, caused by the digital technologies that revolutionized the ways people earned livings and lived, and which made economic life for most people even more insecure. And the culture in turn focused even more compulsively on recycling and rebooting familiar styles and fashions and music and movies and shows.

:{:{Then we moved onto the weird next stage, the latest stage that I first noticed in the 2000s, after my double-take at that old photo— the stasis: in addition to letting the past charm us, in the 1990s we also stopped creating the fundamentally, strikingly new, perfecting a comfortable Matrix illusion that in some sense the world wasn’t really changing all that much.}:

As I was working on Fantasyland, reading and thinking about American history, I noticed more connections between the two phenomena— between our simultaneous switch in the 1970s and ’80s to a grisly old-fashioned political economy and to a strenuously, continuously familiar culture. Which led me to spend a couple of years reading and thinking more deeply about both.}:

A lot more deeply about the economics and politics. That’s what I’d mainly studied in college, but since then I’d mostly just read the news, skimmed along day to day and month to month like anybody whose job never required knowing a lot about deregulation, antitrust, tax codes, pensions, the healthcare industry, the legal fraternity, constitutional law, organized labor, executive compensation, lobbying, billionaires’ networks, the right wing, the dynamics of economic growth, stock buybacks, the financial industry and all its innovations— so many subjects of which I was mostly ignorant.

My immersion was revelatory. Reading hundreds of books and scholarly papers and articles and having conversations with experts made me more or less fluent in those subjects and, more, taught me many small things and one important big thing: what happened around 1980 and afterward was larger and uglier and more multifaceted than I’d known. Inequality is the buzzword, mainly because that’s so simple and quantifiable: in forty years, the share of wealth owned by our richest 1 percent has doubled, the collective net worth of the bottom half has dropped almost to zero, the median weekly pay for a full-time worker has increased by just 0.1 percent a year, only the incomes of the top 10 percent have grown in sync with the economy, and so on.

Americans’ boats stopped rising together; most of the boats stopped rising at all. But along with economic inequality reverting to the levels of a century ago and earlier, so has economic insecurity, as well as the corrupting political power of big business and the rich, oligarchy, while economic immobility is almost certainly worse than it’s ever been.

Before I started my research, I’d understood the changes in the 1970s and ’80s hadn’t all just . . . happened, spontaneously. But I didn’t know how long and concerted and strategic the project by the political right and the rich and big business had been. One of my subjects in Fantasyland is how conspiracy-theorizing became an American bad habit,a way our chronic mixing of fiction and reality got the best of us.

Of course there are secretive cabals of powerful people who work to make big bad things happen, actual conspiracies, but the proliferation of conspiracy theories since the 1960s, so many so preposterous, had the unfortunate effect of making reasonable people ignore real plots in plain sight. Likewise, the good reflex to search for and focus on the complexities and nuances of any story, on grays rather than simple whites and blacks, can tend to blind us to some plain dark truths.

I still insist on a preponderance of evidence before I draw conclusions. I still resist reducing messy political and economic reality to catch-phrases like “vast right-wing conspiracy” and “the system is rigged,” but I discovered that in this case the blunt shorthand is essentially correct. 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. After all, as the god of the economic right himself, Adam Smith, wrote in capitalism’s 1776 bible, The Wealth of Nations: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Evil Geniuses is the book I wish had existed a dozen years ago to help clarify and organize and deepen and focus my thinking and understanding and anger and blame. Like most people over the past decade, I’d noticed this fact here or that infographic there about inequality or insecurity or malign corporate power, but quickly moved on, flittered off to the next headline. But then I decided to go deep into the weeds in order to understand, then come out of the weeds to explain what I’d learned as clearly as I could.

I wanted to distill and gather and connect the important facts and explanations in one compact package, to make a coherent picture out of all the puzzle pieces. There are lots of facts and figures in here, but not much jargon at all. By chronicling CEOs and billionaires and intellectuals and zealots and operators planning and strategizing for years, together and apart, networking and plotting, even memorializing some plots in memos— so many jaw-dropping memos— I’ve tried to tell a compelling story as well as make a persuasive argument about what’s become of us.

Of course, Ronald Reagan didn’t cheerfully announce in 1980 that if Americans elected him,private profit and market values would override all other American values; that as the economy grew nobody but the well-to-do would share in the additional bounty; that many millions of middle-class jobs and careers would vanish, along with fixed private pensions and reliable healthcare; that a college degree would simultaneously become unaffordable and almost essential to earning a good income; that enforcement of antimonopoly laws would end; that meaningful control of political contributions by big business and the rich would be declared unconstitutional; that Washington lobbying would increase by 1,000 percent

...

that our revived and practically religious deference to business would enable a bizarre American denial of climate science and absolute refusal to treat the climate crisis as a crisis; that after doubling the share of the nation’s income that it took for itself, a deregulated Wall Street would nearly bring down the financial system, ravage the economy, and pay no price for its recklessness; and that the federal government he’d committed to discrediting and undermining would thus be especially ill-equipped to deal with a pandemic and its consequences.

Rather, when we were promised in 1980 the wonderful old-fashioned life of Bedford Falls, we didn’t pay close enough attention to the fine print and possible downsides, and forty years later here we are in Pottersville instead, living in the world actually realized by Reaganism, our political economy remade by big business and the wealthy to maximize the wealth and power of big business and the well-to-do at the expense of everyone else. We were hoodwinked, and we hoodwinked ourselves.

[ Return to the review of “Evil Genuises.” ]

===

no lnx van fair

The Hive Interview: Can We Undo the GOP’s Decimation of America?

Evil Geniuses author Kurt Andersen unravels how the right helped create a wildly inequitable society—and how Americans could hold the government accountable for overlooking their economic interests.

By Joe Hagan

August 10, 2020

In his new book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, writer and public intellectual Kurt Andersen describes a kind of secret history that happened in broad daylight: Starting in the early ’70s, he writes, a band of conservative economists and pro-business groups, terrified of the progressive movements of the 1960s, drew up plans and blueprints for a version of America in which big corporations and Wall Street would be liberated from regulation and labor unions and antitrust laws, allowing the free market to sort out the winners from the losers.

Their ideas powered the Reagan Revolution of the ’80s and over the next three decades reengineered the American economy to favor Wall Street and fatten the wealthy, resulting in a wildly inequitable society and the violent convulsions of the Trump presidency.

“My ‘evil geniuses,’ the economic right, who really kept their eye on the ball and always keep their eye on the ball, let the rich get richer,” he says. “Lower taxes are everything. The power of big business to do what it wants is key and paramount and overrides everything else. But to get what we want and to be politically successful, we’re going to have to have as our allies this rabble. These white working-class people, these racists. That started in the 1960s and hasn’t stopped, and here we are with Donald Trump. That Faustian bargain maybe has come due, and maybe the evil geniuses will now, at least some of them, go to hell.”

This week Andersen joins special correspondent Joe Hagan for an in-depth conversation on Andersen’s virtual autopsy of recent history, including the role of toothless Democrats and the “liberal useful idiots” who not only cooperated in the great bamboozlement, but benefited from it—including, Andersen admits, himself.

Vanity Fair: Your last book, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, posited that the 1960s revolutions, the liberation movements, the birth of the modern individual in American society, engendered this revolution that indulged more freely in woo-woo thinking and conspiracy thinking and fact-free beliefs about reality, [and that] led us to this moment where we have a lying reality-TV-show president.

Now you have this new book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, a perfect partner book to the last one. But it’s interesting to me that the theory of the book in itself posits possibly a conspiracy: that starting in the 1980s, and possibly a little bit before, the United States economy was totally reengineered to favor Wall Street and the big business and the 1 percent by this cabal of right-wing economic thinkers and big business interests. So here we are, indulging in a conspiracy, but this one’s…real?

Kurt Andersen: Well, I have had that thought myself. I realized halfway through this book exactly that. That although these are two volumes, as a friend of mine says, two volumes in the history of the “fuckening” of America, they are in conversation. One, they are companion volumes, and yes, as you say, a large part of Fantasyland is about the conspiracy-mindedness that has always been part of not only the American way of thinking, but of [the] human way of thinking. But [it] was one of the things that got out of control in and after the ’60s, and of course I still believe that most conspiracy theories are preposterous/ Let’s fast-forward to now and look at QAnon for instance.

But writing this book and doing the research and realizing how much of a coordinated, strategic long game was involved by these rich right-wing people and right-wing activists, zealots, and big business...We can talk about what is defined as a conspiracy, but this one certainly quacks, walks, and looks a lot like one. I mean, again, it was in plain sight—most of us didn’t pay very close attention, or put two and two and two and two together, to see the whole landscape of change that was being wrought in the ’70s and ’80s and beyond.

Well, that was the amazing thing about reading your book. It wasn’t a secret. There are a lot of things I didn’t know: that in the early ’70s, partly as a reaction to what was going on in the ’60s, the right-wing economic thinkers and big business minds began to think, Well, if “If it feels good, do it” is going to be their mantra, well, we’re going to do it too, except instead of rolling around in the mud at Woodstock, we’re going to roll around in cash. So it’s a whole different—but it’s a similar impulse perhaps, but going in [a] totally different direction. The thing that really struck me was, you describe it as “organized capital” contra “organized labor,” and it really was an idea about: Let’s get the business minds together and re-architect and campaign on our own behalves for the economy.

That’s exactly right. And by the way, that combination of “do your own thing,” “find your own bliss,” “seek your own truth,” and focusing on profit and capital and material, I think you wrote a biography of somebody who embodied both sides of that ‘60s thing. [Ed: That's Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine.] But yes, I’m sorry. Now that I made my joke about you, no wonder I lost track of what your question was.

Jann Wenner, always the conversation stopper. Well, the impulse that people think of as driving the antiestablishment, countercultural figures, these guys got together, let’s talk for instance about—

Organized capital.

That’s right. And “the Powell Memo.” These people that we didn’t know about. I didn’t, anyway. Lewis Powell, nominated to the Supreme Court [by Nixon]. Tell us about that.

Ronald Reagan campaigns for president in Los Angeles, 1980.By John T. Barr/Getty Images.

Yeah, well, I heard about the Powell Memo some years ago, and among a certain category of journalists and academics and lefties, it has been well known for 20-odd years. It was a revelation to me because just whether or not it was the original scripture and playbook for this long game that the economic right played to take over and reengineer our system, in retrospect, given the success of that long game along exactly the lines described in 1971 in this 40-page memo, it’s an extraordinary forensic artifact.

So this guy Lewis Powell, he was an establishment Democratic moderate, decorous lawyer of national repute in Virginia. Worked for the tobacco companies and all kinds of corporate clients on boards. Just a normal establishment figure. He, like so many people in that milieu and C-suites and the rest in 1970 and ’71, [was] freaking out about this antiestablishment, specifically antibusiness sentiment that Ralph Nader and the general public were buying into. It’s unfair. Corporations are not to be trusted. What had begun in the New Deal had suddenly become, to their eyes, kind of extreme in the late ’60s. What are we going to do to stop this?

Maybe this talk of revolution is for real. Maybe the socialist revolution is nigh, they thought in 1970-71. So Lewis Powell in Virginia, age 60 or whatever he was, was talking to a neighbor about this and ranting over bourbon, no doubt, and the neighbor happened to be an official of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and said, “Lewis, why don’t we at the Chamber of Commerce commission you to write a memo explaining this and explaining your plan to stop this socialist, left-wing, Ho Chi Minh-of-America takeover of the American way of life and the destruction of free enterprise.” “Why, I sure will.” And he did that and turned it in and, again, was a couple of months later nominated by Richard Nixon to be a Supreme Court justice. That is interesting and that’s why Lewis Powell is famous, of course. But I’m not postulating that, for instance, as part of any conspiracy.

So this moderate guy was suddenly immoderately hysterical about what was going on in the late ’60s. But because he was this skilled lawyer and strategist, and had been for 40 years, he laid [out] in this very skillful, lawyerly way: This is what we got to do. We’ve got to create these think tanks to take over the intellectual life as much as we can. We got to change the discourse in the media. We’ve got to organize business people and CEOs to be effective. Not just protecting their own company, but protecting and defending and asserting the importance of capitalism and profits.

But he just lays it out, which was an extraordinary thing to do at that time, and certainly given that what happened bears a striking resemblance to what he laid out in the summer of 1971 is amazing…I don’t really consider myself a real historian in doing primary research, but I did discover this very, very little-known speech of his that preceded that memo, the Powell Memo, as it’s now called, that he had given a year ago, which is even more hysterical about: “Oh, my God, ‘the Greening of America.’ It’s crazy, they’re going to take us down.” He didn’t quite say we’re going to be put up against the wall and shot, but…

The Greening of America - Wikipedia

The book's argument rests on three separate types of world view:

• "Consciousness I" applies to the typical values and opinions of rural farmers and small businesspeople which dominated society in 19th century America.
• "Consciousness II" represents a viewpoint of "an organizational society", featuring meritocracy and improvement through various large institutions, the ethos of the New Deal, World War II and the 1950s Silent Generation.
• "Consciousness III" represents the worldview of the 1960s counterculture, focusing on personal freedom, egalitarianism, and recreational drugs.^[2]

The book mixed sociological analysis with panegyrics to rock music, cannabis, and blue jeans, arguing that these fashions embodied a fundamental social shift.

So there he had it, and almost it was secret for a year, and then it was leaked to a newspaper columnist who talked about it and it wasn’t a big deal. But like, Oh, look this thing that Powell wrote a year and a half ago. But immediately, as soon as it became to that degree public, it became this truly founding scriptural document for Charles Koch, for instance, and all of the Charles Kochs of the world. The libertarian and right-wing people and general CEOs were suddenly liberated by: Now we have a mission. We have a doctrine. We have a document. We have a plan, a battle plan. So that was the beginning. And then there was so much I didn’t know, as I did the research, about in so many different realms of how to think about, how we should think or shouldn’t think about antitrust enforcement, and are monopolies good or bad?

Just all across the board, the way the conventional wisdom was pretty radically changed in America about fairness, basically, and about what the government should or shouldn’t do in terms of making the economy fair for most Americans. And they did it and they changed it, quickly.

I mean, another memo that I knew nothing about was this one that was commissioned by a different...by a right-wing billionaire, Richard Mellon Scaife, in 1979 and was completed in 1980, [which] laid out even more extraordinarily, really beat by beat, how the right, the same economic right, should try to have influence in and, to whatever degree possible, take over the understandings of the law and the judiciary and jurisprudence in America.

Well, and a year later the Federalist Society is established, and the rest is history. So again, I am not, as you know, a conspiracist or conspiracy-minded. But you look at the evidence and the history, and it’s hard not to see that there was this extraordinary, brilliant effort in many different places to bring about this change. Also this thing called the Business Roundtable was founded right then in the early ’70s as well. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was always the national business organization, but it consisted of thousands and thousands of companies large and small, and therefore all kinds of businesses belonged to it, had that power. But it was ineffectual because what does GE have in common with Dave’s Widget Shop over here.

So the CEOs of the biggest companies got together and said, “No, we need just us, just the 200 CEOs of the biggest companies, and instead of just being some public face and saying we believe in business, we need to get in there and fight the fight in Washington and lobby and threaten and be organized

capital.” My phrase, not theirs.

And you’ve pointed out in the book the big crucial year, watershed year is 1980, around the time that Reagan is going to come into office. He’s going to be the affable face and the salesman, really, of this new concentration of business minds and fellow travelers, from Milton Friedman to the Kochs, to name the people you’ve heard of now because they’ve all came to fame and power since. But the thing that really struck me reading your book was how important it was for them to do away with and ultimately crush the labor unions. How this was really to take away the bargaining power of the worker ends up being the most important block in all of this. Once you’ve got that out of the way, off to the races.

And I certainly at the time didn’t realize it. Of course I write about the history of growing, well, mutual attempts between young people like me, new young liberals coming of age in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, and labor unions and union members and essentially the educated white-collar cohort versus the unionized blue-collar cohort. Starting not over economic issues, of course, but over the war and the counterculture and all those late-’60s issues. We saw it, of course, in 1968 at the Chicago Democratic convention of Mayor Daley and his police beating up protesters. But there were other incidents like that, and that was the beginning of a big political fissure that we are still living with and dealing with obviously politically. I wasn’t anti-union, and I belonged to the newspaper guild at my first big journalism job at Time magazine. But unions, whatever, they’re old. They’re racist. They’re sexist. They were pro-war. Eh, the unions.

So that I call myself one of the liberal useful idiots. Not this time to the communists, as that phrase was originally used, but to the capitalist. Sort of allowing or at least looking the other way or shrugging about the crushing of the unions that took place very quickly and very successfully. I mean, the ground was softened in the ’70s, but then as soon as Ronald Reagan became president, crushed, really, truly crushed overnight one of the few labor unions, the air traffic controllers union, who had endorsed him for the presidency. That really just gave the greenlight to big companies to crush unions, to replace strikers, and do the whole range of things, [so] that within that decade, of the 1980s I mean, the labor movement and the labor unions of the United States as a key player at the table of the economy was just undone. Right.

Well, at this juncture I’m thinking about when I came into the workforce. It’s the mid-’90s at the dawn of the internet boom. All my assumptions about economics, about the stock market, about money in general, were received at that moment, right? I hadn’t done a lot of deep thinking about it in any way. So I came into the world thinking, Stocks go up, good, shareholder value. It was getting frothy. Everything was going crazy, and capitalism was taking on this “cool,” right? We were all a part of that. You talk about useful idiots. We were all indulging in it because it seemed like it was the post–Cold War inheritance that we won the game, all boats are rising. How were we wrong?

Well, we were wrong because we ignored the fact that the system—in all kinds of ways, many and probably most of them too tedious or obscure and abstruse to have paid much attention to—the system was rigged, was reengineered through tax codes, through regulation, deregulation, lack of antitrust enforcement. Of companies deciding, “No, we’re not going to give fixed pensions anymore.“

What happened to the health care industry and the resulting unaffordability of health care. On and on and on and on. All of which, all of which happened from 19, let’s say 78 to 1998. But especially in the ’80s. We ignored that because we were doing fine, basically is the answer. I was doing fine, you were doing fine, and we were enjoying ourselves, and this just seemed like the new reality.

I mean, and part of my reason for writing this book is because I’m old enough that I at least experienced, up to the time I was, what, 25, the old system. I saw, and now having done my research, I see that this was a different, fairer system, especially since the New Deal in the ’30s, under which Americans were living. That was not only much fairer, much more economically equal, much more economically secure, but had become more so. And in 1976 had reached its top. In 1976, by the numbers and metrics, the United States was more economically equal than it had ever been. And hey, let’s celebrate. No, let’s twist all the dials so that it ceases to be so and starts becoming as economically unequal and insecure as it was a century ago.

Right. Well, and you and I were a part of a New York media world which sort of sent up all these power brokers who were getting super rich and living like pigs in the Hamptons and elsewhere. We were both on the margin of it and making fun of it. But even at the time, we were like, Wow, where does it end? This is crazy. And suddenly you started to see also working-class people, too, driving giant SUVs, and all of a sudden credit was all over the place and there was just this crazy ripening of the economy that was going on that turned out to be unsustainable.

And Democrats—and this is a really important thing you point out in the book—were playing on the ball field of the GOP every time they got into power, right? If they had Congress or if they were in the White House—Clinton was a triangulator who basically paid lip service to their business values.

And really accepted that social problems can only be solved by market-based solutions. That was key. I mean, basically yes, Democrats and liberals on economics decided that they really didn’t disagree with Republicans. They became essentially liberal Republicans after liberal Republicans ceased to exist on economics. There was no party of the left on economics.

And then of course the other important things that Democrats were distinctly and consistently to the left on, more or less, of matters of race and culture, sexuality and the rest, feminism and women’s rights and civil rights. That became the way in which they were distinct from Republicans, which if you are a hypothetical white working-class person, you look at the parties and go, “They’re pretty much the same on economics.

They don’t give a fuck about me or the fact that my manufacturing job has either been automated or shipped to China or whatever.” Choose your legitimate reason to be an angry person like that. And then you’re like, what else? How are they different? How they’re different is maybe the Republicans don’t care about me, really. But the Democrats really care about other people than me. So there you have, that’s where we are politically.

Meanwhile, my evil geniuses, the economic right, who really kept their eye on the ball and always keep their eye on the ball, let the rich get richer. Lower taxes are everything. The power of big business to do what it wants is key and paramount and overrides everything else. But to get what we want and to be politically successful, we’re going to have to have as our allies this rabble. These white working-class people, these racists. That started in the 1960s and hasn’t stopped, and here we are with Donald Trump. That Faustian bargain maybe has come due, and maybe the evil geniuses will now, at least some of them, go to hell.

Continuing my Faustian trope, but we’ll see. But that’s what happened, and then people like me—I won’t drag you into this, but you’re of a different generation. But we were doing okay and we did accept the idea of regulating business and breaking up business and all the rest, the whole New Deal menu and more of how the balance could be maintained between workers and citizens, and the power of big business was broken. And we allowed it to be broken, those of us who were doing okay financially. I don’t want to go into the hyperbole of “because the rich people were giving us their leftovers or some crumbs,” but effectively that is what happened.

And I don’t think that everybody was paying attention to how the middle was getting hollowed out as the efficiencies of big business began to work their magic with automation and outsourcing and the rest. But 2008, the economic collapse, I feel like we’re only now finally coming to the final chapter of the ramifications of 2008. I’ve always noticed that it superpowered the conspiracy thinking that we’ve talked about.

I mean, I remember when Alex Jones was on CNN as a guy they would bring on to actually talk about things, and he’s obviously a total nutjob…There was this angry reaction and it bifurcated into [the] Tea Party over here, Occupy [Wall Street] over here, but it was always there simmering [under] the surface. That’s where Trump comes in to exploit that. It’s interesting that it was Trump [on one side] and Bernie Sanders on the other side talking about trade, right? So I guess my question is, he took advantage of that, and the irony being that he was the caricature of the go-go’ 80s when all of this big business stuff blew up. And now he’s coming in to say, “I’m going to fix, undo, or otherwise assuage all the problems that I represented.”

One of the things he successfully ran on in 2016 was “it takes a thief,” effectively. “I know that. I know how these people work. I own these politicians. I’ll get rid of them.” Which was, in the ways that he is brilliant, that was a brilliant thing to do. But of course he wasn’t part of big business. Never part of big business. He’s a small business man who got big business, that is to say banks and Wall Street, to fund his vanities and follies for many decades.

To me, I mean, this is a bit of a digression, but Donald Trump’s business success—I’m making quote marks, air quotes—is a collateral damage of the hideous growth of Wall Street and the financial industry and its recklessness…and we’ll see the truth of that once...Gosh, I do sound like Alex Jones, don’t I? Once the [Deutsche Bank] situation is fully exposed. But the fact that these banks, all these reputable banks and institutions, were providing loans to this guy they had to know was an untrustworthy buffoon, is evidence for the degree of recklessness and self-dealing and all the rest that Wall Street had undergone in the ’70s and ’80s.

And one of his campaign ads in 2016 had Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman, in it.

As an evil villain.

Correct. Yeah, that‘s the other thing. The Steve Bannon version of Donald Trump, which is to say, yeah, racist, xenophobe, bigot, all that. But yes, we’re going to keep your Medicare, keep your social security. It’s going to be better than it ever was. We’re going to spend trillions rebuilding the infrastructure. If he had governed like that, this unusual Republican who’s not going by the normal Republican tenets, I believe that a lot of people on the left and liberals would have held their nose and said, “Yeah, not bad.” And he’d have 65, 70% approval rating now. I really believe that.

Instead what he did, because he’s an idiot, and because he understood that Republicans are elected, Republicans are quislings, and that all they want—because the prime directive of the economic evil geniuses is keep taxes low, keep regulation off of business. So he gave them all that. Oh, that’s what you care about, fine. Whatever. That’s how it works.

Right. Well, another subplot to your book is the cultural effect of all this redistribution of wealth to the top and the politicization of it, the political economy of it, which was that—you call the ’60s and ’70s “Peak New,” right? This is when we had all gotten used to a level of just continual change, which is part of the American impulse to reinvent constantly. Well, that began to slow down, and you noticed it from looking at a photograph of some people from the ’80s recently, maybe in the last 10 years. Tell me about that.

Well, and in fact I noticed it and then wrote a piece about it for Vanity Fair magazine that appeared in 2011. I happened to see this picture in 2007, I think, in the New York Times. It was a profile of Steve Rubell and his partner, who started, of course, Studio 54 and had become big hotel impresarios. Anyway, it was a picture of them and their staff at Morgans, which was this first fancy, boutique hotel in 1986. Anyway, all these waiters and attendants and bellpeople, big crowd of attractive young people standing outside with their bosses on a Manhattan street. It was 20 years old, this picture. That’s an old picture. Almost nothing about any of them, the way they were dressed, looked, groomed, looked anything other than 2007.

And I thought, That is weird, isn’t it? Because of course for my whole lifetime, and then before my lifetime, things changed every decade, pretty significantly. I mean, cars look different. The way people did their hair and groomed themselves and dressed looked different. And design looked different, and each decade had its own character. I thought, Well, that’s weird.

So I began trying to figuring out...I became obsessed with this and why did that happen, and when I wrote about it—I wrote an essay about it—I didn’t really connect it very much to what had happened economically, what was happening economically at the same time. Again, I’m not such a conspiracist that I think the evil geniuses are genius enough or powerful enough to have contrived to stop that kind of cultural change.

Reverse engineer culture or something.

No. However, I do think they were synergistic, and I do think…that things after the ’80s really stopped after we spent a decade or two just wallowing in nostalgia, which was, the degree of the wallow, new for America. This stasis has happened, and I really do think that it has served the interests of the people who don’t want big political and economic change to make people to think, without even thinking that they’re thinking, but just, Oh, no, things don’t really change. It’s the same. Listen to the same music. This new singer is not so different than the singer that was 20 years ago. What has happened so radically new since hip-hop, let’s say, as an example in pop culture of a truly new thing in the ’70s and ’80s. But what’s been as big as that? And you can go through the whole realm of culture and think, That’s weird. Again, I mean, so while I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I am a seeker of unified theories of existence.

A Zeitgeistian.

I do in Evil Geniuses connect nostalgia and this strange cultural stasis to the bigger economic and political changes that happen. It really is unprecedented. I mean, America was about the new; modern life is about this constant novelty in all realms. And instead the novelty of the last several decades has been in the digital realm, sure. But very little else in the culture.

Right, and it almost serves as a fun house mirror of everything that we already had, like a giant archive constantly coming at us. Well, I thought about that—you and I have talked about this in the past. But we talk about the 20th century being this anomaly of a monoculture in which you have a narrow band of media through which everything was coming. A lot of us experienced all these newnesses you’re talking about through that, through the distribution of sound and image and news and information and politics and the rest. But as the internet came along and fractured that—and I made this parallel reading your book. I was thinking that these right-wing forces, they tried to de-engineer the New Deal and take us back to before the Depression. In doing so, ended up exposing us to similar problems, by the way, but also back to a pre-media time when you have a fragmented media and it’s more like the pamphleteering late 19th century now than it was 20 years ago. We reversed that too.

That’s a good point, and I think intentionally I wrote about that media part of it, which is so true. I mean, often I talk about pathological nostalgia, which is we are in nostalgia for something. But America and certain kinds of Americans have become pathologically nostalgic, and that drives a lot of our politics. But we talk about that it’s often, “Oh, they want it to be the ’50s again.” No, the ’50s were pretty good except for the racist, sexist, misogynist part of it. I mean, economically, the ’50s were good. They, my economic evil geniuses, wanted to be, as you say, before there was a federal government. Before there was income taxes. Before there was a public health system and indeed before there was—

A mainstream media.

A mainstream media. Again, newspapers, big newspapers that dominated American media for a century, were the result of business constraints, which is to say to sell as many newspapers as you could in a given city. You couldn’t be left-wing or right-wing, you had to appeal and have a big tent and appeal to everybody. Yes, with cable television and talk radio and unregulated talk radio and certainly the internet, that business constraint was no longer there. And the idea of the good side of mainstreamness, which is that mostly just untrue craziness could be kept out of the mainstream—that started disappearing, and here we are. I mean, no question there are all kinds of bad things about the mainstream and dissident opinion being stigmatized and kept out of it, no question. But we didn’t have QAnon for instance. Back when there were only three networks and two news magazines and a couple of national newspapers.

Well, and I thought a lot about Ross Douthat’s recent book, which makes a case that we’ve reached a decadence from our success.

Yes, yes. In which he quotes Fantasyland at length.

Well, and that makes perfect sense to me because this is all of a piece, and one of the things I love about your writing and your books is that you articulate things that have been floating around in my mind as I look out and I’m like, Yeah, why is the culture seeming to be a little bit static? I’m a big music fan. Why is music not as impactful as it once seemed. It doesn’t have the centrality to the culture. Well, the culture is no longer central; it’s been fragmented and it’s reflected the economic thing as well and that everybody now has the option to go into their little silo and then QAnon being one of the wacky ones, right? The decadence is a thing that we’ve been. And Trump could not be a more glaring symptom of that decadence.

Yeah, and when you say decadence, I think of capitalism as it’s practiced in the United States, because give me a free market like the Nordic countries and I’m good. And by the way, they are free market systems. They’re not socialist countries, they’re free market countries.

Right, and you make that point in the book.

With great social democracies and the systems. But the term that so many people have been using the last couple of decades and more and more lately is “late capitalism,” which of course implies that it’s about to die. Which I think, there’s a wishful thing. But it is definitely a decadent capitalism in America. No question. I think that’s to me a more precise and true phrase and doesn’t suggest that it’s going to collapse in some miraculous way because it’s too late. I mean, I’ve been hearing the phrase late capitalism for a long time. It’s like waiting for the end of the world when some prophet says the world is about to end.

But it is absolutely decadent, and in the story of Evil Geniuses [I argue] that we have become this, not North American, but traditionally Latin American oligarchy where only the rich are getting richer and building real and figurative gates to keep all the peasants away.

Well, and I think during this pandemic when we saw David Geffen on his boat out in the Caribbean or wherever he was, people immediately were stuck by that as a sign or symptom of the separation of the haves and have-nots. So one other thing to point out—let’s just get into the slivers-of-hope section of our conversation here. You point out a really interesting thing in the book: that 25 years ago there was a poll taken. They asked people, “Do you want the government to do more for people or less?” Sixty-two percent at the time said no, we don’t. It’s like, we don’t want more government, we want less.

And the choice was government more, or let people and businesses take care of their own problem.

Exactly. And now it’s flipped, more or less. Fifty-eight percent would like to see the government do more, and you start to explore whether we’re at an inflection point. Certainly it looks like it. I mean, the Bernie Sanders and the Elizabeth Warrens of the world and the Andrew Yangs have been on national stages delivering messages that you would never have heard 10 years ago.

Correct.

That’s a radical thing and that’s what—Trump will exploit the fear of that, but it may be that our options are narrowing at this crossroads, between more of this autocratic demagoguery and actually solving the problem.

The hopeful possibilities coming out of the pandemic and its economic consequences is sane people, sensible, reasonable people, will look and say, “No, we really do need an effective government to deal with not only huge one-off challenges like this, but both economically and in the public health sense. But no, we really do need government. We’re not all on our own. Business can’t do it by itself.” To me it’s a case study that the reaction of the Trump administration and the right from the get-go [was], “No, no, no. Open up right away. Open up right away. Well, we’ll deal with it. Keep the stock market going.” Down the line they just played from their playbook of how they’ve been privileging and prioritizing stock prices and corporate profits above all else. I mean, these last six months have been just an extraordinary case study in that.

Now I hope [it] will be clear to more people than ever that, wait a minute, not only do they not, as the survey question often has it, care about people like me, [but] they really care only about their narrow economic interest, period, end of story. So the question is, can the various other social and culture fissures in America that all kinds of people, especially Donald Trump and the Republican Party, exploit politically, can those be put in abeyance enough to create a good working majority of people who can be activated politically in their own economic interests?

And the economic interests, by the way, of America, of the economy. Again, racism and misogyny and patriarchy aside, the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s are a model. If we had that economy now, the growth, the fair, equitable arrangements of how the wealth was shared, my God. Literally we were as equal back in the day as some of the Scandinavian countries are now. It would be great, and so it’s not really radical, and we had these enormously higher tax rates on the rich. Didn’t seem to hurt growth, did it?

No, it didn’t. Two things you point out in the book are, I would say, interesting tea leaves to read. One is that the Business Roundtable, which is one of these big business groups as part of the cabal, came out in 2019 advocating for more responsibility to the workers. Like, Uh-oh, maybe this isn’t going to go so hot for us if we keep going in this direction we haven’t corrected in any way. You point out that Financial Times this last spring said about the pandemic, “Virus Lays Bare the Frailty of the Social Contract.” Now, this is the first election I can remember in which “the social contract” came up. We’re rethinking the entire thing. You talk about, in the book, the Alaska model; it’s an interesting thing because it gets to a lot of other conversations.

Andrew Yang, during his perfectly great presidential run, was probably not ever going to be

nominated for the presidency, but to get the conversation going, not only about universal basic income, but about how A.I. and automation are going to continue eliminating jobs. They just are, and this is different than the other industrial revolutions, and there are not going to be enough jobs that it makes economic sense for people to do. Period, end of story. How are we going to deal with that? So the fact that that was not regarded as crazy and that people, Republicans as well as Democrats, in polling said, “Yeah, universal basic income sometime might be necessary.” Fantastic that that is now legitimately on the table.

So Alaska, 50 years ago they had this gigantic oil strike in the north slope of Alaska and all the oilcompanies wanted to drill there, and Alaska said, “Okay, you can do that, but we’re going to charge you. We’re going to get a share of [the] billions of dollars of oil revenues you’re going to get.” And the then Republican governor, since Alaska has almost exclusively Republican governors and is a very Republican state, decided on the advice of this libertarian socialist economist that worked at the University of Alaska, “We’re going to give a large chunk of that money, guaranteed within the constitution of the state, to give a portion of that money to every individual in Alaska—man, woman, or child, no matter what, no strings attached.”

So Alaska has had a universal basic income. Now, it’s small; it can’t let you live. But it’s thousands of dollars, often several thousands of dollars, at least a thousand or two dollars a year to every man, woman, or child. So if you’ve got a family of five—10, 15, 20 grand every year. That obviously makes a huge difference in people’s lives. So we’ve had this incredibly successful experiment. Now, ironically and unfortunately, it’s based on fossil fuels—and that’s a whole other conversation. But the principle, the thing, is that there is social wealth. Alaskans decided, “Hey, this is our oil. We should all each benefit from this, rather than have it just vaguely go away to whoever.”

And you point out in there that there was an uptick in women entering the workforce because they could afford childcare.

Yes, and there are also studies about childhood health that got better and all kinds of things. And by the way, it’s unclear exactly to what degree the Alaska fund, Alaska Permanent Fund, is responsible, this thing that has given every Alaskan thousands of dollars a year, every year, no matter what, for the last several decades, is responsible. But back then when it started, Alaska was one of the most economically unequal states in the union. Today it is one of the top one or two least unequal states in the union. But really I think it’s important that here is this conservative, Western, ultra-entrepreneurial, individualistic state that has had and loves and would not ever give up this social welfare payment. And understands that there is such a thing as social wealth, in this case oil. But it could also be allowing polluters, charging polluters to pollute or charging internet companies for all the work that the government did inventing the internet. Or any number of things.

Well, those are really interesting observations to me. I hadn’t heard them before, and you, God bless you, you read Hillary Clinton’s memoir. There was a little thing in there where she said she considered what if we made the fossil fuel industry pay based on how much CO2 emissions they have and then give it away to people.

Yeah, she specifically said basically copying Alaska on a national scale in some way. She wasn’t entirely clear whether it would just be fossil fuel or where the funding would come, but yes. She and Bill and her campaign decided, “No, no, we couldn’t make the numbers work, and so maybe that’s too bad, maybe I would have won.”

It is beginning to think outside the box in these radical ways that in this case isn’t so radical because as Justice Brandeis said in “the laboratory of democracy,” we had one of our states prove that in this way and this has worked just fine.

Yeah, and just as an aside, the other thing you pointed out that was interesting is how much the government is involved in the invention of things like the internet and receives no return on that investment, and you liken it to: We build a highway, and then we let a bunch of young college kids put toll booths on it and collect all the money, and we don’t get any of it.

So I’m thinking now we’re talking about this “inflection point” and the importance of this election. I just want to go on record saying your book is a great primer for thinking about what the meaning of this election is. Look at the big view. Let’s go to 20,000 feet. Let’s look at the last 50 to 75 years and think about where we want to go from here. We’re so caught up in the daily news cycle, and we’re boring into every little Twitter war and dumb thing that Trump says. But let’s back up a minute here and think about which direction we want to go. Apocalypse and demagoguery or reinvent the country and go somewhere optimistic and sunny, okay?

Yeah.

The thing that I hope that Joe Biden will bring us in this election is something you point out. You just mentioned it in passing, but I just know that it’s going to be a thing, which is that all these people are out of work right now, and when the corporations go back [to full operation] they’re going to use this as an excuse to reduce their workforce, not hire more people. They’re going to see how efficient everything was without all these workers, and there’s going to be even more unemployment and more people without jobs and without security. A floor has to come under these people. We’ve got to reinvent the floor, right? A new New Deal has to be created.

Absolutely right. I think this is an inflection pointt moment, and Andy Grove, the great founder of Intel who popularized the idea of “the inflection point” for businesses and groups and societies and organizations, made the point that inflection point can take you to the stars or down to the bottom. That’s where we are. I really do [believe that] because I’m not without hope. If we reengineer our badly reengineered economic system, the sky is the limit with A.I., with automation, with all of it.

And to their credit, people like Mark Zuckerberg, who—not to defend him or Facebook, except he and other Silicon Valley people are at least honest enough to have made the leap and understand where technology is going in terms of work and the larger economy to say, “Yeah, something like universal basic income is going to be necessary. The old way of just give business whatever it wants and screw the people, the losers, that just isn’t going to work.“ So at least he and they in their engineer Spockian way understand where this is going, and a solution that will look radical is going to be necessary.

Right. So we have Joe Biden, who is like, you can put the radical juice into the old Coke bottle and—

He’s Captain Kirk.

He’s Captain Kirk, that’s right.

I don’t know. Yeah, well, let’s cross our fingers and hope (a) that he’s elected, and (b) I believe that he is enough of a...he wants to do right. He wants people to be happy. He does. I mean, he is, God knows, beset by nostalgia to an extreme about how better life was in Scranton when he was a kid and all that, but it was. So he also is obviously a consummate politician, and if people, and specifically Democrats, are pushing him to the left, he’s not going to resist. He is not. So I’m hopeful about what could happen in his administration and beyond.

But it really, to your point about short term—like what happened today? What did Trump say today? Or what’s going to happen in the election in November? We really have to think, we have to obviously toggle between thinking short term, winning this election, and long term: Well, for what purpose other than to prevent a fascist autocracy?

Yes, that’s important, but truly if we think beyond that and beyond not getting [an] unapologetic racist out of the White House and all of the obvious things about Donald Trump, let’s not think, as I’m afraid Joe Biden has, that it’s just about Trump. That there hasn’t been a big problem of which he, I, anybody who calls themselves Democrat mostly, have been part of. Of not understanding how what happened to the economy and how things went bad didn’t just happen. It was part of a set of plans in a very long game.

The things I talked about in Fantasyland, of the magical thinking and conspiracy theories and delusions and all that which has been part of the American character forever, that’s gotten out of hand. It’s a big problem. In a way it can’t be fixed. It can be stopped. It doesn’t have to—we can fight and need to fight to say, “No more. No more.” Take QAnon off Twitter for instance. But this is fixable. It was this other way 40, 50 years ago and then was changed, and it can be changed back as long as we have a democracy. As long as we have politics. But this can be fixed.

So I’m hopeful in a way that I really wasn’t once I came to the conclusions I came to about Fantasyland. But in terms of the evil geniuses and what they have wrought, well, they rotted, and indeed as you know from reading the book, I think we who are not of that ilk can look at what they did and copy it to some degree and see what a long game they played, and how they kept their eye on the important ball and all these other things. Man, they did it. And if we want to turn the United States of America into a decent, fair social democracy, well, there’s a lot to learn from the history of how they did it the other way.

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review

BY KURT ANDERSEN

RANDOM HOUSE, 2020

If you like conspiracy theories, Kurt Andersen has a good one for you.

Once upon a time there was a well-functioning democratic society that valued fairness, opportunity, and public integrity. Big business and the executive class accepted, for the most part, a social contract requiring them to treat everyday people with decency and to pay their fair share of taxes. Whether born rich, middle income, or poor, whether endowed with a fancy education or high school at best, every (white) person had a good chance to build, and live, a good life and set up their offspring for better.

But then, through the creation and meticulous, decades-long execution of a nefarious plot, a group of rich-but-determined-to-get-richer evildoers ruined it all and became obscenely wealthy in the process. What was even more far-fetched (and you might have a hard time buying the plausibility if it were fiction) was that the conspirators somehow got their victims to go along with it—to help even!—by drugging them with emotionally gratifying misdirection: nostalgia for a mythical bygone day and seething contempt for the liberalism that supposedly took it away.

A gripping story—but one with a lot of competition. Conspiracy theories are too numerous to keep up with in American culture, past and present, warning of everything from planned pandemics and autism-inducing vaccinations to the moon landing being staged in a studio and 9/11 being an inside job. One of the most audacious happens to be of recent vintage: QAnon, which would have us believe that a cabal of Satan-worshipping liberal elites is engaging in pedophilia and thwarting the wonderful man in the White House as he seeks to do God’s work.

But there’s a crucial difference between Andersen’s conspiracy story and all the rest. His is true. And thoroughly documented.

In Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, Andersen uses his sharp journalistic skills and keen storytelling ability to show and explain how this “unmaking” happened and who did it.

“The paradigm shift of the 1980s really was equivalent in scale and scope to those of the 1960s and the 1930s,” Andersen writes.

Key intellectual foundations of our legal system were changed. Our long-standing consensus about acceptable and unacceptable conduct by big business was changed. Ideas about selfishness and fairness were changed. The financial industry simultaneously became reckless and more powerful than ever. The liberal establishment began habitually apologizing for and distancing itself from much of what had defined liberal progress. What made America great for centuries, a taste and knack for the culturally new, started to atrophy. Plus much more. And all of what happened in the 1980s definitely didn’t stay in the 1980s.

This conservative momentum—the Reagan revolution, as you might know it—kept charging ahead through the ’90s, ’00s, and teens. Andersen provides a meticulous and surprisingly readable examination of the seemingly eye-glazing changes in business and financial regulations that gave the oligarchs their victory and its spoils, while leaving the vast majority of Americans in a state of ever-increasing economic insecurity, stranded on the wrong side of a canyon of income inequality not seen since the Gilded Age.

The villainous masterminds of Andersen’s story—people including the Kochs, Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors, and Robert Bork, and think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation—were not conspiring in secret, exactly. Their rhetoric and white papers circulated publicly, and the surprisingly docile media often covered them in accepting if not positive terms.

But nor did Andersen’s evil geniuses fully reveal the ultimate objective and consequence of their long-game strategy: freeing a select few to become insanely wealthy while gradually replacing FDR’s New Deal with what for poorer Americans amounted to a raw deal. They managed to give their scheme a veneer of philosophical and ethical worthiness, convincing much of the public that it would be best for everyone if business were less restrained.

How?

In part, by manipulating the complicated and seemingly boring rules and regulations that protect the public from predatory capitalism, which most citizens have neither the time nor inclination to master. Antitrust mechanics, byzantine business regulations, under-the-hood changes in tax code—when you’re working angles like these, the esoteric subject matter alone protects you from unwanted citizen scrutiny.

In the meantime, the malevolent geniuses, in tandem with powerful changes in the culture, provided spoonful after spoonful of sugar to help the nasty medicine go down.

Part of that trick was commandeering a powerful, pre-existing cultural force: the spirit of extreme individualism and self-expression that took off in the 1960s. What started as a liberal thing was turned in a different direction to glamorize freedom for aspiring oligarchs—the freedom to be as ostentatiously greedy and rich as they always wanted to be. It’s almost as if the conservative business interests said, “OK, hippies and liberals, you win. From now on, it’s maximum freedom and individualism for all. You can have your sexual and artistic self-expression. You do your thing and we’ll do ours!”

Another key form of sugar was nostalgia, which Andersen discusses at length and in fascinating ways. A major point in his analysis is that citizens’ forward-looking spirit was a huge part of America’s success as a country over its first two centuries. Sure, there was always a gauzy fondness for things gone by among some of the people, some of the time. But he sees it taking hold at a deeper level, and with an unprecedented durability, as the 1960s wound down and the ’70s began. And not by accident. Resurgent conservative interests manufactured nostalgia and fed it to a public ready for respite from the tumultuous ’60s.

If you want to play the conspiracy game and go back in time to find juicy clues as to what was coming, you can find one at Woodstock, of all places. As Andersen cleverly points out, the second-to-last performers on that stage were not remotely close in style or sensibility to the rock artists we associate with Woodstock: acts like Jimi Hendrix; the Who; and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

No, the second-to-last act was Sha Na Na—a nostalgia act that glamorized a decade, the 1950s, that wasn’t even old yet!

“To the crowd and to the Woodstockmovie audiences in 1970, this was spectacularly surprising and amusing. It was intense instantnostalgia,” Andersen writes.

Even at the event that remains a defining peak moment of a revolutionary new age that had only just gotten started—the phrase Woodstock Generation actually preceded baby boomers—Americans began turning backward for the reassuring, unchallenging gaze back at a past that wouldn’t change or surprise or shock.

Nostalgia was the charming sanctuary to which people retreated to feel better during their post-1960s hangover—and then never really left. They were encouraged by a culture industry that immediately created a wide-ranging nostalgia division of a kind that hadn’t existed before.

In discussing a paucity of cultural change over the decades that followed, Andersen goes too far at one point. He writes about a revelatory moment he had in 2007 while examining a photo of trend-setting New Yorkers from the mid-’80s and thinking their clothes and hair and make-up didn’t look dated. Cultural change, he realized, had slowed to a crawl—and he goes on to notice much the same in music, architecture, graphic design, and elsewhere.

Really? I cannot watch a movie from the ’90s without cringing at the men’s boxy suits, which, thank goodness, have given way to sleeker cuts. Didn’t skinny jeans happen? As for popular music, “dated” is exactly what I hear when I do any memory-lane listening to rock bands from the ’80s or ’90s.

But if Andersen’s eyesight and hearing fail him a little on this score, it can be easily forgiven. Because in most other ways, his book demonstrates a remarkable ability to see through to the truth of the politics and culture of recent decades, and to make sense of them in a way with crucial relevance to now.

Thankfully, once his “recent history” catches up to our scary and infuriating now, Andersen doesn’t stop. He leaves his readers with a thorough analysis of where we are and what we must do if we’re to reverse the “unmaking” of the country.

America, he writes, finds itself at a strategic inflection point both hastened and revealed by a coronavirus pandemic that has tested the country and found us wanting. Layer that crisis on top of a climate crisis going largely unaddressed, and on top of an extreme form of short-term-profit-obsessed capitalism that’s serving no one but the plutocrats, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious to critical masses of Americans that the current paradigm is played out. It’s time to rip the wool of nostalgia off our eyes and commit to the process of reform—create the new future—that past generations have done at their moments of crisis.

“We may or may not,” Andersen says, “be up to summoning the old-fashioned grit and gumption necessary to persevere and thrive in this newnew world.” This moment, he adds, “could mean an opportunity to rise to new heights, or it could be the beginning of the end.”

Past generations rose to their occasions. Andersen’s evil geniuses seized their moment of crisis and opportunity nearly a half-century ago when inflation, energy shocks, Watergate, and Vietnam conspired with the post-’60s hangover to convince Americans that that status quo had to go. Like them, today’s Left and its allies must “use all available crises to increase their political power and thereby begin to restore the democratic sharing of economic power and wealth we once had and even improve on it,” Andersen writes.

If the evil geniuses could pull off their plot, lovers of democracy can do the same with ours, Andersen believes. We have the numbers. Powerful cultural tides are rolling in our favor. We have the better ideas and more are out there, waiting to be grasped and acted on. There’s just one thing to do, and Andersen nails it in the book’s closing line: “So let’s go, already.”

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How America Went Haywire - The Atlantic

How America Lost Its Mind

The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history.

By Kurt Andersen

September 2017 Issue

*“You are entitled to your own opinion,

but you are not entitled to your own facts.”*

*— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

*“We risk being the first people in history to have been

able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive,

so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”*

— Daniel J. Boorstin,The Image: A Guide to

Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

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When did America become untethered from reality?

I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Reportwent on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection:truthiness.

“Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart … Face it, folks, we are a divided nation … divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart … Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.”

Whoa, yes, I thought: exactly. America had changed since I was young, when truthiness and reality-based communitywouldn’t have made any sense as jokes. For all the fun, and all the many salutary effects of the 1960s—the main decade of my childhood—I saw that those years had also been the big-bang moment for truthiness. And if the ’60s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it.

Each of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. Some of my best friends are very religious, and others believe in dubious conspiracy theories. What’s problematic is going overboard—letting the subjective entirely override the objective; thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings are just as true as facts. The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control.

From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies—every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, all of us free to reinvent ourselves by imagination and will. In America nowadays, those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts. Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the past half century, we Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation—small and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us. And most of us haven’t realized how far-reaching our strange new normal has become.

Much more than the other billion or so people in the developed world, we Americans believe—really believe—in the supernatural and the miraculous, in Satan on Earth, in reports of recent trips to and from heaven, and in a story of life’s instantaneous creation several thousand years ago.

If the 1960s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it....

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