Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History Read Free

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 catchphrases 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.
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    So how did big business and the very rich and their political allies and enablers manage to convince enough Americans in the 1970s and ’80s that the comfortable economic rules and expectations we’d had in place for half of the twentieth century were obsolete and should be replaced by an older set of assumptions and protocols?
    Most people at the time didn’t realize just how immense and pervasive the changes were and certainly not where they’d lead. Reagan’s election and landslide reelection were plainly big deals, some sort of national mandate, but at the time the 1980s seemed more like a post-1960s reversion to the historically typical, not really its own moment of wrenching transformation. Whereas during the 1960s, everyone was aware we were experiencing a great turning point in culture and politics, with almost everything changing in obvious ways—like how in the ’30s people were