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

everything looking and sounding more or less the way they did a generation ago, provided daily reinforcement of the sense that the status quo is permanent and unchangeable across the board—in other words, a kind of fatalistic hopelessness of the kind that was standard before democracy existed, before revolutions, before the Enlightenment. We’ve thus been discouraged by the culture as well as by much of politics from imagining that the economy might be radically redesigned and remade once again, encouraged to think that fundamental change is either no longer possible or no longer desirable or both. If the present is more or less indistinguishable from the recent past, why won’t the future be pretty much the same as the present but with more robots? There are the gadgets and bits of fresh software, but otherwise we have become unaccustomed to the new, many of us skeptical and afraid of the new, confused about how to think of the past or cope with the future.
    Unlike longing for a fairer economy of the kind we used to have, which would require a collective decision to bring back, the itch of cultural and social nostalgia is easy for individuals to scratch and keep scratching. So for many Americans, who spent several decades losing their taste for the culturally new and/or getting screwed by a new political economy based on new technology, fantasies about restoring the past have turned pathological. Thus the angriest organized resistance to the new, the nostalgias driving the upsurge of racism and sexism and nativism—which gave us a president who seemed excitingly new because he asserted an impossible dream of restoring the nastily, brutishly old. The recent wave of politicized nostalgia is global, of course, taking over governments from Britain to Russia to India. But those countries at least have the excuse of being ancient.
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    “We respect the past,” President Obama said of Americans when I was just beginning work on this book, right before he was replaced by President Trump, “but we don’t pine for it. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it. We are boisterous and diverse and full of energy, perpetually young in spirit.” As was his wont, he was being aspirational, wishful, reminding us of our better angels. It was his gentle, upbeat way of saying hey, you know, folks, we really have been obsessively pining for the past and excessively fearing the future.
    But he was correct about our history and founding national character: openness to the new was a defining American trait . From the start, four centuries ago, we were eager to try the untried and explore the uncharted, even or especially when it looked risky or terrifying. Americans’ innovative, novelty-seeking, risk-taking attitudes were key to most of the country’s exceptional successes. The United States was a self-consciously new species of nation, the first one invented from scratch and based on new conceptions of freedom and fairness and self-government and national identity. Our story at its best was a process of collectively, successfully imagining, embracing, and exemplifying the new—then gloating whenever the rest of the world followed our lead.
    Of course, that process of perpetual reinvention and refreshment always involved tension between people pushing for the new and people resisting it, sometimes with existential ferocity: irreconcilable differences over status quos resulted first in the American Revolution and then in the Civil War and then the politics of the Depression. In our history so far, at the critical junctures, the forces of the new have eventually triumphed over the anciens régimes.
    Almost a half-century ago, the country began a strange hiatus from its founding mission of inventing and reinventing itself in pursuit of the new and improved. Since then Americans have gotten variously confused and contentious and paralyzed concerning the old days, about which parts of the American past can or can’t and should or