Forty years ago the United States was in the midst of a contentious presidential election. The incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter was being challenged by Republican B-grade movie actor turned politician Ronald Reagan.
Carter was widely viewed as a kind and gentle but weak leader who was unable to solve the country’s many problems. And America had a lot of problems back then. Not only was the economy sluggish, with low growth and very high interest rates but thanks to the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal the average American’s trust in their government was at an all time low.
Reagan promised a new vision for the country. Government was the problem he asserted. His plan was to lower taxes, especially on the wealthy, and shrink the size of government. With their increased wealth the rich would invest more in the economy he told voters. With all of that new investment the economy would grow at a faster rate than even during prosperous times of the 50s and 60s. The economy would grow so fast he assured us that before long the benefits would ‘Trickle Down’ to everyone so that ‘A rising tide would raise all boats’.
With his fatherly, show business personality Reagan easily won the 1980 election and proceeded to turn his agenda into policy. Since Reagan’s presidency that mantra of ‘Lower Taxes’ and ‘Shrink the Government’ has been gospel for the Republican Party, an act of faith without any evidence to support it. As the rich get richer, they still promise, the wealth will someday trickle down.
Regulations were another target; they just got in the way of Big Business making America a wealthier nation. Get rid of all of that anti-trust, anti-financial, pro-environment government meddling. The ‘Invisible Hand’ of a ‘Free Market’ would solve all of America’s problems.
Well over the next forty years the rich certainly got richer, the rest of us are still waiting for the trickle to start. In fact while the real wealth of the top 1% of Americans has quadrupled the wealth of the middle 50% has remained virtually the same and the wealth of the lowest quarter of Americans has actually fallen by about a third.
‘Evil Geniuses, the Unmaking of America, a Recent History’ by journalist Kurt Anderson is the story of how the people of the United States were duped into accepting a flawed, indeed a dangerous economic plan. It’s the story of how in the 60s a few ultra-conservative, New Deal hating politicians and economists began to build a movement that in the 80s not only dominated the Republican Party but received the tacit consent of many Democrats.
But the conservative movement in the US was about more than just the economy. The ‘Free Market’ conservatives not only co-opted the support of the ‘Moral Majority’ religious right but even bargained with the racist, anti-immigrant hate mongers in America for their support. This latter accommodation with the old white supremacists was started by none other than Richard Nixon as his ‘Southern Strategy’.
In ‘Evil Geniuses’ Kurt Anderson gives you all of the details of that monumental con game and even more importantly makes all of the connections. You’ll discover how the Koch brothers and other millionaires used their huge fortunes to fund conservative think tanks and endow university professorships with the sole intention of providing intellectual justification for their wholesale theft of the wealth of America. You’ll learn about how Roger Ailes, before creating the ‘fair and balanced’ FOX News was executive producer for Russ Limbaugh. Together the two demonstrated how to turn anger and hatred into entertainment, politics as show business laying out the path that would eventually lead to the ultimate hate monger Donald Trump.
There are far too many details to mention here, too many connections between the principal players; you’ll just have to read “Evil Geniuses’ to get the whole story. As Kurt Anderson himself says several times the story reads almost like a conspiracy theory except that, with the exception of a few individuals like the Koch brothers, all of the conspiring was done in public, there was virtually no attempt made to hide anything. Several times Mister Anderson points to the character of Gordon Gekko in the movie ‘Wall Street’ claiming that ‘Greed is Good’ as an example of the brazen economic immorality that has dominated right wing politics for the last 40 years.
I do have a few small criticisms of ‘Evil Geniuses’ however. For one thing Mister Anderson needs to learn how to present data in either graph or table form. Throughout ‘Evil Geniuses’ we are giving a good deal of statistics about GDP or unemployment or income inequality exclusively in prose form, not the easiest way to absorb a large number of facts. I know that Mister Anderson is a magazine writer and editor not a scientist, but he must know some science journalists who could give him a few pointers on how to use graphs and tables.
Let me give one example. Anderson discusses a survey where people in the US are shown pie charts illustrating the wealth breakdown in two countries, i.e. how much the top 1% own, the next 10% own on down to the people at the bottom. The people surveyed aren’t told which countries are represented, they are in fact the US and Sweden, and are asked, based on the information from the graphs only, which country they would rather live in. Of course more than 90% chose Sweden. Well I think that the point could have been made more effectively if the pie graphs themselves had been shown! If Anderson had access to the survey’s results he could have gotten access to the pie graphs and just shown them! Really, in my opinion a dozen or so graphs or tables would have greatly improved the punch of ‘Evil Geniuses’.
Other than that I give my highest approval to ‘Evil Geniuses’ by Kurt Anderson. It is without doubt an important and well researched book in these trying times for our country. In addition to being important however it also succeeds in being an absorbing, enjoyable book, a combination not at all easy to accomplish.