Evil Geniuses summary

After President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal in 1932, the US became a modern, center-left country that looked after its citizens. The New Deal helped provide secure employment that brought good pensions, as well as relief for the poor and unemployed. 

When Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency ushered in a wave of liberal reforms in the 1960s, it looked like the ideas of the economic right were in permanent retreat. Anyone who proposed cutting taxes for big corporations or slashing welfare was considered a strange, fringe character. 

As the political right plotted their comeback, there were a few especially influential figures. These were people who’d watched, with horror, as the 1960s unfolded and sentiment turned against big business and the rich. And even though their economic ideas were unpopular for decades, they hung in there. They waited for the right moment to pounce. 

Two of these people would become particularly important to the economic counter-revolution.

When you think of the radical elements of the 1960s, you probably have a few images in mind. Maybe you see hippies at Woodstock tripping on LSD. Perhaps you picture student protestors demonstrating against the government, or the banners and slogans of the anti-nuclear campaigns. 

Funnily enough, the opponents of all of this radicalism – the kinds of conservatives we’ve met in the previous blinks – ended up stealing some of its ideas and campaigning styles.

At a certain point in time, it must’ve seemed to American liberals that they had won most political arguments. The logic of the New Deal, with its secure employment, strong labor unions, and relief for the poor, had become embedded into American society. And even though there was some way to go on race, gender, and sexuality, progress had been made.

So, fatefully, after the 1960s, American liberals became complacent – and let their guard down.

We’ve established that the 1980s in America was the moment when capitalism was unleashed – when unadulterated greed was allowed free rein. 

However, behind the ostentation of the decade, the economic right forced lots of quieter changes, whose consequences we’re still experiencing today. The 1980s, in many ways, have never really ended.

With the 1980s came the birth of the archetypal Wall Street shark. In the 1987 film Wall Street, these sharks are personified by Gordon Gekko, a coldhearted financier who declares, “Greed is good.”

As well as depicting the greed of the 1980s, a character like Gekko symbolizes a change in the economic structure of the US. Whereas before, the country had focused on making and manufacturing things, a great chunk of the economy was now based entirely on financial speculation. 

For many Americans today, this lengthy campaign by the economic right has resulted in a more precarious existence – one in which secure work, housing, and health care are hard to come by. Rather than Roosevelt’s New Deal, they’ve got a Raw Deal.

And the future looks scary. In the worst-case scenario, they will be rendered obsolete in an increasingly automated workplace, while the elite class grows wealthier off the profits.