Evil Geniuses Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Evil Geniuses

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Zusammenfassung von Evil Geniuses

Name: Evil Geniuses
Rating: 3.8 (152 reviews)
Author: Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen

The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

3.8 (152 Bewertungen)

26 Min.

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Democracy

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What’s in it for me? Learn about the economic right’s takeover of America.

America is known as the land of opportunity – a beacon of hope for democracies all across the world. Well, it used to be at least. So what’s changed? Quite simply, the United States has started to look backward, to the bad old days when robber barons and a tiny aristocracy owned the greatest share of wealth and controlled political power.

It’s an old story. A powerful elite has taken too much for itself, while everyone else struggles. Unable to find secure work, housing, and health care, many Americans today must be wondering what happened to their great country. And that’s just what we’ll find out in these blinks, which examine the shadowy plots, leading political figures, and economic ideologies that have led the US to its current predicament.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how nostalgia signaled the end of progressive politics in the US;
why liberals became complacent; and
why we’re still living, in a very real sense, in the 1980s.

Since the end of the twentieth century, America has become more nostalgic – and stagnant.

America was once the land of tomorrow. Leaving the old monarchies and traditions of Europe behind, it looked toward new horizons. New religions, new inventions, and new enterprises all flourished.

The twentieth century brought radical change, too – think space travel, rock and roll, and the civil rights movement. But sometime at the end of the last century, this drive toward modernity began to slow down.

The key message here is: Since the end of the twentieth century, America has become more nostalgic – and stagnant.

Author Kurt Andersen first noticed this in 2007, when he came across a newspaper photograph from twenty years earlier. The photo showed some stylish-looking people standing around on a US city street. Studying their clothes and hairstyles, he noticed how similar they looked to people in 2007.

This led him to something of an epiphany. Looking at cars, fashion, music, and design in 2007, he realized how little things had fundamentally changed since 1987. Aside from mobile phones or computers, there was very little in 2007 that looked or sounded new.

By contrast, the twentieth century ushered in one radically new cultural era after another. Just think of the dramatic transition from 1955 to 1965 – the freedom-fueled music and fashion of the 1960s were worlds apart from the conservative norms of the 1950s. So what happened?

Well, quite simply, America has abandoned the new and embraced nostalgia. This turn toward nostalgia began as early as the 1970s. Just after the radical changes of the 1960s, a great chunk of the American public started to quietly long for the past – or, more accurately, an imagined past, where everything felt more familiar and stable.

This could be seen in the mass popularity of movies and TV shows of the period, like Grease, American Graffiti, and Happy Days, which were all set in idealized versions of the 1950s and early ’60s.

This desire for nostalgia in the US hasn’t slowed as we’ve moved further into the twenty-first century. Aside from technological advances, cultural change seems to be at a standstill. Fashion, music, and design are still repeating styles from different periods in the twentieth century. Retro is cool.

Why does this matter? Well, it reflects a broader impasse that goes way beyond fashion or music. It tells us that America is stuck in a time warp, both politically and economically. And with the problems the country faces, like inequality and climate change, it simply can’t afford to look backward.

Nostalgia opened the door to the economic right.

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.

Two men, Milton Friedman and Lewis Powell, were instrumental to the resurgence of the economic right in the 1970s.

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.

The right adopted some strategies of their political opponents to gain power.

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.

The American right’s success owes a great deal to liberal complacency.

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.

The political changes set in motion by the economic right in the 1980s still affect the US today.

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.

One of the results of the right’s victories in the 1980s was the birth of financialization.

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.

America must reform dramatically – or face a dystopian future.

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.

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Worum geht es in Evil Geniuses?

Evil Geniuses (2020) describes the rise of the economic right after the 1960s and the consequences of their policies today. From Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan, it looks at the significance of some of the right’s central figures while also sketching a broader narrative that explains how the US has ended up as it has today.

Wer Evil Geniuses lesen sollte

Anyone interested in American history
Americans looking for a way to explain their present situation
Fans of political history and economics

Über den Autor

Kurt Andersen is a journalist, novelist, and radio host. He’s the author of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, which was a New York Times best seller. He’s also the author of the critically acclaimed novels True Believers, Heyday, and Turn of the Century.

Kategorien mit Evil Geniuses

Politics History Economics

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