Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

In this sweeping jeremiad, journalist Andersen (coauthor, You Can’t Spell America Without Me) traces the origins of today’s economic inequality and political dysfunction to “the quite deliberate reengineering of our economy and society since the 1960s by a highly rational confederacy of the rich, the right, and big business.” This reengineering, Andersen contends, was aided and abetted by a more spontaneous cultural trend: “a wholesale national plunge into nostalgia” in TV (Happy Days), movies (Grease), music (Bruce Springsteen), and design (New Urbanism). Right-wing politicians and economists exploited this “nostalgia boom,” Andersen writes, by pitching regulatory rollbacks, tax cuts, and small government as a return to a more “rugged” and “frontiersy” America. Andersen also blames the Clinton administration’s deregulation of financial markets and the Supreme Court’s gutting of campaign finance laws for contributing to today’s “extreme insecurity and inequality,” and holds out tentative hope that the coronavirus pandemic and protests against racial injustice will shock the country out of its economic, political, and cultural stasis. Much of Andersen’s material will be familiar to newshounds, but he arranges it into a cohesive argument backed by hard data and stinging prose. Readers will get a clearer picture of how the U.S. got to where it is today. (Aug.)