"The heart of the right’s successful strategy was to turn regulation of business into a simple-minded, single-minded for-or-against binary question. All politics (and most of life) involves simplifying complex issues."
A difficult but important read, "Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America" dissects decisions made 40 years ago that have had seismic impacts on financial policy, wealth disparity, social mores, and political bipolarity.
Kurt Andersen -- a self-described "appalled social democrat" -- painstakingly re-creates the cultural backdrop that inspired and enabled such power grabs, taking a decade-by-decade look at contributing factors.
"America’s tragic flaw is our systemic racism, and it’s a residue of a terrible decision our founders made to resist the new and perpetuate the old: the enslavement of black people."
"If omnipotent sadists had set out to take an extremely good, well-functioning piece of our political economy and social structure and make it undemocratic and oppressive, this is what their scheme would’ve looked like."
"As it turned out, the 1980s were the ’30s but in reverse: instead of a fast-acting New Deal, a time-release Raw Deal."
The book is a slog, made more challenging by some sentence and continuity structural problems that stand in the way of comprehension at times. But it's worth the effort -- Anderson's irreverent comments and occasional informal tone can break up monotony and make the troubling material more palatable in key moments.
"From the 1970s, liberals had been cruised toward the ideological center and beyond, eager to compromise, reasonableness and intellectual flexibility central to their self-identities -- which made people on the right who were wingers by temperament feel obliged to keep moving further right."
"That 'USA! USA!' chant with its cheerfully fuck-you edge ... finally to any sort of excited mob of Americans who felt like madly insisting on our awesomeness, to perform feelings of patriotic self-confidence, which used to abide more organically and implicitly."
"Evil Geniuses" does not make for fun reading and requires an intentional dedication -- but that doesn't make it any less essential.
"Modern liberals prided ourselves on not being idealogues, on entertaining all sorts of disparate policy ideas for improving the world, whereas the economic right really has one big, simple idea -- do everything possible to let the rich stay and get richer."
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