Kurt Anderson: “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, as we wrestle with deep-rooted issues of social justice and inequality, it’s plain to see that fairness is in short supply. But our next guest says it wasn’t always the case. Kurt Andersen is a bestselling author and journalist. His latest book is “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History.” And here he is talking to our Walter Isaacson about the dangers of America’s hypercapitalism and the need to take a step back.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And, Kurt Andersen, welcome to the show.

KURT ANDERSEN, AUTHOR, “EVIL GENIUSES: THE UNMAKING OF AMERICA: A RECENT HISTORY”: Happy to be here.

ISAACSON: Your last book, “Fantasyland,” totally amazing, it was about conspiracy theories in America all the way going back to the Salem witch trials, how that’s part of our national character sometimes to believe in fantasies. And now you’re doing another book that is also about a conspiracy, but one you believe in. You kind of make note of that in the book. How did you move from “Fantasyland” to this book, “Evil Geniuses”?

ANDERSEN: Well, I moved from — really, the seeds of this book came out of the work, the research I was doing for “Fantasyland.” “Fantasyland” was the history of the last few hundred years, but a bunch of it was the last 50 years and how this proliferation of magical thinking and delusion and our chronic American weakness for entertaining falsehoods came to undo us. But the other half of the story was, I realized after I finished “Fantasyland,” and so it was really, OK, how did the economics change? How did the politics change? How does technology work here, all the sort of hard aspects of how America drove into a ditch these last 50 years? So, that set me on solving this. I mean, when I was out talking about “Fantasyland,” more than once, someone would say to me, well, you say that people deny climate change in America because of this history of not believing science and so forth. What about the Koch brothers? And it got me thinking, because they had a point, those readers, which is to say, yes, our magical thinking, fantasyland America predisposed us to — a lot of us — to believe climate change isn’t real, but it wouldn’t have happened had we not had this orchestrated effort by the economic right, by the oil companies, by everybody to cast doubt on science. That’s one of the things, as you know, that I have in this book is these extraordinary memos from the American Petroleum Institute, from the pollster Frank Luntz, others, saying, oh, we got to start casting doubt on science, that — in the late ’80s and ’90s.

ISAACSON: Explain who the players are in this.

ANDERSEN: Well, the kind of — one of the original players was the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who was just — had just become well-known during the ’60s, when anything goes, let’s see what everybody has to say, even though he was still a bit on the fringes at the University of Chicago. But he wrote this extraordinary Friedman doctrine, essay, that was published in “The New York Times Magazine” in the 1970s, saying, businesspeople, forget all this social responsibility stuff. Forget trying to improve the environment. Forget trying to be less racist, all of it. Profits are all that matter. And it was kind of a liberating rallying cry for the kind of hunkered-down CEOs and an economic writers to come up. And so he’s one. Lewis Powell, again, a guy who was not a particularly amazing or charismatic, distinguished Supreme Court justice, but who, just as a big-time lawyer in 1971, commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wrote out this memo, this 40-some-page memo laying out, here’s what we have to do to take back the power for big business, period. That’s what he did. And because it was so successful within a dozen years, or certainly a generation, it’s amazing at how specifically what happened — develop the think tanks, take over the media, influencing universities, become seriously militant, you CEOs, about lobbying for things in Washington, create more lobbying, change the judiciary — that’s our big option. It was like something in a bad novel, where you go, oh, this is ridiculous, this is too on the nose, how much Lewis Powell’s memo in 1971 had it. There are other memos. There’s one in 1980 that, again, funded by billionaires, a billionaire, Richard Mellon Scaife, to say, what do we need to do to make the law friendly to our right-wing way of thinking economically? Well, this is what you need to do. And, kaboom, Federalist Society is the epitome of that recommendation. And a year later, it was created. And now it is the single most powerful kind of influencer of law and jurisprudence.

ISAACSON: When you talk about the 1980s being sort of a paradigm shift, something happens then, what were we shifting from, and what did we shift to?

ANDERSEN: Well, some of my leftier friends will take issue with the fact when I say that, oh, apart from sexism and racism, America economically — economically, America was working pretty well from World War II through almost 1980. We were getting more and more equal. 1976, by the so-called Gini coefficient, which measures inequality in any state or country or whatever, was the best it ever has been in America, and certainly better than it has been since. We were doing pretty well. All boats were rising. As productivity rose, so did median incomes. As economic growth increased, all boats rose together, some poor, some rich, but all boats rose together. And — or — well, take CEO pay. It was 50 times the average CEO made than his or her — probably not so much her back then — but made 50 times as much as the average employee. Then, suddenly, it was decided, not because it had been illegal, but just because the norms changed, and greed is good as of the 1980s, the average CEO was making 200, 300, 500, today as much as 1,000 times as much as his or her employee. That’s what happened, being — somehow, we were — enough of us were hoodwinked to think, no, this is just the way it works. This is the free market. This is the way it’s always been. But it wasn’t the way it’s always been. Through progressivism, through the New Deal, through both Roosevelts, we put guardrails up and systems in place that made it work much better. And it was working much better, until these guys hijacked it and made it work worse, and made it work well only for the relatively well-to-do or the extremely-well-to-do.

ISAACSON: You say that you yourself was a useful idiot. And you have a wonderful section in the beginning of the book and excerpted some in “The Atlantic” that talks about how, in the 1980s, 1990s, you were riding high. You were in part of the media world in New York. And you went along, like most New Democrats and neoliberals did, with this whole change. Explain that to me and how you feel that that played into this paradigm shift we had in America.

ANDERSEN: Once the shift came, this conservative shift, some of which, some of which, a bit of which, was organic, happened after the late ’60s and early ’70s, but these guys, my evil geniuses, took it — took that slight pendulum swing, that course correction, and went off-road. So, they really changed the whole way of thinking through — and by so many means, by setting up a think tank, by giving money to universities, by changing our beliefs. Now, our — again, I don’t want to — I don’t want to grab you into my useful idiot cadre, Walter, but there was a good-faith effort by liberals, by Democrats, of the Gary Hart kind, of the Bob Kerrey kind, of the Bill Bradley kind, to say, wait, we are a free market country, and there’s a lot of room for compromise with the right, with free marketers. We were played, I think, and I have come to believe, looking back, that we were — because of the economic right. And that’s what this book is about. It’s not so much about religious rightists or anti-abortion people or — it’s about this long game played so brilliantly by these — by big business, by right-wing ideologues, the rest. They kept at it. And we, the New Democrats, said, yes, of course, there are market-based solutions. Oh, good public-private cooperation. Oh, good, yes, sure. Let’s — some deregulation is good. And it was. But then it just — the center kept moving right. And there was no more — basically, no more economic left. And that’s the problem, I think, because we, many of us liberals, college-educated people were doing well in our professions, and our jobs were not being offshored and not being outsourced and not being automated. And so we could afford to sort of take the long view and say, look, the industrial revolutions in the past have all worked out OK eventually. And it looks, this time, as if this is different.

ISAACSON: But you say that a whole lot of Democrats, including Democratic presidents, like Bill Clinton, they became New Democrats, and they kind of go along with this agenda.

ANDERSEN: Yes, well, they help by standing down, and not — they’re not being among — in the Democratic Party, the Democratic coalition, much in the way of a plausible, visionary, inspiring left alternative on the economy. Yes, they fail. Again. I — and I wasn’t a politician. I was just a lowly journalist. But I was — again, I include myself in that mea culpa that we, because — I mean, I wouldn’t — we were kind of bought off, right? I mean, I always rejected that idea. Oh, you mainstream corporate media types, you’re just bought off. No, no, no, no, I’m willing to tell the truth. And that’s what we’re — what I’m about, is telling the truth. Yes, but our — I would say — and their — and Gary Harts and others — indifference to the people suddenly out of work in the Rust Belt, and all of the other losers in this changed, go-go, financialized, technological new economy, the callousness was wrong, and took many of them and us too long to recognize, too many — like two generations to recognize. Until the 2000s, really until the 2010s, not that many national Democrats were standing up and going, this is wrong, and it’s a systemic problem. It’s harder than it has probably ever been in America to rise up, right, from generation to generation. And that didn’t — again, it didn’t just happen. It happened as a result of all of these changes in norms and laws and regulations that don’t benefit — not just don’t benefit the poor, don’t benefit the middle, and don’t even benefit the somewhat upper middle anymore.

ISAACSON: I’m going to read you something of a book that I think should be read as a companion to your “Evil Geniuses.” I know you have read it, and you actually cite Michael Sandel, the Harvard professor. But Michael wrote — writes in his upcoming book: “The elites who governed the United States from 1940 to 1980 were successful. They won World War II. They rebuilt Europe and Japan. “They strengthened the welfare state, dismantled segregation, and presided over four decades of economic growth that the rich and the poor both benefited from. By contrast, the elites” — and he said about meritocratic elites, not just a right-wing conspiracy — who have governed since the four days — four decades since then, in other words, our time, “have brought stagnant wages for most workers, inequalities of income, wealth disparities not seen since the 1920s. The Iraq War, endless wars in Afghanistan, financial deregulation, the decline of an infrastructure in our country, and a polarization and poisoning of our politics that comes from things like unlimited money in politics and gerrymandering. So, don’t we want to get back to a time when we protected workers and had more just and fair distribution of the wealth of society?

ANDERSEN: Absolutely, we do. And that’s why I spend so much time at the end of — near the end of the book talking about the forms of nostalgia. Nostalgia is not all bad, because nostalgia can also be — it’s a big, broad brush. And looking at — well, look, not so long ago, when you and I were young people, America was fair economically, pretty fair. And, yes, there was regulation. Yes, there was very high taxes on the wealthy, and so on and so forth. And it worked well. And people got rich. And the middle class felt secure and was expanding. So, that’s not — so, there are different kinds of nostalgia. There’s pointless nostalgia. We’re not going to be a big coal mining country again. And we’re not going to have illegal segregation again. And we’re not going to — so, there are wrong and useless and fantastical forms of nostalgia. Then there’s, well, let’s look at our recent history and say, like, wow, we were doing it much better. Let’s at least get back to doing it as well as we were doing in 1976 and as well as other countries, our rich country peers, are doing it now. So, there’s useless nostalgia and dangerous and pathological nostalgia. And then there is looking at history. And those are two different things. And we have to be careful not to say, oh, everything in the past is in the past and it’s no good. That’s not true either. There are just — there are parts of the past that we can look to as models for the future.

ISAACSON: Yes, but we have to remember that the past we’re looking for as models was deeply segregated, had great racial discrimination–

ANDERSEN: A hundred percent.

ISAACSON: — and, for that matter, discrimination against women and gays.

ANDERSEN: Yes, absolutely. So — and that’s the thing. That’s why, in so many ways, the ’70s, we were — we were beginning to address those issues, right? Legally — civil rights laws had happened. Title IX and women’s rights laws had happened. And we were getting economically more equal. All these different parts of progress were happening. Yes, you don’t want to go back to the patriarchy and white supremacy of life before the modern times. But that doesn’t mean that everything that was in place back then was terrible, because, economically, it was much better.

ISAACSON: What has the pandemic exposed about the truths about this country? And will it force a reckoning?

ANDERSEN: Well, it — I don’t know it will force a reckoning, but it certainly makes, to me, more naked this ruling paradigm of our version, our American version of hypercapitalism, and all that counts is money, and all other values and communitarian ideas, eh, nothing. It’s all about the money, Jack. It’s all about the stock market and the marketplace values in general. I think the pandemic and the unnecessarily failed response to it, driven by these various ideologies and instincts, will, I think, have the job of at least convincing people, like, yes, this is screwed up, and these people do not have my best interests or the public good at heart. So, I think it — I am hopeful, because I’m a hopeful, optimistic American, that this can be a moment for a reset, for a reckoning. Pick the word. But talk to me on November 4. And I will just — I will either be a hopeful American or at some new stage of hopelessness that I have never experienced before.

ISAACSON: Kurt Andersen, thank you so much for being on the show.

ANDERSEN: Oh, it was totally my pleasure, Walter. Thank you.