America's alt-right turn

Book review of Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America. A Recent History

Kurt Andersen had good reason to be angry with himself for having missed the biggest story of his life. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, where he was editor of the  Harvard Lampoon. For the last four decades he has been a multi-faceted journalist — architecture and design critic for Time; founder of satire magazine  Spy; editor-in-chief of New York; creator of award-winning programme on public radio, et al. Also, author of several novels and best-selling books of historical fiction, most recently Fantasyland, a history of the last 500 years of America highlighting its peculiar susceptibility to falsehood and illusion.

Yet, he did not see how a core set of worthies drawn from business, economics, politics, law and the media — influencers in social media jargon, whom he labels evil geniuses — conspired to make the US business and economy take a sharp right turn in the 1980 so that the dominant wisdom became a set of inter-locked values of conservatism and libertarianism. All regulation is bad; government is the problem; taxes can go only one way —down; the judiciary’s sole criterion in assessing regulations on business should be to advance efficiency, disregarding fairness equity, safety and so on. The result: A country where the well-off and the very rich have captured a disproportionate share of the national wealth so that today’s US is as unequal as it was in the 1920s, before the New Deal, reversing the nearly four decades of shared prosperity after World War II.

In a more original contribution, Mr Andersen further shows how America’s temperament, which leans towards what Walter Lippmann labelled as “mystical anarchism”, has been exploited by the same evil geniuses, fortuitously joined by fundamentalist Christians, to ensure that the US remains trapped in a nostalgic and mythical past where “thought is unnecessary and happiness is inevitable” (Lippmann again). The result is a people so trapped in the past that they are afraid of the future. Certainly a future ruled by AI, robotics, bio-engineering, continuous learning, climate change and abortion on demand. All that in a US in which WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) will be a minority by 2042.

In the main, this book is a  mea culpa, fuelled by Mr Andersen’s outrage at having missed this story even as he strode the national stage as a major social commentator. And precisely because he is a good journalist, who challenges himself to conquer new mental frontiers in pursuit of the holy grail of truth, this book is the answer to Everything You Wanted to Know and Did Not Know Who to Ask on How the US has Become so Unequal, Unfair and Divided.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America. A Recent History 

Author: Kurt Andersen

Publisher: Random House

Pages: 390

Price: Rs 2,143

Mr Andersen keeps the narrative taut, like a whodunit, as he shows that what has unfolded in the US over the last four decades was a concerted effort in which the conspirators camouflaged the naked pursuit of their greed and self -interest behind the seeming pristineness and universalism of the values of libertarianism, conservatism and fundamental Christianity. Particularly devastating are the chapters in which Mr Andersen demonstrates how this assorted set brought about the dominance of Wall Street, meaning financial capitalism or making money from money, over Main Street, making money from producing a good or a service. Mr Andersen is equally convincing in showing how the Democrats, frozen in the headlights, have been unable to reverse course in any significant way, none more tragically so than Barack Obama who could not change the nature of financial capitalism even after the 2008 worldwide meltdown.

The list of villains in this grim reality play is very long and very distinguished but if one has to nominate the Prime Influencer, the honour must go to 85-year-old Charles Koch, the little known 11th richest businessman in the world. An inheritor of oil wealth, Koch set out his libertarian and conservative agenda as early as 1974 and has since worked indefatigably to bend the inter-related realms of US business, economics, politics (Governments and legislatures, Union and states), think tanks and the media to keep the US on the straight and the narrow.

Among the most impressive examples of the far-sightedness of Koch and company is their ascendance in the higher US judiciary. They created the Federalist Society in US law campuses in 1982 for students to imbibe conservative and libertarian values and interpret the Constitution as an Originalist. Their efforts are now reaching their fruition: The last two Trump nominees to the US Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, blooded their legal nous in the Federalist Society, with Mr Gorsuch being the first from those ranks to make it to the highest court. 

As Mr Andersen notes, the one election promise Donald Trump has delivered unfailingly is that all nominees to the higher judiciary would be Federalist Society alumni. The latest is Amy Coney Barrett, after whose nomination Conservatives will be a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court. 

Mr Trump knows that such a US Supreme Court could come in handy if an unusually large number of mail ballots in contentious states delay the announcement of the election result on November 3. Read this book to understand why, if and when Joe Biden becomes president, among his first decisions will need to be to raise the bench strength of the Supreme Court, if the US is to veer away from its self-defeating path since Ronald Reagan became president in 1980.