By GREGORY N. HEIRES
Our rigged political system and economy are products of decades of bad public policies and corporate practices. These actions have produced the greatest inequality since the Great Depression, killed off unions, and dramatically increased the concentration of political power in the hands of a political elite.
“Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History” by Kurt Andersen tells the story of how corporate interests, conservative politicians, and right-wing professionals worked together to change the rules of the game to help the rich get off at the expense of the rest of us.
Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America:
A Recent History
By Kurt Andersen
Random House; 464 pages
August 2020
Hardcover: $26.99
ISBN 10: 1984801341 /
ISBN 13: 9781984801340
In addition to lifting government regulations and attacking government programs, these “evil geniuses” counted on the support of Republicans and Democrats alike. As they shifted the political consensus to the right, they aimed to erase the legacy of the New Deal.
The Cultural Divide
Andersen dates the country’s shift to the right to the cultural divide that emerged in the 1970s. A backlash to the civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, the 1960s counterculture, the women’s movement, liberal social policies, and a mass nostalgia for the romanticized 1950s created the political climate for conservative change, he argues.
In 1971, corporate lawyer Lewis F. Powell Jr., who later became a U.S. Supreme Court justice, laid out a fight-back strategy for Corporate America in a confidential memo, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The memo discussed how the free enterprise system was being undermined by the liberal media, colleges, the pulpit, intellectual and literary journals, socialists, communists, the arts and sciences, and politicians.
“The painfully sad truth,” the memo stated, “is that business, including the boards of directors and the top executives of corporations great and small and business organizations at all levels, often have responded — if at all — by appeasement, ineptitude, and ignoring the problem.”
Powell urged the Chamber of Commerce and its corporate and political supporters to respond to the assault on free enterprise by creating a nationwide network of think tanks, university beachheads, and sympathetic media devoted to creating and publicizing conservative public policy and ultimately winning political power.
One of the guiding lights of the fight-back was economist Milton Friedman. He promoted the doctrine that the pursuit of maximum profits was the central purpose of economic activity, reinforcing the conservatives’ moral argument for rapacious capitalism. This perspective was embodied by the trader portrayed by Michael Douglas in the film “Wall Street,” who proclaimed, “Greed is good.”
Beginning in the 1980s, right-wing professionals and corporate interests started in earnest to build up the infrastructure of the nationwide network proposed by Powell to create the ideological justification and blueprints for tearing apart the post-World War II political consensus that had built upon New Deal policies and supported for programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the War Against Poverty.
Eventually, the evil geniuses behind this agenda triumphed. Democrats lost the lock on the power they held in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Republicans swept to power in statehouses and county and local governments.
Democratic Complicity
Yet Democrats aren’t blameless. Politicians and college-educated professionals from both sides of the political aisle increasingly bought into the notion of being “socially liberal but fiscally conservative.”
An early convert was Gary Hart, whose 1974 stump speech for the U.S. Senate was called “The End of the New Deal.” As a New Democrat, President Bill Clinton would later declare that “the era of big government is over.” His vice president, Al Gore, spoke of “reinventing government,” which provided the rationale for contracting out and privatizing government services. Clinton dismantled the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for poor mothers and children, a program that had existed for decades.This forced single moms to participate in work programs to receive benefits and imposed restrictions on how long assistance was available. Clinton also signed legislation to toughen criminal law, which led to a dramatic increase in incarceration, especially of African Americans.
Our Unfair and Broken Economy
The cost of all of this?
Over the past 40 years, we have witnessed a systemic economic squeeze on the middle class and the poor due to anti-worker corporate practices and the erosion of progressive public policy.
The share of wealth owned by the richest 1 percent of the population has doubled. The collective net worth of the bottom half of the country fell to nearly zero. The median weekly pay for full-time workers has increased by only 0.1 percent a year. The wages of ordinary Americans no longer rise alongside productivity. The fruits of productivity have gone to the top 10 percent, whose incomes have kept up with productivity.
Along with wages, upward mobility has stagnated. The privatization of student loans has saddled college graduates with about one-and-a-half times the debt ($11.5 trillion in 2019) of credit cardholders. Political resistance has blocked increases in the federal minimum wage, which has declined 31percent since 1968. Today, workers earning the federal minimum wage have the present equivalent of $6,800 less per year to spend on food, rent, and other essentials than did their counterparts 50 years ago. Traditional pensions have largely been replaced by risky 401(k) savings plans.
Thanks to the success of the Right, a majority of states have anti-union right-to-work laws. In 2019, the share of U.S. workers represented by unions was —10.3 percent — below its level four decades ago. According to the Economic Policy Institute, research shows that this de-unionization accounts for a sizable share of the growth in inequality over those years — around 13–20 percent for women and 33–37 percent for men. Working people are now losing on the order of $200 billion per year due to the erosion of union coverage over the last four decades — with that money being redistributed upward to the rich, EPI says.
But the Right’s triumph has not only been an economic one. Virtually all of President Donald Trump’s judicial appointees came from the Federalist Society, a group of conservatives and libertarian lawyers founded in 1982. Conservative media feed the public with conservative dogma. Over decades, corporations have steadily shifted the burden of health costs to their employees. The changing political climate culminated with Trump’s election, which helped create the political climate favorable to the neo-fascist and white supremacist coup attempt we witnessed on Jan. 6.
A New Progressive Era?
So, what is to be done?
Andersen recounts how, in many respects, he embraced the move to the right but has now grown disenchanted, morally outraged, and more progressive as he witnessed the social, political, cultural, and economic wreckage caused by the conservative cabal he describes. Yet, he appears cautiously hopeful that the right-wing agenda has run its course.
Indeed, “Evil Geniuses” raises the question of whether the United States has reached a transition point that will result in a paradigm shift in which the country will enter a more progressive, more inclusive era. Will, the current division within the Republican Party enable the Democrats to expand upon the gains they made in the 2020 elections? Or do we face a deepening threat of white supremacy and fascism along with conservative public policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us?
“For Americans now,” Andersen asks, “will surviving a year (or more) of radical uncertainty help persuade a majority to make radical changes in our political economy to reduce their chronic economic uncertainty and insecurity? Or will Americans remain hunkered forever, as confused and anxious and paralyzed as we were before 2020, descend into digital feudalism, forgo a renaissance, and retreat into cocoons of comfortable cultural stasis providing the illusion that nothing much is changing or ever can change?”
Meanwhile, now that the Democratic Party has won control of the U.S. Congress and the White House, many of us are asking whether the political will is there to ensure that needed major changes–health care, police, labor law reform; a federal jobs guarantee; paid family leave; addressing structural racism; child care; fairer taxes; affordable housing; the elimination of college debt, among others–are carried out. How deep is the legacy of the neoliberal New Democrats within the party? How effective will Republicans be at blocking reform? Can we eliminate the neo-fascist threat?
This isn’t a moment for the country’s movement for economic, political, and social justice to let down its guard.
The New Crossroads blogger Gregory N. Heires is a former president of the NY Metro Labor Communications Council. This review originally was published in the April edition of the Jobs for All Newsletter, which is available at https://njfac.org.