Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America QUOTES

1 " ...The economic right was shrewd enough to understand that the issues they didn't care much about--abortion, gay rights, creationism--did matter to liberals, and that those culture wars drew off political energy from the left that might otherwise have fueled complaints and demands about the reconstructed political economy. And Establishment Republicans could keep reassuring themselves that when push came to shove, their culture-warrior political partners didn't ever actually wind, that abortion was still legal, gay and lesbian rights expanded, creationism kept out of the public school curricula. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

2 " As the 1990s began, the right stayed angry and upset and kept growing in size and power thanks to the primitives, the bigots, the Protestant fundamentalists and cowboy commando conspiracy fantasists. But the grown-ups on the right, the economic right, corporate leaders and the rest of the rich, kept their eye on the prize—less taxation, less regulation of business, greed is good—and they maintained control of the party. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

3 " ...Libertarians fantasize that they're action heroes and entirely self-made. They tend to exempt themselves from the truism that there but for the grace of God goes each one of them, because an implicit premise of their ultra-individualism is that anybody in America can make it in their own and that unfair disadvantages either don't exist or can't be helped. I have a hunch that the demographic profile of self-identified libertarians--94 percent white, 68 percent male, 62 percent in their forties or younger--has something to do with those beliefs and fantasies. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

4 " For most of us insist that somewhere in the past there was a golden age. But people who are forever dreaming of a mythical past are merely saying that they are afraid of the future. The past which men create for themselves is a place where thought is unnecessary and happiness is inevitable. The American temperament leans generally to a kind of mystical anarchism. In 1976 the Republicans were not yet the party of unhinged mystical anarchism they became over the next four decades. Rather, after the unhappiness, unfriendliness, cynicism, paranoia, and finally the high crimes of Richard Nixon, Americans were eager to install Mr. Rogers "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

5 " The federal minimum wage is frozen for the entire decade, longer than ever, which translates to an effective pay cut of one-third for America’s lowest-paid workers. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

6 " People’s incomes over a certain level aren’t taxed to pay for Social Security at all. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

7 " When I started this book, I worried that my strong sense that we’d arrived at a historic crossroads equivalent to the 1770s or 1860s or 1930s, America’s Fourth Testing, might seem like a stretch. By the end, I was no longer concerned about overstatement, particularly after the pandemic arrived—a new virus requiring new behaviors and policies, work and life suddenly more than ever dependent on the Internet, government failure by leaders ideologically dedicated to undermining government, maximizing corporate profit at all costs, and an American hyperindividualism whipped up by the right that makes a huge common problem harder to solve. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

8 " In 1910 President Theodore Roosevelt, a rich Republican, said that “corporate funds” used “for political purposes” were “one of the principal sources of corruption” and had “tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

9 " Looking back now, it’s hard not to conclude that the anxious nominal party of the economic left, Democrats, was magnificently played by the committed and confident economic right, Republicans, for forty years. I’m not saying the shift in popular sentiment wasn’t partly organic. But Democrats, after the Republican presidential landslides of 1972 and 1984, remained too dazed and confused and scared for too long. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

10 " ...In all this, financialization has done what people back in the 1950s and '60s and '70s worried and warned that the Communists would do if they took over: centralize control of the economy, turn Americans into interchangeable cogs serving an inhumane system, and allow only a well-connected elite to live well. Extreme Capitalism resembles Communism: yet another whopping irony. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

11 " In 1982 I reported and wrote a Time cover story called “Inmate Nation” about what’s now called mass incarceration, because the number of U.S. inmates had just started to increase sharply and, to my editor and me, alarmingly—that year by 43,000 to 412,000. The total number of inmates today is 1.5 million, of whom 130,000 are in privately run prisons. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

12 " MIT economist David Autor has written, “but a serious challenge in determining who owns it and how to share it. Our chief economic problem will be one of distribution "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

13 " MIT economist David Autor has written, “but a serious challenge in determining who owns it and how to share it. Our chief economic problem will be one of distribution, not scarcity. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

14 " For Greenspan, however, the problem isn’t extreme inequality per se, or the newly extreme inequality between the great majority and the rich, but rather the envy of the poor for the middle class. And his proposed solution to that, honest to God, was to contrive to pay middle-class workers even less, to bring their incomes down closer to those of the poor. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

15 " History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes, "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

16 " Such a colossal irony: after socialists and Communists in the 1930s and then the New Left in the 1960s had tried and failed to achieve a radical class-based reordering of the American political economy, the economic far right took its shot at doing that in the 1970s and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest hope or fear. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

17 " corporate funds” used “for political purposes” were “one of the principal sources of corruption” and had “tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

18 " During the 1980s, prudent New Deal rules concerning mortgage loans were repealed, allowing people to get home loans with too little money down and interest rates that would “adjust” to unaffordable heights. So during the 1980s, the average price of a house in America doubled. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

19 " the choice isn’t between automation and non-automation,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the MIT economists focused on digital technology and work. “It’s between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

20 " A lot of the financial players since the 1970s have indeed evolved into parasites, like tapeworms. Tapeworms live in the gut, to which they attach themselves by “hooks” and “suckers,” then “get food by eating the host’s partly digested food, depriving the host of nutrients.” They can grow hideously large, many feet long, and live inside hosts for decades. Thinking about the future of our political economy, though, I was heartened when I read that “hosts also develop ways of getting rid of or protecting themselves from parasites. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America