Evil Geniuses

What happened when a nation built on novelty began craving the past? Kurt Andersen’s book argues that America’s transformation from the 1970s onward wasn’t random—it was a coordinated shift in culture, politics, and economics that reengineered the country’s social contract. You need to see how nostalgia, corporate mobilization, legal reform, deregulation, and financialization all worked together to dismantle mid‑century egalitarianism and replace it with a market‑first ethos that still shapes your daily life.

Cultural origins of the shift

America began as a self‑declared land of the new. Tocqueville admired its restless innovation; postwar prosperity and the space race strengthened optimism about progress. But after the chaotic 1960s—assassinations, Vietnam, racial unrest, and rapid social change—many Americans grew exhausted with novelty. In the 1970s nostalgia became refuge. Films like American Graffiti and TV shows like Happy Days retreated into feel‑good visions of simpler decades. Cultural nostalgia softened public expectations for the future and made voters receptive to politicians promising restoration.

How nostalgia met political engineering

That cultural craving aligned with an elite strategy. Corporate leaders and conservative philanthropists—guided by Lewis Powell’s secret 1971 memo—mounted a sustained counter‑Establishment campaign. They funded think tanks, law programs, and lobbying networks to reshape ideas and rules. This long game wasn’t about temporary election wins; it built enduring institutions that professionalized the right’s influence across academia, courts, and media.

Legal and economic transformations

You see that infrastructure at work in the rise of the Federalist Society and doctrines like originalism and Law & Economics. The conservative legal movement reframed constitutional interpretation around the Founders’ intent and redefined antitrust law through economic efficiency, narrowing its purpose to consumer prices. Those changes gave corporations greater freedom to consolidate and treat markets as self‑correcting—producing decades of concentration and wage stagnation.

Building the new economic order

Deregulation swept industries from airlines to cable television. Initially bipartisan, it dismantled protective scaffolds that balanced corporate power with consumer and labor interests. Meanwhile, financiers turned debt into profit centers. Junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, and later mortgage securitization shifted economic gravity to Wall Street. The “shareholder value” revolution converted corporate purpose into stock‑price maximization, enriching executives and investors while hollowing pensions and middle‑class security.

Labor collapse and liberal complicity

Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers (PATCO) in 1981 signaled the death of workplace power. Employers adopted permanent strike replacements and outsourcing tactics, accelerating union decline. At the same time, centrist liberals embraced market modernization—New Democrats and think‑tank intellectuals argued for pragmatic, pro‑business reform. That convergence created bipartisan consensus around deregulation and austerity, ensuring the new order endured.

The result: a financialized, nostalgic America

By the 1990s finance dominated corporate strategy, labor lost bargaining power, and culture recycled old styles instead of imagining new futures. Automation and offshoring deepened inequality, and antitrust retreat allowed monopoly power to flourish. The pandemic finally exposed the fragility of this system—weak public institutions, concentrated wealth, and political polarization undermined collective response. Andersen’s message to you is clear: the story is not fate but design. Understanding how nostalgia enabled power consolidation helps you see how cultural moods influence structural outcomes—and why reviving genuine progress demands cultural and political imagination.

Andersen begins with a cultural paradox: a country founded on innovation slowly turned into a nation obsessed with its own past. Americans once saw novelty as national destiny—new towns, new industries, new frontiers. Tocqueville noted that energy; the postwar boom turned it into a civic religion. But the rapid social revolutions of the 1960s overwhelmed people’s capacity to absorb change. By the 1970s, nostalgia became comfort food for the anxious middle class.

Peak new and cultural exhaustion

The early 1960s marked what Andersen calls Peak New—Kennedy’s New Frontier, Jetsons optimism, and science‑fiction confidence. Then came turbulence: Vietnam, assassinations, protests, and cultural upheaval. People began yearning for reassurance. Hollywood responded with backward‑looking films and TV shows, revivals of 1950s aesthetics, and sentimental rituals of remembrance. This nostalgia wasn’t trivial—it became an economic and political force that shaped voters’ psychology.

Political uses of nostalgia

Politicians exploited the mood. Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” ad sold deregulation and tax cuts as restoration of simpler virtues. A promise to return to an idealized past repackaged complex economic reforms as moral renewal. The nostalgia industry—from vintage architecture to retro TV—made citizens comfortable with looking backward rather than demanding new social structures. When culture stopped believing in a different future, neoliberal policies found little resistance.

The cultural consequence

By the digital age, nostalgia was permanent. Streaming platforms, reboots, and curated algorithms turned history into a menu always on demand. Andersen argues that this endless recycling bred political complacency. When everything familiar can be replayed, change feels unnecessary or even dangerous. Culture became the emotional shield for an economy turning the clock backward on equality.

The major structural pivot came from the corporate elite. In 1971 Justice Lewis Powell, soon to join the Supreme Court, authored a confidential memo warning business leaders that intellectuals and media were undermining capitalism. He urged a long‑term mobilization: fund scholars, litigate aggressively, and build institutions to defend free enterprise. His memo became catalyst for a multi‑decade conservative revival.

Building an infrastructure of influence

Industrial heirs—Scaife, Coors, Olin, Koch—answered Powell’s call. They financed think‑tanks such as Heritage, AEI, and Cato; endowed law schools; and created lobbying hubs like the Business Roundtable. Heritage provided ready‑made policy blueprints for future administrations. Corporate lobbying became data‑driven and professionalized. Campus programs seeded ideological continuity by training economists and lawyers in market‑first doctrines.

The long game logic

Andersen shows this wasn’t mere reaction; it was deliberate institution‑building. Donors didn’t demand immediate returns—they sought cultural capture. By the 1980s the right’s intellectual apparatus could generate media narratives, court doctrines, and policy papers that legitimated its worldview. When Reagan arrived, the groundwork was ready: tax cuts, regulatory rollback, and antitrust reinterpretation had scholarly and legal backing.

Why it still matters

This network proved resilient. Many of its foundations continue funding research and judicial pipelines today. Andersen wants you to recognize that American economic ideology didn’t shift because the public suddenly changed its mind—it changed because organized wealth built institutions to make that shift seem inevitable.

Courts and regulations became the new battlefields. Andersen connects Powell’s call to later legal strategies that reshaped public policy. The Federalist Society, founded by conservative law students with donor support, created a talent pool that would populate the judiciary. Doctrines like originalism narrowed constitutional interpretation, while Law & Economics redefined public good as market efficiency.

Legal reinterpretation and consequences

Robert Bork and Richard Posner applied economic reasoning to law, arguing that the purpose of antitrust was to preserve low consumer prices, not competition itself. That subtle shift weakened enforcement and allowed corporate consolidation. As judges trained under Federalist Society influence rose, they applied these doctrines, turning law into a lever for business interests.

Deregulation spreading quietly

At the same time, technical rule changes dismantled protective systems. Airline fare controls vanished, cable rates soared, and pharmaceutical advertising exploded. Many of these reforms were bipartisan—championed by liberals seeking efficiency. Andersen explains that deregulation by omission, such as failing to update antitrust thresholds, further entrenched inequality. The scaffolding protecting consumers and workers was methodically unbolted.

Lasting structures of advantage

The combined effect was a system where corporate concentration flourished and public oversight faded. Laws once meant to counterbalance power turned into tools for reinforcing it. You live within the legacy of those legal ideas every time markets behave like monopolies and courts call that efficiency.

Andersen charts how Wall Street moved from servicing the economy to dominating it. Financialization turned capital markets into the main driver of corporate behavior. Beginning with Michael Milken’s junk bonds and KKR’s leveraged buyouts, the 1980s normalized debt exploitation. Firms profited from fees, not production. Private‑equity deals stacked companies with debt and harvested short‑term gains.

Tools and tactics of extraction

Derivatives, mortgage securitization, and share buybacks became the mechanisms. After the SEC permitted repurchases in 1982, CEOs used them to boost earnings per share—and their own pay. Jensen and Meckling’s shareholder‑value doctrine rationalized this, declaring that maximizing stock price was a virtuous mission. Meanwhile, rating agencies institutionalized risk trading, connecting household mortgages to global speculation.

Consequences for everyday life

Corporations diverted funds from investment and wages to executive compensation, share buybacks, and dividends. CEO‑to‑worker pay ratios ballooned into the hundreds‑to‑one range. Retirement plans shifted from guaranteed pensions to 401(k)s, transferring risk to individuals. Andersen likens this to a circulatory system swelling for its own sake, depriving the body of oxygen. Finance stopped serving industry and began redefining success itself.

The culture of financial success

Financial prestige shaped cultural values: speculation replaced creation. Wall Street’s ethos—aggressive risk, immediate payoff, perpetual dealmaking—became aspirational even outside finance. The movies, the media, and political rhetoric glorified traders over builders. Andersen’s insight is that once finance ate America, its digestive logic governed everything from corporate pay to national priorities.

Workplace power collapsed during the same period. Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981 was the symbolic end of mid‑century labor strength. In one act the administration validated permanent strike replacements and sent a message that unions could be broken by presidential resolve. Employers across sectors followed suit.

Cultural and systemic weakening

Andersen situates labor’s decline within cultural backlash. Working‑class resentment toward liberal elites—the Hard Hat Riot spirit—split former allies. Professionals distanced themselves from unions, trading solidarity for individualism. Legal norms eroded: the National Labor Relations Act’s protections were hollowed by court interpretations and Senate obstruction. As strikes vanished, wages stagnated.

Economic consequences

Manufacturing towns collapsed, pension guarantees disappeared, and the link between productivity and pay severed. Jacob Hacker later called the pattern the Great Risk Shift—risks once absorbed collectively were shifted to workers and families. Labor’s decline became not just an employment issue but a social rupture, replacing security with precarity.

Why Reagan mattered

Alan Greenspan even praised the PATCO firings as proof that employers controlled the labor market again. For Andersen, that moment symbolically sealed the new hierarchy—investor power atop, labor power below, and public institutions mostly silent. The strikes that defined early industrial democracy now feel like artifacts of another century.

The revolution succeeded partly because its opponents joined it. Andersen underscores the role of neoliberal centrists and liberal moderates in normalizing market ideology. Journalists and policymakers sought pragmatic modernity, not confrontation. Gary Hart’s and Bill Clinton’s New Democrats advocated business‑friendly efficiency. Publications like Washington Monthly and PBS programs like Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose made laissez‑faire sound sophisticated.

Joining the consensus

By the late 1980s, Democrats shared Republicans’ faith in markets. They favored deregulation, fiscal restraint, and global trade liberalization. When liberals stopped defending unions and antitrust enforcement, the bipartisan consensus completed the system’s shift toward concentrated wealth.

Institutional consolidation

Parallel efforts continued within law and politics: Grover Norquist’s pledge locked the GOP into permanent antitax orthodoxy; the Federalist Society’s pipelines produced conservative judges; the Koch network funded university centers like Mercatus to entrench doctrine. This institutional web guaranteed continuity. Ideological diversity narrowed even as party competition appeared lively.

The climate and policy frontier

Such consolidation extended to science and environmental policy. Industry‑funded networks converted climate uncertainty into political paralysis, exemplifying how the right’s legal and media power could stall collective problem‑solving. Andersen frames this as institutional engineering rather than persuasion—a generation‑long capture of levers once designed for public good.

Market concentration and technological disruption are the economic outcomes of the ideological changes you’ve followed. Antitrust retreat allowed dominant firms to merge freely, raising prices and suppressing wages. Automation and offshoring emptied the middle of the workforce, creating a polarized economy of high‑income professionals and low‑paid service workers.

Monopoly and monopsony

Using Robert Bork’s consumer‑welfare framework, regulators ignored effects on employment and small business. The result: markups soared and local labor markets lost competition. Digital giants like Google and Facebook exemplify new monopolies invisible to price metrics. When employers dominate single regions, workers have little bargaining power, anchoring wage stagnation.

Technology’s hollowing effect

Automation multiplied the imbalance. Manufacturing jobs migrated overseas, then disappeared under robotics. Economists like David Autor demonstrate that routine tasks vanish while service jobs proliferate at lower pay. Apple and Google now earn astronomical revenues with far fewer employees than mid‑century industrial giants. Andersen’s comparison—GM and AT&T’s million workers versus tech’s quarter‑million—shows how employment decoupled from value creation.

Political stakes of technology

You face a choice: let automation widen inequality or craft policies that redirect gains—through education, social dividends, or universal benefits. Andersen argues that technology itself is neutral; what matters is the political economy guiding it. Without reform, data monopolies may become the next version of 1980s finance—profitable for few, disempowering for many.

Finally Andersen presents the COVID‑19 pandemic as an inflection point revealing all previous systems under strain. Public health failure, weak infrastructure, and extreme inequality exposed the risks of decades of privatization. As markets plunged, government stepped in—for investors first. The crisis thus tested whether America could rediscover collective purpose after years of atomized economics.

Ideological responses

Some leaders warned that precautions would ruin the economy; others demanded robust state intervention. Conservative think‑tanks and media networks amplified reopening protests. Andersen documents how organized money shaped that grassroots anger—proving the long game still active. Online mobilization and donor coordination turned a health emergency into ideological theater.

A mirror of past choices

When the CARES Act showered liquidity on markets while hospitals lacked supplies, decades of financial prioritization came into view. Public capacity had been hollowed by years of antitax dogma. Andersen suggests that the pandemic offered a chance, like the Great Depression once did, to rebuild shared systems. The question is whether citizens will demand them or slide back into the complacency that nostalgia delivers.

The forward vision

If America is to escape the cycle, it must rediscover belief in progress—and recognize that cultural imagination and political will are twins. Crises expose design flaws; they also offer resets. Andersen leaves you with a challenge: understand how the past forty years were engineered, so you can engineer a different next forty.