Kurt Andersen - The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

When you reach your fifties, it gets easier to notice the big ways in which the world has or hasnt changed since you were young, both the look and feel of things and peoples understandings of how society works. A half-century of life is enough to provide some panoramic perspective, letting you see and sense arcs of history firsthand, like when an airplane reaches the altitude where the curvature of the Earth becomes visible.

Some of the arcs of historical change are obvious, their paths as well as their causes. The equality and empowerment of women is one of those big duh ones. But other important historical arcs, more complicated or obscure, have to be figured out.

Thats how I came to write my last nonfiction book, a not-so-obvious American history called Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire. Id noticed that in so many ways, as Stephen Colbert joked on the first episode of his old nightly show, America had become increasingly divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart. From the 1960s and 70s on, I realized, America had really changed in this regard. Belief in every sort of make-believe had spun out of controlin religion, science, politics, and lifestyle, all of them merging with entertainment in what I called the fantasy-industrial complex. In that book I explained the deep, centuries-long history of this American knack for creating and believing the excitingly untrue. As soon as I finished writing Fantasyland, we elected a president who was its single most florid and consequential expression ever, a poster boy embodying all its themes.

But that long-standing, chronic American condition that turned into an acute crisis is just half the story of how and why weve come to grief these last few decades. This other part concerns the transformation of our social system that started in the 1970s and 80s, helped along by a simultaneous plunge into compulsive nostalgia and wariness of the new and unfamiliar. Whereas Fantasyland concerned Americans centuries-old weakness for the untrue and irrational, and its spontaneous and dangerous flowering since the 1960s, Evil Geniuses chronicles the quite deliberate reengineering of our economy and society since the 1960s by a highly rational confederacy of the rich, the right, and big business.

From my parents young adulthood in the 1930s and 40s through my young adulthood in the 1970s, American economic life became a lot more fair and democratic and secure than it had been when my parents were children in the 1920s and early 30s. But then all of a sudden around 1980, that progress slowed, stopped, and in many ways reversed.

I didnt start fully appreciating and understanding the nature and enormity of that change until the turn of this century, after the country had been transformed. In 2002, when several spectacular corporate financial frauds were exposed and their CEO perpetrators prosecuted, I published a long screed in TheNew York Times blaming Wall Street. If infectious greed is the virus, New York is the center of the outbreak, I wrote, because it

is also, inarguably, the money center of America and the world, the capital of capitalism.It was New York investment bankers who drove the mergers-and-acquisitions deal culture of the 80s and 90s and who most aggressively oversold the myth of synergy that justified it.It was theywho invented the novel financial architectures of Enron and WorldCom. It was the example of New York investment bankers, earning gigantic salaries for doing essentially nothingknowing the right people, talking smoothly, showing up at closingsthat encouraged businesspeople out in the rest of America to feel entitled to smoke-and-mirrors cash bonanzas of their own.

A few years later, one very cold morning just after Thanksgiving, I had another slow-road-to-Damascus moment from whatever I had been (complacent neoliberal?) to whatever I was becoming (appalled social democrat?). I was actually on the road to Eppley Airfield in Omaha after my first visit to my hometown since both my parents had died, sharing a minivan jitney from a hotel with a couple of Central Casting airline pilotstall, fit white men around my age, one wearing a leather jacket. We chatted. To my surprise, even shock, both of them spent the entire trip sputtering and whiningabout being baited and switched when their employee ownership shares of United Airlines had been evaporated by its recent bankruptcy, about the default of their pension plan, about their CEOs recent 40 percent pay raise, about the company to which theyd devoted their entire careers but no longer trusted at all. In effect, about changing overnight from successful all-American middle-class professionals whod worked hard and played by the rules into disrespected, cheated, sputtering, whining chumps.

When we got to the airport, I said goodbye and good luck and, at the little bookstore there that contains a kind of shrine to the local god Warren Buffett and his company Berkshire Hathaway, bought a newspaper. In it I read an article about that years record-setting bonuses on Wall Street. The annual revenues of Goldman Sachs were greater than the annual economic output of two-thirds of the countries on Eartha treasure chest from which the firm was disbursing the equivalent of $69 million to its CEO and an average of $800,000 apiece to