Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History (48 page)

Before these fresh hells, as I’ve spent the book arguing, our political economy and society were already at a historic crossroads, Americans stuck uncomfortably on the cusp between searching for lost times and imagining a better future. We have now arrived at a scarier place, the inflection point even more obvious. But it’s not exactly unprecedented. We’ve been here before.

We were in a place like this when my grandparents were young in the 1910s.

There was the global influenza epidemic, of course, which killed one in 150 people in the United States, the equivalent of 2 million Americans now. But in many other ways as well, the early 1900s looked remarkably like the early 2000s.

At the end of the nineteenth century, corporate mergers and consolidation had accelerated, and political corruption by the rich and powerful had become extreme. A Wall Street crash occurred in 1907. Americans experienced extraordinary technological change—electrification, telephones, movies, airplanes and cars, all at once. The foreign-born population of the United States had tripled. The influx of non-Protestant foreigners and the mass migration into U.S. cities of black people, accompanied by skillful racist fictions in a riveting new medium (
The Birth of a Nation
), prompted a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Political engagement was high: the turnout in the midterm elections of 1914 wasn’t exceeded for a century…until 2018.

The 1914 Walter Lippmann book I quoted earlier,
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest,
is a staggering exhibit of the rhymes between then and now. Lippmann considered the consequences of feminism, a word not even twenty years old, and the imminent electoral power of enfranchised women; the homogenizing of U.S. cities; and the “overwhelming demand upon the press for…personal details open to the vast public. Gossip is organized; and we do by telegraph what was done in the village store.”

Should the size and power of corporations be limited? What happened to old-fashioned loyalty between employers and employees? Is socialism practical? A progressive movement flourished. In the previous dozen years, Lippmann wrote, “people had begun to see much greater possibilities in the government” and “looked to it as a protector from economic tyranny.” As a result, “big businessmen who are at all intelligent…are talking more and more about their ‘responsibilities,’ their ‘stewardship’ ”—exactly as the Business Roundtable nervously did at the end of 2019. “Today if you go about the world,” he wrote in 1914, “you find that countries like…Denmark are the ones that have come nearest the high level of social prosperity.”

In America, anarchism was bubbling up on the right as well as the left, along with a general “sense of conspiracy and secret scheming” that supposedly served “labyrinthine evil.” He noted the rise of nostalgic antimodern anger and its political embodiment by the populist William Jennings Bryan, who’d just lost the presidency for the third time. “He is the true Don Quixote of our politics, for he moves in a world that has ceased to exist,” but like his enemies—the “propertied bigot,” the well-situated “defenders of what America has become”—he lacked “any vision of what America is to be.”

Twenty years after that, in the 1930s, when my parents were young, we were also in a place like we are today. The Great Depression revealed the precariousness and excessive unfairness of our economy, then prompted a great philosophical shift and the creation by the left of fundamental changes that restored American capitalism by making it new and improved.

And we were in a place
kind of
like this when I was young in the 1970s. Following hard on the whiffs of revolution around 1970, crazy inflation and various disconcerting large events—the oil price crisis, Watergate, the Vietnam surrender, the collapse of iconic U.S. manufacturers—combined to create high anxiety and fear, of which the economic right took brilliant political advantage.
^*7

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change,
because
only then does the politically impossible become the politically inevitable,
you’ll recall Milton Friedman, the new president’s economic hero, explaining in 1982.
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,
to miss
the opportunity to do things that you could not do before,
you’ll recall the incoming president’s White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, saying in late 2008 as the financial system was melting down.

Today’s evil geniuses (and obedient dimwits) of the economic right were instantly determined to exploit the pandemic crises to maintain and increase their political and economic power and thus the share of American wealth that flows to big business and the rich. So must the left use and its allies use all available crises to increase their political power and thereby begin to restore the democratic sharing of economic power and wealth we once had and even improve on it.

That’s why the third-ranking member of the House Democrats, James Clyburn of South Carolina, told some fellow members, on a private conference call in the spring, that the pandemic crises were “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to our vision.” Hilariously, the right professed to be
appalled
by that, then was further “outraged,” according to
The
New York Times
, when the majority’s proposed multitrillion-dollar recovery bill “included an array of progressive policies well beyond the scope of emergency aid.” The liberals were daring to “use the crisis to advance a liberal agenda.”

The leaders of the economic right in 2020 weren’t as terrified by the prospects of mass death or the huge new tranche of federal debt as they were by the stunning, irresistible power of such a crisis to change political rules and ideological conventions overnight.

In the last chapter, I described the polls since the 1990s showing that more and more Americans were in favor of the federal government solving big problems. In a survey in the spring of 2020 by Suffolk University for
USA Today
about how the federal government had dealt with the health and economic consequences of the pandemic, fully half of Americans said it had done too little and only 10 or 11 percent thought it had done too much.

Imagine the elite right’s shock when it saw the
Financial Times
one Friday in April 2020. The
FT
is a moderately conservative million-circulation daily published in London (“Since 1888, this newspaper has argued for free markets”), at least as influential globally as
The Wall Street Journal
. Two or three months earlier the headline on that day’s main editorial could have been a gag on a prop newspaper in a fantasy film:

These ultimate Establishment conservatives had had a conversion experience.

As western leaders learnt in the Great Depression, and after the second world war, to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone. Today’s crisis is laying bare how far many rich societies fall short of this ideal….We are not really all in this together….Better paid knowledge workers often face only the nuisance of working from home….Radical reforms—reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades—will need to be put on the table….Redistribution will again be on the agenda….Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.

If I’ve lost the
Financial Times, some strategist on the rich side in the class war must have thought,
I’ve lost elite opinion
. Today suddenly everyone deemed it essential for Congress to shovel out trillions to average American citizens by means of new debt and for the Federal Reserve to conjure trillions more by esoteric monetary magic! Tomorrow it could be wealth taxes on the superrich or true universal healthcare or carbon taxes on (cheap) oil or God knows what socialist madness!

As the
Times
columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote, “If something like a social democratic state is feasible under these conditions,” then people might become convinced that it was “absolutely possible when growth is high and unemployment is low,” particularly after Bernie Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s campaigns “pushed progressive ideas into the mainstream of American politics.” Joe Biden echoed this wish. “I think people are realizing,” he said, “ ‘My Lord,
look
at what is
possible
,’ looking at the institutional changes we can make, without us becoming a ‘socialist country’ or any of that malarkey.”

My case that Americans need to rediscover the defining but atrophied national knack for taking up the challenges of the
new
in new ways is suddenly undeniable and urgent. As the Columbia University economic historian Adam Tooze said early in 2020, we’ve entered “a period of radical uncertainty, an order of magnitude greater than anything we’re used to.”

We’ve already seen how the pandemic changed the economy and the culture and daily life temporarily—and we will continue adapting and adjusting. But what
permanent
changes will happen? For one thing, I’m betting that the automated jobless future I laid out in the last few chapters will arrive even sooner. Many of us have become habituated already to working only from home and communicating only with little talking pictures of human colleagues and clients. That’s why ten weeks after the pandemic started driving stock prices down, 495 of the 500 biggest corporations had dropped 13 percent, but the share prices of the other five companies, the five largest—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google—were 10 percent
up
.

But we really don’t know where the experience of the pandemic and the protests of 2020 will lead us—the overnight upendings, the long traumas, judging how individuals and institutions and ideologies and systems worked or failed. People in 1918 and 1929 and 1970 (and 1347) had no clue what was coming next, either. Will my hypothetical grandchildren grow up as ignorant of these events as I was of the global viral pandemic that my grandparents survived and of the 1919 “race riots” that included the lynching of a black man in my hometown? For Americans now, 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? Will we summon the necessary will to achieve racial fairness? Like Europe six hundred years ago after the plague, will we see a flowering of radically new creative works and the emergence of a radically new economic system? 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?

The United States used to be called the New World. It’s a new world again, maybe the way it was struggling to become new in the 1910s. Lippmann was pragmatic, in many ways conservative, in no way a utopian, but back at that chaotic, pivotal moment, he quoted Oscar Wilde’s line that “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,” because social progress comes only by navigating toward hopeful visions of perfection. “Our business is not to lay aside the dream,” Lippmann explained, “but to make it plausible. Drag dreams out into the light of day, show their sources, compare them with fact, transform them to possibilities…a dream…with a sense of the
possible.
” He also wrote that the urgent national inflection point a century ago came down to choosing “between those who are willing to enter upon an effort for which there is no precedent, and those who aren’t. In a real sense it is an adventure.”

So let’s
go
already.