Narrator: Imagine sitting in an airport shuttle on a cold morning in 2006. Beside you are two airline pilots, men who represent the pinnacle of the American middle-class dream. But they aren't talking about their travels; they're fuming. They speak of how their employee-owned shares in United Airlines vanished in bankruptcy, how their pensions defaulted, and how their CEO just received a 40 percent pay raise. Moments later, inside the terminal, you pick up a newspaper. The headline screams of record-breaking Wall Street bonuses, with Goldman Sachs executives taking home millions, their firm's revenue exceeding the entire economic output of many countries. This stark, jarring contrast isn't an accident. It's a symptom of a system that has been fundamentally rewired.

In his book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, author Kurt Andersen meticulously unpacks the last half-century to reveal how this reality came to be. He argues that the extreme inequality and economic insecurity defining modern America are not the result of inevitable global forces, but the outcome of a deliberate, brilliantly executed, and decades-long project by a confederacy of the rich, the right, and big business to rig the game in their favor.

Narrator: For nearly fifty years after the Great Depression, America built a social contract that fostered shared prosperity. From the 1930s to the 1970s, economic growth was widely distributed, a strong middle class emerged, and the gap between the rich and the poor narrowed. But around 1980, this progress didn't just slow down; it reversed. Andersen argues this was no accident. It was a calculated reengineering of the American economy.

The story of the airline pilots in the Omaha airport shuttle serves as a perfect microcosm of this shift. These were highly skilled, respected professionals whose financial security was systematically dismantled by corporate bankruptcy and pension defaults. Their experience stood in shocking contrast to the simultaneous explosion of wealth on Wall Street, where the rules seemed designed for limitless gain. This wasn't just a tale of two different fortunes; it was the story of one system feeding on the other. Statistics from the book confirm this anecdote: since the 1980s, the share of wealth owned by the richest 1 percent has doubled, while the collective net worth of the bottom half of Americans has plummeted to nearly zero. For most full-time workers, median weekly pay has barely budged, increasing by a mere 0.1 percent a year after inflation. The American Dream, once a promise of upward mobility, was being systematically unmade.

Narrator: As the economic ground shifted, so did the culture. Andersen observes that beginning in the 1990s, the relentless pace of cultural change that defined the 20th century ground to a halt. Pop culture became dominated by revivals, reboots, and remixes. Fashion, music, and design began endlessly recycling the past. This cultural stasis, Andersen argues, was a reaction to the overwhelming newness of the 1960s and the economic anxieties that followed. People sought comfort in the familiar.

The political right masterfully exploited this yearning for the past. They framed their radical economic agenda—deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and weakening unions—not as a new and untested experiment, but as a return to a mythical, stronger America. Ronald Reagan, with his folksy, old-Hollywood charm, was the perfect vessel for this message. He sold a vision of "Morning in America" that harkened back to a simpler time, all while his administration was busy dismantling the very structures that had created post-war prosperity. Americans, Andersen writes, were "hoodwinked, and we hoodwinked ourselves," embracing a comforting nostalgia that masked a raw deal.

Narrator: The term "evil geniuses" refers to the intelligent, strategic, and highly organized architects of this economic transformation. Their blueprint can be traced back to documents like the 1971 Powell Memo, a confidential memorandum written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. It was a call to arms for American corporations, urging them to fund a vast counter-establishment to fight what they saw as an attack on the free enterprise system.

And they did. A flood of money from wealthy industrialists like the Koch brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the Olin family poured into creating a new intellectual infrastructure. Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute exploded in size and influence, churning out policy papers and providing experts to argue for deregulation and tax cuts. Legal organizations like the Federalist Society were founded to cultivate a new generation of conservative judges who would reinterpret the law to favor corporate interests. This wasn't a grassroots movement; it was a top-down, lavishly funded, and coordinated campaign to change how America thought about economics, government, and fairness.

Narrator: For the new economic order to succeed, the old checks and balances on corporate power had to be removed. The most important of these was organized labor. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith called unions a "countervailing power" that ensured workers received a fair share of the economic pie. The right-wing project viewed this power as an obstacle to be eliminated.

The turning point came in 1981 with the PATCO air traffic controllers' strike. When the union, which had endorsed Reagan for president, went on strike, Reagan's response was swift and brutal. He fired more than 11,000 striking controllers and banned them from federal service for life. This act sent a powerful message to the private sector: union-busting was now acceptable. Companies began aggressively replacing striking workers, a practice that had been rare for decades. Union membership, which stood at over a third of the private workforce in the 1950s, plummeted. Today, it is just 6 percent. Without the countervailing power of unions, wages stagnated, and corporations gained almost unchecked power over their employees.

Narrator: With unions weakened and regulations rolled back, the nature of American capitalism itself began to change. The focus shifted from making things to making money. This process, known as financialization, saw Wall Street's influence grow exponentially. The culture of "greed is good," famously captured in the 1987 film Wall Street, became the unapologetic ethos of the era.

A key tool in this transformation was the leveraged buyout (LBO). Private equity firms would borrow massive sums of money to acquire companies, load them with debt, and then extract value through fees and asset stripping, often leaving the company a hollowed-out shell. The story of Simmons Bedding is a tragic example. A century-old, successful company was passed from one financial owner to another, each LBO adding more debt, until it finally collapsed into bankruptcy, costing thousands of jobs while the financial firms pocketed a billion dollars in fees and profits. This was combined with the rise of stock buybacks, where companies used profits not for innovation or wage increases, but to artificially inflate their own stock price, further enriching executives and shareholders.

Narrator: Andersen argues that this right-wing revolution could not have succeeded without the complicity of liberals and the Democratic Party. As the political center of gravity shifted right, Democrats became increasingly cautious, embracing a "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" mantra. They sought to appear reasonable and pragmatic, often at the expense of their core principles.

President Bill Clinton's administration epitomized this trend. He declared that "the era of big government is over" and passed welfare reform that dismantled a key New Deal program. More consequentially, his economic team, stacked with Wall Street veterans like Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, championed financial deregulation. They actively fought against efforts to regulate the complex new financial instruments known as derivatives. When Brooksley Born, the head of a small regulatory agency, tried to sound the alarm about the immense risks these instruments posed, she was publicly rebuked and shut down by Clinton's own team. This deregulation directly paved the way for the 2008 financial crisis. By trying to meet the right in the middle, Democrats effectively helped institutionalize the new, unequal economic paradigm.

Narrator: The result of this four-decade-long transformation is an America that is exceptional, but for all the wrong reasons. When compared to other wealthy, developed nations, the U.S. has become an outlier. It has the highest level of income inequality, with a Gini index closer to developing nations than to its peers in Western Europe and Canada. Americans spend vastly more on healthcare for worse outcomes, with lower life expectancy. Social mobility, the heart of the American Dream, is now lower in the U.S. than in most of Europe.

Andersen points out that these other nations did not abandon capitalism; they saved it from its own excesses. They maintained strong unions, robust social safety nets, and aggressive antitrust enforcement to ensure markets remained competitive. The U.S., by contrast, chose a different path, one that has led to a system that feels, to many, fundamentally rigged.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Evil Geniuses is that the America of today—with its vast inequalities, political polarization, and pervasive economic anxiety—was not an accident of history. It was a choice. It was the result of a meticulously planned and executed campaign by a powerful minority to rewrite the rules of the American economy for their own benefit, a project that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

The book leaves us at a critical inflection point. Understanding this history is not about assigning blame, but about recognizing the deliberate architecture of our current problems. The ultimate challenge Andersen poses is whether Americans can shake off the cultural and political stagnation of the last few decades. Can they rediscover the nation’s historical genius for bold experimentation and collective action to imagine and build a new, fairer, and more prosperous future for everyone?