“Technology changed the nature of economies and all the rich world. But in the US, we did this different thing of saying, no, all boats are not going to rise anymore.”
Kurt Andersen is the bestselling author of the novels Heyday, Turn of the Century, and True Believers. He contributes to Vanity Fair and The New York Times and was the host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award–winning public radio show and podcast. He also writes for television, film, and the stage. Andersen co-founded Spy magazine, served as editor in chief of New York, and was a cultural columnist and critic for Time and The New Yorker. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College.
In the 1970s, a subtle yet radical shift took place in American politics that culminated in Reagan’s election. A pro-business vision of the economy displaced the working class policies of FDR’s New Deal. This set the stage for the next 30-40 years of policy consensus that ultimately drove the economic inequality we see today. “I was a little oblivious to and indifferent to the systemic change in the economy that had happened around it, starting in the seventies… I didn't realize until I went back and did the research how that had been not the beginning, but the end of a decade of strategic work of CEOs and rich billionaires and libertarians.”
While the middle class initially shared in prosperity, major advancements in technology and globalization exposed the systemic inequity. This has given rise to many of the cultural and political divisions we see today.
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
SPEAKER
Kurt Andersen
Author
Evil Geniuses
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darcy. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum at the intersection of finance, technology and public policy. And we're very sorry for the late start today, a little bit of miscommunication on the timing, but our guest today is worth the wait. It should be a fascinating conversation about his recent book and observations about things that are going on in the country. But SALT Talks are a digital interview series that we launched during this work from home period. They are interviews with leading investors, creators, and thinkers. What we're really trying to do is replicate the experience that we provide at our global conference series, the SALT conference. And that's to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts for our audience, as well as to provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future.
John Darsie: (00:54)
And we're very excited today to welcome Kurt Andersen to SALT Talks. Kurt is the best-selling author of a number of books, including several novels, as well as non-fiction books. Among his novels are Heyday, Turn of the Century and True Believers and his most recent nonfiction book, which we're going to talk about a lot today is called Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America. He contributes to the Vanity Fair and New York Times and was the host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody award winning public radio show and podcast. He also writes for television, film and stage. He also co-founded Spy magazine and served as editor-in-chief of New York and was a cultural columnist and critic for Time and The New Yorker. A reminder, if you have any questions for Kurt during today's SALT Talk, you can enter them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your video screen. And now we'll turn it over to Anthony Scaramucci, who's the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative investment firm, as well as the chairman of SALT to conduct today's interview. Take it away, Anthony.
Anthony Scaramucci: (01:56)
Well, first of all, Kurt, thank you so much for joining us. I loved your book. Before we go into the book though, I want to talk a little bit about your professional background, your personal background. It's a little cliche, but I ask everybody this. And I always learn something. As an example, yesterday or two days ago, John Brennan, the CIA director, he told us that he wanted to be the first American Pope and that his name that he had designated for himself when he was 14 was Owen the first, which was his family's, his mom's maiden name. So, I thought there's no way we're going to find that out Kurt on Wikipedia. So tell us something about your life that sort of triggered you to go in the direction that you went in with your career or something fun about you that we couldn't find on the web.
Kurt Andersen: (02:44)
Well, I really started doing what I was doing as a junior high school student in Omaha, Nebraska. I got a job on the student newspaper, Arbor Heights Junior High School. And started I guess being a journalist of sort, but really writing satire. That was my first quasi-professional writing experience and I loved it and they let me keep doing it, they let me get away with it through high school as well. And then I went to Harvard and was on The Harvard Lampoon there, that you could find on Wikipedia. But really even though I had done legit journalism and I write novels and history books, really having that founding self-tutorial in making mischief, I guess was the beginning of my writing life.
Anthony Scaramucci: (03:44)
And you were also one of the founding editors of Spy magazine with Graydon Carter. And so I want to go back to that moment in time. It was the roaring eighties. I was a prolific reader of Spy magazine as was everybody that lived here in New York. And you had Donald Trump on the cover once in a while but really what as [crosstalk 00:04:09]?
Kurt Andersen: (04:04)
We did have him on our cover once a while. In fact our first issue of Spy Magazine in October of 1986, the cover story, it was called Jerks, the 10 most annoying New Yorkers, of whom Donald Trump was one of them. And in his little write-up we did on him among the 10, he was just one of 10 at that point. He was saying that he could solve the nuclear missile issue with the Soviet Union. Just send him over there, he could learn everything he needed to know in an hour about nuclear missiles was his quote in the first issue of Spy Magazine. So yeah, we kept at him, investigated his bankruptcies and his bullying and all that he was then and remains.
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:46)
Who was the number one jerk? Did you have a ranking or did you or did you have to [inaudible 00:04:49]?
Kurt Andersen: (04:49)
No, I mean, ranking is the kind of thing we did. We didn't do it in that case. So he was just one of 10 along with Leona Helmsley and a lot of others.
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:57)
Okay. Yeah. Well, there you go. Well, you're really going back. All right. Well, let's turn our attention to your book, Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America. And basically for our viewers that haven't listened to read the book or listen to it on audible, it's a fascinating discussion about the US economic system and how it unfortunately was re-engineered, let's call it about 40 years ago to benefit elites. And so we had something going on and I don't know if you've read American Amnesia that was written about in 2016, if you haven't, I'll send you a copy of it.
Anthony Scaramucci: (05:33)
It basically said that we had this pretty good intersection between our government helping middle and lower middle income people through government activism and programs. And we had a pretty robust capitalist story going on in conjunction with that. We seem to have jettisoned one part of that about 40 years ago. We'll call it the Reagan revolution and now as a result of which income divide is widening even deeper. I'd like you to address that for our listeners. Explain why you wrote the book, explain what you have seen in our Zeitgeists economically over the last 40 years.
Kurt Andersen: (06:10)
Yeah, I'd taken a pause from writing novels to write this previous book called Fantansyland. That was about what I noticed really in this century, right? In the last 15 or 20 years. Which is to say how the belief in the untrue of all sorts. Believe whatever you want had gotten out of control in this country. And so that book was an attempt to figure out how that had happened. And I figured out that it was a really deep in our bloodstream, but it was under control. It was an okay balance for a few hundred years, right? Because the grownups when pushed came to shove were in charge. But then I realized as that book came out and I went out and talked about it, that that was really only half the story. That this inequality and economic insecurity and the sense of hopelessness and less upward mobility, all that economic stuff was the other half of how we got into the ditch or the ditches we're in.
Kurt Andersen: (07:12)
And how did that happen? And I realized because I was doing pretty well in the '80s and '90s as a journalist, as a magazine editor, as an entrepreneur, as all kinds of things. And which while I was voting democratic and I consider myself a liberal, I was a little oblivious to and indifferent to the systemic change in the economy that had happened around it, starting in the seventies, really. And in this evil geniuses, I traced back to how yeah, Reagan got elected and wow, that's new and taxes on the well-to-do were cut in half or more as they were on big business.
Kurt Andersen: (07:52)
That's a big deal. But I didn't realize until I went back and did the research how that had been not the beginning, but the end of a decade of strategic work of CEOs and rich billionaires and libertarians, and all these different people working in all these different ways to do what they did as, as you say it. To re-engineer the system, to hijack the system really, and to change it from this great kind of post new deal America that had worked for everybody, the rich got rich, the middle class got more prosperous.
Kurt Andersen: (08:28)
The working class were doing okay. This system was working, all the boats were rising economically pretty well together. And then it changed. And what I realized too, during the research for this book is that inequality increased elsewhere, right? Globalization happened everywhere. Technology changed the nature of economies and all the rich world. But in the US, we did this different thing of, of saying, no, all boats are not going to rise anymore. Your boats, you, 80% of less wealthy people are just not going to rise any more. Your incomes and your household wealth is not going to increase. And that didn't just happen by accident. It happened by a whole series of regulatory changes, changes in thinking, changes in norms, changes in law, changes in taxes that have left 80% of us, not better off than we were 40 years ago.
Anthony Scaramucci: (09:24)
And it's a brilliant exposition. In addition, where you're saying right now, what you write in the book, you really lay out what happened in the convergence of a lot of special interests that sort of allowed for this outcome to happen. I was dying to ask you this when I was reading your book. So now I've got the opportunity to ask it to you here. Isn't it the fault of the politicians though? Isn't it the fault of our public servants in a sense that they almost abided to special interests through the political lobbying, the payments, the junket, the packs that were formed to help them stay in power. And they sort of lost that, no bleach obliged, if you will, or that understanding that they were there to serve the American people, which included all of the American people, not just necessarily the people that were donating to them?
Kurt Andersen: (10:12)
Certainly, they have their large share of the blame along with, and the Democratic politicians do as well as the Republican politicians who were more unapologetically and shamelessly devoted to this change. But there's plenty of blame to go around. But what and it's easy to blame politicians. We're used to blaming politicians and they're are political figures who are among my Evil Geniuses, but I think it's important to look at the whole realm of people, including CEOs, including intellectuals, including people in the media who did all that they had to do in various ways or failed to do what they had to do in the case of Democrats, I would say, to stand up and say, "No, this is a raw deal. This is no longer the new deal."
Kurt Andersen: (11:09)
So, but yeah. But I think as I try to lay out in the book in so many ways, the Zeitgeist, the set of norms about what was fair, really just what was fair, were being changed on so many fronts. And so partly out of earnestness, Neo-liberal Democrats said, "Yeah, maybe we should go halfway. Maybe we're off the free market it's pretty good." And then basically lost their distinct vision of this sense of fairness and went along with the crushing of labor unions and went along with the end essentially of overtime pay, went along with reducing the minimum wage, all those things. And pretty soon, since there were no actual liberal Republicans anymore, there were the Democrats on economics took the place of liberal Republicans. Everybody was a Republican. The Democrats were just a little softer.
Anthony Scaramucci: (12:09)
It's very compelling stuff. You wrote about technology in the book about how it's exacerbated inequality created more insecurity. I'd like you to address that, but then also, how can technology fix some of this inequality as well? It's sort of an interesting thing. It's hurt us in one way, but it may be able to help us. You explain it. I'd like you to articulate it here.
Kurt Andersen: (12:31)
Right. Well, I mean, my first couple of chapters are a quick history of modern capitalism, of America, and of technology and how technology has been key to prosperity again and again and again. But technology can be good. It can be bad. It can make nuclear weapons, it can make nuclear power. It can make life easier, or it can make slavery worse through the cotton shin. It's the choices, it's the political public social choices that are made about how to use it. So technology, we moved from farms to factories, from factories to offices, technological change, good, use it well. We have this whole set of balancing mechanisms through government, through citizens organizations, through unions, all the rest. There needs to be this balanced system. In the 1970s and '80s we lost that balance. So it became simply fine for companies to lay off as many people as they could constantly as a way to do business, right? So sooner or later that catches up with you as it has caught up with us, there aren't enough decent paying jobs for human beings.
Kurt Andersen: (13:50)
And that is going to become a bigger and bigger problem as AI kicks into gear and makes fewer and fewer jobs necessary. How do you deal with that? So we can have a future that is more like a utopia frankly, where machines do all the work, but we got to figure out how to then share that bounty. And it's not just... It can't all go to Mark Zuckerberg and the investor class. I mean, we all did it together. By the way, as you know I talked about in the book how the United States government was key, is key to building doing all, making all kinds of businesses happen, including the internet and all of its businesses.
Anthony Scaramucci: (14:34)
Absolutely.
Kurt Andersen: (14:34)
Do we as citizens, taxpayers get anything out of that? We do not. So there is a social wealth that has been created that with all, with nanotechnology, with AI, all that. It can get even more fantastically prosperous, but it's not going to work if just the rich are getting richer. And just the people who own the machines and the AI are benefiting.
Anthony Scaramucci: (15:01)
Well, we're in agreement. There is another famous author, Malcolm Gladwell once wrote, I think it was in one of his piece. I didn't remember seeing it in his book, but he said that he felt that this proliferation of greed at the corporate level started with baseball free agency in 1974. He attributed it to Curt Flood. And he basically said, what happened was Curt Flood got his free agency. The court said he could be a free agent. Then you had the rise of Reggie Jackson. And Reggie is a friend of mine. He always will mention that he got a five-year deal, which was $600,000 a year. At the time it was a stupendous contract. And obviously you have Pat Mahomes now getting a half a billion dollar deal from the Kansas city chiefs.
Anthony Scaramucci: (15:47)
And Malcolm's point was once the sports athletes could make $25, $50 million a year, American CEO said, "Well, wait a minute, I'm doing a way harder job than them. What am I chopped liver?" They went to their boards and said, "Pay me more money." And you saw this whole proliferation. And so I guess the question I have is what is the counter dote to that? What could happen in the society to make people recognize, well, wait a minute, you got to look out for the little guy. Or wait a minute your compensation on a multiple of your poorest employee is just too high. And I know we want to compete for art at Sotheby's and have a big aircraft, but you may want to take care of these people, because if your neighbor's doing better, there'll be less social unrest. There's a public good to that for your family as well.
Kurt Andersen: (16:38)
100%. Well. So a lot of things have to happen. And one of the bits of the pieces of hopefulness that I take from this book and doing the work is that it changed, right? We had this new deal all in the same boat sense of common good even as the rich got rich. And we've always had an unequal society economically, and no doubt always will. But it's question of extremes and how ostentatious one feels no shame about being, in having and showing off wealth while most people have had no income increases, can't afford college and all the rest. So there's the, are we good people? Are we fair people or is greed good and profits all that matter? That's the question. That was changed 40 and 50 years ago. It can be changed again in through various ways.
Kurt Andersen: (17:33)
And to your point about the CEOs and earning multiples of their average workers, that wasn't a law. It just was the norm that for decades and decades the average CEO got 50 or 60 times the pay of his average worker. And that was a lot of money. Then it okay, fine. The '80S it goes up to a hundred times. But then in the '90S to 300, 400, 500, a thousand times as much money. Tell me that's fair. And, and, and, and it wasn't just the market working its way as we know. And as I discovered, really when I did the work and talk to people in finance and journalists and authors in finance that the pay that CEOs get is not some kind of free market. It is this clubby cabal that decides, as you say, because Curt Flood or Reggie Jackson are getting what they're paying like, "Hey, why aren't I getting paid this money?"
Kurt Andersen: (18:34)
So, how do you fix that? By preaching the injustice and fairness. But I also think just as Franklin Roosevelt, 75 years ago, understood, wait, rich guys like me and us, this system, this golden goose, isn't going to keep laying golden eggs for us. If the people in the Keynesian way aren't buying stuff to make it all work, right? The system needs a prosperous middle class to work. And I'm afraid that not only has the way we've changed the system 40 years not doing that, it's just going to get worse as more and more jobs become automated.
Anthony Scaramucci: (19:17)
Yeah. And I've made this case. I think you and I share our level of moderation. I have made the case of my friends. Well, you want to live in a barbed wired security compound in your McMansion while your fellow neighbor's suffering or do you want to figure out a way to help people stem the inequality this way they don't come after you with a pitch fork or a Tiki torch at some point, which will happen because it has happened throughout civilization. So we'll turn it over to audience producer. We're getting a lot of audience questions.
Anthony Scaramucci: (19:49)
But I have just two more questions for you. And they're tied to your other books, because you seem to have a knack for seeing things before other people see them and a knack for understanding what's going on. And so you wrote a best seller in the year, 2000, it's called The Turn of the Century. And for some reason before the iPhone and Facebook Kurt, you predicted what America was going to look like in 2020, you captured a lot of elements of our media, a lot of elements of what it would take to be successful in politics in terms of bombast and over-exaggeration. Tell us how you did that. Tell us what you saw back then and why did it come true? And what do you see over the next 20 years?
Kurt Andersen: (20:34)
Well, that was my first novel actually came out in 1999. And I've looked back at it fairly recently, and I Pat myself on my back because it didn't see the future in some ways pretty clearly. I don't know, in that case, because it wasn't a nonfiction book and I hadn't written a big nonfiction book, although I'd been a magazine writer and a magazine editor. I think because it was fiction and this near future fiction, it allowed me to sort of tune into my instincts and intuitions in a way that if I were writing a serious piece of journalism, I wouldn't have allowed myself to do. So, it was this funny, it was this interesting time where again, I saw things happening. I saw how in a way that hadn't been true in my younger life how money was everything and how this blurring of distinctions between fiction and reality was just becoming a real problem and on and on.
Kurt Andersen: (21:39)
So I was able to piece it together, I think in fiction by depicting again, the present and near future in a way that writing speculative fiction allowed me to do. Then I think with this last big nonfiction book Fantasyland, and then with The Evil Geniuses as well, I really took what I learned to some degree as a novelist, through telling stories and seeing the big picture rather, and focusing on small facts and details and figures as well, but seeing the big picture in a novelistic way that I hope I bring to these nonfiction histories as well.
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:22)
Well, in Fantasyland, you wrote that in another best seller, you wrote that into 2017. You said something fascinating about America. You said that the society has a peculiar susceptibility to falsehoods and allusions. Tell us why you feel that way? It's obviously true. I just want to understand why [crosstalk 00:22:42]?
Kurt Andersen: (22:41)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, see, I didn't know. Again, both of these books begin with a question of like Evil Geniuses, how did things get so screwed up and insecure and unfair economically? And that one was, how did that happen and how old the thing was that? And so I just began some years of research and it really is, it's not unique to America, but it is so definingly present in America. It is so deeply part of our character I realized when it wasn't just a thing that had happened since the internet.
Kurt Andersen: (23:12)
At first, I thought, "Oh, maybe it's the internet helped that. And it certainly God knows then." And I thought, "Oh, it's the late '60s and '70s where everybody could do their own thing and find their own truth. And yap, that's part of it too. But then I just kept tracing the threads back in time and saw that literally from the first European settlers where they were coming here, because it was going to be the new Jerusalem and or they were going to find gold in the dirt in Virginia. Again, it was neither of those turned out to be true, but the Americans self-selected to believe that. American self-selected to believe in advertising. Right? Okay.
Kurt Andersen: (23:53)
The first big mobile advertising campaign was to get settlers to come to these money-making colonies and downplay the harsh realities of that. And because we are, and always were such a uniquely religious place, that in its extreme forms also led us to believe things that aren't necessarily true. Our knack for entertainment. And then as entertainment become more and more extraordinary and Hollywood and movies and television, again that helped blur this, this our sense of I think the real and the fictional in a way that isn't unique to Americans, but my God is part of our defining quality.
Kurt Andersen: (24:41)
So on and on and on grownups, it was a thing in balance and the serious people and experts and people knew what they were doing were still in charge. And then that establishment control started in all kinds of ways, started going out of control in the 1970s. And Fantasyland, I finished before Donald Trump was nominated for president. It came out right after he was elected president, and he wouldn't have been in that book, probably. Probably wouldn't have been mentioned if he hadn't run for president. But then just as I'm writing this eccentric history of America, here he comes embodying everything in that book, Fantansyland. And so, one of the small silver linings personally, it was that he illustrated this theory of how America had gone to hell that I wrote without him being even present in the thinking or execution of that book.
Anthony Scaramucci: (25:44)
It's amazing. I'm going to turn it over to John and we've got a ton of audience questions. The book Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America. Probably one of the best books I read this summer. I did a lot of reading in the pandemic-
Kurt Andersen: (25:59)
I appreciate that, thank you.
Anthony Scaramucci: (26:01)
Congratulations on the book, but before I turn it over to John, just quickly, what's on your nightstand? What are you reading?
Kurt Andersen: (26:07)
Oh, I am reading, what did I just read a book called Mill Town, about this town in Maine, that, and by working class woman who grew up there and how that town has been effectively torn asunder by the very things I'm talking about. It's sort of a micro version of about Evil Geniuses in that way. That's the book I'm in the middle of. I just started Anne Applebaum's, the Twilight of democracy. So I'm reading happy, uplifting books.
Anthony Scaramucci: (26:41)
If you know Anne, I just finished her book. If you know her, reach out to her for me. I'd love to get her on one of these days. I think she's fascinating. She wrote quite a book. That's a very, I won't ruin the ending there, but it's a great book.
Kurt Andersen: (26:52)
Yeah.
Anthony Scaramucci: (26:52)
Okay. John fire out those questions, we've got a ton of audience participation. John is working from the new SALT studio. So he's sparing you his ancestors. He's a big time wasp so he's got, I don't know, white wigged people in his background. So he's sparing you that today. Go ahead.
John Darsie: (27:12)
Ignore his antics Kurt, but you argue in the book that we've gone back to sort of a pre-new deal world order. And that's a theme that we've had a few speakers that have touched upon during SALT Talks. One of which was Daniel Okrent, who wrote The Guarded Gate, which you might've read. So, if we're in a pre-new deal world order, we obviously need a new deal to get us out of it. What in your view does that new deal need to look like if we can get a more progressive president into office? What do we need to do to jumpstart our climb out of the current morose?
Kurt Andersen: (27:47)
And I just want to make the point that it's not, in my view, a world order. We are exceptional in the world in these ways. But so, I've always loved the line history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. And so we can't say, "Oh, we need this thing exactly like we did it in the new deal. And we did this thing exactly like we did in the new deal." But the idea of the new deal, that there's an essential place for the government and society in general to make the free market economy more fair, more legitimate, more trusted, all those things in all kinds of ways, whether it's antitrust enforcement or so forth are important. But 2020 is obviously a very different time than 1932 or 1936.
Kurt Andersen: (28:46)
And not at least in the way that as John Maynard Keynes saw it back in the 1930s. Technology and machines are changing the nature of work in this profound way that I don't think is going to be, it's going to be sort of, it'll just sort itself out like things sorted themselves out during the 20th and 19th centuries during the previous industrial revolutions. So you've got to have things on the table, like a universal basic income. Andrew Yang was never going to be nominated let alone elected president probably, but the fact that he's so intelligently had this particular critique of what was problematic about our economy, which is to say not enough decently paying jobs for enough human beings because of the miracles of technology and how are we going to deal with that. That in all of its... However we do end up dealing with it, needs to be on the table as all kinds of people, Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, and others in Silicon Valley have signed off on.
Kurt Andersen: (29:55)
So that's one way, but first we need to re convince ourselves, relearn the necessity and virtues of having a social understanding that everybody needs to come along if we're going to get to the promised land. And not just because it's good and it's fair and it used to work great and from 1945 to 1980, it worked fantastically. But the system is just not going to work. FDR was called a socialist in 1932 and 1936, and he saved American capitalism from its greed and from its excesses and from its misguidedness. And again, as his cousin Teddy Roosevelt had begun doing the progressive era a generation earlier. So there's lots of ways to do it.
Kurt Andersen: (30:54)
And again, do we need more higher taxes on people like me and probably you and those of us, a lot of people watching? Yes, of course we do. Because we have plenty. And I think if you're a fair-minded person and you're not utterly committed to just me, me, me, me, me about all things economically, people will come to understand that, yeah, this isn't working. And by the way, it works a lot better in all these ways in other countries.
Kurt Andersen: (31:28)
The fact that having universal health care has been made so contentious is also crazy because show me just for starters, show me how it works better here than it does in all these other rich countries. That by the way and one of the things I hated about the democratic primary process and their arguments about healthcare and how it should be dealt with was there isn't just one way that Denmark, Germany, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, all these other countries do it. They do it in a whole bunch of different ways with different versions of private and public but it's universal and nobody goes broke paying for healthcare.
Kurt Andersen: (32:10)
So there's a reason that became the central, how do we fix this mess question in the democratic primaries and in this election? But that is an obvious beginning. But it's all these ways in which just the basic security that people did feel Americans had and felt when I was a kid and my parents felt coming out of the war. We need to figure out ways to restore that in this very new situation with AI and all the, AI and globalization that make all the problems very different than they were 70 years ago.
John Darsie: (32:52)
So do you think, and this is an audience question, do you think the extreme views that we're seeing reflected in our politics today are the results of our leaders driving us in that direction or a reflection of the way our culture has become divided?
Kurt Andersen: (33:08)
It's both, there's a lot of chicken and egg problems in this that I talk about in Evil Geniuses. I think and there are conspiracy theories on both sides. There are extreme views on both sides. Everything is true on both sides, but it's asymmetrical. It's insanely more true on the right. Now, why did that happen? That happened because the rational, smart, evil geniuses in politics and finance and C-suites and the rest understood that to get what they needed to do done in the 1970s and '80s and 90s, they needed to have enough people to get elected. And who are those people going to be? There aren't enough rich people and CEOs to form a party. So you need a bunch of people who are not rational or not educated or not whatever.
Kurt Andersen: (34:10)
And how do you get them? Well, you get them by riling them up and making them afraid of everything and everybody. And that leaves, inevitably has led in this country, which by the way of course has a certain history of toxic racism and bigotry to extreme toxic political feelings. And I think at what may be the end of this long 50-year cycle that came after this other long 50-year new deal cycle, that in the desperation to hold on to power, the right in the form of the Republican party has unleashed the extremism on their side to this horrible and ultimately I believe self destructive. Self-destructive both of the republican party. And if it's allowed to go unchecked America, that this there's self destructive way.
John Darsie: (35:11)
So we have another audience question, I think is interesting. Because you talk about some of these themes in the book. They talk about a book that's titled Fairness and Freedom, and it basically compares the evolution of the United States and New Zealand, which were two open societies that were founded by British colonists. And it basically talks about how New Zealand adopted an approach from an early stage of that country's life around the collective good. Whereas the United States was more about libertarian individualism.
John Darsie: (35:39)
And we've seen those two different approaches achieve success in each country, the United States and our philosophy around individualism has certainly been part of the economic miracle here. But at certain times it's also been a detriment to us. One of which you could talk about is COVID. You see New Zealand has zero cases while the West wing has 37 and counting. So, what do you think has created that environment? Do we need a reset of that brand of individualism that's become a sort of our trademark in the United States? You talk a little bit about how China maintained some of its political system while resetting their economic system as well. So how do we find more of that balance?
Kurt Andersen: (36:21)
Yeah. Well, I do talk about China and what they did in the late '70s. And I think where we are now requires perhaps as significant and radical of a change as they did and it worked out well for them, didn't it? The individualism thing is interesting. That's a real thing, right? That's a real thing in the founding of the United States. And then became this mythologized real thing as well. But we also had this intense sense of community, even back in the 19th century, the height of Cowboys and resettlers and all that kind of mythic individualism. Small towns became this sustaining place where people helped everyone. Then when we got big corporations and bigger population and bigger government, everything else, we used governments, local and federal and used unions and used all these non-individualistic means to balance out the individualism and to make sure that there was a sense of the common good and the common.
Kurt Andersen: (37:37)
So, yes, we have this in our system and it will always affect, and people want to be who they want to be. And that's been great and grand and beautiful in American history. But my argument, my theory of the case is that starting around 1970, that just got out of control. It just got out of control and was privileged over everything else. And for these Milton Friedman Knights who are major part of my Evil Geniuses, they used that to help themselves and kept helping themselves. So, it was always there but it was always there in balance with this sense of we are Americans together. We help each other and all that. And then, I say it's like a chronic condition that sort of was fine. And to be in the bloodstream intellect was allowed to just metastasize out of control, which I think is what's happened.
John Darsie: (38:43)
Well, Kurt, thanks so much for joining us. I think we could talk for three hours. No problem about these themes, because they're the big themes that we're facing as a country today. And hopefully we can have you back on in a few months when maybe the landscape is a little bit different and we can talk about some of these energetic government policies that hopefully can help lift us out of the current predicament. Anthony, you have any final words?
Anthony Scaramucci: (39:04)
I need to know when your next book is Kurt so I can start investing in that direction [crosstalk 00:39:10].
Kurt Andersen: (39:07)
As soon as I know I'll let you know.
Anthony Scaramucci: (39:11)
All right. Well, exactly right. Well, thank you so much, Kurt. We appreciate it. Hopefully we can get you to one of our live events at some point. I think you would enjoy that and-
Kurt Andersen: (39:20)
I'd love that.
Anthony Scaramucci: (39:20)
... enjoy the chemistry there.
Kurt Andersen: (39:22)
Thanks.
Anthony Scaramucci: (39:23)
All the best to you, Kurt.
Kurt Andersen: (39:24)
See you.