The Unmaking of America
This week: a conversation with Kurt Andersen about inequality, nostalgia, and the 1970s. Listen today at 2 pm, or anytime at our web site.
How did America go from the New Deal era to whatever we’re in now, when so much tends away from not just New Deal thinking, but novelty itself? Whether we’re told to make America great again or to resist universal healthcare, the message is that some sort of past inequality ought to continue.
Kurt Andersen’s new book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, tells the story of that shift from ideals of fairness to an increasingly unfair political economy, a shift with economic and cultural ramifications that brought us to a state of compounding, ever-intensifying, nostalgic inequality. It happened, Andersen tells us this week, as a subtle undermining of the advances represented by FDR and the 1960s:
Liberalism broadly construed (culturally and politically and economically, even) seemed, as we now say, such a hegemon. So in control that: “What do we have to worry about? Oh, look, Milton Friedman got the Nobel Prize. That’s fine. Oh, look, PBS gives Milton Friedman a TV show. Fine.” We were magnanimous in our true liberalism, allowing it to happen . . . “Sure. Let’s meet ’em halfway. Of course it’s a free market country and we can have free market solutions to social problems.”
In Andersen’s account, a new consensus took hold among political elites in the 1970s and beyond. Democrats like Jimmy Carter began to follow Republicans rightward, and even to merge with Republicans, on matters of economics:
They would not be a party of the economic left . . . They would not represent a distinct economic vision from the Republicans at the time, and instead, the hills they would die on and the battles they would fight hard were about race and and and abortion and all these worthy causes. But the economics? We don’t disagree fundamentally with with the Republicans. And that was the decision that was made collectively, more or less, starting in the late 70s and and lasting for a couple of generations, which, of course, had the effect of of making the miners of the world, the manufacturing workers of America, think like, “Why am I a Democrat anymore, if they’re really on my economic issues, my union issues and all the rest, not really different from Republicans?”
Andersen would like to see 1) the right as it’s now represented out of office, as the first step toward 2) a return to New Deal principles:
The necessary thing, but not the sufficient thing, is to get rid of this most grotesque version of this rightist party that we now have. And that is, as I say, necessary, but not sufficient to get there. So, you get a big landslide, God willing, in which the main villain is thrown out. And we’ll see about how many of the rest of his villainous enablers are thrown out. And then we see.
And it’s going to be a long slog. . . . And that’s the beginning, where we see a Democratic Party that will have to do what the Democratic Party did in 1933 to get us out of the hellishness that we’re in now, just as it did get us out of the hellishness that we were in then and see where we go.
Read: “The Real Thing”
Dealing with the phantasmatic, sick nostalgia in American wealth and inequality means grappling with a knotty entwinement of reality and artifice. Henry James’s story “The Real Thing” can help. James gives you a full drama of delusion, artifice, money, and reality that says something especially to American readers, as its title’s anticipation of the ultra-American Coca-Cola slogan suggests.
A couple with a noticeable connection to aristocracy but clearly in need of money appear at an artist’s studio. They hope to model for this illustrator the real version of aristocratic, romantic heroism. But they don’t inspire the artist properly. They don’t convey some vaguely understood “real” version of the imagined, glorious, aristocratic character that the artist seeks. Instead, they seem like uncanny types, awkwardly unstable cliches.
“The case was worse,” the narrator says, with the husband:
[H]e became useful only for the representation of brawny giants. I adored variety and range, I cherished human accidents, the illustrative note; I wanted to characterize closely, and the thing in the world I most hated was the danger of being ridden by a type. I had quarrelled with some of my friends about it- -I had parted company with them for maintaining that one had to be, and that if the type was beautiful (witness Raphael and Leonardo), the servitude was only a gain. I was neither Leonardo nor Raphael; I might only be a presumptuous young modern searcher, but I held that everything was to be sacrificed sooner than character. When they averred that the haunting type in question could easily be character, I retorted, perhaps superficially: “Whose?” It couldn’t be everybody’s- -it might end in being nobody’s.
What’s the reality here? Is it that character emanates always from something more general, something like the “types” of class and fiction? Or that the aristocrats are not actually wealthy enough to count as “the real thing”? Or that there isn’t a sturdy sense of the real thing, to begin with, when it comes to money, to class, to art? In this season of diverging realities and amplified delusions, of class tensions complicated by proliferating tensions of all kinds, “The Real Thing” poses questions worth investigating.
Find it in the Library of America’s collection of James’s stories (the volume with “The Real Thing” was edited by John Hollander and by friend-of-Open-Source David Bromwich).
Support us on Patreon, and hear a conversation with a Simpsons show-runner
Become a patron of Open Source on Patreon, where you can find an ever-growing catalogue of interviews. This includes Adam Colman’s ongoing series of interviews with writers about their work in the pandemic; this week he talks to Mike Reiss, a writer for The Simpsons, about Reiss’s work on the funniest show in the history of television.
They discuss: the warm sense of community on the show and in the writers’ room; the connection between Harvard and The Simpsons (Reiss, a Harvard alum, has dreams of a sinkhole swallowing the whole institution); and decades-old Simpsons plots of a pandemic and Trump presidency. It’s all part of a conversation about a wonderful, strange writerly job that Reiss calls “socially acceptable.”
To find Open Source on Patreon, go to patreon.com/radioopensource!
Listen: Avery Amereau
From Gramophone’s review of Avery Amereau’s new recordings of Handel arias:
Galatea’s ‘Benché tuoni’ from the early serenata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo gets this chronologically arranged recital off to a rollicking start. Egged on by Nicholas McGegan’s ever-responsive band, Amereau defies the raging Polifemo in a terrific show of vocal bravado, biting into the Italian consonants and careering effortlessly above the stave in the da capo. Her care for words pays dividends, too, in Rinaldo’s showpiece ‘Venti, turbini’, voice vying in furious agility with solo violin and bassoon, and in a swaggering ‘Con tromba guerriera’ from Silla, where singer and trumpet spur each other on to ever more extravagant coloratura flights. Another highlight is Zenobia’s invocation to the furies from Radamisto, the tone darkly glittering, the spitting double consonants (‘abisso’, ‘tiranno’) duly relished.
This week’s ephemeral library
NBA on strike? A biography of Toussaint Louverture. The grace of Chadwick Boseman. This is How Biden Loses.
We’re off next week, folks, for a little R&R. We’ll be back after Labor Day and by popular demand we’ll be in the Glascow pub with the Scottish sage Mark Blyth.
Take it easy and please take it, as the wise Studs Terkel liked to say. Be well!
The OS Team
