NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • When did America give up on fairness? The author of Fantasyland
tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets
whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should
ever change—and charts a way back to the future.
“The one book everyone must read as we figure out how to rebuild our country.”—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci
During
the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social
systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge,
secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But
then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early
1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy
of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules
and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined
and dismantled. The clock was turned back on a century of economic
progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market
all-powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, lifting up an oligarchy that
served only its own interests, and leaving the huge majority of
Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope.
Why and how
did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and
brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt
Andersen offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of
America’s undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly
assigning blame—to the radical right in economics and the law, the high
priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and
liberal “useful idiots,” among whom he includes himself.
Only a
writer with Andersen’s crackling energy, deep insight, and ability to
connect disparate dots and see complex systems with clarity could make
such a book both intellectually formidable and vastly entertaining. And
only a writer of Andersen’s vision could reckon with our current
high-stakes inflection point, and show the way out of this man-made
disaster.