The New York Times hates capitalism. It's right there on the front of Sunday's Book Review.
Far, far-left writer Anand Giridharadas reviewed Kurt Andersen’s latest book, Evil Geniuses – The Unmasking of America: A Recent History. Andersen, founder of the satirical Spy magazine was a standard-issue New York City liberal until he himself took a hard, historically conspiratorial turn left. The "evil geniuses" are the conservative movement, lobbying to defend the free market from the economic authoritarians.
Their headline “Hijacking America” ushered in 2,000 words of self-referential indulgence from Giridharadas, who was given unusually free rein in his review, but it does him no favors. While trying for edgy charisma, he just comes off self-indulgent and self-promoting.
It used to be called the New World. Now it’s run by a man who wants to make it great “again.”
….America was hijacked by capital supremacists, who preached and enacted, as Andersen details with wallets-full of receipts, a return to a pre-New Deal order: “everybody for themselves, everything’s for sale, greed is good, the rich get richer, buyer beware, unfairness can’t be helped, nothing but thoughts and prayers for the losers.”
….Andersen sets out to narrate a complex, many-layered history of how a band of rich people, corporate executives and political right-wingers, aided and abetted by gullible “useful idiots” in the media and the political left, transformed the nation into a casino where only they ever win.
An easy way to place yourself on the radical left is to proclaim the leftist media are "useful idiots" for the capitalist pigs. He praised the book as "a radicalized moderate’s moderate case for radical change."
It’s no surprise that Giridharadas is a fan of author Jane Mayer:
The rich and the right correctly understood what they were seeking as a cultural project with economic benefits. They acted accordingly. In territory that has already been reported by Jane Mayer, in her must-read-if-you-care-about-your-country-even-just-a-little book Dark Money, they reserved a fraction of the spoils of widening economic inequality to invest in the yanking open of political inequality, so as to widen the economic inequality yet further….
There’s a little entertainment value when he tracks Andersen going after the Democratic Party for “shameful liberal complicity.”
Voting for cable deregulation? Hiring Goldman Sachs bankers as advisers? Praising Charles Murray’s advocacy of punishing mothers on welfare? Each time, Democrats were #OnIt. With Democrats like these, do we even need a second party representing the plutes?
“Plutes,” is Giridharadas’s clever (?) wannabe catchphrase for “plutocrats,” the enemy of all decent people. It’s his go-to phrase, as NewsBusters has documented.
The right might be surprised to learn about all the power they have now.
At this moment of five intersecting crises -- health, economic, racial, democratic and climatic -- things can feel hopeless. The rich and the right did it. We all live in their world now….
Giridharadas agrees with Andersen's bizarre assertion that the left, which has lately shown itself all too eager to punish cultural dissent in the universities and job market, and muscle in the streets, are just too nice, too nuanced to compete with the right!
….[Andersen] offers the left two pieces of counsel of particular note: to focus relentlessly on the amassing of power, the building of institutions, networks, societies, associations -- the long game. And to embrace the power of evil genius. .He says the mainstream left has been too nice, too nonideological, too pragmatic, too nuanced. Winning back America as a country that works for Americans will be the battle of a generation, and this book raises the question of whether the left should seek to achieve that country by embracing the cabalistic power-building, linguistic cunning, intellectual patronage and media stewardship the right has employed.
Anyone who thinks the leftist media is "too nuanced" is clearly writing for laughs.
