Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

bit slower in the 1950s, fast again in the 1960s through the early 1970s. It seemed that while the forward progressive momentum occasionally slowed, it would never permanently stop or move backward .
    Over on the economic right, meanwhile, especially among people who owned or ran or advised big businesses, the flip side of that liberal triumphalism around 1970 was the opposite of complacency—it was alarm, dread, panic. The national consensus remained in favor of government acting on behalf of the public good, requiring business to operate fairly and cleanly and affluent people to pay high taxes, giving a hand to the poor. In 1964 and 1965 the Democrats had actually reduced the top personal income tax rates on the richest Americans from 91 to 70 percent—but after that everything was moving in the wrong direction. In the late 1960s antibusiness attitudes among the U.S. public spiraled out of control along with the general distrust of the Establishment. That default antipathy was now mainstream and not diminishing.
    Respectable opinion seemed to have turned against big business so quickly and so hard . An exposé of the dangers of synthetic pesticides, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, had become a number-one bestseller for months and introduced the idea of “the environment” to millions of Americans, which led directly to the creation of the EPA. There was young Ralph Nader, the tenacious lawyer-investigator-activist out of Harvard Law School, whose own damning exposé of corporate irresponsibility, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, became a bestseller in 1966 and by the end of the year inspired a new federal regulatory bureaucracy to improve car safety. As the 1970s began, Nader was an immensely effective antibusiness celebrity expanding his purview and appeared on the cover of Time for a story about “The Consumer Revolt.” Time marveled that Ford’s CEO and chairman, Henry Ford II, was now “acknowledging the industry’s responsibility for polluting the air and asked—indeed, prodded—the Government to help correct the situation. The auto companies must develop, said Ford, ‘a virtually emission-free’ car, and soon.” By then Nader had assembled a team of even younger lawyer-investigator-activists who were making trouble for other big businesses. Only in private, meeting with auto executives, was the Republican president willing to vent, saying that these liberal activists “aren’t really one damn bit interested in safety or clean air, what they’re interested in is destroying the system, they’re enemies of the system.”
    The survey firm Yankelovich, Skelly & White had started asking Americans every year whether they agreed with the statement that “business tries to strike a fair balance between profits and the interests of the public.” In 1968, 70 percent still agreed; in 1970, only 33 percent did. Capitalists were freaking out. So were true-believing free-market intellectuals, who were never very numerous and had lately felt pushed even further to the fringe. All those various “countervailing powers” that had been built up for a century on behalf of citizens and workers seemed to have become crazily supercharged.
    The early 1970s still felt like the very late ’60s. Maybe the revolutionary madness was peaking, but so far the grassroots reactionaries were reacting only against the rapidly changing culture— against the new policy of busing of black students to white schools, against acid, amnesty, and abortion, against empowered women. The national flip-flop concerning the Equal Rights Amendment tracks that cultural moment perfectly.
    In the spring of 1972, the 535 members of Congress passed the ERA with only thirty-two nay votes. Just a week later the legislature of Republican Nebraska, where I still lived, became the second state to ratify that amendment to the Constitution—unanimously, 38–0—and by summer it had been ratified by another