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

nineteen, including Idaho, Texas, Kansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Hard-core cultural conservatives, who hadn’t been much of an organized national political force, were suddenly galvanized to stop this new abomination. And so less than a year after rushing to approve the explicit guarantee that “equality of rights shall not be denied on account of sex,” Nebraska was a bellwether again, becoming the first state to rescind its ratification. At that very moment, at the beginning of 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court happened to decide by a vote of 7–2 that abortion was an implicit constitutional right. So with ERA ratification stopped in its tracks, the freshly mobilized cultural right now turned its attention to trying to recriminalize abortion.
    But those kinds of backlash by the religious and the provincials weren’t directly doing besieged corporate America and the serious right, the economic right, any good at all. Silent Spring, Unsafe at Any Speed— and then in the fall of 1970, denouncing big business more existentially, Reich’s Greening of America . It appeared with every possible mainstream blue-chip imprimatur: Yale law professor, prestigious major publisher, Times bestseller list for nine months—and a third of the book filled almost an entire issue of The New Yorker, so that tens of thousands of members of the business classes could have a savage countercultural attack on their oppressive and doomed capitalist system delivered directly to their doorsteps.
    Reich told New Yorker subscribers that they and/or their well-compensated friends and neighbors were all prisoners of “an inhuman consciousness dominated by the machine-rationality of the Corporate State” that “literally cares about nothing else than profits” and that had added “to the injustices and exploitation of the nineteenth century” by the robber barons a new “de-personalization, meaninglessness and repression” that threatens “to destroy all meaning and all life.”
    He specifically ridiculed the die-hard economic right-wingers,
the businessmen who were the most vocal in their opposition, [who] had a pathological hatred of the New Deal, a hatred so intense and personal as to defy analysis. Why this hatred, when the New Deal, in retrospect, seems to have saved the capitalist system? Perhaps because the New Deal intruded irrevocably upon their make-believe, problem-free world in which the pursuit of business gain and self-interest was imagined to be automatically beneficial to all of mankind, requiring of them no additional responsibility whatever. In any event, there was a large and politically powerful number of Americans who never accepted the New Deal even when it benefited them, and used their power whenever they could to cut it back.
    It was a sign of those triumphalist liberal times that Reich referred to haters of the New Deal in the past tense, as if such weird old coots were extinct.
    In fact, exactly two weeks before America’s most elite weekly published Reich’s astounding hurrah for revolution, and exactly two blocks west on Forty-third Street in Manhattan, America’s most elite daily published its antithesis, a manifesto telling businesspeople that they should literally care about nothing other than profits and that they had no additional responsibility to society whatever. The essay was as intemperate and self-righteous as The Greening of America, and in the end it had more consequence. According to the economist Mariana Mazzucato, it became the modern “founding text…in many ways, of corporate management.”
    It was written by Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago libertarian economist, and published across five pages of The New York Times Magazine under the headline A FRIEDMAN DOCTRINE—THE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY OF BUSINESS IS TO INCREASE ITS PROFITS . Friedman had become famous during the 1960s, as the decade of free speech and anything-goes outlandishness made his outlandish ideas seem