How an elite clique rewrote the American dream for their own benefit - and left the rest of the world behind.

Evil Geniuses is a secret story about how over the past half century, even before Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, America has sharply deviated from its dream of progress for many to a system of unlimited profit and personal interests for a few.

When the social liberation of the 1960s finally ended with the chaos of Vietnam and Watergate, a cabal of wealthy industrialists, business executives, wide-eyed libertarians and right-wing economic radicals waited, determined to reclaim everything they considered rightfully theirs.

Mostly out of sight, they quickly built and funded a new empire of think tanks, academic institutions and professional organizations, lobbying and political groups, using them to transform politics, media, finance, the legal system and laws of the United States to reinvent and control the political economy. Going back to the robber barons a century earlier, they sold the redesigned system to the people as a nostalgic return to traditional American values. For a decade, America's thriving visionary vision has been imprisoned by the uncontrolled financial accumulation and political power of the super-rich.

Now financiers run everything.

In this fascinating and deeply researched cultural and economic expose, New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen maps a rich history of tangled networks, unlikely connections and dark truths that control the people, showing how on earth America is where it is now and what it can do to defeat its progressive future.