We Used to be Wise

The wreckage was not an accident.

For fifty years, people who knew exactly what they were doing took apart the structures that made the United States work. They had a plan. They wrote it down. In August 1971, a tobacco lawyer named Lewis Powell handed the Chamber of Commerce a memorandum explaining how to capture courts, universities, media, and legislatures on behalf of concentrated wealth. Two months later, Nixon put him on the Supreme Court.

We Used to Be Wise is the accounting.

The book traces what the campaign cost. The depositor insurance built after 1929, gutted. The wage floor built after the Triangle fire, dismantled. The court that decided Brown v. Board, captured. A healthcare system that charges more per person than any other wealthy country and kills more mothers than Germany, Japan, or the United Kingdom. Elections where 10,000 votes in one state now outweigh a million in another. Bridges that fall. Water that poisons. The handshake with NATO replaced with a handshake with the Kremlin.

Each chapter names the mechanism and the people who built it. Lewis Powell. Paul Weyrich. Charles and David Koch. Mitch McConnell. The five justices who rewrote the First Amendment to mean what their donors wanted it to mean. The bean counters who replaced the builders.

This is not a book about Trump. Trump is the symptom. The disease is fifty years old.

The final chapter counts bodies.

The conclusion names the strongest counter-argument the books critics will raise and defeats it. Globalization did not require the Reagan tax cuts. Automation did not require Citizens United. Every wealthy country faced the same pressures. The United States made different choices than Germany, than Japan, than the Nordics. The choices were political, not inevitable.

We used to know what happens when banks gamble with depositors money. We used to know what happens when workers have no floor. We used to know what happens when alliances go conditional and courts get captured. We had the graves. We wrote the laws. The laws worked.

Then, over fifty years, the people who did not like what the graves taught spent a great deal of money making sure everyone forgot.

This book is the accounting.