the illusion that nothing much is changing or ever can change?" Reception Anand Giridharadas's review in The New York Times says "It is a radicalized moderate’s moderate case for radical change" and summarizes the recommendations in it as "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." Publishers Weekly says "Much of Andersen’s material will be familiar to newshounds, but he arranges it into a cohesive argument backed by hard data and stinging prose." Kirkus Reviews calls it "A rousing call for desperately needed systemic transformation." A review in Religion Dispatches describes the book as "an extended mea culpa for his own inability, and the inability of culture liberals like him, to grasp what said geniuses were doing to remake the political economy" and says "Andersen deserves credit for showing how an ever-more-powerful overclass has shaped the political economy we all inhabit", but criticizes the book for failing to fully engage with the issue of racism and not addressing what it calls The Righteous Mind problem: "how the lasting legacy of Puritanism tends to undergird deference toward the wealthy while fueling reaction against the ironic counterculture that Andersen himself helped to create." A review in the Chicago Tribune says "The elements he is able to pull together and weave into a narrative that so convincingly pinpoints how we arrived at this moment are consistently novel and interesting." Tom Krattenmaker in The Humanist says Evil Geniuses "demonstrates a remarkable ability to see through to the truth of the politics and culture of recent decades, and to make sense of them in a way with crucial relevance to now." See also Dark Money References American history books Books about North America 2020 non-fiction books Random House books