Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

Hannah Arendt escaped Germany as a young woman in 1933, when the Nazis took over, and emigrated to America, where she became one of the most important political philosophers of the age. Her first big book, in 1951, was The Origins of Totalitarianism. I’d never read it until 2016, around the time Trump made “rigged elections” a recurring theme of his campaign. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks” in a totalitarian movement, Arendt wrote, “from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating.” When I read the next paragraph, I was staggered. I stopped and read it again. It gave me goosebumps. A mixture of gullibility and cynicism have been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true….Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cy...