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

by Kurt Andersen

Our special American alloy of Protestantism and the Enlightenment also generated our extreme, self-righteous individualism. I have searched for the truth and discovered it (Protestant and Enlightenment). My intuitions are equal to facts (Protestant). My skepticism is profound (Enlightenment) except concerning my own beliefs (Protestant). Who I am is whatever I imagine myself to be (both), and You’re not the boss of me (both).

Ours was a country created by wildcatters and entrepreneurs, hustlers of every kind. Wide open spaces made for solitude as much as for community, which in turn made for still more extreme individualists—people alone for months on end marinating in their own thoughts and feelings and fancies. The spaciousness also made it easy for Americans, especially at the start and again more recently, to sort themselves into homogeneous, self-reinforcing geographic clusters where all the inhabitants share the same script.

Our nostalgia tic also explains a lot. Americans have always been apt to think of America as the best place on Earth—but also that it used to be so much better, more pioneering, more charming, more virtuous, more authentic.

The unprecedented and broadly shared affluence of our twentieth century—with its go-go blowout starting in the 1960s—was a prerequisite to Fantasyland, but the arrival of full Fantasyland was accompanied by the end of those economic glory days for most people. According to psychologists, stress can trigger delusions, and engaging in fantasy can provide relief from stress and loneliness. According to sociologists, religion flourishes more in societies where people frequently feel in economic jeopardy. According to social psychologists, belief in conspiracy theories flourishes among people who feel bad about themselves; they may be powerless to improve their lives, but knowing about all the alleged secret plots gives them a compensatory jolt of what feels like power.

Back in 1972, the entire nonreligious fraction of Americans, disbelievers plus doubters plus nothing-in-particulars, was just 5 percent—and now it’s 23 percent. (That’s partly a function of education. Almost half of Americans who didn’t get beyond high school think every bit of the Bible is literally true, while only one in six college graduates do.)

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...

Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, the last book he published, but “not so open that your brains fall out….I have a foreboding of an America when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and the next generations. We need to adopt a guiding principle, based on those aphorisms of Daniel Moynihan and Thomas Jefferson I’ve quoted so often: You’re entitled to your own opinions and your own fantasies, but not your own facts—especially if your fantastical facts hurt people.

while our Fantasyland tendencies were present from the beginning, the current situation was not inevitable, because history and evolution never are. Nor now is any particular future. We could regain our national balance and composure. These last decades may turn out to have been a phase, one strange act of our ongoing epic, an unfortunate episode in the American experiment that we will finally move past and chalk up to experience. Nations and societies have survived and recovered from far more terrible swerves, eras that felt cataclysmic as they were happening. The good news, in other words, is that America may now be at peak Fantasyland. We can hope.