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

by Kurt Andersen

If the Roman Catholic French or Spanish had been more successful in making more of North America theirs, maybe we would be less rogue-utopian and individualistic. If the Dutch had extended their influence beyond New York and beyond the 1600s, the sensible and cosmopolitan strains of our national character might be more dominant. What if those first hundred radical Puritan extremists hadn’t leased the Mayflower and had stayed instead on their side of the Atlantic? What if we hadn’t been so tolerant of slave labor? What if the American Revolution had failed, or the Confederate secession had succeeded? What if California had remained part of Mexico, or the United States hadn’t fought a war in Vietnam? What if Joseph Smith and P. T. Barnum and Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan and Oprah Winfrey and Donald Trump and a dozen other key channelers of these American tendencies had never appeared? What if Internet search had been designed differently or if, in 2009, some senior Wall Street executives had been imprisoned for their recklessness and fraud? There were so many inflection points along the way. We might now be a warmer Canada, a massive Netherlands, a lumbering Argentina, or the United States the way it was until recently—that is, a country with a penchant for fantasies, but the penchant mostly under control. Instead, it all happened as it happened. We are what we are, in all our sui generis splendor. America was the dreamworld creation of fantasists, some religious and some o...