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

by Kurt Andersen

It’s telling that Americans know and celebrate Plymouth but Jamestown hardly at all. The myth we’ve constructed says that the first nonnative new Americans who mattered were the idealists, the hyperreligious people seeking freedom to believe and act out their passionate, elaborate, all-consuming fantasies.

Hutchinson is so American because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality. She’s so American because, unlike the worried, pointy-headed people around her, she didn’t recognize ambiguity or admit to self-doubt. Her perceptions and beliefs were true because they were hers and because she felt them so thoroughly to be true. They weren’t mere theories and opinions delivered by her Oxford- and Cambridge-educated antagonists. Hutchinson didn’t have to study any book but the Bible to arrive at the truth. Because she felt it. She knew it.

Alone among the Puritans, Anne Hutchinson is the one with whom American sensibilities today can connect, because America is now a nation where every individual is gloriously free to construct any version of reality he or she devoutly believes to be true. American Christianity in the twenty-first century resembles Hutchinson’s version more than it does the official Christianity of her time.

As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. That’s the real-life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism.

While most of the thirteen colonies had a state church before the Revolution, afterward the Constitution outlawed them. Every set of beliefs and practices—old or new, more or less reasonable or plainly nuts—was officially equal to every other. In other words, a new American culture and psychology emerged during the 1600s and 1700s—which the new government then codified, allowing our native peculiarities to continue.

“On the first of January, 1848, of the Christian era,” The New York Herald declared, “the new age of miracles began.” Which was among the greatest illustrations of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

A defining feature of America from the start, according to McDougall’s Freedom Just Around the Corner, was the unprecedented leeway and success of its hucksters—“self-promoters, scofflaws, occasional frauds, and peripatetic self-reinventors,” as well as “builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers.” He writes that “Americans are, among other things, prone to be hustlers,” which “is simply to acknowledge Americans have enjoyed more opportunity to pursue their ambitions, by foul means or fair, than any other people in history.” For a large pool of hustlers to be successful, of course, requires a large population of easy believers.

For a great many white Southerners, defeat made them not contrite and peaceable (like, say, Germans and Japanese after World War II) but permanently pissed off. Which in turn led them to embrace a Christianity almost as medieval as the Puritans’.

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the 1980s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, it hadn’t seemed like a serious problem in America.

In other words, before the end-time battles can happen, as many Jews as possible need to be near Armageddon. The eleven-year-old Christians United for Israel, with 3 million members, is a primary vehicle of the American Christian Zionist movement. Its Pentecostal minister founder has preached that God sent Hitler to Earth as “a hunter” to exterminate Jews in order to herd and corral the survivors in Palestine—“to get them to come back to the land.”

ONE SET OF FANTASIES HAS had more current, awful, undeniable real-world consequences than any other: the one that recast owning guns as among the most important rights, as American liberty and individualism incarnate.

Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Nixon, complained after he retired that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word fraud—on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

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