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

by Kurt Andersen

I haven’t abandoned hope. Even as we’ve entered this winter of foolishness and darkness, when too many Americans are losing their grip on reason and reality, it has been an epoch of astonishing hope and light as well.*10 During these same last three decades, Americans accomplished the miracle of reducing murders and other violent crime by more than half. We decoded the human genome, elected an African-American president, recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion years ago, and created Beloved, The Simpsons, Goodfellas, Angels in America, The Wire, The Colbert Report, Transparent, Hamilton, and, in my extended family alone, a dozen excellent babies. Since 1980, the fraction of Earth’s people living in extreme poverty has plummeted from more than 40 percent to 10 percent. I do despair of our devolution toward unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.