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

by Kurt Andersen

What’s now called Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare, praying and channeling God’s power to defeat satanic strangers and institutions, disappeared from America for centuries. The bit of the Bible that preoccupies these spiritual warriors, Ephesians 6:12, was obscure until recently: “Put on the whole armor of God….For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” To believers, the exhortation to wage war on the devil is not metaphorical. They ignore the “not against flesh and blood” passage and focus on the “wickedness in high places”—which to them means that particular VIPs (popes, presidents, supporters of marriage equality) are Satan’s agents on Earth.

Why in America have we hung on to the magical beliefs as well as the industriousness and money love and individualism that our founding religion encouraged?*9 Some of the standard scholarly explanations seem correct as far as they go, but they’re all limited by the scope and tools of their particular disciplines. They also tend to construct explanations that flatter Americans. Legalists focus on the Constitution and especially the First Amendment—that government wasn’t permitted to mess around in religion, which made religion flourish and attracted persecuted believers from elsewhere. Other historians attribute it to our frontier past, where wilderness folk, untethered from social control, were more inclined and free to dream up new religions: they could, so they did. But none that I’ve seen convincingly explains the persistence or extravagance of supernatural belief, or why during the last century and particularly the last half-century our divergence from the norm has grown so extreme. They don’t look at our religions and spirituality in the context of the larger American predisposition to feel special and think magically. They don’t register the connections between our religion and the rest of our giddy, uncertain grip on reality, the free-range wishfulness, the great American all of it.

The economists also don’t have much of an answer to a very specifically economic conundrum: the fact that, country by country, prosperity and a sense of security correlate with less religious belief almost everywhere—except America. As the political scientists Pippa Norris of Harvard and Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan explain in Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, “religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially in poorer nations and in failed states. Conversely, a systematic erosion of religious practices, values, and beliefs has occurred among the more prosperous strata in rich nations.”

Out of its various threads, the philosophy now had its basic doctrines in place: rationalism is mostly wrong-headed, mystical feelings should override scientific understandings, reality is an illusion one can remake to suit oneself.

Exactly how had Chopra and Williamson become so conspicuous and influential? They were anointed in 1992 and 1993 by Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey’s daily show had started airing nationally in the mid-1980s. In the 1990s twelve or thirteen million devotees watched it every weekday. Through her magazine O, started in 2000, she reached millions more. More than any other single American by far, outside conventional religion and politics, Oprah Winfrey is responsible for giving a national platform and credibility to magical thinking, New Age and otherwise. In her broad domain, she is the Cotton Mather, John Wesley, Brigham Young, and Billy Graham, the first New Age pope. If Ronald Reagan was the first king of his Fantasyland realm, Oprah Winfrey is still queen of hers.

In Fantasyland, purely about data is a phrase like mainstream and Establishment and consensus and rational and fact, meaning elitist, narrow, and blind to the disruptive truths. “Medicine is a very religious experience,” Oz told Specter, then added a kicker directly from the relativistic 1960s: “I have my religion and you have yours.”

Thanks to the coenabling usual suspects—academia, media, government, and business—we are living in two worlds at once, an amazing scientific present and a revived prescientific past, where robotic surgery and 3-D-printed bionic ears coexist with spurious folk remedies.

But many more in the humanities and social sciences, beyond the confines of the hep postmodern isms, are simply nonjudgmental Squishies. Reason may be okay for us as far as it goes, in our privileged clan, but we may not presume to expect it of others. These notions became standard on campus and were then taken out into the world by three generations of graduates so far, tens of millions of educated Americans, where they sifted into popular thought. It became uncool to disparage magical thinking and other irrationality. The very Americans who ought to be important fighters in the long war in defense of reason, professors and the graduates whose minds they shape, instead became enablers of Fantasyland.

So what if there are lots of Americans with various screws loose? So what if they dream and stew in their own mad, mad, mad, mad dreamworlds? Ignore them, let them alone, let them be. Right? Aye, there’s the rub. There are real consequences in the real world. Delusional ideas and magical thinking flood from the private sphere into the public, become so pervasive and deeply rooted, so normal, that they affect everyone. Some American fantasies have become weaponized, literally. In other words, our pockets are being picked and our legs are being broken.

Scientists of the mind had long since abandoned the concept of repressed memories, but laypeople were primed to believe. The 1960s and ’70s had taught them to obsess over sex, to credit conspiracy theories, and to believe that anyone who feels like a victim is a victim. Cinema also trained us to believe in repressed memories: a Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor has noted that “the flashback, in which a whole childhood trauma is suddenly recalled,” is a fictional device that makes the fictional idea of repressed memory seem real.

But beginning in the 1980s, the rising chorus of panicky Christian crazy talk had not just the rhyming whiff of Salem in 1692 but something like its actual horrible effect. Legitimate concern over the sexual abuse of children spun off a new, almost entirely fictional subgenre. The idea that satanic cults were systematically and commonly subjecting American children to nightmarish abuse—by the thousands, by the tens or hundreds of thousands—was more or less invented by a young woman just across Puget Sound from Seattle.

In 1973 the book Sybil had been published, about a woman who said she’d been abused as a child and had sixteen different personalities. After selling six million copies in the United States, it became a four-hour Emmy-winning NBC Big Event movie that was one of the most watched shows of the year. During the previous centuries in the entire world, there had been perhaps two hundred reported cases of multiple personality disorder; during the 1970s, the decade of Sybil, there were around four hundred, mainly among American women, especially highly hypnotizable women. Twenty years later psychiatrists promoting the diagnosis estimated that at least two hundred thousand Americans had the disorder, or maybe more than a million.

Insane people have committed criminal acts they believed Satan wanted them to commit, and children are sometimes victimized in Grand Guignol fashion by sadists and lunatics. But this satanic crime spree and profusion of secret death cults did not exist. It was a mass delusion. Why did it happen at that moment? The precipitous rise in violent crime that began in the 1960s had not yet peaked. The supply of clinical psychologists, caregivers desperate to find the secret source of their clients’ unhappiness, tripled from the mid-1970s to 1990. The national fantasy-industrial complex was giving people the perversity they wanted—TV news programs stoking fears as never before, Satan-themed bands like Mötley Crüe—and plenty of people now openly fancied themselves as Wiccans and devil worshippers.

From the early 1980s through the early 1990s, around two hundred Americans were indicted and prosecuted in dozens of states as satanic ritual abusers. More than eighty were convicted, some of them sentenced to

The Satanic Panic never really took off outside the United States. A historian in Norway found that until Rivera’s 1988 NBC special was covered in the Norwegian press, there had been no public references to satanic ritual abuse. According to The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic, published in 2004 by a U.S. social psychologist specializing in trauma and mental illness, the few international prosecutions in the 1980s and ’90s were generally “closed in a matter of months,”

By the 1990s, the fear of a UN military takeover of the United States was so widespread and impassioned that the Indiana Department of Transportation, for instance, was obliged to abandon its internal system for tracking the age of highway signs. Indianans had become convinced the colored dots on the backs of the signs were coded navigation instructions for the impending invasion by the UN’s armed foreigners.

David Koresh prophesied that he would be martyred. And at thirty-three, just like Jesus, he was killed by the empire’s henchmen. Unlike Jesus, he took four government agents and seventy-five of his disciples with him, all killed in a gun battle and fire after a federal team came to check out their arsenal of semiautomatic rifles. I’m not suggesting Koresh and his followers are typical of Christians awaiting the supernatural end of the world, or of Americans whose gun love is driven by dreams of an armed citizen uprising against tyranny. But the Branch Davidians’ theology is not so different from that of a large fraction of Americans. We call Koresh a “cult leader,” which allows us to file him away reassuringly as a one-off nut, like Charles Manson or Jim Jones. But it’s important to recognize that his church was a long-standing subgroup of a 150-year-old Protestant denomination that is one of the twenty largest churches in America, with six thousand U.S. congregations.

If a famous, award-winning, well-connected American journalist (and former presidential adviser) bought the exciting fictions he found on the Internet, why should we expect ordinary people to be any more scrupulous and skeptical?

In fact, it was the sudden, shocking exposure of actual conspiracies starting in the 1970s that made Americans overcorrect, to assume that anything bad is the intentional result of some conspiracy. Which may make it harder, ironically, to expose and dismantle the rare real ones. Our news and Internet-enabled media discourse are clogged more than ever with conspiracy theories. All the fantastical noise obscures the occasional signals.

People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable—many give themselves over to the dubious and untrue. But the politics of Fantasyland are highly asymmetrical. That is, starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. Moreover, it now has unprecedented power—as of 2016, effective control over much of the U.S. government.

Most Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. It’s a political movement whose most widely read and influential texts are fiction. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.” It was those fictions that allowed him and other higher-IQ Americans to see contemporary America as a dystopia in which selfishness is righteous and they are the last heroes.

Environmental science had the bad luck to recognize and start to publicize global warming in the early 2000s, just as full Fantasyland dawned. At first, Republicans were officially reasonable on the subject. As recently as 2008, their party platform mentioned “climate change” thirteen times, stipulating it was caused by “human economic activity,” and they committed themselves to “decreasing the long term demand for oil” in order “to address the challenge.” Four years later they had switched to denialism, the next platform mentioning “climate change” once, in scare quotes, only to disparage concern about it. The 2012 platform considered the UN’s twenty-year-old global warming mission statement Agenda 21 a more dire problem than global warming.

The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008 three-quarters of the GOP presidential primary candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016 only one did. That one, Jeb Bush, was careful to say evolutionary biology was only his truth, that “it does not need to be in the curriculum” of public schools, and if it is, ought to be accompanied by creationist teaching.

“no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust”—is kind of a theoretical freedom. Not only have we never had an openly unbelieving president, of the 535 members of the last Congress, exactly one listed her religion as “none.” Among all 7,383 state legislators, there is apparently only one atheist.*7 Eight of the fifty state constitutions officially prohibit atheists from holding public office; of those, Pennsylvania and Tennessee specifically require officeholders to believe in Heaven and Hell; and in Arkansas, atheists are technically ineligible to have any state job or to testify in court.

The antivaccine hysteria among well-educated, affluent parents I find especially galling. A population’s “herd immunity” starts to collapse and permit infectious epidemics when as few as 6 percent forgo immunization. In dozens of New York City private schools, the rate rose to more than 30 percent. In the richest section of Los Angeles—Malibu to Santa Monica down to Marina del Rey, through Beverly Hills and Brentwood to West Hollywood—the fraction of preschoolers with Personal Belief Exemptions exceeded 9 percent, four times the rate in L.A. County at large. In plenty of West L.A. private schools, especially “progressive” ones, majorities of parents stopped vaccinating.

Only 15 percent of us now say we ever hunt, less than half as many as in the 1970s. In any given year, maybe a third of those hunters among us, 5 percent of Americans, actually slog through fields and forests with rifles and shotguns. In fact, fewer of us now own any kind of gun for any reason—even as the number of guns has increased phenomenally. In the 1970s about half of Americans had a gun, and it was almost always just a gun, one on average. Today only about a quarter of Americans own guns—but the average owner has three or four. Fewer than eight million people, only 3 percent of all American adults, own roughly half the guns. Members of that tiny minority of superenthusiasts own an average of seventeen guns apiece.*1

The least fantastical is the idea that if a criminal threatens or attacks tomorrow, you want a gun handy to kill him. Being prepared for a showdown with a bad guy is the main reason gun owners give for owning one, and that answer has doubled in the surveys since the 1990s. During the same period, the chance of an American actually having such an encounter has decreased by half. In New York City, where restrictions on owning and carrying guns are among the strictest in the United States, the chance of being murdered is 82 percent less than it was in 1990.

The 1995 jackbooted-government-thugs letter was the moment the NRA inarguably settled in deepest Fantasyland. It seemed demented even to Republicans, dozens of whom had voted for the assault weapons ban in Congress. Former president George H. W. Bush resigned from the NRA in protest. Just days after the letter went out, the anti-gun-regulation activist Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City federal building.

The father of one of the murdered children devotes himself to debunking the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories; in 2016 one of the pro-gun fantasists was indicted in Florida for threatening to kill him.

During the 1970s, a couple of each year’s biggest movies at most were fantasies; nowadays only one or two are not. Only in the 2000s, a half-century after the Tolkien books appeared, did Hollywood finally turn them into a giant franchise.

To produce our documentary, we also went to Walt Disney World—and to Celebration, Florida, where I’d been before. Celebration is the real town that Disney built at the south end of Disney World in the 1990s. It’s an example of New Urbanism, the movement among architects and planners, beginning in the 1980s, that considers the development of cities and suburbs since World War II disastrously misguided. America abandoned the accumulated wisdom of centuries and built streets too wide, houses too far apart, driveways and garages too dominant, and homes too far from jobs and shopping, with too much dependence on driving and too much incoherent sprawl. The houses Americans built are architecturally inferior not because they ape old styles but because they’re inauthentically nostalgic.

During the two decades leading up to the financial and economic crash of 2008, the right and far right built out an unprecedented new multimedia infrastructure. There are now ten times as many talk radio stations as there were in the 1980s. Of the several shows with the largest audiences, all but one are about politics and government by and for right-wingers, with a combined daily audience of forty-five million. (The other show provides “biblically based” financial advice aimed at evangelicals, and directly behind those is Coast to Coast AM, the nightly conspiracy-and-magic-and-falsehood clearinghouse.) In a decade, from 1996 through 2007, we got Fox News, the Drudge Report, Infowars, and Breitbart, with Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter as free global platforms for all of them, their followers and wannabes.

Yet compared to the Breitbart News Network and Infowars, and leaving Sean Hannity aside, Fox News is fair, balanced, and reality-based. Once again, the residents of Fantasyland get graded on a curve. There are different degrees of egregious.

From 1967 through 2011, California was governed by former movie stars more than a third of the time, and one of them became president of the United States.

The campaign turned from a Batman subplot to a new postmodern genre that broke the fourth wall. Like no candidate ever before, Trump riffed in campaign speeches about the campaign, about his performances and box office. When a longtime PR man for tyrants took over, he followed suit, commenting on the Trump character and script and show as part of the show. “When he’s out on the stage,” Paul Manafort said, “he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose. The part that he’s been playing is evolving into the part that now you’ve been expecting, but he wasn’t ready for, because he had first to complete the first phase.” Act one had finished, he said, and during act two, “the image is going to change.” It did not then and has not since.

Trump took a key piece of cynical wisdom about show business—The most important thing is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made—to a new level: his actual thuggish, un-PC sincerity is the opposite of the old-fashioned goody-goody sanctimony that people hate in politicians. And when Trump does do his obligatory bits of patently faked niceness, they get a pass, because the rest of the time he’s implying that most public niceness is fake.

their most honest defense of his false statements has been to cast them practically as matters of religious conviction—he deeply believes them, so…end of story. That’s what the press secretary did concerning the nonexistent three to five million illegal voters: in a single encounter, he earnestly reminded reporters that Trump “has believed that for a while” and “does believe that” and “it’s been a long-standing belief he’s maintained” and “it’s a belief that he has maintained for a while.”

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).

After 1970 certain ingrained American habits—individualism, righteous conviction, open-mindedness—were all at once out of control, like flora and fauna in a newly tropicalized climate, blooming luxuriantly and shooting out seeds.

The seven centuries of Greek civilization are divided into three eras—the Archaic, then the Classical, then the Hellenistic. During the first, the one depicted by Homer, Greeks’ understanding of existence defaulted to supernaturalism and the irrational. Then suddenly science and literature and all the superstar geniuses emerged—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—in the period we canonize as “ancient Greece.” But that astonishing era lasted less than two centuries, after which Athens returned to astrology and magical cures and alchemy, the end. Why? According to The Greeks and the Irrational, by the Oxford classicist Eric Dodd, it was because they finally found freedom too scary, frightened by the new idea that their lives and fates weren’t predestined or managed by gods and they really were on their own. Maybe America’s Classical period has also lasted two centuries, 1800 to 2000, give or take a few decades on each end.