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

by Kurt Andersen

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.

The Southern Baptist minister and professor Roger Olson bemoans the fundamentalist takeover of evangelicalism. “An analogy,” he wrote recently, “is what has happened to the Republican Party,” where moderates were marginalized. But that isn’t just an analogous dynamic: the transformations of Christianity and of the political right happened simultaneously and amplified each other.

The right had three generations to steep in this. Its exciting taboo vapors wafted more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of the people who voted Republican in 2012.*1

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.

But over the last generation, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” says the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016. “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.” The right’s ideological center of gravity careened way to the right of Rove and all Bushes, finally knocking them and their ilk aside. What had been its fantastical fringe became the GOP center. In retrospect, the sudden change in the gun lobby in the late 1970s, from more or less flexible to absolutely hysterical, was a harbinger of the transformation of the entire right a generation later. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

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.

On this subject, some Republicans are Cynics, some are Believers, and many combine bits of both. The pure Cynics are doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, which has cynically and successfully raised doubts about the clear scientific consensus on the cause of global warming. In this, they repeated what the tobacco industry had pioneered starting in the 1960s, as soon as medical science established that smoking causes cancer. At the Brown & Williamson cigarette company in 1969, an internal memo was explicit. “Doubt is our product,” it declared, “the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

Searching the records of the 278 Republicans serving in the Senate and House in 2014, the news organization PolitiFact found only eight who publicly acknowledged that global warming is real and caused by humans. We can’t know, of course, how many of the others are Believers and how many are Cynics. The good news is that only 17 percent of Americans who don’t call themselves Republican believe global warming is a myth.

AND THEN THERE was a new set of nonwhite people to fear. On September 20, 2001, President Bush made a point of saying that our enemy “is not our many Muslim friends…[or] our many Arab friends.” But after that, many Republicans began explicitly encouraging and exaggerating fears of Muslims, especially after the election of a nonwhite president with the middle name Hussein.

Until around 1980, “the Christian right” was not a phrase in American politics. In 2000 my widowed seventy-eight-year-old mom, having voted for fourteen Republican presidential nominees in a row, decisively quit a party that had become too religious for her. 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.

Most people aligned with the white pan-Christian party today don’t have a strong secular vision of America. A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion.” (And a large majority of all Americans believe that the “Constitution establishes [the United States as] a Christian nation” already.)

In fact, there are millions of American Christians trying to realize their fantasy of a fully theocratic nation. Their movement is called the Third Wave or dominionism, a term coined by Peter Wagner, the godfather of “spiritual warfare,” who believes the satanic sun goddess has sex with the Japanese emperor (see Chapter 31). The movement is a loose confederation of churches, mostly charismatic and Pentecostal but some merely fundamentalist. They are endeavoring to acquire political and cultural power in order to battle and defeat demons and put fundamentalist Christians in charge.

After the movement made news because of its links to national Republicans during the 2012 election cycle, Wagner wrote an essay in Charisma News about the criticism that his group has an “excessive fixation on Satan and demonic spirits. This is purely a judgment call, and it may only mean that we cast out more demons than they do. So what?” As for a theocracy, Wagner says, “There’s nobody that I know—there may be some fringe people—who would even advocate a theocracy.” Fringe people—as opposed to one member of Wagner’s own Council of Prophetic Elders who, according to Charisma, “received word that a witch had applied for a job as chaplain of [Alaska’s] prison system. ‘As we continued to pray against the spirit of witchcraft, her incense altar caught on fire, her car engine blew up, she went blind in her left eye, and she was diagnosed with cancer.’ ”

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.

This natural experiment confirmed the science: diseases we had eliminated returned. If you’d nostalgically pined for a return to old-time America, you got your way. U.S. cases of whooping cough had bottomed out at around 8,000 through the early 2000s; by 2012, we were up to 48,000—the 1955 level. The outbreak in California (as in Washington State) was the worst since the 1940s—hundreds were hospitalized and ten were dead in one year. Twenty of the Americans who got whooping cough in 2012 died, most of them newborns. Measles cases increased tenfold within a few years.

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.

Spectacular mass killings happen in America far more often than anywhere else, and not just because we make massacre-perfect weapons so easy to buy. Such killers are also engaged in role-play and are motivated by our besetting national dream of overnight fame. The experts say that most mass killers are not psychotics or paranoid schizophrenics in the throes of clinical delusion; rather, they’re citizens of Fantasyland, unhappy people with flaws and failures they blame on others, the system, the elitists, the world. They worry those resentments into sensational fantasies of paramilitary vengeance, and they know that acting out those fantasies will make a big splash and force the rest of us to pay attention to them for the first time.

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.

I don’t take the hard line of the biologist and professional atheist Richard Dawkins, who’s practically Maoist on the subject. He argues that reading fairy tales to children may dangerously “inculcate a view of the world which includes supernaturalism.”

That's absurd.

Rather, I think a different Oxford don, J.R.R. Tolkien, had it right in the lecture he gave just after he published The Hobbit. “Fantasy,” he said in 1939, talking about fantastical prose fiction, “is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make.”

Exactly what do you mean, I asked, by help out the characters? “I was very close friends with them,” she replied, “and I helped them get ready for whatever show they were doing—or if they needed help when they were meeting and greeting with guests.” I was still confused, didn’t yet know the rules. Although when we spoke Julie had not been an employee for nine years, she still adhered to the coy Disney corporate omertà: the people who play characters in the parks aren’t supposed to say, ever, that they play Snow White or Donald Duck. Because then the fictional beings might seem less real.

Consider the experience of one prominent Republican congressman from California’s Central Valley. When he arrived in 2003, at twenty-nine, he was among the most conservative elected officials in Washington. The right-wing Heritage Foundation now ranks him in the most “liberal” third of House Republicans. “I used to spend 90 percent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter” about some real issue, he told The New Yorker. His typical constituent back in the 2000s had an opinion about “actual legislation. Ten percent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head,” he said, during the last dozen years or so. Now only a small fraction of the messages from constituents are “based on something that is mostly true. It’s dramatically changed politics and politicians, and what they’re doing.” The congressman who sounded so sensible in 2015 was Devin Nunes, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee. By 2017, he was a stalwart defender of a president whose specialty is passing along untrue conspiracy theories, such as the one about having been wiretapped in Trump Tower.

Skepticism of the press and of academic experts has been a paramount fetish on the right for years, which effectively trained two generations of Americans to disbelieve facts at odds with their opinions. “For years, as a conservative radio talk show host,” Charlie Sykes wrote in early 2017, “I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to…destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information.” The conservative talk-radio host John Ziegler made a similar confession in 2016: “We’ve effectively brainwashed the core of our audience. And now it’s gone too far. Because the gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don’t see how you reverse it.”

The loss of immunity to false information is the big problem. Fox News’s conservatism is fine, but the channel’s tendency to present fiction as news is definitely not.

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.

The day after the Republicans’ second primary debate in 2015, at the Reagan Library, before the debates became completely cartoonish, a shocked New York Times editorial called it a collection of assertions so untrue, so bizarre, that they form a vision as surreal as the Ronald Reagan jet looming behind the candidates’ lecterns. It felt at times as if the speakers were no longer living in a fact-based world where actions have consequences, programs take money and money has to come from somewhere. Where basic laws—like physics and the Constitution—constrain wishes. Where Congress and the public, allies and enemies, markets and militaries don’t just do what you want them to, just because you say they will. I read that and said out loud, “Welcome to Fantasyland.”

I started paying close attention to Donald Trump a long time ago. In Spy magazine, which I cofounded in 1986 and edited until 1993, we devoted many hundreds of hours to reporting and researching and writing three cover stories and countless other articles about him, dozens of pages exposing and satirizing his lies, brutishness, egomania, and absurdity. Now everybody knows what we knew then.

Donald Trump is a pure Fantasyland being, its apotheosis. If he hadn’t run for president, I might not have mentioned him at all. But here he is, a stupendous Exhibit A. To describe him is practically to summarize this book. He’s driven by resentment of the Establishment. He doesn’t like experts because they interfere with his right as an American to believe or pretend that fictions are facts, to feel the truth. He sees conspiracies everywhere. He exploits the myths of white racial victimhood. His case of Kids “R” Us Syndrome—spoiled, impulsive, moody, a seventy-year-old brat—is extreme. And he is first and last a creature of the fantasy-industrial complex. “He is P. T. Barnum,” his sister, a federal judge, said to his biographer Tim O’Brien in 2005. Even as a teenager in the early 1960s, Trump himself told O’Brien, he understood that any racket in America could be turned into an entertainment racket. “I said, ‘You know what I’ll do? I am going to go into real estate, and I am going to put show business into real estate. I’ll have the best of both worlds.’ ”

Successful presidents and candidates have had to be entertainers for a while, but Trump went all the way. He used the pieces of the fantasy-industrial complex as nobody had before. He hired actors to play enthusiastic supporters at the kickoff of his candidacy. And unlike the other candidates, he was an exciting star, so TV shows wanted him on their air as much as possible—and as people who worked on those shows told me, they were expected to be careful not to make the candidate so unhappy he might not return.

Before Trump won their nomination and the presidency, when he was still “a cancer on conservatism” that “must be…discarded” (Governor Rick Perry) and an “utterly amoral” “narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen” (Senator Ted Cruz), what upset and bewildered Republicans was his performance style, like that of a villain in a bad movie. Back then they were genuinely shocked not by his racism but by the shameless ways he indicated he was a fellow traveler of the straight-ahead racists who cheered him on. Serious Republicans also hated Trump’s ideological incoherence—they didn’t yet understand that his campaign logic was a new kind, the consistency of exciting tales and showmanship that transcends ideology. Super Bowl halftimes and Disneyland are crazily eclectic too, but they’re entertaining.

“I play to people’s fantasies,” his ghostwriter, on Trump’s behalf, warned Americans thirty years ago in The Art of the Deal. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration.”

The single major item on the Fantasyland checklist we can check off only nominally is the one for religion. Among the many shocking things about Trump is his irreligiosity—that our Christian party chose the candidate who was the least Christian of the lot, and that white evangelicals nonetheless approve of President Trump overwhelmingly. During the campaign he tossed a few special fantasy crumbs their way, promising he’d make sure they would again feel free to say “Merry Christmas” to strangers of every faith. And his shameless-sinner style is still more proof of his astounding honesty—he’s not pandering to them, not feigning piety or saintliness. When asked about his religious affiliation, Trump regularly describes himself as “Protestant”—an odd tell, sort of like saying he’s a Homo sapiens of the Western Hemisphere instead of an American man.

He tweeted, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” On that last one, he later claimed he’d been kidding.

Not all lies are fantasies, and not all fantasies are lies; people who believe untrue things can pass lie detector tests. Trump’s version of unreality is a patchwork of knowing falsehoods and sincerely believed fantasies, which is more troubling than if he were just a liar.

Whatever he believes or doesn’t, he makes untrue assertions more frequently than any U.S. leader in recorded history. The fact-checking organization PolitiFact looked at four hundred of his factual statements as a candidate and as president and found that 50 percent were completely false and another 20 percent mostly false. After he became president, according to The Washington Post, he issued an average of more than four falsehoods or “misleading claims” per day.

In Fantasyland, refusing to be fact-checked is celebrated—“his brazenness is not punished,” the Economist noted, “but taken as evidence of his willingness to stand up to elite power.” Lying works for Trump even when he’s denying that he told lies he was recorded telling.

As far as religion goes, then, America isn’t so much secularizing as splitting into two distinct societies, one more secular and reality-based, one much less so. Rationalism and reasonableness are gaining some ground, but the true believers, still the bigger cohort, are sticking to their guns. We are polarizing religiously the way we have been polarizing politically. As I’ve said, that’s not coincidental, it’s synergistic.

DURING THE EARLY months of the Trump administration, I was reminded of a George Orwell essay from 1943 about the civil war in Spain, four years after the fascists won. One subtle but profound effect of the fascist regimes in Spain and Italy and Germany, he wrote, was how their propaganda “often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history.”

The idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum was always a very American belief. But it’s really an article of faith more than a historical law—the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending was reconfigured during the Enlightenment into a set of secular fantasies about inevitable improvement. One version was our blithe conviction that America’s forms of freedom and democracy and justice and affluence must prevail in the end. I can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into disarray and decline.

“Keeping an open mind is a virtue,” 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.” That was twenty years ago.