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

by Kurt Andersen

Dean celebrates practically every attitude and approach that appalls me. She rejects “the presumption that there is some ‘public’ that shares a notion of reality, a concept of reason, and a set of criteria by which claims to reason and rationality are judged.” In fact, as far as “the rationality of the public sphere” goes, “the collapse of its very possibility” is all to the good. Naturally, she uses the late 1960s term consensus reality to disparage reason. The “norms of public reason are,” she writes, “oppressive and exclusionary.” Because the “antidemocrats” in the mainstream try “to contain the rest of us with their borders, sciences, traditions and truths,” disbelief in science “makes sense” and “is potentially democratic. It prevents science from functioning as a trump card having the last word in what is ultimately a political debate.” Alternate realities engendered by the Internet and talk radio and cable news are fine by her. “Now,” she writes, “the ‘irrational’ can get their message out. They can find and connect with those myriad others also dismissed by science. They can network and offer alternatives to official deployments or reason.” Such as imaginary conspiracies: “democratic politics in an age of virtuality will need to turn to conspiracy theory as a way of making links,” she says. “And, of course, to ask about the ‘truth’ of this information is to miss the point.” Of course. To her, a particular feminist academic is foolish to warn against “epidemic hyste...