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

by Kurt Andersen

Identical majorities of liberals, moderates, and conservatives believe that foods containing GMOs are unsafe to eat—57 percent of all Americans.fn1

The media did their part too. In 2002 The New York Times Magazine ran a long article called “The Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory.” Kennedy, a liberal celebrity from a liberal celebrity dynasty, was endorsed all over TV, including in his appearance on The Daily Show. Oprah Winfrey: sure. But one doesn’t expect America’s great celebrity skeptic, the maker of a feature-film documentary mocking religion, to entertain and encourage provably false fantasies. According to Bill Maher, “Flu vaccines are bullshit”—in fact, getting vaccinated with a “flu shot is the worst thing you can do.… If you have a flu shot for more than five years in a row,” he said on CNN, “there’s ten times the likelihood that you’ll get Alzheimer’s disease.”

Vaccine-phobia runs the ideological gamut, but lately it seems to be shifting rightward—where antiexpert and antigovernment derangement is more intense.

Let me put a finer point on what I’m saying. Very, very few of the guns in America are used for hunting. Americans who own guns today keep arsenals in a way people did not forty years ago.

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.

But after the NRA’s apoplectic-fantasist faction took control in the late 1970s, it turned its dial up to eleven and kept it there, becoming the center of a powerful new political movement that opposed any and all regulation of firearms—the types and numbers of guns and accessories and ammo people could buy, who could buy them and how easily, registration, licensing, even a requirement to use safety locks.

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.

REASONABLE PEOPLE HOPED that after the massacre in 2012 of the twenty first graders and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the delirium might begin to break. The killer’s mother, who homeschooled him, “had a survivalist philosophy, which is why she was stockpiling guns,” according to her sister-in-law. The stockpile consisted of seven firearms, including the rifle with which her son murdered her. To murder the children and teachers, he used her semiautomatic “modern sporting rifle”—that’s the term preferred by the national gun industry trade association, which happens to be headquartered in Newtown. The killer brought twenty-two high-capacity thirty-round magazines with him to the school.

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.” And yet … look at what’s become of the culture industry lately.

The next step is augmented reality. It exists and works, and before long it will be available to everyone. Google, Warner Bros., and blue-chip Silicon Valley venture capitalists have shoveled $1.4 billion into the start-up Magic Leap, which has no products or revenues and almost a thousand employees.

Civil War reenactors are the original gangstas in this realm, LARPers and cosplayers before those terms existed, but now they seem strangely—oh, what’s the word?—right, dated. The Internet has made it much, much easier for reenactors—as well as cosplayers and LARPers and Burners and all the other outdoor fantasizers—to find costumes and gear and one another.

From the earliest days of the American fantasy-industrial complex in the 1850s, snooty critics used Barnumized as a term of disparagement—in 1854 The New York Times called a celebrity conductor’s concert of classical music attended by forty-five thousand New Yorkers a Barnumized spectacle; in 1922 a movie director was said to have Barnumized classic works of literature. A few decades ago we coined the successor synonym: Disneyfication, to denote how urban America had started to resemble theme parks.

FROM THE 1980S through the ’90s and into the 2000s, the financial and economic fantasies that got such traction were happy happy happy. In addition to our uniquely entrepreneurial approach to religion, America also developed an unusually religious approach to entrepreneurialism, especially since the 1960s. At Amway, Mary Kay, Walmart, Chick-fil-A, Apple, the Oprah Winfrey empire, Martha Stewart in her heyday, Whole Foods, and Amazon—among employees as well as customers—those businesses cultivated a cultish, evangelical vibe.

“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.

At the end of 2016, BuzzFeed analyzed the year’s political stories—the twenty most viral articles from publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, and the twenty most viral published by false-news peddlers. During the last three months of the presidential campaign, the top fictional articles—“Pope Francis Endorses Donald Trump,” “Wikileaks Confirms Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS”—were much more widely shared and commented on than the top genuine ones.

DURING THE FIRST fifteen years of the twenty-first century, the GOP turned into the Fantasy Party, with a beleaguered reality-based wing. A far-right counterculture empowered millions of followers and took over the American right, as their extremist predecessors succeeded in doing to evangelicalism and the gun lobby three decades earlier.

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.

Finally, in the fall of 2016, he grudgingly admitted the president was indeed a native-born American—at the same moment that an Economist/YouGov survey found a majority of Republicans still believed Obama probably or definitely was born in Kenya.

Our nostalgia tic also explains a lot. Americans have always been apt to think of America as the best place on Earth—but also that it used to be so much better, more pioneering, more charming, more virtuous, more authentic. People imagined in the 1700s that it was better in the theocratic wilderness of the 1600s, then in the 1800s that it was better back in the 1700s, before the racket and speed of factories and railroads;

The political scientists who wrote American Conspiracy Theories (2014) found that the least educated are almost twice as likely as the most educated to be highly predisposed to believing conspiracies.

Until now I’ve avoided setting a precise date. When did it begin? Obviously after the 1960s and ’70s, and after Ronald Reagan. The 1990s were the hinge decade: Oprah and Behold a Pale Horse and the Satanic Panic and Limbaugh and The X-Files swept the nation, the NRA called law enforcement officers jackbooted thugs, a wrestler from the booming WWF was elected governor of Minnesota, Disney built its perfect make-believe town in Florida, the federal building in Oklahoma City was blown up, the Pats Robertson and Buchanan ran for president, President Clinton was investigated for murdering his White House counsel before being investigated for lying about adultery, Final Fantasy was launched, and so were the National Institutes of Health’s alternative medicine center and reality TV and Fox News. And, of course, the Internet: starting in 1995 everyone could browse the Web, so let’s call 2000, the first year a majority of Americans were online, the unequivocal first year of full Fantasyland.

The recent American secularization, such as it is, has been led by the young. A third of millennials say they’re atheist or agnostic or nothing in particular, and fewer of them than their elders say they believe in God with absolute certainty. The small fraction of all Americans who regard the Bible matter-of-factly—as “an ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man”—has increased a lot since 1990, as has the group convinced of a God-free process of creation and evolution.fn7

can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into disarray and decline.

Cultural predispositions and national characters are real, and societies do come to crossroads and make important choices. But while our Fantasyland tendencies were present from the beginning, the current situation was not inevitable, because history and evolution never are. Nor now is any particular future. We could regain our national balance and composure. These last decades may turn out to have been a phase, one strange act of our ongoing epic, an unfortunate episode in the American experiment that we will finally move past and chalk up to experience.