Fantasyland Quotes

“mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.” —MARK TWAIN, “Corn-Pone Opinions” (1901)”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“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.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Szasz opposed any involuntary psychiatric intervention and, along with the Cuckoo’s Nest portrayal, paved the way for the disastrous dismantling of U.S. mental health facilities. But more generally they helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress the people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact”—now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone, from creationists to climate change deniers to antivaccine hysterics, who prefer to disregard science in favor of their own beliefs.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” —PHILIP K. DICK”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“It’s telling that Americans know and celebrate Plymouth but Jamestown hardly at all. The myth we’ve constructed says that the first nonnative new Americans who mattered were the idealists, the hyperreligious people seeking freedom to believe and act out their passionate, elaborate, all-consuming fantasies. The more run-of-the-mill people seeking a financial payoff, who abandoned their dream once it was defunct? Eh. We also prefer to talk about Pilgrims rather than Puritans, because the former has none of the negative connotations that stuck permanently to the latter.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else’s.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Before the Internet, crackpots were mostly isolated and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the Web, just like actual news. Now all the fantasies look real.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Let me quote once more from Tolkien’s lecture, which he delivered a few months before the fantasy-besotted Nazis started World War II. “Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence),” Tolkien said in that same 1939 lecture, “then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish.” It turns out he was half right. Many Americans now are in a state in which they don’t want to know or can’t perceive factual truth, yet the perishing of fantasy featuring elves and orcs and superheroes and zombies and angels is nowhere in sight.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s. For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession. After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“The great compromise between the American religious impulse and the American Enlightenment in the 1700s permitted any and every conceivable sect to bud and blossom. Fine. But that principle isn’t working so well anymore. The fanciful and religious and cryptoreligious parts have gotten overripe, bursting and spilling their juices over the Enlightenment-reason parts, spoiling our whole barrel. Holders of any belief about anything, especially and incontrovertibly if those beliefs are ascribed to faith, are now expected to be immune from challenge.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Whether an individual’s conspiracism exists alongside religious faith, psychologically they’re similar: a conspiracy theory can be revised and refined and further confirmed, but it probably can’t ever be disproved to a true believer’s satisfaction. The final conspiratorial nightmare crackdown is always right around the corner but never quite comes—as with the perpetually fast-approaching end-time. Like Christians certain both that evolution is a phony theory and that God created people a few thousand years ago, conspiracists are simultaneously credulous (about impossible plots) and incredulous (about the confusing, dull gray truth). Conspiracists often deride arguments against their theories as disinformation cooked up by the conspirators—the way some Christians consider evolutionary explanations to be the work of the devil.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Wallowing in nostalgia for a lost Golden Age ruined by meddling liberal outsiders from Washington and New York, previously a white Southern habit, became more and more of a white American habit. And so the Republicans’ Southern Strategy could be nationalized as well. When he first ran for president, Ronald Reagan popularized the term welfare queen—a powerful caricature, based on a single criminal case, that exaggerated the pervasiveness of welfare fraud and spread the fiction that black people were the main recipients of government benefits. In Vietnam, the United States had also just lost a war, which gave non-Southerners a strong dose of Lost Cause bitterness for the first time.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“A MAIN ARGUMENT of this book concerns how so many parts of American life have morphed into forms of entertainment. From 1980 to the end of the century, that tendency reached a tipping point in politics and the political discourse.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“If underground militant cells were setting off hundreds of bombs and robbing banks around the country these days, of course, America would be crazed, consumed, talking of nothing else, and probably under martial law. The bombings back then seldom made the national news because a reasonable and rational Establishment was still in charge of the media discourse, determined to help Americans remain reasonable and rational.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“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.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“We read messages and see the intimate visual details of celebrities’ lives on social media; 15 million or 50 million or 86 million of us have identical unmediated connections with America’s most famous people, including the president of the United States. Which makes us feel as if celebrities are our pals, in a way that People and the subsequent glut of celebrity media could not quite do. Meanwhile the American fantasy of becoming famous for real feels less fantastical than ever. Reality TV has turned hundreds of schmos (and Kardashians) into celebrities. There are almost as many reality shows on the air now as there were television shows of any kind in 2000. YouTube is a gateway to celebrity that has no gatekeepers at all.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Pre-Internet information systems, in which accuracy and credibility were determined mainly by experts or otherwise designated deciders, had terrible flaws and annoyances, including complacency, blind spots, snobbishness, and bigotry. But those gates and gatekeepers also managed to keep the worst hogwash out of our mainstream.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“If you’re fanatical enough about enacting and enforcing your fiction, it becomes indistinguishable from nonfiction.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“That is, it only becomes problematic when people refuse to let blissful epiphanies remain mostly obscure and evanescent.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“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.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country of three hundred million people at the turn of the twenty-first century could and should revert to something like its nineteenth-century self. Both had a familiar American magical-thinking fetish for gold—to return to gold as the foundation of U.S. currency because, they think, only gold is real. However, as the post-Reagan Republican mother ship maintained extreme and accelerating antigovernment fervor—acquiring escape velocity during the 2000s, leaving Earth orbit in the 2010s—libertarianism became a right-wing movement. (Also helpful was the fact that extreme economic libertarians included extremely rich people like the Koch brothers who could finance its spread.) 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.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“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. I’m thinking, for instance, of the Russian government’s interference in the last U.S. presidential election, to which too little attention was paid as it was happening. In the middle of 2016, it sounded like just one more wild speculation.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History