A house divided
Two years ago, when a novice politician launched his presidential campaign with false claims about immigration, crime and his own biography, Kurt Andersen took stock of the race and how it might influence the book he’d been working on since 2013. Andersen found it “surprising and appalling” that Donald Trump had surged to the front of the Republican pack. Nevertheless, it was also “a little gratifying to me — empirical proof of my theory as it applies to politics.” Andersen’s theory is that we’ve become a nation in which “opinions and feelings are the same as facts.” In “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire,” his extremely welltimed history of hucksterism, credulousness and questionable beliefs, he demonstrates why this is such a troubling state of affairs.
Given this new era of ours, as we spend inordinate amounts of time talking and reading about the erratic man who lives in the White House, it feels important to establish up front that this exhaustively researched book isn’t really about the president.
Sure, Andersen devotes most of the last chapter to Trump, calling his election the “ultimate expression” of “the fantasyindustrial complex.” On the whole, however, Andersen is far more interested in exploring why so many Americans are willing to believe almost anything — and how this affects all of us. According to recent surveys by legitimate polling companies, half the country doesn’t believe in man-made climate change, and 1 in 4 is open to the idea that Barack Obama is the antichrist. Twenty percent suspect that 9/11 was an inside job.
“Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster
and faster during the last halfcentury,” Andersen writes, “Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation, small and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us.”
Though some of his arguments will agitate readers on both sides of the political spectrum, Andersen maintains that in the past 25 years, “America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left.” (Political scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein proved as much in their 2012 book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism.”)
Many will know Andersen as the affable host of “Studio 360,” the popular radio show, and as the author of several very good novels (“Turn of the Century,” his 1999 book about the intersection of news and reality TV, is one of the more underrated novels of the past couple decades). It’s also worth noting that he co-founded Spy magazine. As he did in the pages of that satirical monthly, the Andersen at work in “Fantasyland” is happy to skewer public figures and organizations that many hold dear.
Andersen covers hundreds of years in the book’s first third. This country, he writes with characteristic irreverence, “was founded by a nutty religious cult,” the Puritans, who were “resistant to reality checks and convinced they had special access to the truth.” After the Civil War, two distinct groups — he dubs them “the moderns” and “the committed magical thinkers” — opted for increasingly divergent paths, and by the early 20th century, many in this latter group accepted the Bible as “100 percent nonfiction.” More recently, evangelicals developed their own powerful media institutions and began flexing their muscle at the ballot box. To Andersen, developments like these go a long way toward explaining why conservative Christianity plays a far bigger role in American society than in similarly wealthy nations.
Though the counterculture of the 1960s is typically associated with the political left, Andersen argues that the decade’s ethos “gave license to everyone in America to let their freak flags fly.” Groups on opposite sides of the political spectrum began unwittingly influencing one another, he says, “operating as de facto tagteam allies.” Postmodernist professors questioned the nature of reality, and prominent “anthropolog(ists) decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should not just be respected but considered equivalent to reason and science.” When this cultural mood “flowed out across America, it helped enable extreme Christianities and consequential lunacies on the right — gun rights hysteria, black helicopter conspiracism, climate change denial, and more.”
Andersen says modern Republican leaders deserve a lot of the blame for persuading many voters to reject basic facts. He cites an erstwhile member of the party who says the GOP has “purposely torn down the validating institutions,” empowering Second Amendment absolutists and convincing millions that the mainstream press is inherently dishonest. As we’ve learned the hard way, politicians who cry “fake news” are often its most enthusiastic purveyors.
Meanwhile, the Internet has become the “perfect infrastructure” for fantasists, Andersen says, “equip(ping) all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree.” In 2017, as a television celebrity with a hostile Twitter account sits in the Oval Office, the Internet’s negative aspects appear “at least as profound as the upside,” he writes.
By necessity, I’m streamlining some of Andersen’s complex arguments. This is an entertaining but intellectually restless book, one that moves fast and divines links between dozens of ideological, social and political developments. In a two-page section about the “national ratification of fantasy” of the ’60s and ’70s, Andersen covers state lotteries, the birth control pill, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Cosmopolitan magazine, “Deep Throat” and “the slang term stroke book.” It can be hard to keep up.
Mostly, however, “Fantasyland” is a persuasive work of diagnostic journalism. With this rousing book, Andersen proves to be the kind of clear-eyed critic an anxious country needs in the midst of a national crisis.