THE LAND OF MAKE-BELIEVE
This riveting account of America’s 500-year thirst for bunkum and fake news has one problem ...its missing evidence!
Even now, ten months since he moved into the White House, it’s hard to hear the words ‘President Trump’ without frowning in disbelief and asking: how the hell did that happen? How did a nation founded on rational Enlightenment principles come to elect a man who proudly refuses to distinguish fact from fantasy?
According to Kurt Andersen, it is those very principles that made Trumpism possible. ‘The great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control,’ he writes.
Two-thirds of Americans believe that ‘angels and demons are active in the world’. A third believe that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. More than 300 years after the Salem trials, a quarter still believe in witches.
‘Fantasy constituencies’, as Andersen calls them, overlap and cross-fertilise. Belief in, say, extraterrestrial landings leads to belief in a vast government coverup, which in turn makes one susceptible to conspiracy theories about vaccines or global warming or what really happened on 9/11. ‘There is,’ he concludes, ‘a line extending from flying-saucer obsessives to 9/11 truthers to Donald Trump.’
Andersen presents this book as ‘a 500year history’ of delusions in America, a country created by ‘true believers and passionate schemers, by hucksters and their suckers – which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy’. Note how 500 years suddenly become four centuries: he never can decide how long ago America turned into Fantasyland.
At first he claims that ‘this tendency has been encoded in our national DNA’ ever since early-17th-century settlers sailed to Virginia pursuing a fantasy of gold galore. Later, however, he says the turning point was the Sixties, whose counterculture gospel he summarises as ‘mistrust authority, do your own thing, find your own truth’. The era’s psychotropic drugs also fogged up the boundaries between illusion and reality.
In the final chapter, he argues that Fantasyland only took over in the new millennium, when Fox News, Breitbart, Facebook and YouTube trained millions of Americans to believe that facts at odds with their opinions must be fake.
His thesis, like the timeline, is so elastic that you can sometimes hear it twang. Almost any ‘fantasy’ is shaped to suit his purposes, from snake-oil to Scientology, Hollywood to Disneyland, The Book Of Mormon to Playboy. He even attacks the popularity of suburban homes in the Fifties – a ‘national immersion in fantasy’ as sinister as the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Astonishingly, for a book on the importance of evidence-based judgment, Fantasyland has no source notes, references or bibliography. If you overlook the sometimes shaky intellectual foundations, however, Andersen’s account of American myths and bunkum is hugely entertaining. The great 19th-century showman Phineas T Barnum attributed his success to ‘the perfect good nature with which the American public submits to a clever humbug’. Although some of Barnum’s exhibits were preposterous fakes – a mermaid’s corpse, for instance – he maintained that it was a fundamental American right to believe in (and profit from) ‘clap-trap’. It still is.
‘There is a line extending from flying saucer obsessives to 9/11 truthers to Trump’