Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year HistoryNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year.”—Lawrence O’Donnell How did we get here? In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, “fake news” moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “This is a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in.”—Tom Brokaw “[An] absorbing, must-read polemic . . . a provocative new study of America’s cultural history.”—Newsday “Compelling and totally unnerving.”—The Village Voice “A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.”—The Guardian “This is an important book—the indispensable book—for understanding America in the age of Trump.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci |
Contents
| 13 | |
12 | 43 |
The First Great Delirium | 57 |
PART III | 115 |
Progress and Backlash | 117 |
2 | 118 |
BrandNew OldTime Religion | 122 |
The Business of America Is Show Business | 135 |
American Religion from the Turn of the Millennium | 265 |
Belief and Practice | 272 |
Why Are We So Exceptional? | 286 |
Magical but Not Necessarily Christian Spiritual but Not Religious | 293 |
The Reenchantment of Medicine | 300 |
Squishies Cynics and Believers | 306 |
Anything Goes Unless It Picks My Pocket or Breaks My Leg | 317 |
The Inmates Running the Asylum Decide Monsters Are Everywhere | 325 |
Utopia in the Suburbs and the Sun | 142 |
The 1950s Seemed So Normal | 150 |
PART IV | 171 |
Introduction | 173 |
Big Bang The Hippies | 176 |
Big Bang The Intellectuals | 189 |
The Christians | 198 |
Big Bang Politics and Government and Conspiracies | 209 |
Big Bang Living in a Land of Entertainment | 221 |
PART V | 235 |
Introduction | 237 |
Making MakeBelieve More Realistic and Real Life More MakeBelieve | 239 |
Kids R Us Syndrome | 247 |
The Reagan Era and the Start of the Digital Age | 252 |
The XFiling of America | 342 |
Mad as Hell the New Voice of the People | 356 |
When the GOP Went Off the Rails | 362 |
3 | 374 |
Liberals Denying Science | 376 |
Final FantasyIndustrial Complex | 390 |
Our Inner Children? Theyre Going to Disney World | 401 |
The Economic Dreamtime | 409 |
Acknowledgments | 441 |
| 446 | |
| 453 | |
| 459 | |
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Common terms and phrases
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