Kurt Andersen Quotes

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

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.

The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.

When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.

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)

Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” —PHILIP K. DICK

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.

Back then I used to say that I despised the new coinage “quality time,” that it was yuppie parents’ smiley-face equivalent to lawyers’ “billable hours.

The federal minimum wage is frozen for the entire decade, longer than ever, which translates to an effective pay cut of one-third for America’s lowest-paid workers.

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.

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.

Then I read The Once and Future King, and for most of a year I was young Arthur, Dad was Merlyn, and it was my destiny to create the perfect kingdom of Camelot somewhere beyond northeastern Illinois.

In 1910 President Theodore Roosevelt, a rich Republican, said that “corporate funds” used “for political purposes” were “one of the principal sources of corruption” and had “tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.

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.

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.

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.

As the 1990s began, the right stayed angry and upset and kept growing in size and power thanks to the primitives, the bigots, the Protestant fundamentalists and cowboy commando conspiracy fantasists. But the grown-ups on the right, the economic right, corporate leaders and the rest of the rich, kept their eye on the prize—less taxation, less regulation of business, greed is good—and they maintained control of the party.

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.

Acknowledging actual, specific conspiracies makes sense. But reflexive conspiracism can become a bad habit and a misguided way of making sense of current events.

That is, it only becomes problematic when people refuse to let blissful epiphanies remain mostly obscure and evanescent.

If you’re fanatical enough about enacting and enforcing your fiction, it becomes indistinguishable from nonfiction.

Neither side has been aware of it, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been wearing different uniforms on the same team—the Fantasyland team.

History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes,

People’s incomes over a certain level aren’t taxed to pay for Social Security at all.

it will require a struggle to try to make America reality-based again.

...In all this, financialization has done what people back in the 1950s and '60s and '70s worried and warned that the Communists would do if they took over: centralize control of the economy, turn Americans into interchangeable cogs serving an inhumane system, and allow only a well-connected elite to live well. Extreme Capitalism resembles Communism: yet another whopping irony.

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.

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.

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.

For most of us insist that somewhere in the past there was a golden age. But people who are forever dreaming of a mythical past are merely saying that they are afraid of the future. The past which men create for themselves is a place where thought is unnecessary and happiness is inevitable. The American temperament leans generally to a kind of mystical anarchism. In 1976 the Republicans were not yet the party of unhinged mystical anarchism they became over the next four decades. Rather, after the unhappiness, unfriendliness, cynicism, paranoia, and finally the high crimes of Richard Nixon, Americans were eager to install Mr. Rogers

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.

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.

During the 1980s, prudent New Deal rules concerning mortgage loans were repealed, allowing people to get home loans with too little money down and interest rates that would “adjust” to unaffordable heights. So during the 1980s, the average price of a house in America doubled.

...Libertarians fantasize that they're action heroes and entirely self-made. They tend to exempt themselves from the truism that there but for the grace of God goes each one of them, because an implicit premise of their ultra-individualism is that anybody in America can make it in their own and that unfair disadvantages either don't exist or can't be helped. I have a hunch that the demographic profile of self-identified libertarians--94 percent white, 68 percent male, 62 percent in their forties or younger--has something to do with those beliefs and fantasies.

...The economic right was shrewd enough to understand that the issues they didn't care much about--abortion, gay rights, creationism--did matter to liberals, and that those culture wars drew off political energy from the left that might otherwise have fueled complaints and demands about the reconstructed political economy. And Establishment Republicans could keep reassuring themselves that when push came to shove, their culture-warrior political partners didn't ever actually wind, that abortion was still legal, gay and lesbian rights expanded, creationism kept out of the public school curricula.

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.

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.

EVEN PAUL GOODMAN, beloved by young leftists in the 1960s, was flabbergasted by his students in 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that…research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.

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.

In 1982 I reported and wrote a Time cover story called “Inmate Nation” about what’s now called mass incarceration, because the number of U.S. inmates had just started to increase sharply and, to my editor and me, alarmingly—that year by 43,000 to 412,000. The total number of inmates today is 1.5 million, of whom 130,000 are in privately run prisons.

The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press…did not foresee…the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal….In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” —ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our most massive mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

Looking back now, it’s hard not to conclude that the anxious nominal party of the economic left, Democrats, was magnificently played by the committed and confident economic right, Republicans, for forty years. I’m not saying the shift in popular sentiment wasn’t partly organic. But Democrats, after the Republican presidential landslides of 1972 and 1984, remained too dazed and confused and scared for too long.

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.

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.

Productivity isn’t everything,” the Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman has written, “but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to raise its standard of living depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.” A country’s willingness to raise the majority of its people’s standard of living in sync with increasing productivity and growth—to share the good fortune fairly—depends, of course, on politics.

The problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener…. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes….

When I started this book, I worried that my strong sense that we’d arrived at a historic crossroads equivalent to the 1770s or 1860s or 1930s, America’s Fourth Testing, might seem like a stretch. By the end, I was no longer concerned about overstatement, particularly after the pandemic arrived—a new virus requiring new behaviors and policies, work and life suddenly more than ever dependent on the Internet, government failure by leaders ideologically dedicated to undermining government, maximizing corporate profit at all costs, and an American hyperindividualism whipped up by the right that makes a huge common problem harder to solve.

A kind of unspoken grand bargain was forged between the anti-Establishment and the Establishment. Going forward, individuals would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes, or social opprobrium. “Do your own thing” has a lot in common with “Every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it: for some that will mean smoking weed and watching porn—and for others, opposing modest gun regulation and paying yourself four hundred times what you pay your employees.

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.

Conservatives are correct in pointing out that the anything-goes relativism of the campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it 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. The term useful idiot was originally used to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals—postpositivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, postempiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists—turned out to be useful idiots for the American right.

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.

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.

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.

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.

YOU KNOW HOW young people always think the universe revolves around them, as if they’re the only ones who really get it? And how before their frontal lobes, the neural seat of reason and rationality, are fully wired, they can be especially prone to fantasy? In the 1960s the universe cooperated and did seem to revolve around young people, affirming their adolescent self-regard, making their fantasies of importance real and their fantasies of instant transformation and easy revolution feel plausible. Practically overnight, America turned its full attention to the young and everything they believed and imagined and wished.

Should the old federal broadcast rules have been abolished? Maybe, maybe not, but in any case, cable TV was making them iffy and the Internet was just about to start rendering them moot. In any case, when the Washington gatekeepers decided to get rid of that regulatory gate, it was a pivotal moment, practically and symbolically. For most of the twentieth century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our most massive mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

With the Internet, our marketplace of ideas became exponentially bigger and freer than ever, it’s true. Thomas Jefferson said he’d “rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it”—and it would all be okay because in the new United States “reason is left free to combat” every sort of “error of opinion.” However, I’m inclined to think if he and our other democratic forefathers returned, they would see the present state of affairs as too much of a good thing. Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the Internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside—this proliferation and reinforcement of nutty ideas and false beliefs, this assembling of communities of the utterly deluded, this construction of parallel universes that look and feel perfectly real, the viral appeal of the untrue—seems at least as profound as the upside.

This is what made the Beats such an American phenomenon. They were all about their mystical, individualist beliefs, and all in. They rejected bland rules to live lives of antimaterialist and quasi-religious purity. They were like some freaky renegade Protestant sect who didn’t focus on Jesus but otherwise took the original priesthood-of-all-believers idea to the max. The Beats’ self-conception descended from a particular American lineage—mountain men, outlaws, frontier cranks, lonely individualists, and narcissistic outsiders sounding their barbaric yawps over the rooftops of the world. The hippie dream that followed drew as well from a parallel lineage—Cane Ridge, the communes of the 1830s and ’40s, Transcendentalism, pastoralism, Thoreau. Both were enactments of classic American fantasies.

in the early 1960s, the final legal end of white supremacy came into sight. And as a result, certain white Southerners started displaying Confederate symbols, and Southern states retrofitted state flags to include them. It was a historical rhyme of what had happened a century earlier, when losing the war led Southerners to glorify Dixie and the Lost Cause. After the Civil War, historians started calling the decades before 1861 the antebellum era—for many white Southerners, a word connoting fantasies of a perfect Old South. Antebellum is Latin for “before the war”—any war. After the wars of the 1960s—after Vietnam, “the Negro revolt,” the countercultural explosion—plenty of Americans mythologized the 1940s and ’50s and early ’60s as their own late lamented antebellum era.

Today’s standard conception of The Sixties concerns youth and strife and hedonism. We remember the spectacular outbursts of spiritual weirdness—from Hare Krishnas to the Charles Mansonites to the Jonestown mass suicide in the 1970s—but that all rose and fell during those dozen cuckoo years and then ceased to matter, right? Meditation and yoga don’t require any specific beliefs. The 1960s branding is not Sex & Drugs & Rock ’n’ Roll & Irrational Belief in the Supernatural. In the popular understanding of the era, the most far-reaching and specifically religious craziness that detonated during those crazy years, extreme American Christianity, is omitted from the legacy.

Restricting the sale and use of guns became a salient political issue only after the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr. The gun control laws enacted or seriously proposed were modest. When Congress was passing gun regulation in 1968, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice-president wrote that “the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.” The GOP platforms of 1968 and 1972 supported gun regulation—and President Nixon, his speechwriter William Safire recalled, told him that “guns are an abomination” and that he would have outlawed handguns if he could. But violent crime had tripled in a decade, and in the late 1970s hysterics managed to take over the NRA, replacing its motto “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation” with the second half of the Second Amendment—“The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.” Within a decade, the official Republican position shifted almost 180 degrees to oppose any federal registration of firearms. In other words, fantasy was starting to hold its own against reason.

In 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. As the principle of absolute tolerance became axiomatic in our culture and internalized as part of our psychology—What I believe is true because I want and feel it to be true—individualism turned into rampant solipsism.

It’s correct to say that the financial meltdown of 2008 resulted from too much deregulation, too many arcane Wall Street innovations, and some fraud. But that’s just one way of explaining it, the one that comfortingly focuses all blame on government and a small class of the rich and powerful and deceitful. The deeper causes were more widespread and unconscious, the fantastical wishfulness affecting at least a large minority of Americans, maybe a majority.

Starting in the 1900s, from coast to coast and seven days a week, Americans more than anyone on Earth could immerse in the virtuosic fantasies created and sold by show business and the media. This was a new condition. As we spent more and more fabulous hours engaged in the knowing and willing suspension of disbelief, experiencing the unreal as real, we became more habituated to suspending disbelief unconsciously and involuntarily as well.

Since the turn of the century, American fundamentalists had reveled in their sense of persecution by an infidel elite, but in the 1960s the atheist tyranny became official. In 1962 and 1963 the Supreme Court decided in two cases, with only one dissenter in each instance, that it was unconstitutional for public schools to conduct organized prayer or Bible readings, and in 1968 the court finally ruled—unanimously—that states could not ban the teaching of evolution.

IN 1967 YOUNG Tom Stoppard had his breakthrough hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a brilliant play about actors playing characters playing actors playing characters, and the amusing, confusing jumble of fiction and reality. Stoppard knew he was onto something new and important. “I have a feeling,” he said at the time, “that almost everybody today is more trying to match himself up with an external image he has of himself, almost as if he’s seen himself on a screen.

And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes…. I consider that the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides….Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.

Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didn’t subside but grew and thrived—and came to seem unexceptional. Relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else, became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say. But it was by no means limited to the ivory tower. The intellectuals’ new outlook was as much a symptom as a cause of the smog of subjectivity that now hung thick over the whole American mindscape. After the 1960s, truth was relative, and criticizing became equal to victimizing, and individual liberty absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts. As the conservative elite positioned itself as the defenders of rigor against the onslaught of relativism, its members preferred to ignore the unwashed masses on their side, the reactionary hoi polloi activated by America’s extreme new believe-whatever-you-want MO. Anti-Establishment relativism had erupted on the left, but it gave license to everyone—in particular, to the far right and in the Christian fever swamps.

After more than three decades and many hundreds of studies, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that GMO foods are safe to eat. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine commissioned a comprehensive study of the science, and in 2016 their report declared GMOs both safe to eat and environmentally benign. Of the scientists in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 88 percent think it’s safe to eat GMO foods. This is almost exactly the same percentage of those scientists who say climate change is real and man-made, the latter a data point regularly used to demonstrate right-wing antiscience craziness.

We can argue all we want about how different guns were in the 1790s, when it took a minute to fire three shots, and about the correlation between the numbers of guns and gun deaths in the contemporary world, and how Australia’s 1996 roundup program worked. Those debates are academic, however. In this instance, the Constitution apparently is a suicide pact, and not just metaphorically.

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.

major argument of this book is that Americans are not just exceptionally religious but that our dominant religion has become exceptionally literal and fantastical—childlike—during the last fifty years in particular. The fantasies of perpetual youth, Kids “R” Us Syndrome, also appeared fifty years ago, when American adults started becoming more than ever like adolescents and children in our tastes and ways of thinking. These simultaneous spikes could be a coincidence, but they look to me like another case of cultural symbiosis. And childlike magical thinking synergy isn’t limited to Christian kinds. “How do you get yourself to a point of believing?” Rhonda Byrne asks in The Secret, the Oprah-endorsed New Age guide to success-by-wishing-and-pretending. “Start make-believing. Be like a child, and make-believe. Act as if you have it already. As you make believe you will begin to believe you have received….Your belief that you have it, that undying faith, is your greatest power. When you believe you are receiving, get ready, and watch the magic begin!

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.

The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” says the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016. “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.” The right’s ideological center of gravity careened way to the right of Rove and all Bushes, finally knocking them and their ilk aside. What had been its fantastical fringe became the GOP center. In retrospect, the sudden change in the gun lobby in the late 1970s, from more or less flexible to absolutely hysterical, was a harbinger of the transformation of the entire right a generation later. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

As I’ve said, there are left-wing believers in nonexistent conspiracies and other fantasies, but they’re not nearly as numerous or influential. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, after Bernie Sanders did better in some election-day exit polls than he did in the voting, some of his supporters were convinced a conspiracy had falsified the results. (In fact, exit polls always tend to oversample younger voters.) And while you might have considered Sanders’s leftism unrealistic or its campaign rhetoric hyperbolic (“the business model of Wall Street is fraud”), the campaign wasn’t based on outright fantasies. You may not want democratic socialism, but Denmark is a real country.

The Republican position is now to oppose even studying climate change as well as any and all proposals to reduce carbon emissions. Rational people may disagree about how governments might minimize or prepare for the effects of global warming. You are entitled to your own opinion. But refusing to accept its reality is a new and unacceptable posture. You are not entitled to your own facts.

Sharia law uses the sacred texts of Islam as the basis for moral behavior, the way Jews are supposed to use the Talmud and Christians the Bible—and, in Muslim countries, it uses the Quran explicitly as the basis for legal codes. Just before we elected our forty-fourth non-Muslim president in a row, people on the right began fantasizing that American Muslims were scheming to supplant U.S. jurisprudence with Islamic jurisprudence. The definitive text is a 2010 book called Shariah: The Threat to America. Its nineteen authors included respectable hard-right conservatives and national security wonks. We’re “infiltrated and deeply influenced,” the book says, “by an enemy within that is openly determined to replace the U.S. Constitution with shariah.” The movement took off, and in short order the specter of sharia became a right-wing catchphrase encompassing suspicion of almost any Islamic involvement in the U.S. civic sphere. The word gave Islamophobia a patina of legitimacy. It was a specific fantasy—not I hate Muslims or I hate Arabs but rather I don’t want to live under Taliban law, and therefore it could pass as not racist but anti-tyranny. It was also a shiny new exotic term, a word nobody in America but a few intellectuals knew.

The antisharia movement lobbied states to pass statutes and constitutional amendments banning the use of sharia in their courts and legal systems, a fantasy solution to an imaginary problem, almost like a government plan to prevent a zombie apocalypse.

Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the left manage to remain more or less in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost control to its fantasy-prone true believers? One reason, I believe, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian, the first time the United States has had such a major party. It is the American coalition of white Christians, papering over doctrinal and class differences—and now led, weirdly, by one of the least religious presidents in modern times.

Modern electronic mass media had been a defining piece of the twentieth-century experience that served an important democratic function—presenting Americans with a shared set of facts. Now those news organs, on TV and radio, were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries. The new and newly unregulated technologies allowed us, in a sense, to travel backward in time.

The consequence of such mingling is that an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the 1980s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, it hadn’t seemed like a serious problem in America.

Sixteen hundred years ago Saint Augustine instructed, basically, Don’t be stupid. “Shall we say, then,” he wrote about Genesis, “there was such a sense of hearing in that formless and shapeless creation, whatever it was, to which God thus uttered a sound when He said, ‘Let there be light’? Let such absurdities have no place in our thoughts.

Europeans had highly developed regional and national cultures and societies before they bolted on Protestantism. America, on the other hand, was half-created by Protestant extremists to be a Protestant society. American academics accept the idea of American exceptionalism in one of its meanings—that our peculiar founding circumstances shaped us. “The position of the Americans,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “is…quite exceptional,” by which he meant the Puritanism, the commercialism, the freedom of religion, the individualism, “a thousand special causes.” The professoriate rejects exceptionalism in today’s right-wing sense, that the United States is superior to all other nations, with a God-given mission. And they also resist the third meaning, the idea that a law of human behavior doesn’t apply here—scholars of religion insist that explanations of religious behavior must be universal. The latest scholarly consensus about America’s exceptional religiosity is an economic theory. Because all forms of religion are products in a marketplace, they say, our exceptional free marketism has produced more supply and therefore generated more demand. Along with universal human needs for physical sustenance and security, there’s also such a need for existential explanations, for why and how the world came to be. Sellers of religion emerge offering explanations. From the start, religions tended to be state monopolies—as they were in the colonies, the Puritans in Massachusetts and the Church of England in the South. After that original American duopoly was dismantled and the government prohibited official churches, religious entrepreneurs rushed into the market, Methodists and Baptists and Mormons and all the others. European countries, meanwhile, kept their state-subsidized religions, Protestant or Catholic—and so in an economic sense those churches became lazy monopolies.*10 In America, according to the market theorists, each religion competes with all the others to acquire and keep customers. Americans, presented with all this fantastic choice, can’t resist buying. We’re so religious for the same reason we’re so fat.

the Branch Davidians’ theology is not so different from that of a large fraction of Americans. We call Koresh a “cult leader,” which allows us to file him away reassuringly as a one-off nut, like Charles Manson or Jim Jones. But it’s important to recognize that his church was a long-standing subgroup of a 150-year-old Protestant denomination that is one of the twenty largest churches in America, with six thousand U.S. congregations.*1

No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press, and Protestantism was its first viral cultural phenomenon.

In other words, America was founded by a nutty religious cult.

One of the patients at Kellogg’s Seventh-day Adventist sanitarium was C. W. Post, who got the idea there for Grape Nuts, which made him rich. Among Grape Nuts’ advertised health benefits was curing appendicitis. As it happened, Post later had an apparent appendicitis attack, and when surgery didn’t end his distress, he shot and killed himself.

In 1848 the Homeopathic Medical College was founded in Philadelphia, eventually becoming the Drexel University College of Medicine. Homeopathic M.D. degrees were issued by schools across the country to many thousands of homeopathic physicians.

No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press,

the choice isn’t between automation and non-automation,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the MIT economists focused on digital technology and work. “It’s between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth.

If more Americans were to learn of the large body of research showing that higher inequality in rich countries isn’t just unfair but actually slows down economic growth—by a fifth since the 1980s, according to a 2014 study by the OECD—the remarkably strong support for Robin Hoodism might get even stronger.

Of the 100 groups that spend the most, 95 mainly represent business interests, and of the 20 biggest spenders of all, 19 are corporations or business groups, dominated by finance and healthcare. None are unions. The ugly, corrupting frenzy that the Reagan administration unleashed in 1981 and that ostensibly stunned its budget director—“Do you realize the greed that came to the forefront? The hogs were really feeding. The greed level just got out of control”—never stopped.

* The founder of Citizens United, a right-wing political group, became Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2016 and has been credibly accused of operating a scam to rip off MAGA donors. A right-wing legal group that for a decade laid important groundwork for the Citizens United case was the James Madison Center, founded in 1997 by Senator Mitch McConnell with funds provided by Betsy DeVos.

LOL and touché, clever contemporary conservative, for using nostalgia as a political pejorative, the way liberals have always done, the way a lot of us got into the bad habit of doing in the 1970s and ’80s about FDR and organized labor and antitrust and thereby became useful idiots for you and the evil geniuses of the right.

less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes.

So for many Americans, who spent several decades losing their taste for the culturally new and/or getting screwed by a new political economy based on new technology, fantasies about restoring the past have turned pathological. Thus the angriest organized resistance to the new, the nostalgias driving the upsurge of racism and sexism and nativism—which gave us a president who seemed excitingly new because he asserted an impossible dream of restoring the nastily, brutishly old. The recent wave of politicized nostalgia is global, of course, taking over governments from Britain to Russia to India. But those countries at least have the excuse of being ancient.

important to revisit and dissect and understand what happened when this rigging began and the swamp was filled, and not just to know who to blame for our present predicament. Rather, as we attempt to fix the terrible mess that an unbalanced, unhinged, decadent capitalism has made of America, the revamping of our political economy that started fifty years ago is also an essential case study for envisioning the next fifty.

Evil genius is genius nonetheless. In the early 1970s, at the zenith of liberal-left influence, an improbable, quixotic, out-of-power economic right—intellectuals, capitalists, politicians—launched their crusade and then kept at it tenaciously. The unthinkable became the inevitable in a single decade. They envisioned a new American trajectory, then popularized and arranged it with remarkable success. How was that fundamentally different American future—that is, our present—designed and enacted? And how might it happen again in the other direction? There are lessons to be learned: having big ideas and strong convictions, keeping your eye on the ball, playing a long game. There are also some relevant cautionary tales from the last few decades—it’d be nice if in success the left could avoid some of the viciousness, lying, cynicism, nihilism, and insanity that overtook the right after victory.