When did America become uncoupled from reality? In Anderson’s account, we were already losing our grip when our nation was founded. Although school teachers tell the story of our founding with almost exclusive reference to the Pilgrims, America’s real founding fathers were the Puritans, members of a “nutty religious cult” who believed in “fantasies” such as Christ’s second coming.

Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire is one of the bestselling and most discussed books of the year.

In this fast-paced and provocative work of revisionist history and diagnostic journalism, Anderson argues that Americans have recently become untethered from reality and that Trump’s election represents the high point of our collective delusion.

More importantly, Anderson argues Americans should come to grips with the fact that we’ve always been willing to believe nearly anything, having been beholden to magical thinking from the beginning.

History of American Fantastical Thinking

When did America become uncoupled from reality? In Anderson’s account, we were already losing our grip when our nation was founded. Although school teachers tell the story of our founding with almost exclusive reference to the Pilgrims, America’s real founding fathers were the Puritans, members of a “nutty religious cult” who believed in “fantasies” such as Christ’s second coming. America’s religious hucksters, Anderson avers, made us uniquely susceptible to fake news. He offers many colorful examples as evidence, including early America’s widespread acceptance of national myths such as George Washington’s cherry-tree incident and its embrace of quack medicine, homeopathy, and mesmerism.

After the Civil War, he says, a deep divide opened between “moderns” committed to reason and reality, and “committed magical thinkers” closed to reason and immune to reality checks. Thus, in Anderson’s interpretation, the United States became an increasingly lush environment for the growth of falsehoods, magical thinking, and fantasy acceptance.

The 1960s accelerated the onset of our collective neurosis. The sexual revolution taught Americans that morality is relative and that each of us should “do our own thing.” For the first time in world history, an entire society cooperated with young people’s belief that the universe revolved around them. In this case, the youth reckoned that if Americans would just grow pony tails, wear Levi’s, and smoke rope, we’d be liberated from traditional social and moral norms that enslave and make us miserable.

In the 1970s, fantastical beliefs really took hold. As evidence Anderson cites several bestselling books, including The Secret Life of Plants, which supposedly demonstrated the emotional and spiritual relations between plants and humanity, and My Story, the autobiography of the young spoon-bender and mind-reader Uri Geller. Also in the 1970s, postmodernism began to flourish in the academy, teaching that “reality” is a social construction—that all truth claims are merely attempts to seize power for special interest groups.

During the same decade, the Left and the Right developed their own special versions of “crazy.” On the Left, the Weathermen promoted violence and social revolution, arguing that “dope is one of our weapons. . . . Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.” Various factions of the New Left went on to seek revolution through violence, setting off thousands of bombs during that decade. On the Right, America saw the formation of groups such as the John Birch Society, whose members believed the leadership of both major political parties had been infiltrated by Soviet agents ushering in a Kremlin-ruled American police state.

This fantastic way of interpreting the world made it easy for American citizens of both political parties to buy into conspiracy theories about JFK’s 1963 assassination. Similarly, it was easy for Americans to believe in UFOs and in the American government’s purported elaborate coverup of UFO sightings.

In the 1980s, it seemed America had regained some social equilibrium, but this false sense of relief concealed the fact that fantastical thinking was the new normal. The professoriate had bought into metaphysical and moral relativism. The public continued to buy into conspiracy theories. Citizens claimed to have been abducted by aliens. And none of this lunacy seemed as crazy as it would have two decades before.

In the 1990s, as Anderson sees it, the Right became more untethered from reality than the Left did. Once Republicans overthrew the Fairness Doctrine, which kept media shows from being ideologically one-sided, right-wing radio and television shows cropped up all over the nation and in every time slot on the airwaves. No longer held accountable to articulate both sides of an issue, these shows were set free to create echo chambers for their listeners.

Compounding matters, the internet’s ascendance enabled cockamamy ideas and falsehoods to spread instantaneously and globally, creating myriad alternative realities in which persons could live and move and have their being. Search engines gave prominence to beliefs and theories based on the preferences of internet users, rather than evidence or plausibility. The information age has enabled conspiracy theorists, crackpots, liars, and demagogues.

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