Fantasyland

We used to talk about California as being the place where all the flakes of the country had migrated, and most people probably would have agreed with the Bellows quote from Seize the Day: “In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.” At the moment California in its decisions about immigration and about pollution and greenhouse gasses and other matters seems to be much more sane than the rest of the country, where so many of the screws seem to be loose. This reversal came to mind when I was reading Kurt Andersen’s book about America’s nuttiness from its beginnings until the present, when to many of us it seems as if we have gone completely down the rabbit hole into wonderland. Andersen doesn’t call it wonderland; he calls it fantasyland, and his whole title is Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: a 500-Year History (2017). This will be seen as a book about how we got Trump, but in fact Andersen has been working on the book since 2013 and thinking about it long before that. It may conclude with Trump, but, it’s really a long book posing the question why Americans are now and always seem to have been so prone to crackpot religion, hucksterism, conspiracy theories, get-rich-quick schemes and their modern product of lottery fever, magical thinking about remaking ourselves body and soul, quack cures and the turning of vitamin production and herbal remedies into an industry whose billions challenge even the cosmetic industry. At times, Americans seem eager to believe anything—except what people who actually know something about the subject have to tell them about vaccines or climate change or whether Barack Obama was born in the United States. For Andersen, this American exceptionalism keeps coming back to religion. No country in the developed world has the passionate adherence to religion by so much of the population as we see here. Even in countries where there is an established religion and, nominally at least, almost the entire population are believers, it turns out that a much smaller percentage of those people are in fact observant or regular in their religious exercises. Andersen’s book is going to ruffle feathers in a lot of congregations’ dovecotes, and I’m not sure that it is going to make liberals much happier than it makes conservatives. But Andersen has amassed a huge amount of evidence about American credulity.