Fantasyland, An American Tradition

“The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies—every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, each of us free to reinvent himself by imagination and will. In America those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts.”
~ Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland

It’s hard to have public debate in the United States for a number of reasons. The most basic reason is that Americans are severely uninformed and disinformed. We also tend to lack a larger context for knowledge. Historical amnesia is rampant and scientific literacy is limited, exacerbated by centuries old strains of anti-intellectualism and dogmatic idealism, hyper-individualism and sectarian groupthink, public distrust and authoritarian demagoguery.

This doesn’t seem as common in countries elsewhere. Part of this is that Americans are less aware and informed about other countries than the citizens of other countries are of the United States. Living anywhere else in the world, it is near impossible to not know in great detail about the United States and other Western powers as the entire world cannot escape these influences that cast a long shadow of colonial imperialism, neoliberal globalization, transnational corporations, mass media, monocultural dominance, soft power, international propaganda campaigns during the Cold War, military interventionism, etc. The rest of the world can’t afford the luxury of ignorance that Americans enjoy.

Earlier last century when the United States was a rising global superpower competing against other rising global superpowers, the US was known for having one of the better education systems in the world. International competition motivated us in investing in education. Now we are famous for how pathetic recent generations of students compare to many other developed countries. But even the brief moment of seeming American greatness following World War II might have had more to do with the wide scale decimation of Europe, a temporary lowering of other developed countries rather than a vast improvement in the United States.

There has also been a failure of big biz mass media to inform the public and the continuing oligopolistic consolidation of corporate media into a few hands has not allowed for a competitive free market to force corporations to offer something better. On top of that, Americans are one of the most propagandized and indoctrinated populations on the planet, with only a few comparable countries such as China and Russia exceeding us in this area.

See how the near unanimity of the American mass media was able, by way of beating the war drum, to change majority public opinion from being against the Iraq War to being in support of it. It just so happens that the parent companies of most of the corporate media, with ties to the main political parties and the military-industrial complex, profits immensely from the endless wars of the war state.

Corporate media is in the business of making money which means selling a product. In late stage capitalism, all of media is entertainment and news media is infotainment. Even the viewers are sold as a product to advertisers. There is no profit in offering a public service to inform the citizenry and create the conditions for informed public debate. As part of consumerist society, we consume as we are consumed by endless fantasies, just-so stories, comforting lies, simplistic narratives, and political spectacle.

This is a dark truth that should concern and scare Americans. But that would require them to be informed first. There is the rub.

Every public debate in the United States begins with mainstream framing. It requires hours of interacting with a typical American even to maybe get them to acknowledge their lack of knowledge, assuming they have the intellectual humility that makes that likely. Americans are so uninformed and misinformed that they don’t realize they are ignorant, so indoctrinated that they don’t realize how much their minds are manipulated and saturated in bullshit (I speak from the expertise of being an American who has been woefully ignorant for most of my life). To simply get to the level of knowledge where debate is even within the realm of possibility is itself almost an impossible task. To say it is frustrating is an extreme understatement.

Consider how most Americans know that tough-on-crime laws, stop-and-frisk, broken window policies, heavy policing, and mass incarceration were the cause of decreased crime. How do they know? Because decades of political rhetoric and media narratives have told them so. Just as various authority figures in government and media told them or implied or remained silent while others pushed the lies that the 9/11 terrorist attack was somehow connected to Iraq which supposedly had weapons of mass destruction, despite that the US intelligence agencies and foreign governments at the time knew these were lies.

Sure, you can look to alternative media for regularly reporting of different info that undermines and disproves these beliefs. But few Americans get much if any of their news from alternative media. There have been at least hundreds of high quality scientific studies, careful analyses, and scholarly books that have come out since the violent crime decline began. This information, however, is almost entirely unknown to the average American citizen and one suspects largely unknown to the average American mainstream news reporter, media personality, talking head, pundit, think tank hack, and politician.

That isn’t to say there isn’t ignorance found in other populations as well. Having been in the online world since the early naughts, I’ve met and talked with many people from other countries and admittedly some of them are less than perfectly informed. Still, the level of ignorance in the United States is unique, at least in the Western world.

That much can’t be doubted. Other serious thinkers might have differing explanations for why the US has diverged so greatly from much of the rest of the world, from its level of education to its rate of violence. But one way or another, it needs to be explained in the hope of finding a remedy. Sadly, even if we could agree on a solution, those in power benefit too greatly from the ongoing state of an easily manipulated citizenry that lacks knowledge and critical thinking skills.

This isn’t merely an attack on low-information voters and right-wing nut jobs. Even in dealing with highly educated Americans among the liberal class, I rarely come across someone who is deeply and widely informed across various major topics of public concern.

American society is highly insular. We Americans are not only disconnected from the rest of the world but disconnected from each other. And so we have little sense of what is going on outside of the narrow constraints of our neighborhoods, communities, workplaces, social networks, and echo chambers. The United States is psychologically and geographically segregated into separate reality tunnel enclaves defined by region and residency, education and class, race and religion, politics and media.

It’s because we so rarely step outside of our respective worlds that we so rarely realize how little we know and how much of what we think we know is not true. Most of us live in neighborhoods, go to churches and stores, attend or send our kids to schools, work and socialize with people who are exactly like ourselves. They share our beliefs and values, our talking points and political persuasion, our biases and prejudices, our social and class position. We are hermetically sealed within our safe walled-in social identities. Nothing can reach us, threaten us, or change us.

That is until something happens like Donald Trump being elected. Then there is a panic about what has become of America in this post-fact age. The sad reality, however, is America has always been this way. It’s just finally getting to a point where it’s harder to ignore and that potential for public awakening offers some hope.

* * *

by Kurt Anderson
pp. 10-14

Why are we like this?

. . . The short answer is because we’re Americans, because being American means we can believe any damn thing we want, that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.

The word mainstream has recently become a pejorative, shorthand for bias, lies, oppression by the elites. Yet that hated Establishment, the institutions and forces that once kept us from overdoing the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, politics, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—has enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the last few decades.

A senior physician at one of America’s most prestigious university hospitals promotes miracle cures on his daily TV show. Major cable channels air documentaries treating mermaids, monsters, ghosts, and angels as real. A CNN anchor speculated on the air that the disappearance of a Malaysian airliner was a supernatural event. State legislatures and one of our two big political parties pass resolutions to resist the imaginary impositions of a New World Order and Islamic law. When a political scientist attacks the idea that “there is some ‘public’ that shares a notion of reality, a concept of reason, and a set of criteria by which claims to reason and rationality are judged,” colleagues just nod and grant tenure. A white woman felt black, pretended to be, and under those fantasy auspices became an NAACP official—and then, busted, said, “It’s not a costume…not something that I can put on and take off anymore. I wouldn’t say I’m African American, but I would say I’m black.” Bill Gates’s foundation has funded an institute devoted to creationist pseudoscience. Despite his nonstop lies and obvious fantasies—rather, because of them—Donald Trump was elected president. The old fringes have been folded into the new center. The irrational has become respectable and often unstoppable. As particular fantasies get traction and become contagious, other fantasists are encouraged by a cascade of out-of-control tolerance. It’s a kind of twisted Golden Rule unconsciously followed: If those people believe that , then certainly we can believe this.

Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the last several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks with no easy exit. Voilà: Fantasyland. . . .

When John Adams said in the 1700s that “facts are stubborn things,” the overriding American principle of personal freedom was not yet enshrined in the Declaration or the Constitution, and the United States of America was itself still a dream. Two and a half centuries later the nation Adams cofounded has become a majority-rule de facto refutation of his truism: “our wishes, our inclinations” and “the dictates of our passions” now apparently do “alter the state of facts and evidence,” because extreme cognitive liberty and the pursuit of happiness rule.

This is not unique to America, people treating real life as fantasy and vice versa, and taking preposterous ideas seriously. We’re just uniquely immersed. In the developed world, our predilection is extreme, distinctly different in the breadth and depth of our embrace of fantasies of many different kinds. Sure, the physician whose fraudulent research launched the antivaccine movement was a Brit, and young Japanese otaku invented cosplay, dressing up as fantasy characters. And while there are believers in flamboyant supernaturalism and prophecy and religious pseudoscience in other developed countries, nowhere else in the rich world are such beliefs central to the self-identities of so many people. We are Fantasyland’s global crucible and epicenter.

This is American exceptionalism in the twenty-first century. America has always been a one-of-a-kind place. Our singularity is different now. We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any nation, practically a synonym for developed country . But at the same time, our drift toward credulity, doing our own thing, and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less-developed country as well.

People tend to regard the Trump moment—this post-truth, alternative facts moment—as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon. In fact, what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of attitudes and instincts that have made America exceptional for its entire history—and really, from its prehistory. . . .


I hope we’re only on a long temporary detour, that we’ll manage somehow to get back on track. If we’re on a bender, suffering the effects of guzzling too much fantasy cocktail for too long, if that’s why we’re stumbling, manic and hysterical, mightn’t we somehow sober up and recover? You would think. But first you need to understand how deeply this tendency has been encoded in our national DNA.

Fake News: It’s as American as George Washington’s Cherry Tree
by Hanna Rosin



While Newton and Locke were ushering in an Age of Reason in Europe, over in America unreason was taking new seductive forms. A series of mystic visionaries were planting the seeds of extreme entitlement, teaching Americans that they didn’t have to study any book or old English theologian to know what to think, that whatever they felt to be true was true. In Andersen’s telling, you can easily trace the line from the self-appointed 17th-century prophet Anne Hutchinson to Kanye West: She was, he writes, uniquely American “because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality,” a total stranger to self-doubt.

What happens next in American history, according to Andersen, happens without malevolence, or even intention. Our national character gels into one that’s distinctly comfortable fogging up the boundary between fantasy and reality in nearly every realm. As soon as George Washington dies fake news is born — the story about the cherry tree, or his kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. Enterprising businessmen quickly figure out ways to make money off the Americans who gleefully embrace untruths.

12 thoughts on “Fantasyland, An American Tradition

  1. There are times I wonder if the elite really believe their own propaganda that society is some meritocracy where the rich are there because they truly are better.

    You know all that talk about the American dream? Yet another nail in the coffin.

    Things must be awful in America … they aren’t that good in Canada right now and we seem to be where many of the Nordic nations are social mobility wise and comparable to France inequality wise.

    • There are a number of other countries where one is more likely to attain the American dream. Based on a number of measures, that has been true for quite a few years now. I suspect that many of the American elite know this. But they can’t admit it.

    • GenX was the first generation to show the economic decline. But that decline has continued into the following generation as the last wave of Millennials have entered into the workforce. It’s a steady decline. And if nothing alters this path, it will be worse still for the next generation that is in school right now.

      As such, I would disagree with this part of the article: “When they were in their early 30s, for example, Generation Xers were making 30 percent more than the baby boomer generation that preceded them.” GenX early on had high poverty and unemployment rates. And they experienced a recession that no other generation was affected by. They hit the job market as wages were stagnating and declining for so many, as good benefits and job security were disappearing.

      So, even if GenXers on average were making 30 percent more, inequality was growing and ever more of the wealth was going to fewer. Average is not the same as median. No one doubts that there was an economic boom that benefited some people, but in the long term it didn’t benefit most. No other country has American levels of inequality. So, in some of those countries, the median income (rather than average income) of Millennials is much higher than in the US. Median wealth overall in the US is a $50,000 to $100,000 lower than certain developed countries. Inequality has grown in many countries, but no where near what has happened in the US.

      The basic point stands. Only assholes, idiots, and ignoramuses would blame the young for their economic hardships during an economically difficult time.

  2. An interesting aspect of the early Industrial Revolution in the U.K was the “working class entrepreneur”, which wasn’t a cynical euphemism for profiting illegally but an actual “type” that continued long enough to be one of the catalysts of independent music in the UK (Tony Fletcher’s book on the Smiths has a lot of good info on Manchester’s economic history; their first manager was a self financed fashion merchant).

    It’s a different sort of “economic nationalism”, supported by working men’s clubs that go back to Chartism ( I know it wasn’t easy on women either, but perhaps it rubs off; there have been a lot of well-defined female personalities from that area) . I too don’t like the seemingly endless parade of articles that bash the young, though I’m also amazed at what working people did accomplish in spite of the horrifying landscape of the modern world’s birth.

    • There appears to have been more of a functioning free market in past centuries, despite other problematic issues of class, race and gender. Over recent decades in the US economy, corporate consolidation has grown as small business entrepreneurialism has declined. That is related to ever more of the wealth going to the top, not to mention the decimation of organized labor and increasing corporatism in government.

      I’ve known some people who have started businesses. Some have done well, but others have struggled even when they are smart and talented. There is a lot more bureaucratic red tape that takes up a lot of time that didn’t exist in the past. In many sectors, regulations and licensing has become oppressive, sometimes seeming to have been intentionally designed to tilt the playing field (because of big money lobby organizations, regulatory capture, revolving door between big biz and big gov, legalized bribery such as lucrative lobbyist jobs given to former politicians, etc). Neither is the tax system friendly to small businesses for similar reasons. On top of that, healthcare has become unaffordable to many small business owners.

      There was a small corner grocery store that closed a while back, having been around since before my childhood. It was forced to close because it couldn’t afford a new licensing fee that large grocery stores could afford. In my lifetime, numerous small corner grocery stores have closed here in town and a single chain of grocery stores has come to dominate the local market.

      The US once had a thriving economy of small businesses, entrepreneurs, and inventors. That was true particularly in my parents childhoods in the 1940s and 1950s. It was relatively easy to own and operate a business back then. It was common for people to live in the same house or building out of which they ran their business.

      My dad grew up in a small rural town surrounded by farmland (5,000 residents with another 100,000 elsewhere in the county). There of course were many small family farmers left in the region. In town, the downtown was thriving with dozens of small businesses and banks, but there was also around a dozen small factories. I’m sure almost all of it was locally owned and operated. Now the place is a ghost town and even many large factories in the area have mostly closed down or relocated.

      That world has disappeared. But for most of American history, that world was so common as to be the norm and the ideal. The American founders were mostly businessmen and even the plantation owners were mostly small business owners. To be a businessman back then meant to be an educated community leader with an interest not just politics but more importantly also philosophy, science, and inventions. Many of the American founders were inventors, including those who were working class such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.

      It was a more harsh world in many ways. But generally speaking, it was easy to easy to do such things as start a business, mostly just requiring the motivation to do so. And the colonists response to an oppressive corporation that was endangering local small businesses was to start a revolution. It wasn’t so much about taxation as many revolutionaries pointed out. They simply didn’t like what they perceived as foreign meddling in their communities and local economies.

      Along with the motivation to start businesses, they had the motivation to defend those businesses when threatened. Then again, that was also a time when there was a locally owned free press that could challenge government propaganda and corporate spin. It’s hard to imagine the equivalent to radical pamphleteers today having the same kind of influence as existed back then.

  3. “to be a businessman back then meant to be an educated community leader with an interest not just politics but more importantly also philosophy, science, and inventions.”

    What do you think of Elon Musk? I suspect that since America never developed a real aristocracy, for better or worse we have the chaotic mobility (and now a negative stability) of hyper-individualist capitalism; I see free market conservatives undermining their own rhetoric often here, although some Catholic writers mention things like subsidiarity . The noblesse oblige of Disney and private firms beloved of some conservatives is a dodge to real politics, which means addressing the interests of citizens. I don’t believe its possible to will or invent any high culture without any preceding tradition, but perhaps the conditions for cultural renewal can be laid down by people with the time and ability.

    Modern capitalism has created its own environments that fulfill the architectural visions of Fourier and some mad dreamers of the ancient world (unfortunately in America, their distribution still reflects the feudal hierarchies that existed in a pre-capitalist USA). On the other hand, its apocalyptic nature manifests through over-spilling into the political and social worlds. The forms of late capitalism are warfare and dreams, a war of dreams, perhaps the inversion of the radical visionary imagination.

    Benjamin identified a utopian impulse in modern commercial products along with the hellish conditions that can arise in capitalism. I’ve seen little press coverage of how smart phones, for example, in the right hands are subject to a “democratization” of the digital imagination ( the best design and visual culture isn’t produced by corporations anymore, and is increasingly harder to utilize by them. I’d like to see someone with academic credentials investigate that and tell me I’m wrong ! ).

    • I just now came across this comment. It ended up in the trash, along with some other comments.

      “What do you think of Elon Musk?”

      I can’t say I have a strong opinion. He seems typical of one variety of American. He is a self-promoting media personality, aspiring technocratic plutocrat, utopian preacher and prophet, self-affirmed savior of humanity, and a few other things thrown in. He probably believes his own hype, but then again so does Trump. He fits into Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland.


      I agree with that. America is a young society and the population acts accordingly. We Americans are the teenger who, immediately after getting his license, crashes the family car. For nations, maturity takes centuries to even begin to develop.

      Give the US another 500-1,000 years and, if we survive that long, we can talk about a stable and lasting American tradition. Right now, the US is a Frankenstein monster born out of mass global population shifts (mostly dislocated and traumatized refugees, slaves, etc) that have yet to settle out into a coherent culture.

      It would be like the diverse regional and tribal populations having tried to talk about an agreed upon notion of an English nation-state in the period following Norman conquest. Centuries of instability and conflict was required for England as we know it to fully form. England didn’t come into its own until its break from the Catholic Church.


      Your sense of capitalism is similar to my own. Capitalism was once a radical dream. But now it has become a reactionary fantasy. Maybe that is the fate of any radical dream when a ruling elite gains control of it over a period of centuries. The Enlightenment does seem to have created its own monsters. Bright lights cast dark shadows.

      “Benjamin identified a utopian impulse in modern commercial products along with the hellish conditions that can arise in capitalism.”

      I’m only familiar with Benjamin in passing. I maybe get what is being said here. Capitalist from the start was utopian. As the reality of capitalism grows worse, the story sold turns ever more fantastical. The Cold War pushed capitalism into overdrive with the promise that it would save the world.

      Behind capitalism, there has always been the Evangelical salvation, prosperity gospel, new thought, and positive thinking. Norman Vincent Peale was and still is popular across the political spectrum, although most strongly embraced by capitalist realists. My conservative dad is a big fan of Peale and so is our dear leader, Donald Trump. Peale, as I recall from Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland, officiated four of Trump’s weddings.

      In this worldview, everything is a product to be sold or else it is irrelevant. And the ultimate product is the confidence of the con-man and the faith of the dupe. But hidden beneath the surface, the radical heart still beats. And every so often someone takes the promise seriously which can be dangerous. An empty package can only be sold for so long before the customer gets angry.


      Isn’t that true of any technological advancement, in particular through media? Mass publishing of radical and revolutionary pamphlets was not only popular for it was also profitable. Some governments and other defenders of the establishment found they couldn’t produce a better ideological product that would sell to the same degree.

      First and foremost, Thomas Paine was a best selling writer. The printing press was early on built for the elite. But long before the revolutionary era, it was already spawning dissenting voices that incited religious and civil wars along with populist movements. All of that would later inspire the likes of Paine.

      The elite always control new technologies. That is until they lose control. Part of the reason is as you suggest. Those outside of power often see the greatest potential in new technology and so are more innovative in what they do with it.

  4. By “some conservatives” I meant libertarians. As we’ve discussed, principled conservatives exist, but there isn’t much solidly traditionalist principle in right wing parties at the mass-political level.

    • I rarely if ever associate libertarians with conservatives. I don’t see any greater impulse of libertarianism on the political right than on the political left. If you break down libertarianism to actual views, support for those views would mostly be found on the political left.

      Libertarianism, in fact, began on the political left as part of the European workers’ movement which included anarchists, Marxists, communists, and socialists. Even today, a lot of libertarians come from the left, although they are less likely to identify or be perceived as such. The most famous libertarian in the US and the world is Noam Chomsky and yet few ever think of him as libertarian.

      Mostly all I see on the political right is libertarian rhetoric with little if any libertarian substance. Reactionaries have embraced libertarian rhetoric only because it is convenient. But if libertarianism ever became more popular and mainstream, reactionaries would be the first to turn against it because they are defined by reaction and can’t help themselves.

      There is a lot of confusion about libertarianism in the US, such as it being mixed up with plutocratic corporatism (practically defined by it in mainstream debate). But any actual libertarian would be against plutocratic corporatism. The only way to have a free market is to have a free people, which is to say a functioning democracy both in the government and economy. There is no other possible way to be libertarian.

      The fact of the matter is most Americans claiming to be libertarian aren’t actually libertarian. It’s hard for me to take most American politics at face value.

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