Fantasyland

Kurt Andersen book ISBN:978-1-4000-6721-3, published 2017 (most writing 2014-15) - perfect timing to catch the Donald Trump presidency.

Reviews, interviews

Americans have a longstanding love of magical thinking

What is it about the American experience, the American character, that cultivated this love of magical thinking? Why are so many of us committed to our own tailored versions of reality? Andersen’s book tries to answer these questions.

What’s the “fantasy-industrial complex”?

I saw happening as early as the 1800s when I started looking at it. In the 1830s, for example, we had newspapers publishing hoaxes as though they were news and religious evangelists going around the country advertising themselves in newspapers and performing as though it was a night at the theater.

The financial industry became part of the fantasy-industrial complex because they were selling a fantasy of real estate, a belief that people with lousy credit should be given giant loans. (Credit Crisis 2008)

That's the question. Have we lost the ability to distinguish reality from fiction or do we not give a damn? I’m actually not sure we can separate those two things. As you know, I’ve become fascinated by professional wrestling as a part of this and as more than just a metaphor for this.

I’m obliged at this point to note that Donald Trump is a member of the WWE “Hall of Fame.”

So Trump is the culmination of America’s descent into Fantasyland?

I’d say so. I’ve been familiar with Trump for a long time, and I was one of the first people to write about him. (Spy Magazine)

As I was writing this book in 2014 and 2015, I saw that Trump was running for president and I realized, about halfway through the book, that I had to reckon with this stupid — but deadly serious — candidacy.

All I can say at the end of the book is that we should have conversations like this, and consider ourselves members of the reality-based community

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

As he explains in what must have been an alarmingly self-confirming last chapter: Donald Trump is “stupendous Exhibit A” in the landscape of “Fantasyland,” a fitting leader for a nation that has, over the centuries, nurtured a “promiscuous devotion to the untrue.”

Andersen’s history begins at the beginning, with the first comforting lie we tell ourselves. Each year we teach our children about Pilgrims, those gentle robed creatures who landed at Plymouth Rock. But our real progenitors were the Puritans, who passed the weeks on the trans-Atlantic voyage preaching about the end times and who, when they arrived, vowed to hang any Quaker or Catholic who landed on their shores. They were zealots and also well-educated British gentlemen, which set the tone for what Andersen identifies as a distinctly American endeavor: propping up magical thinking with elaborate scientific proof.

In Andersen’s telling, you can easily trace the line from the self-appointed 17th-century prophet Anne Hutchinson to Kanye West.

Enterprising businessmen quickly figure out ways to make money off the Americans who gleefully embrace untruths. The 1800s see an explosion of water cures and homeopathy and something called mesmerism.

The quintessential American of the era is William Cody. He toured the country playing the character Buffalo Bill, fake-scalping actors playing Cheyenne warrior chiefs, and then actually scalping and killing real Cheyenne warrior chiefs while in costume as Buffalo Bill.

a kind of comfort with small fibs settles into the populace. When Andersen was young, he recalls, it was rare to see a woman over 50 whose hair was not gray or white

While the most persistent thread in “Fantasyland” is Christianity (religion) — the astounding number of Americans who believe in heaven and angels, which most of Europe gave up decades ago — Andersen reserves a starring role for the secular spiritualists (NewAge).

It’s clear that Andersen is uncomfortable with the extreme relativism we’ve settled into. But he doesn’t grapple with what it might mean to give that up.

The Pure Products of America Go Crazy: A Conversation with Kurt Andersen About “Fantasyland” - Los Angeles Review of Books

looking back and seeing — in my own little life, in the things I had written — I saw the various threads: everything had become entertainment. The Republican Party had become a Christian party of a kind it had never been. I’d been writing about this stuff for 15 years, but it wasn’t until the 2010s, I guess, that I started thinking, wait, there’s a kind of unified theory going on here

How important is the South to Fantasyland, and when did it go all-in with the fantasy?

Well, again I never fully realized that Southerners during the 18th century through the middle of the 19th were saying, again and again, “Oh, those crazy New England zealots who burn witches…” But that changed, and it’s not just about the religion. The commitment to the slave-based Old South led to a kind of anticipatory nostalgia — “Oh my God, the South is going away, slavery is going away” — and that exacerbated the tendency toward magical thinking. Now there are historians of the South who say that this magical thinking has always been part of the Southern character

Mark Twain’s memoir, where he talks about the influence of Sir Walter Scott and insists, in the strongest polemical way, that Southerners lived according to a feudal fantasy of Sir Walter Scott — that every Southerner read and named their children after his characters. He blamed Sir Walter Scott for the Civil War. And once the South lost the Civil War and invested in deeper fantasies of the noble Lost Cause, building new institutions like the Ku Klux Klan to serve the fantasy of their own nobility and glory — versus evil, meddling liberals from the North — the South became an important part of this story.

the Baby Boom... because of its size and because of when it came along in the political economy of America — became the avant-garde of Fantasyland. It was a perfect storm of conditions: the United States had won the war, we were determining the global order, and there was this huge number of people — and television (TV).

Television and suburbanization happened so quickly and were such a radical change. Especially in the case of television and its successor media technologies, we sort of quickly lost sight of how disruptive that change was: suddenly, between 1950 and 1960, people are going from not spending any time in a fugue state staring at screens to spending a third of their waking hours doing it.

The news and I Dream of Jeannie came out of the same box.

*The other region that seems important to the building of the big fantasy, at least for the last 100 years or so, is Southern California. It has a recurring role in this: Hollywood, Disney, Amy Semple McPherson, and so on. How do Los Angeles and its environs fit into this larger march toward lunacy?

Both Southern and Northern California get repeated shout-outs. Northern California has the Gold Rush, the Beats, Esalen, and all that. And Southern California has Hollywood.*

We have “liberal Hollywood” and conservative Breitbart and whatever Scientology is — all in the same city. It was a perfect petri dish for all of these organisms to grow like crazy.

(Interesting counter-framing) The Fiction of Kurt Andersen’s “Fantasyland”

Blame for widespread irrationality apparently rests with the delusions of the working-class majority, not with the powerful elites who have actively reaped the benefits from sowing seeds of confusion.

So when Andersen repeatedly refers to “we Americans,” I can only imagine that what he is really referring to are fellow liberal elites who, like their right-wing counterparts, have no faith in the working-class to make democratic decisions about America’s future.

Attacking the publics’ ability to think comes easily to Andersen, but again, almost in passing he reiterates that fantasy-thinking has always found a welcome home within elite networks which have incubated all manner of idiocies before serving them up to the public

as he goes on to explain, in their keenness to reject all that capitalist society had bequeathed them, spiritual seekers at Esalen and elsewhere went awry when they combined their social experiments for change with frontal attacks on the legacy of the Enlightenment and the core tenets of the scientific process itself.

Postmodernism: Early leading lights in this field, as highlighted by Andersen, included the French philosopher Michel Foucault — a man whose “suspicion of reason became deeply and widely embedded in American academia.” Andersen continues: “Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else.” This may be true, but Andersen neglects to mention that the relativist proponents of post-modernism have always faced vocal opposition from socialists (and particularly Marxists), i.e., those people who are serious about organizing and not just theorizing about ending oppression.

By contrast, ever content to muddy the intellectual waters of history, conservatives continue to promote the lie that an authoritarian clique of cultural Marxists control and dominate America’s academic institutions with relativist mumbo jumbo.

An “extraordinarily powerful cabal” – that is, the ruling-class – do run America as best they can, but they definitely don’t do it secretly.

in spite of his disdain with the so-called irrationality of the majority of citizens, who, as he puts it inhabit a “post-factual America,” Andersen repeats again (with little emphasis) that elite forces in society have nurtured America’s interest in conspiracies. Specifically, he draws attention to the international best-selling book Chariots of the Gods?... This was all part and parcel of the disempowering media milieu that titillated both the liberal left and the far-right but was categorically rebuked as a dangerous distraction by the socialist left.

With Trump now in the White House, Andersen, having plumped for the fantasy candidature embodied by Hillary Clinton, is apoplectic with the majority of Americans who he blames for the rise of Trump.

Are the ’60s to Blame for Trump? An Interview With Kurt Andersen.

Why do you think the ’60s are partially to blame for where we are right now? Only partially. This excerpt of the book that appeared in the Atlantic this month, thats what they were interested in.

Some of the main strands I follow are extreme religiosity from the beginning, which has effloresced, especially in the last century and especially in the last few decades, into something extraordinary compared to anything else in the developed world. Individualism is another way we went insane, when individualism got out of control, along with the 1960s, and along with the various forms of show business into which we can imagine ourselves and other beings.

You are talking about people who believe things without reason. I’m trying to understand: Is there some data or something that you’re looking at that makes you think this is where this trend started, that people became more unreasonable in the ’60s?

There is data that I’ve looked at extensively and report in the book extensively about the false things that people believe compared to earlier times.

The world is full of countries where there is strong religious belief and a strong belief in conspiracies. What is it specifically that you think is American about that rather than this is how human beings are, that we believe weird stuff?

I’m not saying America is so different from Pakistan. I’m saying America is different from Canada and Japan and Europe and Australia and the rest of the developed world (First World), and we are, by every measure of religiosity.

Don’t the French believe in things like vaccine skepticism more than we do? There is vaccine skepticism in Europe. There’s no question about that. No, that is not uniquely American. The degree to which American have stopped vaccinating their children was higher than anywhere else. (Antivax)

I am not a crusading Richard Dawkins–style atheist. I don’t know. Maybe God exists. When we got to faith healing and speaking in tongues and these specifics, which I grant it’s impolite of me to say, “No, this is really nutty,” I’m sorry. It’s important to me to not allow “but it’s my faith” to be the cloak that protects every belief that is a matter of faith from criticism, ridicule, doubt.

We can thank the Koch brothers, among others, for helping create that media environment

but a media structure could arise to teach them that in Denmark, and I don’t think you’d end up with half of the Danes believing that climate change doesn’t exist.

I think what he’s (Donald Trump) fallen into is because he doesn’t believe much of anything; he has instincts, and I think we’ve seen in the last few days that he has actual instincts about white supremacy, frankly. I don’t think he has well-formed beliefs, but he has instincts, guy-at-the-bar angry instincts. That is his thing. That is his fundamental thing.

Excerpt article

How the U.S. Lost Its Mind

I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community

Each of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. Some of my best friends are very religious, and others believe in dubious conspiracy theories. What’s problematic is going overboard—letting the subjective entirely override the objective; thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings are just as true as facts. The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control

Much more than the other billion or so people in the developed world, we Americans believe—really believe—in the supernatural and the miraculous, in Satan on Earth, in reports of recent trips to and from heaven, and in a story of life’s instantaneous creation several thousand years ago.

And this was all true before we became familiar with the terms post-factual and post-truth, before we elected a president with an astoundingly open mind about conspiracy theories, what’s true and what’s false, the nature of reality.

By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.

*Why are we like this?

The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned.*

American moxie has always come in two types. We have our wilder, faster, looser side: We’re overexcited gamblers with a weakness for stories too good to be true. But we also have the virtues embodied by the Puritans and their secular descendants: steadiness, hard work, frugality, sobriety, and common sense. A propensity to dream impossible dreams is like other powerful tendencies—okay when kept in check. For most of our history, the impulses existed in a rough balance, a dynamic equilibrium between fantasy and reality, mania and moderation, credulity and skepticism.

The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative. The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds.

America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, and by hucksters and their suckers, which made America successful—but also by a people uniquely susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem’s hunting witches to Joseph Smith’s creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Trump.

In 1962, people started referring to “hippies,” the Beatles had their first hit, Ken Kesey published One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the Harvard psychology lecturer Timothy Leary was handing out psilocybin and LSD to grad students.

Esalen was the center of the cyclone of the youth rebellion.

Essentially everything that became known as New Age was invented, developed, or popularized at the Esalen Institute. Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural.

His new institute embraced the radical notion that psychosis and other mental illnesses were labels imposed by the straight world on eccentrics and visionaries, that they were primarily tools of coercion and control

within the psychiatric profession itself this idea had two influential proponents, who each published unorthodox manifestos at the beginning of the decade—R. D. Laing (The Divided Self) and Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness).

If 1962 was when the decade really got going, 1969 was the year the new doctrines and their gravity were definitively cataloged by the grown-ups. Reason and rationality were over.

The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, published three weeks after Woodstock, in the summer of 1969. Its author was Theodore Roszak, age 35, a Bay Area professor who thereby coined the word counterculture.

rejection of expertise and “all that our culture values as ‘reason’ and ‘reality.’ ” (Note the scare quotes.) So-called experts, after all, are “on the payroll of the state and/or corporate structure.”

A chapter called “The Myth of Objective Consciousness” argues that science is really just a state religion

Earlier that summer, a University of Chicago sociologist (and Catholic priest) named Andrew Greeley had alerted readers of The New York Times Magazine

When he’d chalked a statistical table on a classroom blackboard, one of his students had reacted with horror: “Mr. Greeley, I think you’re an empiricist.”

As 1969 turned to 1970, a 41-year-old Yale Law School professor was finishing his book about the new youth counterculture. Charles Reich was a former Supreme Court clerk

In 1970, The Greening of America became The New York Times’ best-selling book (as well as a much-read 70-page New Yorker excerpt), and remained on the list for most of a year.

The Greening of America may have been the mainstream’s single greatest act of pandering to the vanity and self-righteousness of the new youth

Conspiracism was flourishing, and Reich bought in. Now that “the Corporate State has added depersonalization and repression” to its other injustices, “it has threatened to destroy all meaning and suck all joy from life.” Reich’s magical thinking mainly concerned how the revolution would turn out. “The American Corporate State,” having produced this new generation of longhaired hyperindividualists who insist on trusting their gut and finding their own truth, “is now accomplishing what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves. The machine has begun to destroy itself.”

Instead, Consciousness III was just one early iteration of the anything-goes, post-reason, post-factual America enabled by the tsunami. Reich’s faith was the converse of the Enlightenment rationalists’ hopeful fallacy 200 years earlier. Granted complete freedom of thought, Thomas Jefferson and company assumed, most people would follow the path of reason. Wasn’t it pretty to think so.

During the ’60s, large swaths of academia made a turn away from reason and rationalism as they’d been understood. Many of the pioneers were thoughtful, their work fine antidotes to postwar complacency. The problem was the nature and extent of their influence at that particular time, when all premises and paradigms seemed up for grabs

they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy

These ideas percolated across multiple academic fields. In 1965, the French philosopher Michel Foucault published Madness and Civilization in America, echoing Laing’s skepticism of the concept of mental illness; by the 1970s, he was arguing that rationality itself is a coercive “regime of truth”—oppression by other means. Foucault’s suspicion of reason became deeply and widely embedded in American academia.

Meanwhile, over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself.

A more extreme academic evangelist for the idea of all truths being equal was a UC Berkeley philosophy professor named Paul Feyerabend. His best-known book, published in 1975, was Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge

Tart popularized the term consensus reality for what you or I would simply call reality

The far right had its own glorious ’60s moment, in the form of the new John Birch Society, whose founders believed that both Republican and Democratic presidential Cabinets included “conscious, deliberate, dedicated agent[s] of the Soviet conspiracy” determined to create “a world-wide police state, absolutely and brutally governed from the Kremlin,” as the society’s founder, Robert Welch, put it in a letter to friends.

This furiously, elaborately suspicious way of understanding the world started spreading across the political spectrum after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963

The notion of an immense and awful JFK-assassination conspiracy became conventional wisdom in America. As a result, more Americans than ever became reflexive conspiracy theorists. Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, a complicated global fantasy about the interconnections among militarists and Illuminati and stoners, and the validity of paranoid thinking, won the 1974 National Book Award.

Of course, real life made such stories plausible.

Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists).

I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed

The sincerely credulous are perfect suckers, and in the late ’60s, a convicted thief and embezzler named Erich von Däniken published Chariots of the Gods?, positing that extraterrestrials helped build the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, and the giant stone heads on Easter Island.

By the 1980s, things appeared to have returned more or less to normal

The sense of cultural and political upheaval and chaos dissipated—which lulled us into ignoring all the ways that everything had changed, that Fantasyland was now scaling and spreading and becoming the new normal.

Relativism became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say. Michel Foucault’s rival Jean Baudrillard became a celebrity among American intellectuals by declaring that rationalism was a tool of oppressors that no longer worked as a way of understanding the world

The Reagan presidency was famously a triumph of truthiness and entertainment, and in the 1990s, as problematically batty beliefs kept going mainstream, presidential politics continued merging with the fantasy-industrial complex.

Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided

Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared.

Instead of relying on an occasional magazine or newsletter to confirm your gnarly view of the world, now you had talk radio drilling it into your head for hours every day. As Limbaugh’s show took off, in 1992 the producer Roger Ailes created a syndicated TV show around him. Four years later, when NBC hired someone else to launch a cable news channel, Ailes, who had been working at NBC, quit and created one with Rupert Murdoch.

After the ’60s and ’70s happened as they happened, the internet may have broken America’s dynamic balance between rational thinking and magical thinking for good.

Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of results

When I Googled chemtrails proof, the first seven results offered so-called evidence of the nonexistent conspiracy. When I searched for government extraterrestrial cover-up, only one result in the first three pages didn’t link to an article endorsing a conspiracy theory.

The Triumph of the Fantasy-Industrial Complex

People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable. Many give themselves over to the appealingly dubious and the untrue. But fantastical politics have become highly asymmetrical. Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left.

One reason, I think, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian

as the incomes of middle- and working-class people flatlined, Republicans pooh-poohed rising economic inequality and insecurity. Economic insecurity correlates with greater religiosity, and among white Americans, greater religiosity correlates with voting Republican. For Republican politicians and their rich-getting-richer donors, that’s a virtuous circle, not a vicious one.

When Barry Goldwater was the right-wing Republican presidential nominee in 1964, he had to play down any streaks of Bircher madness, but by 1979, in his memoir With No Apologies, he felt free to rave on about the globalist conspiracy and its “pursuit of a new world order” and impending “period of slavery”; the Council on Foreign Relations’ secret agenda for “one-world rule”; and the Trilateral Commission’s plan for “seizing control of the political government of the United States.”

Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.

For a while, Republican leaders effectively encouraged and exploited the predispositions of their variously fantastical and extreme partisans. Karl Rove was stone-cold cynical... But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016, wrote last year. “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 party’s ideological center of gravity swerved way to the right of Rove and all the Bushes.

The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008, three-quarters of the major GOP presidential candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016, just one did. That one, Jeb Bush, was careful to say that evolutionary biology was only his truth, that “it does not need to be in the curriculum” of public schools, and that if it is, it could be accompanied by creationist teaching. A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion,” according to Public Policy Polling.

The Rise of Donald Trump

Spy magazine, which I co-founded in 1986 and edited until 1993, published three cover stories about him—and dozens of pages exposing and ridiculing his lies, brutishness, and absurdity. Now everybody knows what we knew.

He is, first and last, a creature of the fantasy-industrial complex. “He is P. T. Barnum,” his sister, a federal judge, told his biographer Timothy O’Brien in 2005.

Before the emergence of Fantasyland, Trump’s various enterprises would have seemed a ludicrous, embarrassing, incoherent jumble for a businessman, let alone a serious candidate for president.

What connects them all, of course, is the new, total American embrace of admixtures of reality and fiction and of fame for fame’s sake

he was a star, so news shows wanted him on the air as much as possible—people at TV outlets told me during the campaign that they were expected to be careful not to make the candidate so unhappy that he might not return.

Did his voters know that his hogwash was hogwash? Yes and no, the way people paying to visit P. T. Barnum’s exhibitions 175 years ago didn’t much care whether the black woman on display was really George Washington’s 161-year-old former nanny or whether the stitched-together fish/ape was actually a mermaid

Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible.

If he were just a truth-telling wise guy, however, he wouldn’t have won. Trump’s genius was to exploit the skeptical disillusion with politics—there’s too much equivocating; democracy’s a charade—but also to pander to Americans’ magical thinking about national greatness

“I will give you everything,” Trump actually promised during the campaign. Yes: “Every dream you’ve ever dreamed for your country” will come true.

Trump launched his political career by embracing a brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two American taproots—fear and loathing of foreigners and of nonwhites. In 2011, he became the chief promoter of the fantasy that Barack Obama was born in Kenya

The people who speak on Trump’s behalf to journalists and the rest of the reality-based world struggle to defend or explain his assertions.

their most honest defense of his false statements has been to cast them practically as matters of religious conviction—he deeply believes them, so … there.

Which is why nearly half of Americans subscribe to that preposterous belief themselves. And in Trump’s view, that overrides any requirement for facts.

The idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum, as if powered by a Newtonian law, was always a very American belief. However, it’s really an article of faith

I remain (barely) more of an optimist than a pessimist. Even as we’ve entered this long winter of foolishness and darkness, when too many Americans are losing their grip on reason and reality, it has been an epoch of astonishing hope and light as well. During these same past few decades, Americans reduced the rates of murder and violent crime by more than half. We decoded the human genome, elected an African American president, recorded the sound of two black holes colliding 1 billion years ago

What is to be done? I don’t have an actionable agenda

A grassroots movement against one kind of cultural squishiness has taken off and lately reshaped our national politics—the opposition to political correctness. I envision a comparable struggle that insists on distinguishing between the factually true and the blatantly false

Fight the good fight in your private life. You needn’t get into an argument with the stranger at Chipotle who claims that George Soros and Uber are plotting to make his muscle car illegal—but do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes

And fight the good fight in the public sphere.