Kurt Andersen (1) (1954–)

Kurt Andersen, co-founder of Spy magazine, was a pioneer of Trump-baiting in the late 1980s. This history of the American susceptibility to irrational beliefs doesn’t seem to have been planned that way, but appearing not long after the shocking arrival of Trump in the White House in 2017, it was widely seen as an analysis of how the enlightened American democracy devised by the Founding Fathers had allowed itself to be manoeuvred into such an absurd outcome.

Andersen looks at the long and show more varied history of fantastic thinking in the US, from the development of weird religious sects and the continuing near-universality of religious belief (something in which the US differs from almost every other country in the developed world) to non-evidence-based medical nonsense (medicine shows, faith-healing, homeopathy, Oprah, RFK jr., etc.), the entertainment industry (Barnum, Hollywood, Disney, the internet), conspiracy theories, UFOs, the popularity of role-playing and dressing-up, hobbits, super-heroes, gun-fantasies, Hugh Hefner, and all the rest, leading to a state of mind in which every American feels entitled to their own beliefs and sets of facts, irrespective of truth, and is highly suspicious of anyone who contradicts those beliefs.

Andersen’s very good at charting the ridiculousness of many of the manifestations of all this, and the dangerous effects that some of them have had, but it gets a bit muddy trying to find a pattern and work out why this devotion to fantasy should all have become such a peculiarly American problem. He suggests that there’s a dangerous synergy between the arrogance bred from the Puritan “priesthood of all believers” idea and the Enlightened skepticism about (other people’s) ideas inherited from the Founding Fathers, but that doesn’t really account for the vast proportion of Americans whose ancestors came to the US from peasant backgrounds in places with dull and respectable established churches, long after all the intellectual excitement of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Interesting, anyway, and perhaps there are some clues along the line for trying to put things right and bring the country back onto an even keel. But if there were, they clearly didn’t work in the short term… show less

This book has two major premises: (1) American irrationality is as old as the republic itself, older. It's as American as apple pie. (2) Right wing and Christian ascendency and imperviousness to facts share a common origin with left wing hippie culture of the 1960s, i.e. create your own reality. However you weigh the accuracy of the arguments, this book is a delight to read in both its accessibility and its inspiration.

This expose of the roots of the current malaise that IS our country is brilliant, profound, and witty, as befits the co-founder of the late lamented magazine Spy. Andersen takes us decade by decade, from the Great Depression through the Covid pandemic and explains how the reins of the country were taken over by big business (note that last week, the surviving Koch brother said "oopsie"), with the assistance of poor-people hating Republicans and neo-liberal Democrats who were led around by show more their noses by CEOs, banksters, and lobbyists. His main premise, that we are caught up in ongoing waves of nostalgia and are mostly threatened by and rarely able to support innovation, is intriguing. There's a noteworthy quote on almost every page. One of the author's recommendations is to FINALLY put to bed Reagan's damaging indictment of government and to recognize that, in most cases, government (under Democrats) works fairly well and would be much better if corporate interests and money were kept far, far, away from it. show less

So Kurt Anderson is trying to tell us how we got to the place we are in America these days, a place where half the population doesn't have problems with a highly corrupt, ignorant, pathological liar running the country. Basically, he says we're pretty much always been this way. The people [European white people] who "settled" the country were prone to believing fantasies. In the southerly parts, the settlers sincerely believed there was gold to be had for the taking. In the northerly parts, show more people believed all manner of religious fantasies, and insisted their particular fantasies were the only "true" ones. So, they came for religious freedom, but only for their own kind of religion. Religious freedom was not for folks who thought differently.

So, anyway, he traces history through P.T. Barnum and the Buffalo Wild West Show, to Disney World, and then to the academics who denied the very existence of truth, it was only differences of opinion. They even claimed that scientific truth was only a construct of the rich and powerful to keep the lower echelons down. Or something. I thought those peculiar idiots had been discredited long ago, but apparently not.

Whatever, it's a rather scary story and doesn't give me much hope for the future. On the other hand, we've been believing fantasies for some 400 years now, so perhaps we'll continue to thrive on our peculiar fantasies for another 400 years. show less