The excerpts I’ve included below don’t do justice to the comprensive, insightful psycho-social history deemed worthy of the September Atlantic cover story (albeit with a title different from the title of the article). The best is saved for last, where hopefully the rise of Trump will make more sense than it did before. It did for me.
Is there any doubt that Trump is the ideal president to govern a country where 2/3rds of the population lives in a universe governed by one or another alternate realities? Andersen writes:
... how widespread is this promiscuous devotion to the untrue? How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities? Any given survey of beliefs is only a sketch of what people in general really think. But reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.” More than half say they’re absolutely certain heaven exists, and just as many are sure of the existence of a personal God—not a vague force or universal spirit or higher power, but some guy. A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like us; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth. Almost a quarter believe that vaccines cause autism, and that Donald Trump won the popular vote in 2016. A quarter believe that our previous president maybe or definitely was (or is?) the anti-Christ. According to a survey by Public Policy Polling, 15 percent believe that the “media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals,” and another 15 percent think that’s possible. A quarter of Americans believe in witches. Remarkably, the same fraction, or maybe less, believes that the Bible consists mainly of legends and fables—the same proportion that believes U.S. officials were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.
How did Trump get elected? Economics? Hate? Lot’s of possibilities have been proposed. Here’s one the might be the most plausible.
Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.
Between my friends and acquaintances, among people I interact with every day, I can count on one hand the number of people who I consider to live in an absolutely fact based conceptual and belief world. As an atheist and skeptic who, while not a scholar, is a frequent user of Google Scholar to double and triple check mainstream articles about science, I like to think I reside in a fact based world. So fact based in fact that I am willing to accept the possibility that my highfalutin self-image is a narcissistic delusion. But I digress….
Almost everyone I know has more or less deeply held beliefs which are grounded in either beliefs held on faith — often religious - or on their own set of unscientifically proved - albeit frequently published - supposed facts. Not one of them is a Trump supporter. Quite the contrary, all of them are appalled by Trump and what he is doing to the country. They are appalled by calling the truth fake news and the notion there are “alternate facts” as plausible as factual facts. Again, from Kurt Andersen:
People see our shocking Trump moment—this post-truth, “alternative facts” moment—as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon. But what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional for its entire history.
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 other words: Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.
Most of Andersen’s article ( adapted from his book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire—A 500-Year History, to be published in September by Random House) is a social psychological history. He takes readers like me, who came of age in the 1960’s, through a journey from new age psychology, Easlin Institute, hippies, Timothy Leary, and other movements where conventional rational reasoning was questioned or rejected outright.
Paranoid thinking and beliefs in conspiracy weren’t individual manifestations seen only in psychiatric patients. Entire groups held them in common. It didn’t matter whether you were on the right or left:
Each camp, conspiracists on the right and on the left, was ostensibly the enemy of the other, but they began operating as de facto allies. 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). Conspiracy theories were more of a modern right-wing habit before people on the left signed on. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.
Andersen describes how, in the 1990’s, the world of self and group delusion moved from a shared left and right one to be more far rightwing.
Each camp, conspiracists on the right and on the left, was ostensibly the enemy of the other, but they began operating as de facto allies. 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). Conspiracy theories were more of a modern right-wing habit before people on the left signed on. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.
You have to get way down the page before Anderson brings up Donald Trump. It is worth the read to get there because when you will end up with a greater understand of the Trump phenomenon. It’s hard to pick out just one excerpt to share. Here’s a sample.
Trump took a key piece of cynical wisdom about show business—the most important thing is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made—to a new level: His actual thuggish sincerity is the opposite of the old-fashioned, goody-goody sanctimony that people hate in politicians.
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. Extreme credulity is a fraternal twin of extreme skepticism.
“I will give you everything,” Trump actually promised during the campaign. Yes: “Every dream you’ve ever dreamed for your country” will come true.
Just as the internet enabled full Fantasyland, it made possible Trump as candidate and president, feeding him pseudo-news on his phone and letting him feed those untruths directly to his Twitter followers. He is the poster boy for the downside of digital life. “Forget the press,” he advised supporters—just “read the internet.” After he wrongly declared on Twitter that one anti-Trump protester “has ties to isis,” he was asked whether he regretted tweeting that falsehood. “What do I know about it?” he replied. “All I know is what’s on the internet.”
The only time Andersen lost me, as emersed in pessimism as I admit I am, was at the very end of his article when he prescribes an optimistic antidote to Trumpism.
And fight the good fight in the public sphere. One main task, of course, is to contain the worst tendencies of Trumpism, and cut off its political-economic fuel supply, so that fantasy and lies don’t turn it into something much worse than just nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudo-conservatism. Progress is not inevitable, but it’s not impossible, either.
I think he has lapsed into his own fantasy-based world of wishful thinking. I’ll give him that.
This is a long article. I hope this inspires you to read it.