Intellectual History: "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire," Kurt Anderson

And fight the good fight in the public sphere. One task, of course, is to contain the worst tendencies of Trumpism and cut off its political-economic fuel, so that a critical mass of fantasy and lies doesn’t turn it into something much worse than nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudo conservatism. Progress is not inevitable, but it is not impossible either.
Cultural predispositions and national characters are real, and societies do come to the crossroads and make important choices. But while our Fantasyland tendencies we present from the beginning, the current situation was not inevitable, because history and evolution never are. Nor now is any particular future. We could regain our national balance and composure. These last decades may turn out to have been a phase, one strange act of our ongoing epic, an unfortunate episode in the American experiment that we will finally move past and chalk up to experience. Nations and societies have survived and recovered from far more terrible swerves; eras that felt cataclysmic as they were happening. The good news, in other words, is that America may now be at peak Fantasyland. We can hope. (440)

72 pages: 28,897 words; visuals