Kurt Andersen > Quotes

“mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.” —MARK TWAIN, “Corn-Pone Opinions” (1901)”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Keeping an open mind is a virtue,” Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, the last book he published, but “not so open that your brains fall out…. I have a foreboding of an America when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” That was twenty years ago.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“As the 1990s began, the right stayed angry and upset and kept growing in size and power thanks to the primitives, the bigots, the Protestant fundamentalists and cowboy commando conspiracy fantasists. But the grown-ups on the right, the economic right, corporate leaders and the rest of the rich, kept their eye on the prize—less taxation, less regulation of business, greed is good—and they maintained control of the party.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” —PHILIP K. DICK”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Szasz opposed any involuntary psychiatric intervention and, along with the Cuckoo’s Nest portrayal, paved the way for the disastrous dismantling of U.S. mental health facilities. But more generally they helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress the people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact”—now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone, from creationists to climate change deniers to antivaccine hysterics, who prefer to disregard science in favor of their own beliefs.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“In 1910 President Theodore Roosevelt, a rich Republican, said that “corporate funds” used “for political purposes” were “one of the principal sources of corruption” and had “tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“It’s telling that Americans know and celebrate Plymouth but Jamestown hardly at all. The myth we’ve constructed says that the first nonnative new Americans who mattered were the idealists, the hyperreligious people seeking freedom to believe and act out their passionate, elaborate, all-consuming fantasies. The more run-of-the-mill people seeking a financial payoff, who abandoned their dream once it was defunct? Eh. We also prefer to talk about Pilgrims rather than Puritans, because the former has none of the negative connotations that stuck permanently to the latter.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“For most of us insist that somewhere in the past there was a golden age. But people who are forever dreaming of a mythical past are merely saying that they are afraid of the future. The past which men create for themselves is a place where thought is unnecessary and happiness is inevitable. The American temperament leans generally to a kind of mystical anarchism. In 1976 the Republicans were not yet the party of unhinged mystical anarchism they became over the next four decades. Rather, after the unhappiness, unfriendliness, cynicism, paranoia, and finally the high crimes of Richard Nixon, Americans were eager to install Mr. Rogers”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“A MAIN ARGUMENT of this book concerns how so many parts of American life have morphed into forms of entertainment. From 1980 to the end of the century, that tendency reached a tipping point in politics and the political discourse.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“The great compromise between the American religious impulse and the American Enlightenment in the 1700s permitted any and every conceivable sect to bud and blossom. Fine. But that principle isn’t working so well anymore. The fanciful and religious and cryptoreligious parts have gotten overripe, bursting and spilling their juices over the Enlightenment-reason parts, spoiling our whole barrel. Holders of any belief about anything, especially and incontrovertibly if those beliefs are ascribed to faith, are now expected to be immune from challenge.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“...In all this, financialization has done what people back in the 1950s and '60s and '70s worried and warned that the Communists would do if they took over: centralize control of the economy, turn Americans into interchangeable cogs serving an inhumane system, and allow only a well-connected elite to live well. Extreme Capitalism resembles Communism: yet another whopping irony.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Let me quote once more from Tolkien’s lecture, which he delivered a few months before the fantasy-besotted Nazis started World War II. “Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s. For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession. After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Wallowing in nostalgia for a lost Golden Age ruined by meddling liberal outsiders from Washington and New York, previously a white Southern habit, became more and more of a white American habit. And so the Republicans’ Southern Strategy could be nationalized as well. When he first ran for president, Ronald Reagan popularized the term welfare queen—a powerful caricature, based on a single criminal case, that exaggerated the pervasiveness of welfare fraud and spread the fiction that black people were the main recipients of government benefits. In Vietnam, the United States had also just lost a war, which gave non-Southerners a strong dose of Lost Cause bitterness for the first time.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Before the Internet, crackpots were mostly isolated and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the Web, just like actual news. Now all the fantasies look real.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else’s.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“If underground militant cells were setting off hundreds of bombs and robbing banks around the country these days, of course, America would be crazed, consumed, talking of nothing else, and probably under martial law. The bombings back then seldom made the national news because a reasonable and rational Establishment was still in charge of the media discourse, determined to help Americans remain reasonable and rational.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“The federal minimum wage is frozen for the entire decade, longer than ever, which translates to an effective pay cut of one-third for America’s lowest-paid workers.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“...Libertarians fantasize that they're action heroes and entirely self-made. They tend to exempt themselves from the truism that there but for the grace of God goes each one of them, because an implicit premise of their ultra-individualism is that anybody in America can make it in their own and that unfair disadvantages either don't exist or can't be helped. I have a hunch that the demographic profile of self-identified libertarians--94 percent white, 68 percent male, 62 percent in their forties or younger--has something to do with those beliefs and fantasies.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Back then I used to say that I despised the new coinage “quality time,” that it was yuppie parents’ smiley-face equivalent to lawyers’ “billable hours.”
― Kurt Andersen, True Believers: A Novel

“Then I read The Once and Future King, and for most of a year I was young Arthur, Dad was Merlyn, and it was my destiny to create the perfect kingdom of Camelot somewhere beyond northeastern Illinois.”
― Kurt Andersen, True Believers: A Novel

“If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence),” Tolkien said in that same 1939 lecture, “then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish.” It turns out he was half right. Many Americans now are in a state in which they don’t want to know or can’t perceive factual truth, yet the perishing of fantasy featuring elves and orcs and superheroes and zombies and angels is nowhere in sight.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“...The economic right was shrewd enough to understand that the issues they didn't care much about--abortion, gay rights, creationism--did matter to liberals, and that those culture wars drew off political energy from the left that might otherwise have fueled complaints and demands about the reconstructed political economy. And Establishment Republicans could keep reassuring themselves that when push came to shove, their culture-warrior political partners didn't ever actually wind, that abortion was still legal, gay and lesbian rights expanded, creationism kept out of the public school curricula.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Whether an individual’s conspiracism exists alongside religious faith, psychologically they’re similar: a conspiracy theory can be revised and refined and further confirmed, but it probably can’t ever be disproved to a true believer’s satisfaction. The final conspiratorial nightmare crackdown is always right around the corner but never quite comes—as with the perpetually fast-approaching end-time. Like Christians certain both that evolution is a phony theory and that God created people a few thousand years ago, conspiracists are simultaneously credulous (about impossible plots) and incredulous (about the confusing, dull gray truth). Conspiracists often deride arguments against their theories as disinformation cooked up by the conspirators—the way some Christians consider evolutionary explanations to be the work of the devil.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History