Quotes from Kurt Andersen

J.R.R. Tolkien, had it right in the lecture he gave just after he published The Hobbit. "Fantasy," he said in 1939, talking about fantastical prose fiction, "is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make.

The new king of the Protestant Establishment, featured on the cover of Time, was Reinhold Niebuhr, a New Yorker and bona-fide intellectual comfortable with nuance and ambiguity who didn't believe in the biblical miracles, including Jesus's bodily resurrection, or even in individual heavenly eternal life.

The New Democrats were more like journalists and academics than traditional political types, more inclined to be polite than tough. Modern liberals prided ourselves on not being ideologues, on entertaining all sorts of disparate policy ideas for improving the world, whereas the economic right really has one big, simple idea—do everything possible to let the rich stay rich and get richer.

No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press

the stories of the supremely successful entrepreneurs obscure the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops. The fabulous successes seem like proof of the power of passionate belief in oneself, our American faith in faith.

As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it's true, no matter why or how I think it's true, then it's true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. That's the real-life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism. And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.

The authors of one study divided all 3,138 U.S. counties into two groups, Opportunity-Falling and Opportunity-Rising America, depending on whether each county lost or gained businesses between 2005 and 2015. In the two-thirds of counties that were Opportunity-Falling during that decade before the 2016 election, Trump won the two-party vote by 53 to 47 percent, while in the Opportunity-Rising counties he lost by 55 to 45 percent.

The Puritans are conventionally considered more "moderate" than the Pilgrims. This is like calling al-Qaeda more moderate than ISIS. The Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans were no less mad... They forbade Church of England clergy from setting foot in their new American theocracy in Boston and Salem, hung Quakers, and passed a law to hang any Catholic priests who might dare show up.

Each side was sincerely convinced that it was carrying out God's orders. In the North and the South, soldiers and ministers and civilians believed and said again and again, "God is on our side." Sermons on both sides depicted the war as part of the divine plan, a holy battle on the way to Armageddon and Christ's reign.

LOL and touché, clever contemporary conservative, for using nostalgia as a political pejorative, the way liberals have always done, the way a lot of us got into the bad habit of doing in the 1970s and '80s about FDR and organized labor and antitrust and thereby became useful idiots for you and the evil geniuses of the right.

The partnership culture gave way to a bonus culture, in which employees felt free to take huge risks with other people's money in order to generate revenue and big bonuses. Risk management on Wall Street [became] a farce, with risk managers being steamrolled by bankers, traders, and executives focused nearly exclusively on maximizing annual profits—and the size of their annual bonuses.

less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes.

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.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

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.

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)

The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.

When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn't mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: "We forgot.

Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." —PHILIP K. DICK

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.