For a decade now, most of the world has been trying to wrap its collective head around the ascendance of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. Heck, most Americans have been trying to do the same.
How did so many of us here buy into “fake news”, MAGA, Trump’s perpetual lying (and believing those lies), the appeals to the worst aspects of our national character, and the down-the-rabbit-hole lunacy of modern (read: conservative, Republican) politics?
But to be dismayed that American thinking has suddenly gone off the rails is to not understand fully what has happened. You could say that America has always been a land of make-believe, where you can believe any crazy thing you want, and where the ‘dream’ is embedded in our consciousness. It’s been a feature of conservative thinking for some time now that everything was perfect in some sepia-toned 1950s. It’s what got Ronald Reagan elected in 1980 and here we are.
American dreaming
Journalist and author Kurt Andersen had already been writing about this phenomenon. Just as Trump was taking office in 2017, he published Fantasyland – How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (Random House). His conclusion was that American culture is uniquely vulnerable to being conned.
When you think about it, America has been defined by unrealistic schemes and dreams since the beginning. The Puritans believed they could establish a kingdom of God on Earth. The English colonists of North America were after gold, just like the Spanish to the south. The early colonization of both Virginia and New England was driven by the rumour of gold somewhere in them thar hills. And they never stopped coming, despite the repeated failures. Richard Hakluyt and Walter Ralegh were the first American hucksters, tirelessly promoting the riches that just had to be there.
Perhaps it’s no accident that Europe’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas coincided with the end of the Medieval Age and the beginnings of the Renaissance, i.e., modernity and individualism. The Renaissance opened the European mind to the very notion of possibilities, that something could be pursued for its own ends, and one person could believe a thing and act on it. Man could make his own reality.
The Renaissance (and then the Enlightenment) dismantled the medieval notion that all individuals were just cogs in God’s giant system, which was unknowable (except to a select, self-appointed few). And the sudden appearance of this new world was fortuitous. So, if people wanted to believe that this new world was a land of riches, if only they could be found, what was to stop them?
Faith and individualism
The Puritans, who set the tone, were an extreme subsect of an extreme subsect of an extreme religion born in rebellion against the establishment. In Andersen’s view, they were unabashedly nuts. The Salem witch trials were the first political theatre. Anne Hutchinson wasn’t just nuts she was absolutely certain in her accusations of Satan’s nefarious doings.
Today’s most fervent evangelicals are hardly less certain that God speaks to them directly. I wonder, has He explained to any of them why he sends hurricanes to kill and injure the innocent? So He can punish America because he hates gay people?
The creed of American individualism really starts with the religious exhibitionism of Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and other charismatics who testified to their inherent faith and promoted the notion that whatever revelation, hallucination, dream, divine intervention, or what-have-you that incurred your absolute faith was by all rights the Truth because you believed it. This is why today we still have the American individualist credo: Whatever I believe, no matter what it is or how I arrived at it, is the truth because I believe it, and nobody can tell me otherwise.
Surprisingly, in the middle of the Age of Reason, the Great Awakening sprang up. George Whitefield was a celebrity of his time, able to draw crowds of tens of thousands and incite them to frenzies of religious ecstasy, the same way Billy Sunday was able to do in the 20th century, and evangelical pastors of megachurches do today.
Conspiracy theorists
America was also founded on conspiracy theories. Protestantism itself is a conspiracy theory about the nefarious power and influence of the Catholic establishment. Puritanism is a conspiracy theory against other Protestant establishments. The Declaration of Independence is a list of grievances against the supposed intention of the King to enslave Americans. After the American Revolution, fears of European subterfuge led to the enactment of the Alien Acts, which empowered the president to imprison or deport any suspected foreign agents. Sound familiar?
The American Civil War was a grand clash of conspiracy theories on both sides, each side believing wholeheartedly that God was on theirs, which was reinforced by the ‘evident’ nefariousness of the other. The losing South was drunk on its own belief in its cultural superiority.
The 19th century also produced the American pastoral fantasy: the idea of a bucolic South or Midwest where all was peaceful, serene, and righteous. Think of the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The frontier became legend itself. It gave rise to the fantasy that exists to this day – that you can have your bucolic, spiritual existence in nature, as long as it’s not too uncomfortable or inconvenient.
Fantasists and hucksters
The concept of “fake news” is nothing new, nor is the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality. In 1835, the public ate up a completely made-up series of newspaper stories about the discovery of life on the moon. In the 19th century, P. T. Barnum and William H. “Buffalo Bill” Cody perfected the art of humbug. Barnum’s museum and exhibitions blithely mixed the fake and the dubious with the real and factual. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows were a kind of 19th century reality show, celebrating the ‘Indian’ wars and settling of the West with real Native Americans (including Sitting Bull) in a dumbed-down fantasy version – even as the real thing was still going on.
The 19th century was also the heyday of the traveling medicine show and the huckster peddling bogus medical remedies in the form of “snake oil”. The vastness of America’s middle west contributed to the spread and success of this kind of dubious endeavour.
The plains were isolating, and the settlers generally uninformed and undereducated. Disease, illness, and agricultural injuries were common. The idea of a “miracle” cure, easily obtained, was a powerful notion. The Sears catalogues of this era contained a whole section of patent medicines, one of which claimed to cure “anything you have”.
It’s no coincidence that Barnum and Cody came along at the time when entertainment was being industrialized: mass-market newspapers and magazines, vaudeville, and medicine shows. Barnum made his career by realizing “the perfect good nature with which the American public submits to a clever humbug”. If some imaginary prospect is exciting and nobody can prove it’s not true, then it’s my right as an American to believe it is true. This prefigures nicely the up-is-down mentality of the MAGA mindset.
Nostalgia for a golden past was already a thing in the American cultural mind; the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair cemented it with clichéd, sometimes cheesy, historical exhibits.
The rise of Christian fundamentalism was a reaction to increasing scientific progress and rationalism. We can still see the rural-versus-urban dichotomy at work. The Scopes “Monkey Trial” (a staged 1925 trial centred on the teaching of evolution in schools) was tailor-made for the modern entertainment age. The commotion raised by the trial – supernaturalism versus rationality – was entirely American in nature; European countries experienced nothing like it, according to Andersen.
Show business
In the 20th century, Americans were even more ready for the age of show business as industrialized fantasy: movies, radio, and advertising. These new media created the concept of celebrity as we know it today.
As big a star of the 19th century as Edwin Booth was, he could never have reached that many people and been perceived as a popular god. Suburbia (apparently a coinage derived from the words suburb and utopia) was promoted in the media and perceived by the American public as a fantastical paradise compared to the cramped, dirty, and crime-ridden cities. Words like “fantastic”, “incredible”, and “unbelievable” used to have more negative connotations but have evolved in use to generally positive ones.
In the early ‘90s I wrote a magazine article about P. T. Barnum and his unique – and uniquely American – talent for bamboozling the public. I interviewed a historian who had written a biography of Barnum, and I asked him who he thought today might be as close to a huckster/showman as Barnum was. We both agreed it could be Donald Trump – and this was before he found his second calling in reality TV on The Apprentice and more than 20 years before he rode down the infamous gold escalator.
But it’s not just the times that gave rise to Trump. Andersen spoke recently on a podcast and drew from his thesis in Fantasyland. It’s a foundational American belief, he said, that “I can believe what I want because to me it’s the truth and it feels right”.
He could have added, “and you can’t tell me it isn’t”.
Comments? We want to hear them. Please write to editor@westenglandbylines.co.uk
