Americans have always been magical thinkers and passionate believers in the untrue.
We were started by the Puritans in New England who wanted to create and did create a Christian
utopia and theocracy as they waited for the eminent second coming of Christ and the end
of days.
And in the south by a bunch of people who were convinced, absolutely convinced that
this place they’d never been was full of gold just to be plucked from the dirt in Virginia
and they stayed there looking and hoping for gold for 20 years before they finally faced
the facts and the evidence and decided that they weren’t going to get rich overnight
there.
So that was the beginning.
And then we’ve had centuries of buyer-beware charlatanism to an extreme degree and medical
quackery to an extreme degree and increasingly exotic extravagant implausible religions over
and over again from Mormonism to Christian Science to Scientology in the last century.
And we’ve had this antiestablishment "I’m not going to trust the experts, I’m not
going to trust the elite" from our character from the beginning.
Now all those things came together and were super-charged in the 1960s when you were entitled
to your own truth and your own reality.
Then a generation later when the Internet came along, giving each of those realities,
no matter how false or magical or nutty they are, their own kind of media infrastructure.
We had entertainment, again for the last couple hundred years, but especially in the last
50 years permeating all the rest of life, including Presidential politics from John
F. Kennedy through Ronald Ragan to Bill Clinton.
So the thing was set up for Donald Trump to exploit all these various American threads
and astonishingly become president, but then you look at this history and it’s like no
we should have seen this coming.
The idea of America from the beginning was that you could come here, reinvent yourself,
be anybody you want, live any way you wanted, believe any thing you wanted.
For the first few hundred years, like everywhere else in the world, celebrity and fame were
a result of some kind of accomplishment or achievement, sometimes not a great accomplishment
or achievement, but you did something in the world to earn renown.
America really was the key place that invented the modern celebrity culture, which was, beginning
a century ago, more and more not necessarily about having won a war or led a people or
written a great book or painted a great painting, but about being famous, fame for its own sake.
We created that, we created Hollywood, we created the whole culture industry and that
then became what I call the fantasy industrial complex where, certainly in the last few decades
more than ever more than anybody thought possible before, fame itself, however you’ve got
it, was a primary goal for people.
And again, as so many of the things I talk about in Fantasyland, not uniquely to America
but more here than anywhere.
And then you get reality television, which was this unholy hybrid of the fictional and
the real for the last now generation where that blur between what’s real and what’s
not is pumped into our media stream willy-nilly.
There are now more reality shows on television than there were shows on television 20 years
ago.
And that’s another way for nobodies to become famous overnight.
YouTube, another way for nobodies to become a famous overnight for doing almost nothing
or nothing.
So... again back to Donald Trump, he had the advantage, unlike any normal politician, any
person or normal businessperson for that matter who might presume to run for president he
was a celebrity, he was a show business celebrity.
He was a member of the WWE Hall of Fame after all and then also had this primetime show
The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice of which he was the star playing himself for
15 years.
So he was pre-marketed in a way that in the past would have been disqualifying for a president.
Yes we elected a former actor Governor of California and President of the United States,
but not all at once and only 20 years essentially in Ronald Ragan’s case after he gave up
his Hollywood career.
This is a different thing, this is I will go directly from this playing myself on a
reality television program to being president and it worked proving the sheer power of any
kind of celebrity.
And again, yeah he was celebrated for having made a lot of money, but he made a lot of
money in all kinds of dubious ways rather than normal forms of business achievement,
but he’s famous.
He’s a star.
He was a star and that’s why he won the nomination and that’s why he became president.
Like all humans, Americans suffer from what’s called confirmation bias, which is I believe
this; I will look for facts for pseudo-facts or fictions that confirm my pre-existing beliefs.
Americans, long before psychologists invented that phrase confirmation bias, had that tenancy,
again, at the very beginning.
"I’ve never been to the New World.
Nobody I know has been to the New World.
I never really read any first and accounts of the New World, but I’m going to give
up my life and go there because it’s going to be awesome and perfect and I’m going
to get rich overnight and/or create a Christian Utopia."
So we began that way and that has kept up "I just want to believe what I want to believe
and don’t let your lying eyes tell you anything different."
And again, that was always there in the American DNA but kept in check by the needs of survival,
by reality checks of various kinds.
In this softer age where most people aren’t going to probably die tomorrow as a result
of believing fantasies and untruths we became freer to believe them.
So believing whatever nutty thing you want to believe or pretending you are whatever
you are or having even kooky conspiracy theories or speaking in tongues, whatever it is fine
if it’s private.
The problem is when that, as it has in the last couple of decades especially, leeched
into the public sphere and the policies sphere and like "there’s no global warming.
We don’t have to worry about the seas rising."
Or "nah scientists say that vaccines are safe but I think they cause autism so I’m not
going to vaccinate my children" and so on and so on that’s when the rubber hits the
road, will hit the road, and people will start saying wait a minute.
Not until then, not until there’s a consequence and not until there is a price to pay and
not until the Donald Trump-ian fantasies, for instance, the more short-term ones of
oh I’m going to make every dream come true that you’ve ever had for your country, actually
one of his promises during the campaign.
Or I’m going to create a healthcare system that is better and cheaper and will cover
everyone.
Well, that’s probably not going to happen and so once these fantasies are taken into
the public sphere and the political sphere and really in the short-term turn out to be
fantasies and falsehoods that will persuade some people, but not everybody.
According to a recent survey 98 percent of the voters who voted for Donald Trump in the
primaries, which is to say his real base, 98 percent of them in late 2017 still absolutely
supported him.
So I don’t think that’s going to fall a lot.
Those are true believers.
Back in the 1800s - back in before the 20th century, especially in the 1800s, American
journalism was a very, very factionalized partisan thing.
Political parties had their own newspapers and their own magazines and everyone gave
its version of political spin and interpretation.
20th century, for a variety of reasons not just because we got smarter or more rational,
maybe somewhat that, there began being more of a shared set of facts in our media.
People disagree violently left, right, center, whatever, but the facts were agreed upon.
What has been enabled in the last 30 years, first through deregulated talk radio where
you didn't have to be fair and balanced anymore then national cable television, FOX News comes
to mind, and then, of course, the Internet as well where these more and more not just
politically different points of view but these alternate factual realities could be portrayed
and depicted.
We’ve been in that state now for 20 years or more so, again, we were softened up as
a people to believe what we want to believe but then we have this new infrastructure that
I think is new that I think is a new condition.
So there’s a history of oh I believe this or I believe this or slavery is good, no slavery
is bad, those are disagreements.
But in 1860 Southerners didn’t say "oh no there are no slaves.
No there’s no slavery."
That’s the condition we have now.
That is the Kellyanne Conway/Donald Trump situation and Republican Party situation before
Donald Trump ever came along where we say no there’s no climate change or oh this
factual truth is not true.
That’s the new thing and this new media infrastructure is a new condition.
Now, it may not be the end of things as a result, but we don’t know yet.
We’re only 20 years into it and maybe we’ll learn new protocols of what to believe and
what not, we’ll grow up and be able to accommodate ourselves to this new media situation, but
I’m worried that we won’t and I’m worried that a significant fraction of us, for now
mostly on the right but there’s no reason it should be limited to the right, will be
in their bubble and their silo and with their own reality and not be able to be retrieved
into the reality-based world.