Airline Fantasyland

In my forthcoming book, I look closely at America’s modern invention of and unequalled immersion in show business, from the make-believe concoctions of P.T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill to those of Walt Disney and the WWE character/reality show star/insult comic now in the Oval Office.I don’t blame The Emoji Movie, and its success since opening last week, on President Trump. But both are quintessentially 21st-century entertainment phenomena, both are jaw-dropping symptoms of American decline—and they share a fundamental marketing strategy.The Emoji Movie was about as negatively reviewed by professional critics as a movie can be. Its percentage of positive notices, according to the review aggregator, is 7 percent. The other big bad movies this summer, such as Baywatch and Transformers: The Last Knight, completely tanked, some people think, because Rotten Tomatoes now enables everyone to know an extremely negative consensus with precision before movies open.So why did The Emoji Movie have a successful opening weekend, unlike those bombs? As explained on Wednesday, it’s in part because Sony forbade reviews from being published until hours before the movie opened.

Sony’s president of marketing was proud of the trick he pulled off, winning with a product the elite despised: “What other wide release with a Rotten Tomatoes score under 8 percent has opened north of $20 million? I don’t think there is one.”Does that not sound a lot like Trump or a spokesperson of his gloating about how the mainstream haters thought he could never win the nomination or the presidency? And was the studio’s press strategy not akin to the Trump administration’s move of excluding cameras from press briefings?Rotten Tomatoes also measures audience reaction.

Jan 29, 2019 Since then, the price for Fantasyland’s Early Morning Magic has changed (upward, of course), but the number of rides included was also expanded. Once or twice a week (at least from now until March), Disney is offering early risers the opportunity to spend extra time in Magic Kingdom’s Fantasyland before the park’s normal 9am opening time. Fantasyland at Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World Resort has 10 main attractions. The area went through a large expansion and renovation between 2010 and 2014. Conceptual artwork for the expansion shows several new additions and changes. Included is a new dark ride themed to Disney's 1989 film The Little Mermaid (also located at Disney California Adventure), and an area themed to.

Only 7 percent of critics liked The Emoji Movie, but it has an “audience score” of 44 percent—strikingly similar to Trump’s approval ratings among the professionals and civilians, respectively. We'll find out if The Emoji Movie develops a sufficiently devoted fan base to make its sequels profitable. Trump, like a show-business impresario, is playing exclusively to his most devoted fans, ignoring the haters and everyone else, hoping that he can somehow stay afloat with only a passionate plurality of supporters. We’ll see if that works, too. In about the Republicans' failure to make good on their central mantra, repealing and replacing Obamacare, The Washington Post’s chief correspondent Dan Balz made exactly the right point: 'For seven years, Republicans have lived what turned out to be a fiction.'

But I'd like to take the opportunity to note that Republican ideology has been riddled with far more extravagant fictions for a while now. The denial of evolutionary biology and climate science, the belief in an imminent takeover of the American legal system by sharia and of everything else by the UN, the idea that anti-white prejudice is America's most serious racial problem—these and other pieces of make-believe have been peddled to Republican voters by conservative media and politicians since the turn of the century. Not long after Daniel Patrick Moynihan first said that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts, a lot of Republicans were disagreeing, and turning the GOP into a Fantasy Party.Donald Trump didn't make that happen—he just took advantage of the transformation of the GOP (and of presidential politics into show business) to become fantasist-in-chief.

Trump lies shamelessly and compulsively, and because politicians in general fib and dissemble, his supporters excuse that. But a key difference with Trump is that he doesn't merely lie: He's also a fantasist, a credulous believer in fictions. I think he really believed that Barack Obama was born outside the U.S.,“who really knocked down the World Trade Center,” that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton.His belief in the self-servingly and excitingly preposterous seems to be kind of a method acting trick as well, given that he always has been a performer, playing a character named Donald Trump—not just for 15 years on reality television, but in the news media and in life before and since then.

So when he was on the campaign trail a year ago that his new health-care system would be “something terrific,' “something great,” “insurance for everybody,” “Immediately! Quick!”—he probably could have passed a lie-detector test. The big hard-news takeaways of President Trump's this week were his trashing of his attorney general for being insufficiently corrupt, and the threats he made in the direction of the special counsel investigating him and his circle.But I'm more interested in examining his mental tics, parsing how he thinks out loud, lying and fantasizing. In September I'm publishing —which concludes with an explanation of how Trump is the ultimate embodiment of several deep strains in America’s national character. So my reading of his conversation with the Times reporters focuses on his specifically Fantasyland traits—the insistence on blamelessness and imaginary conspiracies, the insecurity and braggadocio and narcissism, the ignorance and incoherence, how he's bedazzled by spectacle and show.The core of his elaborate excuse for failing to pass health-care legislation, for instance, was that it had been impossible for the Clintons a quarter-century ago and hard for Obama in 2010. 'Hillary Clinton was in there eight years and they never got Hillarycare, whatever they called it at the time.

I am not in here six months, and they’ll say, 'Trump hasn’t fulfilled his agenda.' ' In fact, the Clinton administration gave up on health care after a year and a half. 'I say to myself, wait a minute, I’m only here a very short period of time compared to Obama.

How long did it take to get Obamacare?' Fourteen months, he was informed. 'So he was there for more than a year.'

Embedded in the health-care apologia was a perfectly incoherent Trumpian digression: 'Obama worked so hard,' he said. 'I mean, ended up giving away the state of Nebraska. They owned the state of Nebraska.

Gave it away. Their best senator did one of the greatest deals in the history of politics. What happened to him?' Apparently somebody informed the president that in 2009, Nebraska's Democratic Senator Ben Nelson made a pork-barrel deal to vote yes on an Obamacare procedural vote. But Trump's retelling of the story is both entirely incoherent and wrong: In no sense have Democrats 'owned' Nebraska, Nelson's deal was rescinded, and he had scant influence or seniority and decided left the Senate three years later.Again and again in the conversation Trump defaulted to conspiracy theories. When he was asked about Donald Trump Jr.' S email exchange setting up the June 2016 meeting with the four or five well-connected Russians, Trump replied with a tale that Fox News had sluiced into the right-wing media stream just the day before.

'Well, Hillary did the reset. Somebody was saying today, and then I read, where Hillary Clinton was dying to get back with Russia. Her husband made a speech, got half a million bucks while she was secretary of state. She did the uranium deal, which is a horrible thing, while she was secretary of state, and got a lot of money. She was opposing sanctions. She was totally opposed to any sanctions for Russia I just saw it. I just saw it.

She was opposed to sanctions, strongly opposed to sanctions on Russia.' After the takeover of Crimea in 2014, Clinton supported and the Obama administration enacted sanctions on Russia. 'This is post-Crimea?' One of the reporters asked. In reply, Trump simply babbled.'

I don’t really know. But in that time. And don’t forget, Crimea was given away during Obama. Not during Trump. In fact, I was on one of the shows, I said they’re exactly right, they didn’t have it as it exactly. But he was—this—Crimea was gone during the Obama administration.' When one of the interviewers returned to Trump Jr.’s email exchange about Russian election help, the president alluded to a different conspiracy theory.'

Well, I thought originally it might have had to do something with the payment by Russia of the D.N.C. Somewhere I heard that.

Like, it was an illegal act done by the D.N.C., or the Democrats. That’s what I had heard. Now, I don’t know where I heard it, but I had heard that it had to do something with illegal acts with respect to the D.N.C. Now, you know, when you look at the kind of stuff that came out, that was, that was some pretty horrific things came out of that.

But that’s what I had heard. But I don’t know what it means.' And right after that, when he brought up the intelligence 'dossier' about Trump and Russia, the president introduced yet another paranoid theory, this time about why the FBI director briefed him about the dossier before it became public. 'I think he shared it so that I would—because the other three people left, and he showed it to me in my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there.' 'Yeah, I think so.' Concerning James Comey he also illustrated how his astounding narcissism untethers him from the simplest empirical realities.' You know,' Trump said, out of the blue, 'when he wrote me the letter, he said, 'You have every right to fire me,' blah blah blah.

I said, that’s a very strange—you know, over the years, I’ve hired a lot of people, I’ve fired a lot of people. Nobody has ever written me a letter back that you have every right to fire me.' In fact, the letter, in which Comey wrote that he'd 'long believed that a President can fire an FBI Director for any reason,' was his exit memo to FBI colleagues.When the Times reporters softly corrected the president, he resisted—'I thought it was to me, right?' —and never fully accepted the reality: 'It might have been to his staff—It might have been. It was just a very strange letter to say that.

What was the purpose in repeating that? Do you understand what I mean? Why would somebody say, 'He has every right to fire me,' bah bah bah. Why wouldn’t you just say, “Hey, I’ve retired ” In other words: Why would he refer to some principle that cut against his self-interest? And why wouldn't he just lie?In Fantasyland I write about how America invented and dominated show business and mixed it into everything else, including presidential politics—even before we elected a president who was a WWE character and played himself for 15 years on reality TV. His minute-long reverie to the Times about this year's Bastille Day parade in Paris was telling in this regard.' It was one of the most beautiful parades I have ever seen the Bastille Day parade was—now that was a super-duper—O.K.

I mean, that was very much more than normal. They must have had 200 planes over our heads. Normally you have the planes and that’s it, like the Super Bowl parade. And everyone goes crazy, and that’s it.

That happened for—and you know what else that was nice? It was limited. You know, it was two hours, and the parade ended. It didn’t go a whole day. They didn’t go crazy. You don’t want to leave, but you have to.

Or you want to leave, really. These things are going on all day.

It was a two-hour parade. They had so many different zones. Maybe 100,000 different uniforms, different divisions, different bands The whole thing, it was an incredible thing. And you are looking at the Arc. So we are standing in the most beautiful buildings, and we are looking down the road, and like three miles in, and then you had the Arc. And then you have these soldiers Honestly, it was a beautiful thing.'

The U.S., he said, should have some comparably spectacular militarized patriotic parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. And, being Trump, the desperately insecure star of the show, he couldn't leave it there. 'I’ve always thought of that.'

One of the reporters asked.' I’ve always thought of that,' he insisted.

'I’ve thought of it long before.' Updated at 11:50 a.m. ET on April 15, 2020.W hat a difference a few months can make.In January, the United States watched as the new coronavirus and reached American shores. In February, hindered by an and an administration that had, while the pandemic spread within its borders. In March, as the virus launched several simultaneous assaults on a, America finally sputtered into action, frantically closing offices, schools, and public spaces in a bid to cut off chains of transmission. Now, in April, as viral fevers surge through American hospitals and cabin fever grows in American homes, the U.S. Has cemented itself as the new center of the pandemic—the country that should have been more prepared than any other, but that now has the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the world.

With new cinema releases in response to the spread of the coronavirus, I’ve used these weeks of self-quarantine to cast an eye backward over the, to, and to fill in. Now I’ve begun evaluating films that, for whatever reason, didn’t get a fair shake when they were released. Some were blasted by critics, and others simply made no impression at the box office; all of them are available to watch online, just waiting to become cult classics. The 30 films I’ve chosen as the most underrated are all from the past 25 years, and many belong to genres (rom-com, sci-fi, thriller) that are overlooked in serious critical circles. Some of my selections might seem obvious and others ludicrous, but all were made in the spirit of enjoyable debate and discovery. O n February 28, Donald Trump stood before a crowd of supporters in South Carolina and told them to pay no attention to the growing warnings of a coronavirus outbreak in America.

The press was “in hysteria mode,” the president. The Democrats were playing politics. This new virus was nothing compared with the seasonal flu—and anyone who said otherwise was just trying to hurt him. “This is their new hoax,” Trump proclaimed, squinting out from behind a podium adorned with the presidential seal.Six weeks later, the coronavirus has killed more than 25,000 Americans, the U.S. Economy has been crippled—and Trump is recasting himself as a pandemic prophet.

At Monday’s White House briefing, the president responded to questions about his handling of the crisis by dimming the lights and an Orwellian campaign-style video: “THE MEDIA MINIMIZED THE RISK FROM THE START,” the onscreen text read, “WHILE THE PRESIDENT TOOK DECISIVE ACTION.”. L ate last month, a photo circulated of crowding around Carbone, a Michelin-starred Greenwich Village restaurant, waiting to pick up $32 rigatoni and bring it to people who were safely ensconced in their apartment. A police officer, attempting to spread out the crowd, “I know you guys are just out here trying to make money.

I personally don’t give a shit!” The poor got socially close, it seems, so that the rich could socially distance.The past few weeks have exposed just how much a person’s risk of infection hinges on class. Though people of all incomes are at risk of being laid off, those who can work from home are at least less likely to get sick. The low-income workers who do still have jobs, meanwhile, are likely to be stuck in close quarters with other humans. For example, face some of the greatest exposure to the coronavirus, aside from health-care workers. “Essential” businesses—grocery stores, pharmacies—are about the only places Americans are still permitted to go, and their cashiers stand less than an arm’s length from hundreds of people a day.

Fourteen years ago this July, I crowded into a gymnasium in Roanoke along with hundreds of other newly minted J.D.s, waiting to take the exam that would determine whether we would be allowed to practice law in the Commonwealth of Virginia. But in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it looks certain that this year’s crop of law-school graduates will be skipping this rite of passage, at least temporarily.Though the bar exam is traditionally administered in July, the National Conference of Bar Examiners has already alternative dates for the fall. Meanwhile, a growing number of state bars have declared that they will permit new grads to practice law under the supervision of a licensed attorney until the bar exam can be offered again. Other states are considering waiving the exam requirement entirely for people who complete a term of supervised practice. President Donald Trump announced yesterday evening that he will funding for the World Health Organization, on the grounds that it helped China cover up the origin and extent of its coronavirus outbreak. The United States pays for the largest fraction (in recent years, about ) of the WHO’s budget.

The WHO, in turn, funds the COVID-19 responses of dozens of countries around the planet, some of which are extremely to the disease.At about this point in the analysis, the expected move might be to explain why hobbling the WHO is unwise—how doing so will make us all less healthy and less safe; how it will be as a moment when the U.S. Chose to hasten its decline as a superpower; how funding the WHO gives the U.S. Power over the group, and China will step in to seize the control the U.S. T hree months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces.

It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed. Soon, most everyone in the United States will know someone who has been infected. Like World War II or the 9/11 attacks, this pandemic has already imprinted itself upon the nation’s psyche.To hear more feature stories,A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the.

In 2018, arguing that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come. In October, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security if a new coronavirus swept the globe. And then one did. Hypotheticals became reality. “What if?” became “Now what?”. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up.Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going?

By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War.

By Easter, it may have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam.

Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead. Hello, lost generation.The Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, and stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, they never gained the financial security that their parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed. They are now entering their peak earning years in the midst of an economic cataclysm more severe than the Great Recession, near guaranteeing that they will be the first generation in modern American history to end up poorer than their parents.It is too soon to know how the unfurling business-failure and unemployment crisis caused by this novel public-health crisis is hitting different age groups, or how much income and wealth each generation is losing; it is far too soon to know how different groups will rebound. But we do know that Millennials are vulnerable.

They have smaller savings accounts than prior generations. They have less money invested. They own fewer houses to refinance or rent out or sell. They make less money, and are less likely to have benefits like paid sick leave. They have more than half a trillion dollars of student-loan debt to keep paying off, as well as hefty rent and child-care payments that keep coming due. Back in January, when the pandemic now consuming the world was still gathering force, a Berkeley research scientist named Xiao Qiang was monitoring China’s official statements about a new coronavirus then spreading through Wuhan and noticed something disturbing.

Statements made by the World Health Organization, the international body that advises the world on handling health crises, often echoed China’s messages. Updated at 11:50 a.m. ET on April 15, 2020.W hat a difference a few months can make.In January, the United States watched as the new coronavirus and reached American shores. In February, hindered by an and an administration that had, while the pandemic spread within its borders. In March, as the virus launched several simultaneous assaults on a, America finally sputtered into action, frantically closing offices, schools, and public spaces in a bid to cut off chains of transmission. Now, in April, as viral fevers surge through American hospitals and cabin fever grows in American homes, the U.S. Has cemented itself as the new center of the pandemic—the country that should have been more prepared than any other, but that now has the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the world.

Some of my selections might seem obvious and others ludicrous, but all were made in the spirit of enjoyable debate and discovery. O n February 28, Donald Trump stood before a crowd of supporters in South Carolina and told them to pay no attention to the growing warnings of a coronavirus outbreak in America. The press was “in hysteria mode,” the president. The Democrats were playing politics.

This new virus was nothing compared with the seasonal flu—and anyone who said otherwise was just trying to hurt him. “This is their new hoax,” Trump proclaimed, squinting out from behind a podium adorned with the presidential seal.Six weeks later, the coronavirus has killed more than 25,000 Americans, the U.S.

Economy has been crippled—and Trump is recasting himself as a pandemic prophet. At Monday’s White House briefing, the president responded to questions about his handling of the crisis by dimming the lights and an Orwellian campaign-style video: “THE MEDIA MINIMIZED THE RISK FROM THE START,” the onscreen text read, “WHILE THE PRESIDENT TOOK DECISIVE ACTION.”. L ate last month, a photo circulated of crowding around Carbone, a Michelin-starred Greenwich Village restaurant, waiting to pick up $32 rigatoni and bring it to people who were safely ensconced in their apartment. A police officer, attempting to spread out the crowd, “I know you guys are just out here trying to make money.

But in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it looks certain that this year’s crop of law-school graduates will be skipping this rite of passage, at least temporarily.Though the bar exam is traditionally administered in July, the National Conference of Bar Examiners has already alternative dates for the fall. Meanwhile, a growing number of state bars have declared that they will permit new grads to practice law under the supervision of a licensed attorney until the bar exam can be offered again. Other states are considering waiving the exam requirement entirely for people who complete a term of supervised practice. President Donald Trump announced yesterday evening that he will funding for the World Health Organization, on the grounds that it helped China cover up the origin and extent of its coronavirus outbreak. The United States pays for the largest fraction (in recent years, about ) of the WHO’s budget.

Power over the group, and China will step in to seize the control the U.S. T hree months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed.

Soon, most everyone in the United States will know someone who has been infected. Like World War II or the 9/11 attacks, this pandemic has already imprinted itself upon the nation’s psyche.To hear more feature stories,A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the. In 2018, arguing that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come. In October, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security if a new coronavirus swept the globe. And then one did.

Hypotheticals became reality. “What if?” became “Now what?”. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up.Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going? By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War.

By Easter, it may have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead. Hello, lost generation.The Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, and stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, they never gained the financial security that their parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed. They are now entering their peak earning years in the midst of an economic cataclysm more severe than the Great Recession, near guaranteeing that they will be the first generation in modern American history to end up poorer than their parents.It is too soon to know how the unfurling business-failure and unemployment crisis caused by this novel public-health crisis is hitting different age groups, or how much income and wealth each generation is losing; it is far too soon to know how different groups will rebound.

But we do know that Millennials are vulnerable. They have smaller savings accounts than prior generations. They have less money invested. They own fewer houses to refinance or rent out or sell. They make less money, and are less likely to have benefits like paid sick leave. They have more than half a trillion dollars of student-loan debt to keep paying off, as well as hefty rent and child-care payments that keep coming due.

Back in January, when the pandemic now consuming the world was still gathering force, a Berkeley research scientist named Xiao Qiang was monitoring China’s official statements about a new coronavirus then spreading through Wuhan and noticed something disturbing. Statements made by the World Health Organization, the international body that advises the world on handling health crises, often echoed China’s messages.

“You are entitled to your own opinion,but you are not entitled to your own facts.”— Daniel Patrick Moynihan—“We risk being the first people in history to have beenable to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive,so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”— Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide toPseudo-Events in America (1961)W hen did America become untethered from reality?I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection:. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books.

They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true.

Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart Face it, folks, we are a divided nation divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.”.

Whoa, yes, I thought: exactly. America had changed since I was young, when truthiness and reality-based community wouldn’t have made any sense as jokes. For all the fun, and all the many salutary effects of the 1960s—the main decade of my childhood—I saw that those years had also been the big-bang moment for truthiness. And if the ’60s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it.From Our September 2017 IssueSubscribe to The Atlantic and support 160 years of independent journalismEach of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. Some of my best friends are very religious, and others believe in dubious conspiracy theories. What’s problematic is going overboard—letting the subjective entirely override the objective; thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings are just as true as facts.

The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies—every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, all of us free to reinvent ourselves by imagination and will.

In America nowadays, those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts. Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the past half century, we Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation—small and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us. And most of us haven’t realized how far-reaching our strange new normal has become. Much more than the other billion or so people in the developed world, we Americans believe— really believe—in the supernatural and the miraculous, in Satan on Earth, in reports of recent trips to and from heaven, and in a story of life’s instantaneous creation several thousand years ago.

When I say that a third believe X and a quarter believe Y, it’s important to understand that those are different thirds and quarters of the population. Of course, various fantasy constituencies overlap and feed one another—for instance, belief in extraterrestrial visitation and abduction can lead to belief in vast government cover-ups, which can lead to belief in still more wide-ranging plots and cabals, which can jibe with a belief in an impending Armageddon.Why are we like this?The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.Video: America’s Departure From Reality.

A senior physician at one of America’s most prestigious university hospitals promotes “miracle cures” on his daily TV show. Cable channels air documentaries treating mermaids, monsters, ghosts, and angels as real. When a political-science professor attacks the idea “that there is some ‘public’ that shares a notion of reality, a concept of reason, and a set of criteria by which claims to reason and rationality are judged,” colleagues just nod and grant tenure. The old fringes have been folded into the new center.

The irrational has become respectable and often unstoppable.Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense.

During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.A merican moxie has always come in two types. We have our wilder, faster, looser side: We’re overexcited gamblers with a weakness for stories too good to be true. But we also have the virtues embodied by the Puritans and their secular descendants: steadiness, hard work, frugality, sobriety, and common sense. A propensity to dream impossible dreams is like other powerful tendencies—okay when kept in check. For most of our history, the impulses existed in a rough balance, a dynamic equilibrium between fantasy and reality, mania and moderation, credulity and skepticism. The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.The second change was the onset of the new era of information.

Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them. 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 of the fantasies look real.

Our shocking Trump moment is just the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional for its entire history.Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrongheaded fellow Americans use it. Treating real life as fantasy and vice versa, and taking preposterous ideas seriously, is not unique to Americans.

But we are the global crucible and epicenter. We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people.

This is American exceptionalism in the 21st century. The country has always been a one-of-a-kind place.

But our singularity is different now. We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But our drift toward credulity, toward doing our own thing, toward denying facts and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality, has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less developed country.People see our shocking Trump moment—this post-truth, “alternative facts” moment—as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon. But what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional for its entire history.America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, and by hucksters and their suckers, which made America successful—but also by a people uniquely susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem’s hunting witches to Joseph Smith’s creating Mormonism, from P. Barnum to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Trump. In other words: Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age.

The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled. The 1960s and the Beginning of the End of ReasonI don’t regret or disapprove of many of the ways the ’60s permanently reordered American society and culture. It’s just that along with the familiar benefits, there have been unreckoned costs.In 1962, people started referring to “hippies,” the Beatles had their first hit, Ken Kesey published One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the Harvard psychology lecturer Timothy Leary was handing out psilocybin and LSD to grad students. And three hours south of San Francisco, on the heavenly stretch of coastal cliffs known as Big Sur, a pair of young Stanford psychology graduates founded a school and think tank they named after a small American Indian tribe that had lived on the grounds long before. “In 1968,” one of its founding figures recalled four decades later, Esalen was the center of the cyclone of the youth rebellion. It was one of the central places, like Mecca for the Islamic culture. Esalen was a pilgrimage center for hundreds and thousands of youth interested in some sense of transcendence, breakthrough consciousness, LSD, the sexual revolution, encounter, being sensitive, finding your body, yoga—all of these things were at first filtered into the culture through Esalen.

By 1966, ’67, and ’68, Esalen was making a world impact.This is not overstatement. Essentially everything that became known as New Age was invented, developed, or popularized at the Esalen Institute.

Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking (also: massage, hot baths, sex, and sex in hot baths). It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for “science” containing next to no science. The idea was to be radically tolerant of therapeutic approaches and understandings of reality, especially if they came from Asian traditions or from American Indian or other shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, whatever—the more exotic and wondrous and unfalsifiable, the better. Not long before Esalen was founded, one of its co-founders, Dick Price, had suffered a mental breakdown and been involuntarily committed to a private psychiatric hospital for a year. His new institute embraced the radical notion that psychosis and other mental illnesses were labels imposed by the straight world on eccentrics and visionaries, that they were primarily tools of coercion and control.

This was the big idea behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, of course. And within the psychiatric profession itself this idea had two influential proponents, who each published unorthodox manifestos at the beginning of the decade—R. Laing ( The Divided Self) and Thomas Szasz ( The Myth of Mental Illness).

“Madness,” Laing wrote when Esalen was new, “is potentially liberation and renewal.” Esalen’s founders were big Laing fans, and the institute became a hotbed for the idea that insanity was just an alternative way of perceiving reality.These influential critiques helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact.” This is now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone—from creationists to climate-change deniers to anti-vaccine hysterics—who prefers to disregard science in favor of his own beliefs.Y ou know how young people always think the universe revolves around them, as if they’re the only ones who really get it? And how before their frontal lobes, the neural seat of reason and rationality, are fully wired, they can be especially prone to fantasy? In the ’60s, the universe cooperated: It did seem to revolve around young people, affirming their adolescent self-regard, making their fantasies of importance feel real and their fantasies of instant transformation and revolution feel plausible. Practically overnight, America turned its full attention to the young and everything they believed and imagined and wished. If 1962 was when the decade really got going, 1969 was the year the new doctrines and their gravity were definitively cataloged by the grown-ups.

Reason and rationality were over. The countercultural effusions were freaking out the old guard, including religious people who couldn’t quite see that yet another Great Awakening was under way in America, heaving up a new religion of believers who “have no option but to follow the road until they reach the Holy City that lies beyond the technocracy the New Jerusalem.” That line is from The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, published three weeks after Woodstock, in the summer of 1969. Its author was Theodore Roszak, age 35, a Bay Area professor who thereby coined the word counterculture. Roszak spends 270 pages glorying in the younger generation’s “brave” rejection of expertise and “all that our culture values as ‘reason’ and ‘reality.’ ” (Note the scare quotes.) So-called experts, after all, are “on the payroll of the state and/or corporate structure.” A chapter called “The Myth of Objective Consciousness” argues that science is really just a state religion.

To create “a new culture in which the non-intellective capacities become the arbiters of the good and the true,” he writes, “nothing less is required than the subversion of the scientific world view, with its entrenched commitment to an egocentric and cerebral mode of consciousness.” He welcomes the “radical rejection of science and technological values.”. At 16, I bought and read one of the 2 million copies sold. Rereading it today and recalling how much I loved it was a stark reminder of the follies of youth. Reich was shamelessly, uncritically swooning for kids like me. The Greening of America may have been the mainstream’s single greatest act of pandering to the vanity and self-righteousness of the new youth. Its underlying theoretical scheme was simple and perfectly pitched to flatter young readers: There are three types of American “consciousness,” each of which “makes up an individual’s perception of reality his ‘head,’ his way of life.” Consciousness I people were old-fashioned, self-reliant individualists rendered obsolete by the new “Corporate State”—essentially, your grandparents. Consciousness IIs were the fearful and conformist organization men and women whose rationalism was a tyrannizing trap laid by the Corporate State—your parents.And then there was Consciousness III, which had “made its first appearance among the youth of America,” “spreading rapidly among wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people.” If you opposed the Vietnam War and dressed down and smoked pot, you were almost certainly a III.

Simply by being young and casual and undisciplined, you were ushering in a new utopia.Reich praises the “gaiety and humor” of the new Consciousness III wardrobe, but his book is absolutely humorless—because it’s a response to “this moment of utmost sterility, darkest night and most extreme peril.” Conspiracism was flourishing, and Reich bought in. Now that “the Corporate State has added depersonalization and repression” to its other injustices, “it has threatened to destroy all meaning and suck all joy from life.” Reich’s magical thinking mainly concerned how the revolution would turn out. “The American Corporate State,” having produced this new generation of longhaired hyperindividualists who insist on trusting their gut and finding their own truth, “is now accomplishing what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves. The machine has begun to destroy itself.” Once everyone wears Levi’s and gets high, the old ways “will simply be swept away in the flood.”. The inevitable/imminent happy-cataclysm part of the dream didn’t happen, of course. The machine did not destroy itself.

But Reich was half-right. An epochal change in American thinking was under way and “not, as far as anybody knows, reversible There is no returning to an earlier consciousness.” His wishful error was believing that once the tidal surge of new sensibility brought down the flood walls, the waters would flow in only one direction, carving out a peaceful, cooperative, groovy new continental utopia, hearts and minds changed like his, all of America Berkeleyized and Vermontified. Instead, Consciousness III was just one early iteration of the anything-goes, post-reason, post-factual America enabled by the tsunami. Reich’s faith was the converse of the Enlightenment rationalists’ hopeful fallacy 200 years earlier. Granted complete freedom of thought, Thomas Jefferson and company assumed, most people would follow the path of reason. Wasn’t it pretty to think so.

Kikuo JohnsonI remember when fantastical beliefs went fully mainstream, in the 1970s. My irreligious mother bought and read The Secret Life of Plants, a big best seller arguing that plants were sentient and would “be the bridesmaids at a marriage of physics and metaphysics.” The amazing truth about plants, the book claimed, had been suppressed by the FDA and agribusiness. My mom didn’t believe in the conspiracy, but she did start talking to her ficuses as if they were pets. In a review, The New York Times registered the book as another data point in how “the incredible is losing its pariah status.” Indeed, mainstream publishers and media organizations were falling over themselves to promote and sell fantasies as nonfiction. In 1975 came a sensational autobiography by the young spoon bender and mind reader Uri Geller as well as Life After Life, by Raymond Moody, a philosophy Ph.D. Who presented the anecdotes of several dozen people who’d nearly died as evidence of an afterlife. The book sold many millions of copies; before long the International Association for Near Death Studies formed and held its first conference, at Yale.

During the ’60s, large swaths of academia made a turn away from reason and rationalism as they’d been understood. Many of the pioneers were thoughtful, their work fine antidotes to postwar complacency. The problem was the nature and extent of their influence at that particular time, when all premises and paradigms seemed up for grabs. That is, they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy, whose arguments filtered out into the world at large: All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to serve people’s needs or interests. Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe.

The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent. The delusions of the insane, superstitions, and magical thinking?

Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false.These ideas percolated across multiple academic fields.

In 1965, the French philosopher Michel Foucault published Madness and Civilization in America, echoing Laing’s skepticism of the concept of mental illness; by the 1970s, he was arguing that rationality itself is a coercive “regime of truth”—oppression by other means. Foucault’s suspicion of reason became deeply and widely embedded in American academia. The American experiment has metastasized out of control. Being American now means we can believe anything we want.Meanwhile, over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself. To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science.

“If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”. When I first read that, at age 18, I loved the quotation marks. If reality is simply the result of rules written by the powers that be, then isn’t everyone able—no, isn’t everyone obliged—to construct their own reality? The book was timed perfectly to become a foundational text in academia and beyond.A more extreme academic evangelist for the idea of all truths being equal was a UC Berkeley philosophy professor named Paul Feyerabend. His best-known book, published in 1975, was Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. “Rationalism,” it declared, “is a secularized form of the belief in the power of the word of God,” and science a “particular superstition.” In a later edition of the book, published when creationists were passing laws to teach Genesis in public-school biology classes, Feyerabend came out in favor of the practice, comparing creationists to Galileo. Science, he insisted, is just another form of belief.

“Only one principle,” he wrote, “can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.”Over in anthropology, where the exotic magical beliefs of traditional cultures were a main subject, the new paradigm took over completely— don’t judge, don’t disbelieve, don’t point your professorial finger. This was understandable, given the times: colonialism ending, genocide of American Indians confessed, U.S. Wars in the developing world. Who were we to roll our eyes or deny what these people believed?

In the ’60s, anthropology decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected, but considered equivalent to reason and science. If all understandings of reality are socially constructed, those of Kalabari tribesmen in Nigeria are no more arbitrary or faith-based than those of college professors. In 1968, a UC Davis psychologist named Charles Tart conducted an experiment in which, he wrote, “a young woman who frequently had spontaneous out-of-body experiences”—didn’t “claim to have” them but “had” them—spent four nights sleeping in a lab, hooked up to an EEG machine. Her assigned task was to send her mind or soul out of her body while she was asleep and read a five-digit number Tart had written on a piece of paper placed on a shelf above the bed. He reported that she succeeded. Other scientists considered the experiments and the results bogus, but Tart proceeded to devote his academic career to proving that attempts at objectivity are a sham and magic is real. In an extraordinary paper published in 1972 in Science, he complained about the scientific establishment’s “almost total rejection of the knowledge gained” while high or tripping.

He didn’t just want science to take seriously “experiences of ecstasy, mystical union, other ‘dimensions,’ rapture, beauty, space-and-time transcendence.” He was explicitly dedicated to going there. A “perfectly scientific theory may be based on data that have no physical existence,” he insisted. The rules of the scientific method had to be revised. To work as a psychologist in the new era, Tart argued, a researcher should be in the altered state of consciousness he’s studying, high or delusional “at the time of data collection” or during “data reduction and theorizing.” Tart’s new mode of research, he admitted, posed problems of “consensual validation,” given that “only observers in the same altered state are able to communicate adequately with one another.” Tart popularized the term consensus reality for what you or I would simply call reality, and around 1970 that became a permanent interdisciplinary term of art in academia. Later he abandoned the pretense of neutrality and started calling it the consensus trance—people committed to reason and rationality were the deluded dupes, not he and his tribe.

Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certainty. Yet once the intellectual mainstream thoroughly accepted that there are many equally valid realities and truths, once the idea of gates and gatekeeping was discredited not just on campuses but throughout the culture, all American barbarians could have their claims taken seriously.

Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the right—gun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more. The term useful idiot was originally deployed to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further on the left.

In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals—post-positivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, post-empiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists—turned out to be useful idiots most consequentially for the American right. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert once said, in character, mocking the beliefs-trump-facts impulse of today’s right. Neither side has noticed, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been on the same team. Conspiracy and Paranoia in the 1970sAs the Vietnam War escalated and careened, antirationalism flowered. In his book about the remarkable protests in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1967, The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer describes chants (“Out demons, out—back to darkness, ye servants of Satan!”) and a circle of hundreds of protesters intending “to form a ring of exorcism sufficiently powerful to raise the Pentagon three hundred feet.” They were hoping the building would “turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled this levitation. At that point the war in Vietnam would end.”By the end of the ’60s, plenty of zealots on the left were engaged in extreme magical thinking. They hadn’t started the decade that way.

In 1962, Students for a Democratic Society adopted its founding document, drafted by 22-year-old Tom Hayden. The manifesto is sweet and reasonable: decrying inequality and poverty and “the pervasiveness of racism in American life,” seeing the potential benefits as well as the downsides of industrial automation, declaring the group “in basic opposition to the communist system.”Then, kaboom, the big bang. Anything and everything became believable. Reason was chucked. Dystopian and utopian fantasies seemed plausible.

In 1969, the SDS’s most apocalyptic and charismatic faction, calling itself Weatherman, split off and got all the attention. Its members believed that they and other young white Americans, aligned with black insurgents, would be the vanguard in a new civil war.

They issued statements about “the need for armed struggle as the only road to revolution” and how “dope is one of our weapons Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.” And then factions of the new left went to work making and setting off thousands of bombs in the early 1970s. Left-wingers weren’t the only ones who became unhinged. Officials at the FBI, the CIA, and military intelligence agencies, as well as in urban police departments, convinced themselves that peaceful antiwar protesters and campus lefties in general were dangerous militants, and expanded secret programs to spy on, infiltrate, and besmirch their organizations. Which thereby validated the preexisting paranoia on the new left and encouraged its wing nuts’ revolutionary delusions. Elaborate paranoia was an established tic of the Bircherite far right, but the left needed a little time to catch up.

In 1964, a left-wing American writer published the first book about a JFK conspiracy, claiming that a Texas oilman had been the mastermind, and soon many books were arguing that the official government inquiry had ignored the hidden conspiracies. One of them, Rush to Judgment, by Mark Lane, a lawyer on the left, was a New York Times best seller for six months. Then, in 1967, New Orleans’s district attorney, Jim Garrison, indicted a local businessman for being part of a conspiracy of gay right-wingers to assassinate Kennedy—“a Nazi operation, whose sponsors include some of the oil-rich millionaires in Texas,” according to Garrison, with the CIA, FBI, and Robert F.

Kennedy complicit in the cover-up. After NBC News broadcast an investigation discrediting the theory, Garrison said the TV segment was a piece of “thought control,” obviously commissioned by NBC’s parent company RCA, “one of the top 10 defense contractors” and thus “desperate because we are in the process of uncovering their hoax.”The notion of an immense and awful JFK-assassination conspiracy became conventional wisdom in America. As a result, more Americans than ever became reflexive conspiracy theorists. Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, a complicated global fantasy about the interconnections among militarists and Illuminati and stoners, and the validity of paranoid thinking, won the 1974 National Book Award.

Conspiracy became the high-end Hollywood dramatic premise— Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year period. Of course, real life made such stories plausible.

The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy. Within a few decades, the belief that a web of villainous elites was covertly seeking to impose a malevolent global regime made its way from the lunatic right to the mainstream. Delusional conspiracism wouldn’t spread quite as widely or as deeply on the left, but more and more people on both sides would come to believe that an extraordinarily powerful cabal—international organizations and think tanks and big businesses and politicians—secretly ran America.Yet because I’m an American, a fortunate American who has lived in a fortunate American century, I remain (barely) more of an optimist than a pessimist.

Even as we’ve entered this long winter of foolishness and darkness, when too many Americans are losing their grip on reason and reality, it has been an epoch of astonishing hope and light as well. During these same past few decades, Americans reduced the rates of murder and violent crime by more than half.

We decoded the human genome, elected an African American president, recorded the sound of two black holes colliding 1 billion years ago, and created Beloved, The Simpsons, Goodfellas, Angels in America, The Wire, The Colbert Report, Transparent, Hamilton. Since 1981, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty around the globe has plummeted from 44 percent to 10 percent. I do despair of our devolution into unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.What is to be done? I don’t have an actionable agenda, Seven Ways Sensible People Can Save America From the Craziness. But I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations.

We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal. A grassroots movement against one kind of cultural squishiness has taken off and lately reshaped our national politics—the opposition to political correctness.

I envision a comparable struggle that insists on distinguishing between the factually true and the blatantly false.It will require a struggle to make America reality-based again. Fight the good fight in your private life. You needn’t get into an argument with the stranger at Chipotle who claims that George Soros and Uber are plotting to make his muscle car illegal—but do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.We need to adopt new protocols for information-media hygiene. Would you feed your kids a half-eaten casserole a stranger handed you on the bus, or give them medicine you got from some lady at the gym?And fight the good fight in the public sphere.

One main task, of course, is to contain the worst tendencies of Trumpism, and cut off its political-economic fuel supply, so that fantasy and lies don’t turn it into something much worse than just nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudo-conservatism. Progress is not inevitable, but it’s not impossible, either.This article originally stated that among all American state legislators, there is only one avowed atheist. In fact, according to the Center for Freethought Equality, there are several. We regret the error.This article has been adapted from Kurt Andersen’s book, to be published in September by Random House.