Theo Logos's Reviews > Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

Fantasyland reads like a polemic. Polemics should be succinct. Fantasyland is not, and that is its primary problem.

Anderson’s thesis in Fantasyland is that America’s credulity for whacked out conspiracy theories, alternative realities, and lying hucksters peddling fantastical tales is nothing new. Rather, it was present from the beginning. America, he claims, was an idea originally marketed to the credulous of Europe, and has never ceased to be a land where magical thinking was the norm, and fantasy routinely accepted as reality.

Anderson actually makes a strong case for his thesis. He does this in part by not treating religious beliefs with the kid gloves usually accorded them by the polite. He calls out the fantastical, anti-rational beliefs of the Puritans and the First and Second Great Awakenings, then continues on through the development of eschatology, evangelicalism, Mormonism, and all the other isms, major and minor, that dot America’s historical landscape. Around this foundation he populates the patent medicines, mesmerism, phrenology, spiritualism, and other whack-a-doodle fads that have periodically gripped America.

But when Anderson reaches the second half of the 20th century he begins to lose control of his material. He paraphrases Eisenhower’s famous phrase and starts talking about the “Fantasy Industrial Complex.” He sees this as a creation of the “anything goes”’ethic of the 1960s — the paradigm shift he sees creating our present, mad moment. While I don’t wholly disagree with him, from this point on he becomes increasingly more slipshod in his reasoning. Rather than building a solid case for his thesis, he breaks down into ranting. He begins to sound more like a curmudgeonly uncle airing his grievances than a serious commentator.

Fantasyland lacks all scholarly rigor. Still, Anderson could have made this work as a polemic. Polemics don’t require the same balanced treatment as other works of scholarship. They don’t need to carefully examine all sides, and can get away with some ranting. What a successful polemic cannot do is drag on and on and on. If it bores you, it has failed. And in his zeal to include all of his indictments against America since the 1960s, Anderson violated this most basic rule.