Fantasyland – How America Went Haywire by Kurt Andersen

This book explores the migration to, the settlement of, and the maturing of our liberal American Democracy. Essentially the author makes the case that the original migrants who came to the American continent were mostly religious and social misfits in European society, trouble makers, or people hoping to find gold in the new world, get rich quickly, and go home.

Vintage sexual tensions and nylon stockings. He argues that once these early migrants arrived they quickly discovered that there wasn’t any gold and they could not get along with each other, especially as it related to religious doctrine. Various groups splintered from the original Puritan religious dogma, spread out in the country, and started their own communities with their own interpretation of truth and reality.

The author follows that “reality” thread through the 500 years that Europeans have inhabited America. He claims that the American sense of reality is fundamentally different from and much more radical than any European country. It is an interesting read.