I understand @RadioFreeTom’s Cult of Inferiority theory. I’m not sure I agree with it. First, we should look harder at the outsized role played by fantasy in modern American life and culture. https://twitter.com/radiofreetom/status/1287131711059501057

Fantasy — beliefs based on plainly false or wildly unrealistic premises — is nothing new in human affairs. In post-9/11 America it seems to have assumed a larger place in our thinking than it once did. Donald Trump, of course, has been about fantasy throughout his career.

The character he played on a reality television show was, explicitly, a fantasy. In other words, before getting into politics Trump portrayed something very different from what he was, and his audience accepted it as real.

Then Trump got into politics — his rank, stinking, putrid ignorance about everything on full display — and found an audience receptive to the fantasy that the fantasy character he had played on TV could be a real President. A compound fantasy, if you will.

Trump has held on to his audience by conjuring more fantasies, some more successful than others. Trump portrayed a growing economy inherited from Obama as his achievement, even as he spent his days watching TV and picking pointless fights. Undocumented immigrants.....

....threatened America’s national security; a President elected with Russian help was an “America First” nationalist; wiping out environmental regulations would produce tens of thousands of jobs; a lethal pandemic would just go away. All of them, & more, demonstrable fantasies.

Why would anyone believe them? The question assumes that belief in fantasies — let alone compound fantasies — is unproductive and undesirable. We can enjoy Marvel movies, but don’t build our lives around the idea that Thor & The Hulk are real.

Yet fantasies do offer people a way to evade thinking about and adapting to realities they find unpleasant: a changing neighborhood, a changing climate, dying industries, declining religions, wars that cannot be won. Or simply growing older.

What I’m suggesting is that fantasy may be the point of Trump for millions of Americans. It is both easier and more important, from their point of view, to believe in the heroic qualities of a transparently unheroic man than to grapple with grim reality.

The role of fantasy in our politics, regrettably, extends well beyond Trump. It’s probably worth study in depth, but for now let me offer a kind of Occam’s Razor theory.

Americans have seen and felt historically tremendous setbacks in the last 20 years. From the World Trade Center to Iraq; an economy stable but (for most people) stagnant in the century’s first decade followed by a crushing recession; a shocking failure of governance....

....in the face of a lethal pandemic and a climate changing while our government watches passively — none of these realities are easy or pleasant to face. Among the options as to how to respond has been escape into the fantasy of Trump.

This option isn’t right or worthy. It reflects discreditably on everyone who has chosen it. But that millions have done so would be illogical to deny. So too the fact that our political system has enabled them.

At other times in other countries, pulling away from an embrace of fantasy has been a long, painful, and sometimes bloody process. We should be realistic about the dangers we may face; they may be considerable.

But a retreat into fantasy is a path to national disaster. It must be explicitly and decisively repudiated, soon, if this much greater danger is to be averted. [end]

Addendum: Fantasy. It is easy to laugh about this, depicting a man who does not pray and could not identify half the historical figures shown here. But this man is responsible for staggering human suffering, & millions support him & his party anyway. https://twitter.com/mcnaughtonart/status/1286327028807905282?s=21 https://twitter.com/mcnaughtonart/status/1286327028807905282