How America Went Haywire

Whether you are on the left or the right, I think it's fair to say that you can go through your entire day, week, month and maybe even your entire life, without having to really deal with anyone whose political and social views differ very much from your own.

We have become sliced and diced and siloed. Where once we may have strongly disagreed about solutions, we still got our news and facts form similar newspapers and networks.

Today, all that has changed. Every tribe seems to have it’s own sources and its own facts, and as the divide grows deeper and we go ever deeper down the rabbit hole, there may be no exit.

But even if the America we have known is terminal, it's still worth looking at how we got here and whether the fault lies with media, technology, progressive, conservatives,, television, talk radio or politicians, The fear of course is that, in the end, we may find that, as Ed Morrow once reminded us, “that Cassius was right, the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

To better understand those choices, it is important that we read the new work from Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.

My conversation with Kurt Andersen:

True Belivers

It’s hard to believe sometimes that forty-plus years after “the sixties,” after Vietnam, civil rights, feminism, and sex drugs and rock and roll, we are still litigating the issues raised in that period. Clearly it is one of the seminal inflection points in American history. But why? What really happened; what really changed in that period, that tilted the earth's axis?

There’s an old saying that says "if you remember the sixties, you weren't really there." Maybe that's why we still haven't figured it out. Long time journalist and novelist Kurt Andersen takes his shot, as he uses it as the backdrop for his new novel True Believers.

My conversation with Kurt Andersen:

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