“How America Lost Its Mind,” by Kurt Andersen

Do a rhetorical analysis on ” How American lose its mind” by Kurt Andersen. 1000 words

Today, two-thirds of Americans believe that angels and demons exist; a third believe that climate change is a hoax; almost a quarter believe that vaccines cause autism; only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. According to Kurt Andersen, the election of Donald Trump revealed that a critical mass of Americans has become untethered from reality—a drift that traces its origin to the 1960s, “the big-bang moment for truthiness.” As Andersen sees it, a number of factors have led Americans—both on the elite left and the populist right—to give ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation. How did we get to be like this? Andersen argues that this great unbalancing was the product of two momentous changes: a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s, when anything and everything became believable, and today’s information era, which empowers real-seeming fantasies of the ideological, religious, and scientific kinds. People see our shocking Trump moment—an era of post-truth and “alternative facts”—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. Writes Andersen: “Trump doesn’t like experts, because they interfere with his right as an American to believe or pretend that fictions are facts.”