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I'm Megna Chakrabardi, and this is the Jackpot, where on-point news analyst, Jack Beattie, helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in now.

Hello there, Jack.

Hello, Magna. Episode 56. What's the headline?

Fed on fantasies. That has a poetic ring to it, Jack. Am I right about that?

Indeed. It's taken from a W.B. Yates poem included in his meditations in time of civil war. And the line is,

we had fed the heart on fantasies, the hearts grown brutal from the fair. That line could be the epigraph to the Trump era as the, you know, the canonical Yatesian lyrics,

the center cannot hold, the best lack all conviction, etc.

became for the 1960s, thanks partly to Joan Didion's essay collection of 1968, slouching toward Bethlehem, but fed on fantasies and

brutal from the fair. That expresses something very true of our political era. And I was put in

mind of that quotation, reading a review in the New York Review of books, of books

about Weimar Germany and the rise of Hitler. And in one of them, the author makes a point

about fantasy, the grip of fantasy, on German hearts. He says Germans were partly because of the unique circumstances of that time,

defeat in a war, massive inflation, you know, disorder in the streets,

fighting between right and left and so on, that they, many of them simply

rejected reality.

They rejected reality.

And they backed Hitler, quote, because he gave voice to their flight from reality.

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