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" Bill de Blasio was swept to the New York mayoralty on the promise of getting Gracie Mansion out from under the thumb of corporate elites. "
Rick Perlstein
New York
New
Out
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" Call it Camelot's revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long - because, after all, America was ruled by noble men. "
Rick Perlstein
America
Revenge
Conflict
" I love trade magazines - any trade's magazine: by entering into what is taken for granted in a world not your own, you better recognize the vastness of the social universe - for there are so, so many worlds that are not your own. "
Rick Perlstein
Love
You
World
" I don't read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov. "
Rick Perlstein
Research
Building
Storytelling
" Conservatives are time-biders. And they understand, as Corey Robin explains in his indispensable book 'The Reactionary Mind,' that the direction of human history is not on their side - that is why they are reactionaries - because, other things equal, civilization does tend towards more inclusion, more emancipation, more liberalism. "
Rick Perlstein
History
Direction
Mind
" Republican governors are more lunatic than they used to be - as attested by all the ones so eager to turn down free federal money to qualify more of their poor citizens for Medicaid under Obamacare. Meanwhile, some states have taken the money only to hoard it. "
Rick Perlstein
Down
Money
Poor
" Chicago's privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm's investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much. "
Rick Perlstein
Trend
Buddies
Chicago
" Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious? "
Rick Perlstein
Social
Without
Social Justice
" Look at liberty's greatest historic advances: ending slavery. Giving women the vote. Outlawing legal segregation. Each and every time, the people at the forefront of advancing those reforms - often putting their lives on the line - called themselves liberals. "
Rick Perlstein
Women
Ending
Time
" Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress. "
Rick Perlstein
Progress
Business
Architecture
" When you're a writer, you never know which of your pieces are going to gain a toehold and which will not, and it's best not to care too much. "
Rick Perlstein
You
Best
Too Much
" Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls - before the public even knows to call them 'issues' at all. "
Rick Perlstein
Genius
Horizon
Key
" In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears. "
Rick Perlstein
Childhood
Yourself
Adventure
" Black Fergusonians have shown that they will vote when they have something to vote for and know that their vote will count. Seventy-six percent of them turned out in November 2012, when Missouri was a key swing state for Barack Obama's reelection. "
Rick Perlstein
Vote
Black
Key
" Only liberals know how to make you freer on the job, which is where most of us suffer the gravest indignities in our lives. "
Rick Perlstein
Suffer
You
Know
" My liberal friends love to dismiss Reagan. You know, they'll say something like, 'Oh, didn't he, like, only read one-page memos when he was in the White House?' Well, that's just good managerial practice. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt made people write one-page memos. "
Rick Perlstein
Friends
Good
Love
" What is considered 'conservative' and what is considered 'liberal' changes in any given era. "
Rick Perlstein
Changes
Era
Conservative
" While Obama might not push college education exclusively, like most Democrats he does oversell it and does shortchange the alternatives. And millions of young Americans pay the price. "
Rick Perlstein
College Education
Education
College
" I'm just a Bolshevik with a laptop. "
Rick Perlstein
Bolshevik
Just
Laptop
" Ronald Reagan never did much to make abortion illegal. He did, however, deliver videotaped greetings, fulsome in praise for his hosts, to antiabortion rallies on the Mall. "
Rick Perlstein
Praise
Abortion
He
" No historical analogies are exactly precise. "
Rick Perlstein
Exactly
Historical
Precise
" Do people still read before bed? I play 'Words With Friends.' "
Rick Perlstein
Play
Friends
Bed
" The argument that John F. Kennedy was a closet peacenik, ready to give up on what the Vietnamese call the 'American War' upon re-election, received its most farcical treatment in Oliver Stone's 'JFK.' "
Rick Perlstein
Argument
War
Stone
" In Ronald Reagan's case, he always bore with him this extraordinary ability to radiate confidence, optimism, clarity, a blitheness of spirit, in what other people saw as chaos. And after the 1970s, that was catnip. "
Rick Perlstein
Chaos
People
Optimism
" There's a certain kind of cultural energy pursued by the gatekeepers of elite discourse, who want to argue that Americans fundamentally agree with each other, and that's the health of the nation. "
Rick Perlstein
Kind
Nation
Want
" We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. "
Rick Perlstein
Love
Political
Way
" Everyone on the Left has a favorite story that allows them to kind of excuse Reagan, explain away Reagan, say he was dumb, but unless we reckon with that kind of emotional intelligence and his ability to kind of speak to the aspirations of the American people, the less liberals are going to be able to understand the soul of his appeal. "
Rick Perlstein
American
Intelligence
People
" I can't summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tati's 'Play Time.' You just have to see it. "
Rick Perlstein
You
Play
See
" Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions. "
Rick Perlstein
Place
Predictions
Hell
" In the suburban Midwestern Reform Jewish world I was raised in, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, grown men built plastic scale models of Israeli tanks and F-15 jets and displayed them throughout the house, dangling the warplanes from bedroom ceilings with fishing line. "
Rick Perlstein
World
Men
House
" As an adult, I've always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my parents' circle was predominantly conservative, not just on Israel but on most political issues. Most of all, they were intensely (and this is a word I remember repeating in my own angry adolescent dialogues with myself) tribal. "
Rick Perlstein
Own
Myself
Angry