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" In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes. "
Rick Perlstein
Politics
Religious
History
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" I can't summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tati's 'Play Time.' You just have to see it. "
Rick Perlstein
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" It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. "
Rick Perlstein
American
Remember
Culture
" Richard M. Nixon honestly believed in his bones that an organized conspiracy of liberal media insiders had literally been plotting against him ever since he broke Alger Hiss in 1948 (he never shifted course, and lost his soul). "
Rick Perlstein
Media
Conspiracy
Lost
" The only times during my religious instruction I remember hearing God's name invoked with any sincere conviction at all was in the oft-repeated and breathtakingly chauvinistic claim that Israel's 'miraculous' military victories over much-stronger enemies proved that He was ever on Zion's side. "
Rick Perlstein
Remember
Victories
Military
" Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions. "
Rick Perlstein
Place
Predictions
Hell
" That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place. "
Rick Perlstein
Rest
Place
Way
" It's almost a very rough rule of thumb: when Democrats are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around middle-class fears, Democrats win the election; when Republicans are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around cultural fears, Republicans win the election. "
Rick Perlstein
Democrats
Election
Frame
" 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
" For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past. "
Rick Perlstein
Past
Devoted
Forgetting
" 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
" All right-wing antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals from hard-working, taxpaying whites and gives the spoils to indolent, grasping blacks. "
Rick Perlstein
Racial
America
Bears
" Lyndon B. Johnson thought he'd have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas - for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it). "
Rick Perlstein
Home
Christmas
Lost
" 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
" Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists' belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party. "
Rick Perlstein
Hurt
People
Republican
" One thing Republicans understand: In American elections, you have to choose from among only two people - not between the perfect and the good. "
Rick Perlstein
You
Perfect
People
" There is no freedom without groceries. There are no groceries without freedom. What people call 'capitalism' and 'socialism' are actually one and inseparable. It's a virtuous circle. "
Rick Perlstein
People
Socialism
Freedom
" Here's an irony of the history of conservatism's relationship with business and business's relationship with conservatism: 'Wall Street' used to be the right-wing industrialists of the forties and fifties' greatest term of derision. (Wall Street was the place that humiliated them by forcing them, hat in hand, to beg for capital). "
Rick Perlstein
History
Hat
Business
" 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
" Racial rhetoric has been entwined with government from the start, all the way back to when the enemy was not Obamacare but the Grand Army of the Republic (and further in the past than that: Thomas Jefferson, after all, was derided as 'the Negro President'). "
Rick Perlstein
Government
Army
Enemy
" Liberals tend to stress how marvelous education is, in and of itself, and also adore it as a vessel for genuine equality. (That's me, by the way: Hell, I think we should be spending $50 billion a year to make college education free). "
Rick Perlstein
College
Stress
Me
" When I was a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1980s, life was pretty boring, and I found myself riveted by the sheer melodrama of everyday life of the 1960s. "
Rick Perlstein
Myself
Boring
Everyday
" My politics of optimism and hope still casts its lot with the Democrats - in the optimistic hope that the dying embers of its status as the party of our better angels, one that took risks for social justice, can still be fanned into a flame. But I'm an old man, born in 1969. "
Rick Perlstein
Justice
Hope
Man
" 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
" 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
" Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I'm willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct. "
Rick Perlstein
Detail
Historical
Follow
" There's a lot of surplus rage from the '60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton's earmark for a Woodstock museum. "
Rick Perlstein
Think
See
Rage
" Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory. "
Rick Perlstein
Computers
Functions
Memory
" I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature. "
Rick Perlstein
Nature
Career
Rather
" 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
" Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed. "
Rick Perlstein
Blessed
Children
Our