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" No historical analogies are exactly precise. "
Rick Perlstein
Exactly
Historical
Precise
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" Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972. "
Rick Perlstein
Win
Away
Still
" 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
" Sometimes I like to think that the responsibility of every new generation of Democrats is to devise a program that mints new Democrats for another seventy-five years or so. "
Rick Perlstein
Think
New
Responsibility
" 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
" Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip. "
Rick Perlstein
Some
Social
Side
" Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed. "
Rick Perlstein
Blessed
Children
Our
" When conservatives talk to one another, pay attention: they say what they want to do, and mean it. And will do just about anything to get there - even, or especially, claiming that they don't want to do the thing they want to do, until the time is ripe, and they can do it. "
Rick Perlstein
Say
Attention
They Say
" 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
" 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
" 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
" In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes. "
Rick Perlstein
Politics
Religious
History
" I think that all politicians who aspire to the presidency are a little nuts, but for different reasons. What kind of person aspires to be the most powerful person in the world? The answer is someone with an internal drive that is so dynamic and so determined. "
Rick Perlstein
Drive
Powerful
World
" The fact is that the Democratic Party in modern times has always had a conservative wing, one frequently as strong or stronger than its liberal wing, and as such, when progressives speak of the party as a vehicle that naturally belongs to them, as if by right - until conservatives stole it from them - they weaken progressivism. "
Rick Perlstein
Speak
Always
Party
" When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public. "
Rick Perlstein
Determination
Policy
Ignore
" I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature. "
Rick Perlstein
Nature
Career
Rather
" For conservative leaders, making candidates pay them court, publicly and ostentatiously, is a colossal source of their symbolic power before their followers. It's kabuki theater, mostly. "
Rick Perlstein
Power
Pay
Court
" For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past. "
Rick Perlstein
Past
Devoted
Forgetting
" 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
" 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
" Reagan's emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people's longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about any human being that ever lived. "
Rick Perlstein
Political
Intelligence
Better
" For liberals, generally speaking, honoring procedures - means - is the core of what being 'principled' means. For conservatives, fighting for the right outcome - ends - even at the expense of procedural nicety, is what being 'principled' means. "
Rick Perlstein
Core
Fighting
Liberals
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of the voting population that was not anticommunist in 1961 was miniscule. "
Rick Perlstein
Modern
Liberals
Voting
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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