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" 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
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" 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 the rest of the industrialized world, your boss can't fire you unless he or she can give a good reason. In America, with certain exceptions, your boss can fire you for any reason at all or for no reason at all. "
Rick Perlstein
Rest
World
Good
" Why was Barack Obama attractive to people in 2008? If you think about Barack Obama, there's all this anxiety about society, just kind of wracked by centripetal forces - the idea that the center's not holding, no one can talk to each other, the idea of a political system that's broken. "
Rick Perlstein
Anxiety
Society
Think
" 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
" 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
" What does it mean to truly believe in America? To wave a flag? Or to struggle toward a more searching alternative to the shallowness of the flag-wavers - to criticize, to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent? "
Rick Perlstein
Struggle
America
Believe
" Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can't shake. "
Rick Perlstein
Fear
Reach
Moral
" The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse set of institutions that are the envy of the civilized world. Once they were the province, both among the student and faculty bodies, of children of privilege, generally WASPs. "
Rick Perlstein
Education
History
World
" 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
" 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
" One of the most important things liberals don't understand about conservatism, obscured by too much lazy talk about conservatism's various 'wings,' is that its tenets form a relatively organic base for its adherents, where 'traditional morality' serves the interests of laissez-faire economics and vice-versa. "
Rick Perlstein
Wings
Morality
Important
" 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
" Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed. "
Rick Perlstein
Blessed
Children
Our
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions. "
Rick Perlstein
Place
Predictions
Hell
" 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
" The reactionary percentage of the electorate in these United States has been relatively constant since McCarthy's day; I'd estimate it as hovering around 30 percent. A minority, but one never all that enamored of the niceties of democracy - they see themselves as fighting for the survival of civilization, after all. "
Rick Perlstein
Democracy
Fighting
See
" 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
" For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past. "
Rick Perlstein
Past
Devoted
Forgetting
" 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
" 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
" Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time. "
Rick Perlstein
Long
Political
Best
" There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days. "
Rick Perlstein
Failure
Days
Thousand
" 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
" 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
" History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact. "
Rick Perlstein
Measure
Rich
Wisdom
" 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