American - Historian | 1969 -
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
MenConflictFreeRevengeAmerica
I believe politics is a team sport. That, for awful and unfortunate reasons beyond any of our control, the American system only allows, effectively, for two teams.
PoliticsTeamControlBelieveBeyond
No historical analogies are exactly precise.
HistoricalPreciseExactly
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.
DayDemocracyFightingSurvivalSee
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.
AmericaRacialRageLiberalismBears
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').
PastGovernmentStartArmyBackWay
While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.
PastWritingThinkPresentEndMood
I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature.
NatureCareerBecomeBooksRather
Conservatism is, among many other things, a culture. The most important glue binding it together is a shared sense of cultural grievance - the conviction, uniting conservatives high and low, theocratic and plutocratic, neocon and paleocon, that someone, somewhere is looking down their noses at them with a condescending sneer.
CultureTogetherLookingSomeoneLow
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.
PowerConservativePayFollowers
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.
AbortionNeverPraiseMallDeliver
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.
New YorkNewOutCorporatePromise
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Rick Perlstein quotes