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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time? Rick Perlstein Read Quote
Back when I was 16, when I should have been doing normal high school things, I availed myself of my brand new driver’s license to spend as much time as possible in Milwaukee’s Renaissance Book Shop, a tumbledown five-story warehouse that the city was finally able to close down in 2011 for safety reasons. It was my teenage paradise. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
I’m a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event – and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
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 Read Quote
