What is considered ‘conservative’ and what is considered ‘liberal’ changes in any given era. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I can’t summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tati’s ‘Play Time.’ You just have to see it. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
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. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
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 Read Quote
