Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue – and their failures are only judged anomalies. A pretty nice arrangement for investors. The only people who suffer are the citizens. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
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 Read Quote
For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
I’ve summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it’s become rather second nature. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
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. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
