I’m reverent toward my sources. History is a team sport, and references are how you support your teammates. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
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. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Sometimes I like to think that the responsibility of every new generation of Democrats is to devise a program that mints new Democrats for another seventy-five years or so. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
The reason inflation was brought down to manageable levels, by the time of Ronald Reagan’s re-election, was directly attributable to Jimmy Carter’s very courageous act, hiring a Federal Reserve chair, with the charge to induce a recession. That recession was probably the reason he didn’t win a second term. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
My liberal friends love to dismiss Reagan. You know, they’ll say something like, ‘Oh, didn’t he, like, only read one-page memos when he was in the White House?’ Well, that’s just good managerial practice. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt made people write one-page memos. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way – I would say a salutary way – and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
As a general rule of thumb, Democrats do better in national elections when the year’s defining issue is economic fairness, and Republicans do better when the defining issue is national security. Rick Perlstein Read Quote
