It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. – Rick Perlstein
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
Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn’t that obvious? – Rick Perlstein
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
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
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. – Rick Perlstein
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
In Ronald Reagan’s chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears. – Rick Perlstein
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
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
What is considered ‘conservative’ and what is considered ‘liberal’ changes in any given era. – Rick Perlstein
In the suburban Midwestern Reform Jewish world I was raised in, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, grown men built plastic scale models of Israeli tanks and F-15 jets and displayed them throughout the house, dangling the warplanes from bedroom ceilings with fishing line. – Rick Perlstein
Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls – before the public even knows to call them ‘issues’ at all. – Rick Perlstein
In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes. – Rick Perlstein
I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should – not least because he chose a career of public service when he could have made a lot more money doing something else, and not least because he took genuine risks for peace. – Rick Perlstein
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. – Rick Perlstein
One of the most important things liberals don’t understand about conservatism, obscured by too much lazy talk about conservatism’s various ‘wings,’ is that its tenets form a relatively organic base for its adherents, where ‘traditional morality’ serves the interests of laissez-faire economics and vice-versa. – Rick Perlstein
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
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
I love trade magazines – any trade’s magazine: by entering into what is taken for granted in a world not your own, you better recognize the vastness of the social universe – for there are so, so many worlds that are not your own. – Rick Perlstein
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
My politics of optimism and hope still casts its lot with the Democrats – in the optimistic hope that the dying embers of its status as the party of our better angels, one that took risks for social justice, can still be fanned into a flame. But I’m an old man, born in 1969. – Rick Perlstein
Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists’ belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party. – Rick Perlstein
When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them – part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public. – Rick Perlstein
Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry’s very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress. – Rick Perlstein
While Obama might not push college education exclusively, like most Democrats he does oversell it and does shortchange the alternatives. And millions of young Americans pay the price. – Rick Perlstein
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
There is no freedom without groceries. There are no groceries without freedom. What people call ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ are actually one and inseparable. It’s a virtuous circle. – Rick Perlstein
The only times during my religious instruction I remember hearing God’s name invoked with any sincere conviction at all was in the oft-repeated and breathtakingly chauvinistic claim that Israel’s ‘miraculous’ military victories over much-stronger enemies proved that He was ever on Zion’s side. – Rick Perlstein
Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time. – Rick Perlstein
