Top 50 Rick Perlstein Quotes

Republican governors are more lunatic than they used to be – as attested by all the ones so eager to turn down free federal money to qualify more of their poor citizens for Medicaid under Obamacare. Meanwhile, some states have taken the money only to hoard it.

Reagan’s emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people’s longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about any human being that ever lived.

I’m just a Bolshevik with a laptop.

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.

Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972.

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.

Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan’s brand of leadership was what I call ‘a liturgy of absolution.’ He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn’t want that?

Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time.

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).

Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip.

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.

Only liberals know how to make you freer on the job, which is where most of us suffer the gravest indignities in our lives.

There’s a certain kind of cultural energy pursued by the gatekeepers of elite discourse, who want to argue that Americans fundamentally agree with each other, and that’s the health of the nation.

I’ve summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it’s become rather second nature.

Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn’t even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty – at least in the first four years of his presidency.

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.

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.

Polling only works in a country without a depressed, frightened populace. Where the public trusts authorities enough to tell them the truth without fear of retribution.

Liberals tend to stress how marvelous education is, in and of itself, and also adore it as a vessel for genuine equality. (That’s me, by the way: Hell, I think we should be spending $50 billion a year to make college education free).

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.

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.

In the rest of the industrialized world, your boss can’t fire you unless he or she can give a good reason. In America, with certain exceptions, your boss can fire you for any reason at all or for no reason at all.

Whatever you think about his intelligence, what’s unquestionable is that Reagan had extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could sense the temperature of a room, and tell them a story and make them feel good. And that’s more fun, right? It’s more fun to feel good than feel bad. That’s part of our human state.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What does it mean to truly believe in America? To wave a flag? Or to struggle toward a more searching alternative to the shallowness of the flag-wavers – to criticize, to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent?

America was founded on the fissure between slave states and free states, so these huge fault lines are just built into the American project. How we repress them, express them, deal with them, talk around them, think through them, don’t think through them, is fascinating to me.

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.

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.

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.

As an adult, I’ve always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my parents’ circle was predominantly conservative, not just on Israel but on most political issues. Most of all, they were intensely (and this is a word I remember repeating in my own angry adolescent dialogues with myself) tribal.

Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn’t that obvious?

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.

Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed.

In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.

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.

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.

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.

The argument that John F. Kennedy was a closet peacenik, ready to give up on what the Vietnamese call the ‘American War’ upon re-election, received its most farcical treatment in Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK.’

Look at liberty’s greatest historic advances: ending slavery. Giving women the vote. Outlawing legal segregation. Each and every time, the people at the forefront of advancing those reforms – often putting their lives on the line – called themselves liberals.

For liberals, generally speaking, honoring procedures – means – is the core of what being ‘principled’ means. For conservatives, fighting for the right outcome – ends – even at the expense of procedural nicety, is what being ‘principled’ means.

When I was a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1980s, life was pretty boring, and I found myself riveted by the sheer melodrama of everyday life of the 1960s.

All right-wing antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals from hard-working, taxpaying whites and gives the spoils to indolent, grasping blacks.

When you’re a writer, you never know which of your pieces are going to gain a toehold and which will not, and it’s best not to care too much.