Rick Perlstein Quotes & Sayings

Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964. — 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

They reported how when he took over as president of Phoenix Country Club in 1949, he said if they didn't allow his friend Harry Rosenzweig to join he would blackball every name. Rosenzweig became the first Jew the club ever admitted. Left out of the tale was that another Jew wasn't allowed in for a decade. — Rick Perlstein

For the first time on Planet Earth (in 1964 America), a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. An unheard-of 42% of high school graduates sought higher education. — Rick Perlstein

An anti-politician is hardly an anti-politician once he starts winning and works to close the deal by working to sew up the Establishment. — Rick Perlstein

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

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. — Rick Perlstein

The task of defending capitalism was still important to leave to the capitalists. — Rick Perlstein

Back when I was 16, when I should have been doing normal high school things, I availed myself of my brand new driver's license to spend as much time as possible in Milwaukee's Renaissance Book Shop, a tumbledown five-story warehouse that the city was finally able to close down in 2011 for safety reasons. It was my teenage paradise. — Rick Perlstein

Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes. — Rick Perlstein

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

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

This trip was not about running for president. This trip was preparing to BE president. — 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

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

Americans prefer to isolate villains who despoil a preexisting innocence, rather than admit that there might not have been any innocence there in the first place. — Rick Perlstein

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). — Rick Perlstein

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. — Rick Perlstein

Scranton describing Sen. Robert A. Taft's conservatism as compared to Goldwater's said Taft was a conservative in the truest sense of the word. He sought to conserve all the human values that have been carried down to us on a long stream of American history. He saw history as the foundation on which a better future might be built, not a Technicolor fantasy behind which the problems of the present might be concealed. — Rick Perlstein

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

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. — 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

No historical analogies are exactly precise. — 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

Do people still read before bed? I play 'Words With Friends.' — Rick Perlstein

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

Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments. — 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

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? — Rick Perlstein

Looking back later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called "a rather quiet chap about campus," dour and brooding, who couldn't even win a girlfriend, who attracted enemies, who seemed, a schoolmate recalled, "the man least likely to succeed in politics." They hadn't learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority. — 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

Wartime experience as an Office of Price Administration consultant for the candy industry — Rick Perlstein

Ideas in politics are often intuition fancy dress. — Rick Perlstein

Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious? — Rick Perlstein

There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days. — Rick Perlstein

Conservatives are time-biders. And they understand, as Corey Robin explains in his indispensable book 'The Reactionary Mind,' that the direction of human history is not on their side - that is why they are reactionaries - because, other things equal, civilization does tend towards more inclusion, more emancipation, more liberalism. — Rick Perlstein

Chicago's privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm's investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much. — Rick Perlstein

Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism. — Rick Perlstein

One of the ladies asked about that awful Bobby Kennedy, and Goldwater responded by speaking about the attorney general with touching affection. (Mary) McGrory recalled how Jack Kennedy behaved at a similar stage in his campaign: spouting statistics, attacking carefully chosen enemies and puffing all the right friends, quoting dead Greeks, never cracking a joke lest he remind the voters how young he was. — Rick Perlstein

Politics is motion." John Sears — Rick Perlstein

The best measure of a politician's electoral success was becoming not how successfully he could broker people's desires, but how well he could tap their fears. — 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

Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends. — Rick Perlstein

The fact is that the Democratic Party in modern times has always had a conservative wing, one frequently as strong or stronger than its liberal wing, and as such, when progressives speak of the party as a vehicle that naturally belongs to them, as if by right - until conservatives stole it from them - they weaken progressivism. — Rick Perlstein

Call it Camelot's revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long - because, after all, America was ruled by noble men. — 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

Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally. — Rick Perlstein

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

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

That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place. — Rick Perlstein

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. — Rick Perlstein

I'm reverent toward my sources. History is a team sport, and references are how you support your teammates. — Rick Perlstein

A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches. — Rick Perlstein

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? — Rick Perlstein

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. — 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

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

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

Do what you are doing. Monastic motto — Rick Perlstein

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another - until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices. — 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

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. — Rick Perlstein

I can't summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tati's 'Play Time.' You just have to see it. — Rick Perlstein

Besides, he knew something that Chuck Percy, ABC News, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and even the President of the United States did not know: a new conservative-movement political machine was humming just beneath the Establishment's radar in North Carolina, ready to rewire what people thought they knew about how American politics worked. THE — Rick Perlstein

Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it. — Rick Perlstein

The ideal politician is an ordinary representative of his class with extraordinary abilities. — Rick Perlstein

(President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity. — Rick Perlstein

Now even reformers needed political machines. — 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

There's a lot of surplus rage from the '60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton's earmark for a Woodstock museum. — 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

Two hundred thousand Americans sent in their WIN enlistment forms. Now that the campaign season was upon us, a reeling Republican Party had something to sell: collective obligation, in the key of homespun earnestness. — Rick Perlstein

It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble - whether instituting open housing, civilian compliant review boards, or sex education programs - when they presume that a reform is an inevitable comcomitant of progress. It is then they are most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues. — 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

They campaigned on contempt for the body they sought to join. — Rick Perlstein

Black Fergusonians have shown that they will vote when they have something to vote for and know that their vote will count. Seventy-six percent of them turned out in November 2012, when Missouri was a key swing state for Barack Obama's reelection. — Rick Perlstein

We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. — Rick Perlstein

What does sincerity mean if it is chosen as deliberate strategy? — Rick Perlstein

College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination. — Rick Perlstein

In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing. — Rick Perlstein

One thing Republicans understand: In American elections, you have to choose from among only two people - not between the perfect and the good. — Rick Perlstein

Insistent opening bark of the UPI's Helen Thomas: — Rick Perlstein

Some days there were more police in schools than students. Rumors spread that armed black marauders would ride through their neighborhoods shooting whites at random; that blacks were carrying knives and razors to school to turn girls' rooms into rape rooms. So whites started carrying them first. — 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

What is considered 'conservative' and what is considered 'liberal' changes in any given era. — Rick Perlstein

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. — Rick Perlstein

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

I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature. — Rick Perlstein

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

For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past. — Rick Perlstein

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. — Rick Perlstein

I'm just a Bolshevik with a laptop. — Rick Perlstein

Chits knew no ideology. — Rick Perlstein

It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it. — Rick Perlstein

In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words: from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading. — Rick Perlstein

Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure. — Rick Perlstein

Richard Nixon's conversation was loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides. — Rick Perlstein

Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon — Rick Perlstein

Must, never, must avoid, must guard: the minatory commands came the eleven times (from the departing Eisenhower). In contrast, Kennedy's rhetoric on January 20 with a cascade of permissions: the word "let" rang out 14 times. — Rick Perlstein

He (Nixon) needed someone with him so he could be alone. — Rick Perlstein