Rick Perlstein > Quotes

“What does sincerity mean if it is chosen as deliberate strategy?”
― Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

“He (Nixon) needed someone with him so he could be alone.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“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, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“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, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“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, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate." Martin Luther King, Jr. after the violent reception he received in Chicago in 1966.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“The Republican Party spent the year of the liberal apotheosis enacting the most unlikely political epic ever told: a right-wing fringe took over the party from the ground up, nominating Barry Goldwater, the radical-right senator from Arizona, while a helpless Eastern establishment-that-was-now-a-fringe looked on in bafflement. Experts, claiming the Republican tradition of progressivism was as much a part of its identity as the elephant, began talking about a party committing suicide. The Goldwaterites didn’t see suicide. They saw redemption. This was part and parcel of their ideology—that Lyndon Johnson’s “consensus” was their enemy in a battle for the survival of civilization. For them, the idea that calamitous liberal nonsense—ready acceptance of federal interference in the economy; Negro “civil disobedience”; the doctrine of “containing” the mortal enemy Communism when conservatives insisted it must be beaten—could be described as a “consensus” at all was symbol and substance of America’s moral rot. They also believed the vast majority of ordinary Americans already agreed with them, whatever spake the polls—“crazy figures,” William F. Buckley harrumphed, doctored “to say, ‘Yes, Mr. President.’” It was their article of faith. And faith, and the uncompromising passions attending it, was key to their political makeup.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.”
― Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

“Being hated by the right people was no impediment to success. The unpolished were everywhere the majority.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.”
― Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

“In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.”
― Rick Perlstein

“Goldwater was, in other words, a candidate for voters in Boston as much as those in Birmingham—catering to white voters who were against the idea of federal civil rights legislation but at the same time desperate to receive assurances that this didn’t make them bad people.”
― Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

“Ronald Reagan was just as angry. But he made you want to stand right alongside him and shake your fist at the same things he was shaking his fist at.”
― Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

“Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not. How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“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, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

“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, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

“When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less;”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“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, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

“For the left, employers were the exploiters. The New Right replied that the true exploiters were federal bureaucrats grasping for tax dollars, and the media elites who shoved 1960s libertinism down Middle America’s throats. New Rightists were obsessed with what were known as the “social issues”—crime, government intrusion into family life, sexual mores, the right to own a gun. Reagan’s establishmentarian presidential campaign manager John Sears dismissed them as the “emotional issues.” But the New Right reveled in emotion—particularly, the emotion of resentment.”
― Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

“He talks to people's grievances, but he doesn't seem mad. – Elizabeth Drew”
― Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

“Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964.”
― Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

“Jimmy Carter’s pollster Pat Caddell understood how dangerous all this could prove to the Democratic coalition: blue-collar voters were vulnerable to conservative appeals because they were “no longer solely motivated by economic concerns—which have traditionally made them Democrats.” Now that they feared “change in society” more than losing their place in the middle class, they were “one of the most vulnerable groups in the Democratic coalition.”
― Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

“Conservatives felt victimized by a sort of radicalism that, because it graced Middle American classrooms, did not seem radical to most Americans at all.”
― Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

“A pro–civil rights columnist for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger noted the familiar faces from his reporting on White Citizens Council meetings back in the 1950s and ’60s. Only one thing was different: “Their enemy now is not the black man but ‘liberalism,’ in any form, as they see it.”
― Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

“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 to-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“Irving Kristol, for his part, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, like a right-wing Joseph Stalin, that the political advantage tax cuts would provide Republicans was so historically imperative that they should be blasted through whatever the effect on the budget. “The neoconservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums. He wants to shape the future and will leave it to his opponents to tidy up afterwards”: now was no time to go wobbly.”
― Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

“It was called A Ford, Not a Lincoln, and in it, Richard Reeves described him as “slow, plodding, pedestrian, unimaginative,” “inarticulate,” and “ignorant”—though you didn’t have to take Reeves’s word for it. He also quoted the president’s Grand Rapids pastor: “Gerald Ford is a normal, decent, God-fearing man, but you can say that about a lot of people.”
― Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

“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, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan