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.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Legal
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.Collection: Politics
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).Collection: Equality
Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.Collection: Computers
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.Collection: Architecture
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).Collection: Christmas
Ive summarized dozens of books in my literary career; its become rather second nature.Collection: Book
Imagine a senator running for president whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, re-regulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing funding for all schools regardless of property valuations - and who promised to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual experimentation. That was Barry Goldwater, conservative.Collection: Running
In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.Collection: Explaining
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.Collection: Powerful
Only liberals know how to make you freer on the job, which is where most of us suffer the gravest indignities in our lives.Collection: Jobs
In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.Collection: Religious
I cant summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tatis Play Time. You just have to see it.Collection: Play
No historical analogies are exactly precise.Collection: Historical
In Ronald Reagans 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.Collection: Optimism
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.Collection: Sex
When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger.Collection: Foundation