“Europeans had highly developed regional and national cultures and societies before they bolted on Protestantism. America, on the other hand, was half-created by Protestant extremists to be a Protestant society. American academics accept the idea of American exceptionalism in one… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“Since the turn of the century, American fundamentalists had reveled in their sense of persecution by an infidel elite, but in the 1960s the atheist tyranny became official. In 1962 and 1963 the Supreme Court decided in two cases, with only one dissenter in each instance, that it was unconstitutional for public schools to conduct organized prayer or Bible readings,… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share
“If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me otherwise.” — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country of three hundred million people at the turn of the twenty-first century could and should revert to something like its nineteenth-century self. Both had a familiar American magical-thinking fetish for gold—to return to gold as the… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share
“But what other place on Earth has been more congenial to believers and promoters of mad dreams and schemes of so many kinds? California… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“The antisharia movement lobbied states to pass statutes and constitutional amendments banning the use of sharia in their courts and legal systems, a fantasy… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
I'm comparing Americans to international peers in terms of GDP, educational system - the sort of benchmarks we used to designate a so-called developed society. In that sense, we are outliers. Are we suckers? Yes, but it's not just that. That puts too fine a point on what I am saying. We're not idiots and victims. It's about us as… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share
TED was simply wonderful, an intellectual spa, a 21st-century Chataqua, superb and singular. — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press…did not foresee…the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“EVEN PAUL GOODMAN, beloved by young leftists in the 1960s, was flabbergasted by his students in 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina,… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share
“Sixteen hundred years ago Saint Augustine instructed, basically, Don’t be stupid. “Shall we say, then,” he wrote about Genesis, “there was such a sense… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“After more than three decades and many hundreds of studies, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that GMO foods are safe to eat. The National… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
