“The tide of our national meanness rises incrementally, one brutalizing experience at a time, inside one person at a time in a chain of working-class Americans stretching back for decades. Back to the terror-filled nineteen-year-old girl from Weirton, West Virginia,… — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
“Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes… — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
“Remember when welfare mothers were robbing us all blind and driving Cadillacs? ” — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live… — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
The four cornerstones of the American political psyche are 1) emotion substituted for thought, 2) fear, 3) ignorance and 4) propaganda — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
They [Christian rednecks] were so stupid that they couldn't pour piss out of a boot even if the instructions were printed on the bottom. — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
“Somewhere in between are the rest of us natives, in whom such change revives long-buried anger at those faraway people who seem to govern… — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
“Republican or Democrat, this nation's affluent urban and suburban classes understand their bread is buttered on the corporate side. The primary difference between the… — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
“Parties do not lead revolutions. They follow them. And then only when forced to.” — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
“Inconceivable though it may seem to urban Americans, it is easily possible for many working Americans not to know a person of the liberal… — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
The reality is that our economy now consists of driving 250 million vehicles around the suburbs and malls and eating fried chicken. We don't… — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
“This book is written from a changing town in Virginia, but this class of mine, these people--the ones who smell like an ashtray in… — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
Cultural stupidity accounts for virtually every aspect of Sarah Palin, both as a person and a political icon. Which, come to think of it,… — Joe Bageant Copy Share Image
![“They [Christian rednecks] were so stupid that they couldn't pour piss out of a boot even if the instructions were printed on the bottom.” quote by Joe Bageant](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/ac7/joe-bageant-25954_boots_they-christian-rednecks-were-so-stupid-t_951113.jpg)
