Rick Perlstein

I love trade magazines - any trade's magazine: by entering into what is taken for granted in a world not your own,…

— Rick Perlstein

When the 2008 victory of Barack Obama and the defeat of grumpy old John McCain began looking, um, inevitable, I started fielding…

— Rick Perlstein

Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way -…

— Rick Perlstein

Part of the fantasy certain pro-reform Republicans like to broadcast about Hispanics, family-oriented, churchgoing traditionalists, is that they are somehow natural conservatives,…

— Rick Perlstein

I'm just a Bolshevik with a laptop.

— Rick Perlstein

The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse…

— 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…

— 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…

— Rick Perlstein

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.

— Rick Perlstein

Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will…

— Rick Perlstein

I think that all politicians who aspire to the presidency are a little nuts, but for different reasons. What kind of person…

— 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…

— Rick Perlstein

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

— Rick Perlstein

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

— Rick Perlstein

Sometimes I like to think that the responsibility of every new generation of Democrats is to devise a program that mints new…

— Rick Perlstein

“Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.”

— Rick Perlstein

Unfortunately, given the rules of the American political game, people who try to participate by self-righteously refusing to identify with one or…

— Rick Perlstein

I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more…

— Rick Perlstein

Polling only works in a country without a depressed, frightened populace. Where the public trusts authorities enough to tell them the truth…

— Rick Perlstein

Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are…

— 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…

— Rick Perlstein

Black Fergusonians have shown that they will vote when they have something to vote for and know that their vote will count.…

— Rick Perlstein

Whatever you think about his intelligence, what's unquestionable is that Reagan had extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could sense the temperature of a…

— Rick Perlstein

I cant summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tatis Play Time. You just have to see it.

— Rick Perlstein

In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.

— Rick Perlstein