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

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

— 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

It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary…

— Rick Perlstein

When conservatives talk to one another, pay attention: they say what they want to do, and mean it. And will do just…

— Rick Perlstein

In the suburban Midwestern Reform Jewish world I was raised in, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, grown men built plastic scale models…

— Rick Perlstein

Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time.

— Rick Perlstein

Liberals tend to stress how marvelous education is, in and of itself, and also adore it as a vessel for genuine equality.…

— Rick Perlstein

When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them -…

— Rick Perlstein

I like to imagine, as a thought experiment, the day, perhaps not too far off, when a Republican president nominates a Supreme…

— Rick Perlstein

As an adult, I've always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my parents' circle was predominantly conservative, not…

— 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

Imagine a senator running for president whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, re-regulating the communications and electrical…

— Rick Perlstein

Why was Barack Obama attractive to people in 2008? If you think about Barack Obama, there's all this anxiety about society, just…

— Rick Perlstein

It's almost a very rough rule of thumb: when Democrats are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around…

— Rick Perlstein

“It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble—whether instituting open housing, civilian complaint review boards, or…

— 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

Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue -…

— Rick Perlstein

All right-wing antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals…

— 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

It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set…

— Rick Perlstein

My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon…

— Rick Perlstein

My politics of optimism and hope still casts its lot with the Democrats - in the optimistic hope that the dying embers…

— Rick Perlstein

Richard M. Nixon honestly believed in his bones that an organized conspiracy of liberal media insiders had literally been plotting against him…

— Rick Perlstein

Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of…

— Rick Perlstein

Racial rhetoric has been entwined with government from the start, all the way back to when the enemy was not Obamacare but…

— Rick Perlstein

There's a certain kind of cultural energy pursued by the gatekeepers of elite discourse, who want to argue that Americans fundamentally agree…

— Rick Perlstein

What does it mean to truly believe in America? To wave a flag? Or to struggle toward a more searching alternative to…

— Rick Perlstein

“Two hundred thousand Americans sent in their WIN enlistment forms. Now that the campaign season was upon us, a reeling Republican Party…

— Rick Perlstein

Reagan's emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people's longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about…

— Rick Perlstein

Ronald Reagan never did much to make abortion illegal. He did, however, deliver videotaped greetings, fulsome in praise for his hosts, to…

— Rick Perlstein

Call it Camelot's revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free…

— Rick Perlstein

“I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate." Martin Luther King, Jr. after the…

— Rick Perlstein

In the rest of the industrialized world, your boss can't fire you unless he or she can give a good reason. In…

— Rick Perlstein

There is no freedom without groceries. There are no groceries without freedom. What people call 'capitalism' and 'socialism' are actually one and…

— Rick Perlstein

Back when I was 16, when I should have been doing normal high school things, I availed myself of my brand new…

— Rick Perlstein

The reactionary percentage of the electorate in these United States has been relatively constant since McCarthy's day; I'd estimate it as hovering…

— Rick Perlstein

“Nixon has been the subject of more psychobiographies than any other politician. His career vindicates one of that maligned genre's most trustworthy…

— Rick Perlstein

Here is a truism about the psychology of politicians: there is almost nothing so soul-definingly traumatic for them as losing an election.…

— Rick Perlstein

Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's very architecture;…

— Rick Perlstein