Quotes from Rick Perlstein

Nixonland is what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together. By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States. It would, in fact, for the next fifty years.

America the Innocent, always searching for the totems of a unity that it can never quite achieve--even, or especially, when its crises of disunity are most pressing. It is one of the structuring stories of our nation. The "return to normalcy" enjoined by Warren Harding after the Great War; the cult of suburban home and hearth after World War II; the union of hearts declaimed by Adams on Boston's Bunker Hill parade ground after the War Between the States.

Manion's people did what conservatives always did when the going got tough: they started a new group. "For America

the task of preserving capitalism was too important to leave to the capitalists.

world run according to the Gospel of Richard Nixon, where good guys were always good no matter what they actually did, bad guys were always and everywhere ontologically evil, and no one will be safe until " 'we' crack down on 'them,' occasionally adopting their tactics.

Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.

It was as if someone had called to this boom of babies sired by the domesticity-starved veterans of World War II, "Ye shall be as gods." And they believed it. Because they were told it all the time.

People want to believe. Ronald Reagan was able to make people believe.

Chits knew no ideology.

It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble—whether instituting open housing, civilian complaint review boards, or sex education programs—when they presume that a reform is an inevitable concomitant of progress. It is then that they are most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureacratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.

Rockefeller needed Molitor.

Some people think an actor should keep his mouth shut. I think that is wrong. An actor should be careful to know that no group is using him for a selfish purpose, but if he sincerely believes in something he should use his voice.

Two hundred thousand Americans sent in their WIN enlistment forms. Now that the campaign season was upon us, a reeling Republican Party had something to sell: collective obligation, in the key of homespun earnestness.

the rights of free speech and free press do not carry with them the right to advocate the destruction of the very government which protects the freedom of an individual to express his views.

Chronicling the mid-1970s up session with Gerald Ford's clumsiness, the author quotes a medieval maxim that the king has two bodies. The head of state has a physical body like everyone else, but he also represents the body politic, either reflecting its majesty or its weakness.

God might choose his own time, but Reagan had a taste for coming to the rescue.

A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.

Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.

The task of defending capitalism was still important to leave to the capitalists.

Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.

Thirty-six House incumbents with ratings from the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education of seventy-five or higher were defeated—especially traumatic since Republicans had filibustered labor's fondest legislative wish: a repeal of the right-to-work provision of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. Union members voted for politicians who weakened their unions because the Democrats supported civil rights.

One did not argue with people who denied reality. Which was why the pundit Stewart Alsop wrote that conservatism was "not really a coherent, rational alternative at all—it is hardly more than an angry cry of protest against things as they are";

Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.

An anti-politician is hardly an anti-politician once he starts winning and works to close the deal by working to sew up the Establishment.