Quotes from Kurt Andersen

I think we tend to be kind of ahistorical, and think that life as we are living it in the moment is all we know.

The mistrust of government that blossomed in the late '60s has become a chronic and in some ways pathological condition.

I often set two alarm clocks because I'm afraid the first one won't actually make me get up.

Anything remotely resembling news media is going to continue to migrate online until very little or none of it is produced on dead trees.

Once a decade, once every eight years, Donald Trump finds some pretext to say I suck and that I'm bad.

Pre-Internet information systems, in which accuracy and credibility were determined mainly by experts or otherwise designated deciders, had terrible flaws and annoyances, including complacency, blind spots, snobbishness, and bigotry. But those gates and gatekeepers also managed to keep the worst hogwash out of our mainstream.

With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our most massive mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes

People's incomes over a certain level aren't taxed to pay for Social Security at all.

EVEN PAUL GOODMAN, beloved by young leftists in the 1960s, was flabbergasted by his students in 1969. "There was no knowledge," he wrote, "only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that…research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.

Neither side has been aware of it, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been wearing different uniforms on the same team—the Fantasyland team.

Acknowledging actual, specific conspiracies makes sense. But reflexive conspiracism can become a bad habit and a misguided way of making sense of current events.

During the 1980s, prudent New Deal rules concerning mortgage loans were repealed, allowing people to get home loans with too little money down and interest rates that would "adjust" to unaffordable heights. So during the 1980s, the average price of a house in America doubled.

it will require a struggle to try to make America reality-based again.

In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

That is, it only becomes problematic when people refuse to let blissful epiphanies remain mostly obscure and evanescent.

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 with the true nor the false, but with the unreal….In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." —ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

Looking back now, it's hard not to conclude that the anxious nominal party of the economic left, Democrats, was magnificently played by the committed and confident economic right, Republicans, for forty years. I'm not saying the shift in popular sentiment wasn't partly organic. But Democrats, after the Republican presidential landslides of 1972 and 1984, remained too dazed and confused and scared for too long.

In 1982 I reported and wrote a Time cover story called "Inmate Nation" about what's now called mass incarceration, because the number of U.S. inmates had just started to increase sharply and, to my editor and me, alarmingly—that year by 43,000 to 412,000. The total number of inmates today is 1.5 million, of whom 130,000 are in privately run prisons.

No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press, and Protestantism was its first viral cultural phenomenon.

MIT economist David Autor has written, "but a serious challenge in determining who owns it and how to share it. Our chief economic problem will be one of distribution

MIT economist David Autor has written, "but a serious challenge in determining who owns it and how to share it. Our chief economic problem will be one of distribution, not scarcity.

For Greenspan, however, the problem isn't extreme inequality per se, or the newly extreme inequality between the great majority and the rich, but rather the envy of the poor for the middle class. And his proposed solution to that, honest to God, was to contrive to pay middle-class workers even less, to bring their incomes down closer to those of the poor.

Modern electronic mass media had been a defining piece of the twentieth-century experience that served an important democratic function—presenting Americans with a shared set of facts. Now those news organs, on TV and radio, were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America's earlier centuries. The new and newly unregulated technologies allowed us, in a sense, to travel backward in time.