Quotes from Kurt Andersen

Such a colossal irony: after socialists and Communists in the 1930s and then the New Left in the 1960s had tried and failed to achieve a radical class-based reordering of the American political economy, the economic far right took its shot at doing that in the 1970s and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest hope or fear.

The consequence of such mingling is that an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.

corporate funds" used "for political purposes" were "one of the principal sources of corruption" and had "tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.

Since the turn of the century, American fundamentalists had reveled in their sense of persecution by an infidel elite, but in the 1960s the atheist tyranny became official. In 1962 and 1963 the Supreme Court decided in two cases, with only one dissenter in each instance, that it was unconstitutional for public schools to conduct organized prayer or Bible readings, and in 1968 the court finally ruled—unanimously—that states could not ban the teaching of evolution.

Anyhow, my point is that you know now that nonfiction is never the entire truth, and fiction is almost never pure fabrication.

If I think it's true, no matter why or how I think it's true, then it's true, and nobody can tell me otherwise.

the choice isn't between automation and non-automation," says Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the MIT economists focused on digital technology and work. "It's between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth.

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the 1980s and '90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, it hadn't seemed like a serious problem in America.

what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same coins minted around 1967. All the ideas we call countercultural barged onto the cultural main stage in the 1960s and '70s, it's true, but what we don't really register is that so did extreme Christianity, full-blown conspiracism, libertarianism, unembarrassed greed, and more. Anything goes meant anything went.

Asked in a class in the late 1970s at Harvard Business School about a hypothetical CEO who discovers his product could kill customers, young Jeff Skilling said he "would keep making and selling the product. My job as a businessman is to be a profit center and to maximize return to the shareholders. It's the government's job to step in if a product is dangerous.

Starting in the 1900s, from coast to coast and seven days a week, Americans more than anyone on Earth could immerse in the virtuosic fantasies created and sold by show business and the media. This was a new condition. As we spent more and more fabulous hours engaged in the knowing and willing suspension of disbelief, experiencing the unreal as real, we became more habituated to suspending disbelief unconsciously and involuntarily as well.

That's why Occupy was so cool at first," Waverly says, "because it was actually different from what'd been done before. But most protests seem like cover versions of old songs. Like we're all in a sixties tribute band.

How much do companies use buybacks to fool shareholders and the markets about the actual health and prospects of their companies? How much do executives, each being paid with stock and options worth millions and sometimes hundreds of millions, use buybacks simply to enrich themselves?

If more Americans were to learn of the large body of research showing that higher inequality in rich countries isn't just unfair but actually slows down economic growth—by a fifth since the 1980s, according to a 2014 study by the OECD—the remarkably strong support for Robin Hoodism might get even stronger.

Live in the all,' " Melville wrote to Hawthorne. What nonsense!… This "all" feeling…there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer's day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.

Marx famously called religion the opium of the people, and when Lenin founded the Soviet Union, he agreed, saying it was "used for the…stupefaction of the working class." But neither man had ever been to the United States, to see that for Americans it was as much or more a stimulant and hallucinogen than a stupefying opiate.

During the previous centuries in the entire world, there had been perhaps two hundred reported cases of multiple personality disorder; during the 1970s, the decade of Sybil, there were around four hundred, mainly among American women, especially highly hypnotizable women.

The Republican position is now to oppose even studying climate change as well as any and all proposals to reduce carbon emissions. Rational people may disagree about how governments might minimize or prepare for the effects of global warming. You are entitled to your own opinion. But refusing to accept its reality is a new and unacceptable posture. You are not entitled to your own facts.

oppose net tax increases," "any and all" of them, for as long as they're in office.

age twenty-nine the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which in 1986 made the Republicans' antitax fixation official.

Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), funded over the years by the familiar (Koch, Olin, Scaife) right-wing foundations.

averages: a few times I've been in rooms with a hundred ordinary people and my acquaintance Warren Buffett, which meant the average person's net worth in those rooms

If you're young, and have grown up only since the Internet has been dissolving the distinctions between past and present and old and new, the sci-fi writer and futurist William Gibson says, "I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory.

A note on averages: a few times I've been in rooms with a hundred ordinary people and my acquaintance Warren Buffett, which meant the average person's net worth in those rooms was nearly $1 billion.