Quotes from Kurt Andersen

According to the health-efficiency index compiled by Bloomberg News, which combines longevity and healthcare spending into a single metric for almost every country, the United States is second from the bottom, better only than Bulgaria.

As one of those scholars recently summarized the corpus of studies and experiments, the more that change "makes people anxious about the world and their place in it" and causes "major disruptions and uncertainties in their lives," then "the more they longed nostalgically…for the comparative safety and security of a perceived past.

From the 1940s through the '70s—when our richest citizens were paying rates of 70 and 80 and 90 percent on the millionth dollars they earned each year—U.S. productivity and GDP per person and median household income after inflation all doubled.

You're entitled to your own opinions and your own fantasies, but not your own facts—especially if your fantastical facts hurt people.

But what other place on Earth has been more congenial to believers and promoters of mad dreams and schemes of so many kinds? California is America squared.

moral calculus isn't reducible to actual calculus

Norquist is known for his jokey line about his wish to make the federal government smaller—"to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

And while I still resist defaulting to conspiracist explanations, pieces of this story do look and swim and walk and quack an awful lot like ducks—that is, resemble a well-executed conspiracy, not especially secret, by the leaders of the capitalist class, at the expense of everyone else.

Sixteen hundred years ago Saint Augustine instructed, basically, Don't be stupid. "Shall we say, then," he wrote about Genesis, "there was such a sense of hearing in that formless and shapeless creation, whatever it was, to which God thus uttered a sound when He said, 'Let there be light'? Let such absurdities have no place in our thoughts.

Powell proposed waging this war on four fronts—in academia, the media, politics, and the legal system—and doing so with unheard-of budgets and ferocity.

If you're fanatical enough about enacting and enforcing your fiction, it becomes indistinguishable from nonfiction

In other words, America was founded by a nutty religious cult.

If omnipotent sadists had set out to take an extremely good, well-functioning piece of our political economy and social structure and make it undemocratic and oppressive, this is what their scheme would've looked like.

But then around 1980, under the camouflage of high inflation, private colleges started increasing their prices every year a bit faster than inflation. Public colleges soon followed suit, state legislatures started cutting university funding, and that vicious cycle picked up speed. In the 1990s the price of a college education ballooned even faster—especially at public institutions—and never stopped.

In other words, over those three decades, while the number of students grew by half, the amount of money they borrowed each year increased twelvefold.

over those three decades, while the number of students grew by half, the amount of money they borrowed each year increased twelvefold. For the financial industry, a small revenue stream turned into a great roaring river.

It's correct to say that the financial meltdown of 2008 resulted from too much deregulation, too many arcane Wall Street innovations, and some fraud. But that's just one way of explaining it, the one that comfortingly focuses all blame on government and a small class of the rich and powerful and deceitful. The deeper causes were more widespread and unconscious, the fantastical wishfulness affecting at least a large minority of Americans, maybe a majority.

For Northerners, victory had confirmed they were on God's side, fortifying their besetting smugness, and their religion resolved more and more into a pretty, reassuring background hum. Going to church meant sitting quietly and listening to lectures about virtue.

The founder of Citizens United, a right-wing political group, became Trump's deputy campaign manager in 2016 and has been credibly accused of operating a scam to rip off MAGA donors. A right-wing legal group that for a decade laid important groundwork for the Citizens United case was the James Madison Center, founded in 1997 by Senator Mitch McConnell with funds provided by Betsy DeVos.

technology that seems magical and miraculous can encourage and confirm credulous people's belief in make-believe magic and miracles.

He tells me I'm "the ultimate poster child for my generation—you have everything you could possibly want, sky's the limit, then you decide you've got to burn down the joint, you do all this lunatic shit, then you suddenly change your mind and decide, 'Nah, America's not so bad after all—waiter, I'll have another chardonnay,' tuck in to this sweet life, and get away with it all scot-fucking-free.

Compared to a decade ago, it's true, almost twice as many Americans say they don't believe in God. But consider the actual numbers: the total of agnostics and atheists has gone from extremely tiny (4 percent in 2007) to very tiny (7 percent in 2014). Those are percentages one otherwise finds in less-developed countries. If that is evidence for U.S. secularization, we are now just about as secular as, oh, Turkey.

During the more conservative 1950s, President Eisenhower, who fashioned himself a "modern Republican," had said that "only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice" and "hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass.

it was the sudden, shocking exposure of actual conspiracies starting in the 1970s that made Americans overcorrect, to assume that anything bad is the intentional result of some conspiracy. Which may make it harder, ironically, to expose and dismantle the rare real ones.