Quotes About Politics

backlash leaders systematically downplay the politics of economics. The movement's basic premise is that culture outweighs economics

The people can't find Syria on a map, they think God created humans one day in their existing form, and if you give them half a chance, they will go out and vote for a charlatan like Donald Trump.

Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may "matter most" to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money

In only one area have the Cons achieved a tangible, real-world victory. Their intractable hostility to taxes of all kinds has successfully brought disaster on the state government.

Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, who ran for president as a Democrat in 1976.

This much is clear, though, from the elections of the last ten years: those parts of Johnson County with the lowest per capita income and lowest median housing values consistently generated the strongest support for the conservative faction. The areas with the highest income and highest real-estate values—Mission Hills and Leawood—were just as reliably loyal to the moderate machine.22 The more working-class an area is, the more likely it is to be conservative. This

conservatism's populist myth.

While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.

They took all three leadership positions in the Kansas house and introduced what they called a "Contract with Kansas," a solemn pledge to send more convicts to the chair while defending the fetus.

Although the Cons vituperate against the high and the mighty, the policies they help enact—deregulating, privatizing—only serve to make the Mods higher and mightier still. And while it may hurt the Mods' feelings to overhear their secretaries referring to them as RINOs, the many rounds of tax cuts the Cons have accomplished have surely made the sting subside. The Mods win even when they lose.

Few of the writers I have described in this chapter are meticulous or systematic thinkers. Their theories don't hold water; their books are jam-packed with errors and omissions and preposterous interpretations. But backlash readers don't mind; theirs is an intensely personal politics

What is certain is that the liberalism of scolding will never give rise to the kind of mass movement that this country needs.

WHAT THESE EXAMPLES show us is a generation of centrist liberals collectively despairing over democracy itself. After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then, after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda, Democrats turned against the idea of "the people" altogether.17

the people at the top know what they have to do to stay there, and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.

When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people—when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people—issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns.

The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.

The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

The only greater evil than separation... is living under a government of discretion

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government

The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite

The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.