Quotes About Society

Yes, Democrats can prove that America pays more for health care than other countries yes, they have won the dispute that private health insurance is needlessly expensive. But what they've lost is the argument that we are a society.

What were we saying to the country, to our young people, when we lowered capital gains taxes and raised taxes on those who earned their living by working?," asked Joseph Stiglitz: "That it is far better to make your living by speculation than by any other means."39

And although they like to fancy themselves rugged individualists (better yet, the last of the rugged individualists), what they really are is a personality type that our society generates so predictably and in such great numbers that they almost constitute a viable market segment all on their own. One more thing about the backlash personality type: every single one of the bitter self-made men of my youth was a believer in the power of positive thinking.

Thomas Frank

LAWRENCE GOODWYN, THE great historian of mass democratic uprisings, once wrote that to build a movement like the People's Party of the 1890s or the labor movement of the 1930s, one must "connect with people as they are in society, that is to say, in a state that sophisticated modern observers are inclined to regard as one of 'inadequate consciousness.' "5

Mark Lilla evokes the feeling well in a sympathetic 1998 summary of conservative thinking. It is not that anyone thinks that incivility, promiscuity, drug use, and irresponsibility are good things. But we have become embarrassed to criticize them unless we can couch our objections in the legalistic terms of rights, the therapeutic language of self-realization, or the economic jargon of efficiency.

Or is it the other way around—are they supposed to serve us? Let us resolve to ask that far-reaching question again: For whom does America exist? This time around, there can be only one possible answer.

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

I honestly thought that Mission Hills, with its castellated palazzi, was normal and that other places were the aberration. I played with the tots of millionaires and convinced myself that America was a classless society, where all that mattered was ability and one's willingness to work.

conservatism's populist myth.

But it is a class war in which, as David Brooks puts it, there is "no class resentment or class consciousness." The paradox—a class divide in which class doesn't matter—is repeated virtually without fail through the "two Americas" literature

Another thing this spokesman tells me is that more Kansans need to go to jail. In Kansas, he says, the "rate of incarceration went up forty-four percent in the nineties. In the rest of the nation, it went up 71.7 percent. So we are not putting people in jail" at the same rate as other states.

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.

To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you'll need in the society of the future.

Professional-class liberals aren't really alarmed by oversized rewards for society's winners; on the contrary, this seems natural to them -- because they are society's winners. The liberalism of professionals just does not extend to matters of inequality; this is the area where soft hearts abruptly turn hard.

Then there are disturbing reports like the recent study showing that, in terms of wealth, black and Hispanic college graduates actually "fared significantly worse" in the late recession than did members of those groups who hadn't gone to college. The people in question were the ones who did everything right, who went through life the way our society instructs us to, and they were punished for it.

Deleting welfare didn't eliminate poverty itself. We might as well have expected to conquer aging by overturning Social Security.

We're all free agents in this noncoercive class system, and Brooks eventually concludes that worrying about the problems faced by workers is yet another deluded affectation of the blue-state rich.

No matter where I go - London, Beirut, Jerusalem, Washington, Beijing, or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better, not pull them apart.

Though bachelors be the strongest stakes, married men are the best binders, in the hedge of the commonwealth.

Let him who expects one class of society to prosper in the highest degree, while the other is in distress, try whether one side of the face can smile while the other is pinched.

Do as most do, and men will speak well of you.

Let him who expects one class of society to prosper into highest degree, while the other is in distress, try whether one side of his face can smile while the other is pinched.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.