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“A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.”
― Robert Reich

“[Author's Note:] It took me four years to research and write this novel, so I began long before talk about migrant caravans and building a wall entered the national zeitgeist. But even then I was frustrated by the tenor of the public discourse surrounding immigration in this country. The conversation always seemed to turn around policy issues, to the absolute exclusion of moral or humanitarian concerns. I was appalled at the way Latino migrants, even five years ago - and it has gotten exponentially worse since then - were characterized within that public discourse. At worst, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings. People with the agency to make their own decisions, people who can contribute to their own bright futures, and to ours, as so many generations of oft-reviled immigrants have done before them.”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.”
― George Packer

“The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, Name-Dropping

“It’s not just tougher out there. It’s become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work. It makes no difference if you have a ‘Dâ€� or an ‘Râ€� after your name. There’s no sense that this is about democracy, and after the election you have to work together, and knit the country together. The people in the game now just think to the first Tuesday in November, and not a day beyond it.”
― Peter Hart

“America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.”
― Pew Research Center, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“For an entire wing of the G.O.P., a dysfunctional government, whose only visible activity is mismanaging crises, is not an embarrassment but the vindication of a worldview.”
― Amy Davidson

“I'm [Paul O'Neill] an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me.”
― Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill

“There's no evidence from decades of Pew Research surveys that public opinion, in the aggregate, is more extreme now than in the past. But what has changed -- and pretty dramatically -- is the growing tendency of people to sort themselves into political parties based on their ideological differences.”
― Pew Research Center, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“And there was a deeper, less visible effect of the Truman loyalty program. Seeing its consequences for certain individuals and fearing its intrusion on their own lives, many in the government sought protection by strongly asserting their anti-Communism. In the public action that ensued, policy was based not on reality but, instinctively or deliberately, on personal caution...Those who urged a militant and sometimes military anti-Communism were considered sound, trustworthy and personally safe; those who questioned such a course were politically unsafe, possible even slightly disloyal.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, Name-Dropping

“To understand what's happening in the U.S. presidential election of 2016, you need to know what's going on in the year 2024! Soundscape: Where hearing is believing.”
― Royce Flippin

“Especially appealing to the planter elite was the conservatism of the American Revolution. Indeed, according to their reading, it had been so conservative that it hardly deserved the title of revolution at all. The goal had been simple political independence, and the issue of home rule had not expanded to include the dangerous question of who should rule at home. The men who made the revolution had maintained control in victory.”
― James L. Roark, Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction

“What's surprising about the 2016 election results isn't what happened. It's what didn't happen. Trump didn't lose by 30 points or win by 20 points. Most people who voted chose the same party in 2016 that they'd chosen in 2012. That isn't to say there was nothing at all distinct or worthy of study. Crucially, white voters without college educations swung sharply toward Trump, and their overrepresentation in electorally key states won him the election. But the campaign, by the numbers, was mostly a typical contest between a Republican and a Democrat. The fact that voters ultimately treated Trump as if he were just another Republican speaks to the enormous weight party polarization now exerts on our politics.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The Civil War was only one hundred years in the past at the time the Civil Rights Act passed, and during that interregnum, the white South had been trying to balance its top domestic priority - the enforcement of white supremacy - with its forced membership in the broader United States. The southern Democratic Party was the vehicle through which the white South negotiated that tension. Put simply, the southern Democratic Party was an authoritarian institution that ruled autocratically in the South and that protected its autonomy by entering into a governing coalition with the national Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats gave the national Democrats the votes they needed to control Congress, and the national Democrats let the Dixiecrats enforce segregation and one-party rule at home.

The Dixiecrat-Democrat pact is a powerful reminder that there are worse things than polarization, that what's now remembered as a golden age in American politics was purchased at a terrible cost.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“If they wanted to understand our constitutional history, they should read ‘The Federalist,â€� but if they really want to understand American politics, they should read the antifederalists.”
― David E Price, The Congressional Experience: An Institution Transformed