For conservative leaders, making candidates pay them court, publicly and ostentatiously, is a colossal source of their symbolic power before their followers. It's kabuki theater, mostly.

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• Rick Perlstein:

  Ronald Reagan never did much to make abortion illegal. He did, however, deliver videotaped greeting

• Rick Perlstein:

  Bill de Blasio was swept to the New York mayoralty on the promise of getting Gracie Mansion out fro

• Rick Perlstein:

  Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exi

• Rick Perlstein:

  Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state

• Rick Perlstein:

  Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.

• Rick Perlstein:

  Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential imag

• Rick Perlstein:

  History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich b

• Rick Perlstein:

  Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions.

• Rick Perlstein:

  When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became

• Rick Perlstein:

  Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed.