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Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen Biography

Novelist

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“Very few people I knew voted for Reagan, but given that he didn't do anything crazy and started making peace with the Soviet Union, affluent college-educated people, liberals and otherwise, didn't disagree very ferociously about politics in the 1980s and '90s, and certainly not about economics. In retrospect, that rough consensus looks like the beginning of an unspoken class solidarity among the bourgeoisie--nearly everyone suspicious of economic populism, but some among us, the Republicans, more suspicious that the rest. Affluent college-educated people, Democrats as well as Republicans, began using the phrase socially liberal but fiscally conservative to describe their politics, which meant low taxes in return for tolerance of ...whatever, as long it didn't cost affluent people anything. It was a libertarianism lite that kept everything nice and clubbable and, unlike Republican conservatism, at least had the virtue of ideological consistency.”

CulturePoliticsSocietyEconomics
Book:Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America
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“Mutual fund companies are reincarnated equivalents of the excessively powerful trusts that made us enact antitrust laws in the first place. Economists and others across the ideological spectrum now worry about the effects of this new stratum of command and control. Because mutual funds have controlling interests in the big dominant competitors in almost every major business—food, drugs, airlines, telecommunications, banking, seeds, whatever—they aren't naturally inclined to make those rival companies compete aggressively against one another.”

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Book:Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
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“The Puritans are conventionally considered more "moderate" than the Pilgrims. This is like calling al-Qaeda more moderate than ISIS. The Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans were no less mad... They forbade Church of England clergy from setting foot in their new American theocracy in Boston and Salem, hung Quakers, and passed a law to hang any Catholic priests who might dare show up.”

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Book:Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
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“Maybe the reality-based fractions of red and blue America are reaching a sort of consensus: Just as Republicans are beginning to get why George Bush makes so many Americans want to rip their hair out, a lot of Democrats have finally, viscerally come to understand Clinton-loathing. Mutual, symmetrical disillusionment; it's a start.”

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Author:Kurt Andersen
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“I'm comparing Americans to international peers in terms of GDP, educational system - the sort of benchmarks we used to designate a so-called developed society. In that sense, we are outliers. Are we suckers? Yes, but it's not just that. That puts too fine a point on what I am saying. We're not idiots and victims. It's about us as a people, compared with, say, Canadians, believing whatever we believe because, well, we're Americans, we feel this way without regard for what scholars and scientists say.”

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Author:Kurt Andersen
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