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81 " the Branch Davidians’ theology is not so different from that of a large fraction of Americans. We call Koresh a “cult leader,” which allows us to file him away reassuringly as a one-off nut, like Charles Manson or Jim Jones. But it’s important to recognize that his church was a long-standing subgroup of a 150-year-old Protestant denomination that is one of the twenty largest churches in America, with six thousand U.S. congregations.*1 "
― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
82 " That’s why Occupy was so cool at first,” Waverly says, “because it was actually different from what’d been done before. But most protests seem like cover versions of old songs. Like we’re all in a sixties tribute band. "
― Kurt Andersen , True Believers
83 " How much do companies use buybacks to fool shareholders and the markets about the actual health and prospects of their companies? How much do executives, each being paid with stock and options worth millions and sometimes hundreds of millions, use buybacks simply to enrich themselves? "
― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America
84 " If more Americans were to learn of the large body of research showing that higher inequality in rich countries isn’t just unfair but actually slows down economic growth—by a fifth since the 1980s, according to a 2014 study by the OECD—the remarkably strong support for Robin Hoodism might get even stronger. "
85 " The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” says the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016. “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.” The right’s ideological center of gravity careened way to the right of Rove and all Bushes, finally knocking them and their ilk aside. What had been its fantastical fringe became the GOP center. In retrospect, the sudden change in the gun lobby in the late 1970s, from more or less flexible to absolutely hysterical, was a harbinger of the transformation of the entire right a generation later. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve. "
86 " Almost immediately after World War II, our most important ally, the Soviet Union, became our most serious adversary-cum-enemy. For Americans in 1950, it was not delusional to worry about international Communist aggression or Soviet espionage in the United States. But that’s the problem with a conspiracist mindset. After some kernel of reality triggers exaggerated fears and a possible explanation, it grows into an imaginary labyrinth of all-powerful evil, an elaborate based-on-a-true-story fiction that passes for nonfiction, such as the fantasy that thousands of committed Communists were covertly using movies and TV shows to propagandize on behalf of Communism and the Soviet Union. Anti-Communism was realistic; McCarthyism was fantastical. "
87 " If Reagan’s story were fiction, it would seem absurdly pat and overdetermined, the irony too heavy-headed. Out of college during the Depression, he went straight to work for the new fantasy-industrial complex. In a Des Moines radio studio, he regularly pretended he was at Wrigley Field in Chicago, performing fake play-by-play broadcasts of Cubs games based on real-time wire-service descriptions. He visited Hollywood and got his first movie role — playing a radio announcer. During World War II he was an officer in the army — serving in the First Motion Picture Unit, stationed in Burbank and Culver City, where he starred in "This Is the Army," a movie in which he played a corporal who stages a piece of musical theater called "This Is the Army. "
88 " As I’ve said, there are left-wing believers in nonexistent conspiracies and other fantasies, but they’re not nearly as numerous or influential. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, after Bernie Sanders did better in some election-day exit polls than he did in the voting, some of his supporters were convinced a conspiracy had falsified the results. (In fact, exit polls always tend to oversample younger voters.) And while you might have considered Sanders’s leftism unrealistic or its campaign rhetoric hyperbolic (“the business model of Wall Street is fraud”), the campaign wasn’t based on outright fantasies. You may not want democratic socialism, but Denmark is a real country. "
89 " The top income tax rate for the wealthiest was cut from 70 to 50 percent in 1982. It would’ve been prudent to stop there for a while and see how that worked out. But no: in the second Reagan term, the top rate was cut again to 38.5 percent, then once more to 28 percent—along with a large reduction of the income threshold for the highest bracket, which meant that somebody making $1 million or $10 million a year would now be taxed at the same rate that a teacher or plumber was taxed on everything they earned above the equivalent of $40,000. "
90 " The Republican position is now to oppose even studying climate change as well as any and all proposals to reduce carbon emissions. Rational people may disagree about how governments might minimize or prepare for the effects of global warming. You are entitled to your own opinion. But refusing to accept its reality is a new and unacceptable posture. You are not entitled to your own facts. "
91 " oppose net tax increases,” “any and all” of them, for as long as they’re in office. "
92 " age twenty-nine the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which in 1986 made the Republicans’ antitax fixation official. "
93 " Norquist’s stroke of evil genius was to dream up at age twenty-nine the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which in 1986 made the Republicans’ antitax fixation official. "
94 " Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), funded over the years by the familiar (Koch, Olin, Scaife) right-wing foundations. "
95 " averages: a few times I’ve been in rooms with a hundred ordinary people and my acquaintance Warren Buffett, which meant the average person’s net worth in those rooms "
96 " If you’re young, and have grown up only since the Internet has been dissolving the distinctions between past and present and old and new, the sci-fi writer and futurist William Gibson says, “I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. "
97 " A note on averages: a few times I’ve been in rooms with a hundred ordinary people and my acquaintance Warren Buffett, which meant the average person’s net worth in those rooms was nearly $1 billion. "
98 " According to the health-efficiency index compiled by Bloomberg News, which combines longevity and healthcare spending into a single metric for almost every country, the United States is second from the bottom, better only than Bulgaria. "
99 " As one of those scholars recently summarized the corpus of studies and experiments, the more that change “makes people anxious about the world and their place in it” and causes “major disruptions and uncertainties in their lives,” then “the more they longed nostalgically…for the comparative safety and security of a perceived past. "
100 " From the 1940s through the ’70s—when our richest citizens were paying rates of 70 and 80 and 90 percent on the millionth dollars they earned each year—U.S. productivity and GDP per person and median household income after inflation all doubled. "