42
" 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. "
― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America
48
" the story both overemphasized and underemphasized 1980, the definitive pivot point of Reagan’s election. The overemphasis was because I really hadn’t known about all the crucial advance work done by big business and the economic right during the 1970s—the decade of strategizing, funding, propagandizing, mobilizing, lobbying, and institution-building. My initial underemphasis was due to a different kind of ignorance. Because I’d lived through the 1980s and definitely noticed in real time, plain as day, the rapid and widespread uptick in deference to business and the rich and profits and the market, "
― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America
58
" In 1976 the Republicans were not yet the party of unhinged mystical anarchism they became over the next four decades. Rather, after the unhappiness, unfriendliness, cynicism, paranoia, and finally the high crimes of Richard Nixon, Americans were eager to install Mr. Rogers in the White House—that is, sincere, low-key, straightforward Jimmy Carter, a devoutly Protestant goody-goody complete with toothy smile and cardigan sweater whom Reston hadn’t even mentioned as a contender in his New Year’s election preview. "
― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America
60
" Four years later, in 2002, yet another influential memo about denying climate science circulated among Republicans, this one by the prominent strategist and pollster Frank Luntz. He advised them that so far their decade of climate-change-denial propaganda had been effective, but they needed to redouble it. “Voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community,” he wrote. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue,” and continue to “challenge the science.” Luntz recommended as well that Republican politicians use the term climate change rather than global warming, because “global warming has catastrophic communications attached to it,” whereas “climate change sounds [like] a more controllable and less emotional challenge. "
― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America