38 Quotes by Kurt Andersen

Such a colossal irony: after socialists and Communists in the 1930s and then the New Left in the 1960s had tried and failed to achieve a radical class-based reordering of the American political economy, the economic far right took its shot at doing that in the 1970s and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest hope or fear.

...In all this, financialization has done what people back in the 1950s and '60s and '70s worried and warned that the Communists would do if they took over: centralize control of the economy, turn Americans into interchangeable cogs serving an inhumane system, and allow only a well-connected elite to live well. Extreme Capitalism resembles Communism: yet another whopping irony.

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.

Anything remotely resembling news media is going to continue to migrate online until very little or none of it is produced on dead trees.

I often set two alarm clocks because I'm afraid the first one won't actually make me get up.

I think we tend to be kind of ahistorical, and think that life as we are living it in the moment is all we know.

Once a decade, once every eight years, Donald Trump finds some pretext to say I suck and that I'm bad.

The mistrust of government that blossomed in the late '60s has become a chronic and in some ways pathological condition.

When I talk to college students about Spy, it's like I'm describing something that happened in the 19th century. We were very lucky. We started Spy at a time when our generation had arrived at full adulthood and wanted to connect to its anti-establishment youth.