45 Quotes by Nancy Isenberg

The theatrical performance of politicians who profess to speak for an “American People” do nothing to highlight the history of poverty.

Every era in the continent’s vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal.

Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft.

By 1770, fewer than 10 percent of white Virginians laid claim to over half the land in the colony; a small upper echelon of large planters each owned slaves in the hundreds. More than half of white men owned no land at all, working as tenants or hired laborers, or contracted as servants.

An astute observer wrote in 1924 that American voters preferred to “cherish the unrealities they have absorbed” based upon “the primal instinct to defeat the side they hate or fear.

Unlike Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the free market, Wilson’s dark hand represented the dangers of an unregulated economy: downward mobility and the ruin of countless lives.26.

We know, for instance, that Americans have forcefully resisted extending the right to vote; those in power have disenfranchised blacks, women, and the poor in myriad ways. We know, too, that women historically have had fewer civil protections than corporations. Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft: high-sounding rhetoric, magnified, and political leaders dressing down at barbecues or heading out to hunt game.

To modern conservatives, women are first and foremost breeders.

How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people?