Alexandra Petri Quotes

We're seeing quite a lot of people who really would like a return to class-based politics.

The Republicans always do a good job of dividing and conquering. They do a really good job of making black folks, poor white folks, and Hispanics not like each other.

Have you heard a single national figure tell you all of the crises of the recent past are not economic, they're cultural?

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.

No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others.

Our greatest political disease -- the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the relatively rich and the relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on?

The political tendencies of the various social classes are based on a correct practical instinct.

Our country is too big for union, too sordid for patriotism, too democratic for liberty.

Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.

Trump critics such as myself have been accused of living in a bubble. On the contrary, it is Trump's supporters in the 1 percent who breathed their own fumes.

The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite.

We all know liberals and Democrats who look down on certain people, and there is such a thing as P.C.

The Democratic Party has become the party of the coastal elite, and the Republican Party is the party of the working class and that average American citizen who's been struggling over the past eight years with Obama in the White House.

The Democratic Party tends to have this hypereducated ruling-class mentality, and we need to realize that's not making us connect with a lot of voters.

Maybe this is my left-wing conspiracy theory, but the right has re-branded itself as kind of the everyman party: Who's the person you'd rather have a beer with? The Republican Party, even though it's a party of incredible wealth and corporate interests, has hidden behind this everyman quality.

It is no accident that the place that lends itself to creating conflicts between the dominant order of thought and people who want to speak their minds freely is the college campus, where conservatives feel outnumbered and crushed by a system of higher education that believes in academic freedom for me, not for thee.

I think there are phrases that are exciting to a certain group within the Democratic Party but scare the crap out of other people.

I think the media has portrayed conservatives as these cold, heartless people who want poor people to die and let half the population starve and all this. They've done that so effectively because they've owned the narrative for so long.

You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

The majority decision constitutionalizes a distinction between a red leather pouch and a paper bag that is necessarily based at least in some part on economic and class differences and perceptions.

There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater.

For too many of us, it's become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or on college campuses, or places of worship or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it's true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.