Todd Gitlin Quotes

We have seen this complete right wing takeover of modern liberalism, and it is an ugly spectacle to behold.

It matters not one iota what political party is in power or what President holds the rein of office. We are not politicians, or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all our tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connections, our purchased Senators, our hungry Congressmen, and our public-speaking demagogues, into the scale against any legislation, any political platform, any Presidential campaign that threatens the integrity of our estate.

I'd say putting another Clinton in the White House is only going to make that right-wing extremism greater. We will see more of these neoliberal policies, like Wall Street deregulation, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Hillary has always supported. She's changed her tune a little bit, but Hillary has walked the walk.

The candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism.

We live in a time when all elites, whether on the left or the right, believe in rigid rules that say there is no alternative to the present political and economic system.

Little things had to go wrong for Donald Trump to become president: Comey, emails, all that stuff. Big things did make Trump possible. Big, cultural, political, economic forces opened the door to someone like Trump.

To some extent, the mainstream's absence means the Tea Party is the Republican Party.

The greatest propaganda coup of the American Right has been to convince its citizens that we are in the grip of a liberal conspiracy.

I don't know how it could be more stark or clear: this entire society is being dominated by corporate power in a way that may exceed what happened in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century.

When Reagan was elected, I felt that the Agency had gone much more into the service of a political tendency in the country with which I had already felt very strong disagreement.

We're the Fascist States of America today, not the United States of America, because the corporations are in power.

I think if you look all across the country, the so-called Blue Dogs are all gone to kennel. There are no more Blue Dogs, they're called Republicans. People would rather elect consistently conservative Republicans than Blue Dogs, who are only conservative when it's convenient.

They plan to ride into the White House on the Sweet Talk Express. Well, think again. Bush and Cheney are not compassionate conservatives. They are ruthless reactionaries.

A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.

Corporations are the new dictators.

The reactionary percentage of the electorate in these United States has been relatively constant since McCarthy's day; I'd estimate it as hovering around 30 percent. A minority, but one never all that enamored of the niceties of democracy - they see themselves as fighting for the survival of civilization, after all.

Big corporations have money and power to make sure every rule breaks their way; people have voices and votes to push back.

The Republican Party has become the party of one branch of one religion.

There is nothing wrong with God, and the flag is good as is the family, but what I resent is that the Republicans use these as a cover for their support of big money.

I used to think that James Kilpatrick and Barry Goldwater were really conservative, but now we’ve got people to the right of them. They want to use government to be punitive.

One party is under the ironclad control of Wall Street and the other one caters to Wall Street.

The [Republican] party has no future. It can’t win with a base that is at war with math, physics, human biology, economics, and common-sense gun laws all at the same time.

The Republican and Democratic parties are alike capitalist parties — differing only in being committed to different sets of capitalist interests.

I see particular commonalities in the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Globalization and trade liberalization were supposed to make us all better off through the mechanism of trickle-down economics. What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics, as we moved ever closer to a system of 'one dollar, one vote' as opposed to 'one person, one vote.'