Frank Schaeffer Quotes

I would like to share with you my plan to destroy America…. I would invest in ethnic identity and victimology. I would get them to think that their lack of success was only the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry.

In this post-post-racial, post-Obama era of resurgent populism and Balkanized identity politics, it really does feel as though it matters - and matters more than anything else - whether you're black or white.

Trump is dividing people against each other; he's going to try and sow racial division; so you have to figure out an answer. I think really the only answer for the Democratic Party, or for progressives at large, is to have an answer about how these people who haven't been to college, who haven't had a lot of things given to them in life, are going to do better, year after year after year.

Under Donald Trump, you know, we've seen the foundation of the Republican Party move into the Democratic Party, so Donald Trump, I think, will have a lot of trouble moving things through Congress.

I think I will be doing very well during the election with evangelicals and with Christians.

In a sense, whites who were always sort of the unthinking majority who didn't think of themselves necessarily as one among many interest groups but is simply the dominant group, now as whites become - are close to becoming a minority of Americans, are becoming a political interest group. And that's what Donald Trump is playing to. And it's a really dangerous, volatile game.

I think Ted Cruz is a very mean-spirited guy. You can see it from how the Republican Party responds to him.

Politics is based on social identity, and so, again, there is going to be differences between rural and urban and between left and right.

Byrd, the former Klu [sic] Klux Klan Kleagle, is taking a stand over states' rights, or his rights over State, or some such. Whatever the reason, the sight of an old Klansman blocking a little colored girl from Birmingham from getting into her office contributed to the general retro vibe that hangs around the Democratic Party these days.

I think it's a healthy thing for the Democratic Party to go through some reflection.

I don't see tribalism ever really disappearing entirely. I just think that people are almost hardwired to identify as groups. And that sort of group identity always runs the risk of being chauvinistic.

Liberalism has become a special kind of stupid, and it's on full display now, which I think ultimately has the potential to be a good thing.

What I don't want to see my Democratic party do is to begin to talk down towards white men, as if their concerns are not legitimate and that we shouldn't be listening to a lot of their aspirations and hopes as well.

What Donald Trump has done is to make it possible for people who had racist, sexist, and all kinds of prejudices and bigotry to put them right out there.

I have become the poster child for calling all the Trump people racists, when, in fact, I don't think they're all racists, but they tolerated racism. And that's a problem.

I think is interesting is that term is so pejorative or understood to be so pejorative and there's a real difference between how Republicans, it seems to me, think of that and how Democrats do. I don't think Democrats feel as negatively about the Democratic Party establishment as Republicans do feel about their party's establishment.

I think for the foreseeable future we have to disabuse ourselves of any ideas of unifying, or coming together, or all getting along. I don't think we're going to reconcile the America that elected the first African American president with the America that just elected a president avidly endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan - I'm not sure I even want to reconcile the two.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

You have two people who I would classify as extremists. Donald Trump because of his behavior and Ted Cruz because of his views, leading the Republican Party.

Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don't think the two mix.

My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all.

I think it is important that we go and bring both of the parties together. The more we go to the left, the more we go to the right, I believe of what President Eisenhower said, "Politics is like the road. The left and the right represents the gutter, and the middle is drivable."

I think Trump has had a very strong and disturbing effect on the country already. He has given more legitimacy to white supremacy and even to neo-fascist groups, and he's created a pervasive atmosphere that's more vague but still significant. I don't believe that he can in his own way destroy the country, just as he can't eliminate climate awareness, but he can go a long way in bringing - well, in stimulating what has always been a potential.

I think his [Bernie Sanders] campaign was good for the Democratic Party, good for our country. And I know how passionate he is about the issues he cares about. So we'll have a long list of matters to discuss when we sit down.

We [Democrats] have become a party of assembling all these different groups, the women's caucus and the black caucus and the Hispanic caucus and the lesbian-gay-transgender caucus and so forth, and that doesn't relate to people out in rural America.