Eric Alterman Quotes

The bottom line is, there're a lot of conservatives that don't feel Donald Trump is conservative, right? Or, he's not their brand of conservatism... and there's a lot of people who don't have a seat on the inside who used to have a seat on the inside.

The Democrats don't like the Tea Party because the Tea Party engineered their defeat. The Republicans, some members, don't like the Tea Party because the Tea Party illustrates what they have to do to win and they're not really comfortable with that.

There is no such thing as a moderate Republican anymore.

Conservatives were brought up to hate deficits and justifiably so. We've long thought there are two things in Washington that are unbalanced - the budget and the liberals.

The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.

Paul Ryan and his allies, who include Mike Pence, are congressional conservative Republicans, they have a very clear conservative agenda. The question will be who has to bend more to accommodate the other - Mr. Trump accommodate their ideology, or will they have to accommodate his? And if he can rally audiences behind him, we could see a very interesting intra-party war of a kind we haven't seen in a really long time.

When American liberals go to the UK they see the Tories as the Washington Generals, and they see the Labor Party as the Harlem Globetrotters, and they love that. Total power. Whether anything works or not is irrelevant. We work.

We have an extreme rightwing government in Britain, although it's called the Labour government. That's confused a lot of people, but it's confusing them less and less.

There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans.

The color of communism was not red but gray.

You can't go out and adopt Democrat policies all the way or halfway to show that you're not what they think you are.

Men who sincerely abhorred the word Communism in the pursuit of common ends found that they were unable to distinguish Communists from themselves…. For men who could not see that what they firmly believed was liberalism added up to socialism could scarcely be expected to see what added up to Communism. Any charge of Communism enraged them precisely because they could not grasp the differences between themselves and those against whom it was made.

This is the Democratic paradox: You want so much to run America and yet you seem not so fond of Americans.

The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can't believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.

The more people that understand and are made able to spot liberalism, and then the more people are able to associate liberalism with the problems in their lives, the political problems, the economic problems, the more people can be conditioned and educated to understand that liberalism is the problem, coupled with the ability to spot it, would be the fastest way to eradicate it. It would be really helpful if we had a Republican Party engaged in this.

I guess you'd say, including the - what I just spoke about, the learning that liberalism isn't quite as liberal as it pretends to be.

The Right said, [Barack Obama] is lying, he's a socialist who pals around with terrorists, he's a secret Muslim and blah blah blah. That was their line. The liberals all said, He's winking at me, I can feel him winking in my direction. He wasn't winking. He said exactly who he was and he's lived that out perfectly.

In Washington I'm thought of as a conservative, but in Tennessee I'm thought of as a Bolshevik.

The only way you can ever accuse a Conservative of hypocrisy is if they walk past a homeless person without kicking him in the face.

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.

The [media] coverage is always, "Will [Democrats] get it? Will they get what they want?" And, really, it's even worse than that. It's not, "Will they get it?" It's "How soon will they get it, and what are the villains gonna do to try to stop them from getting it?"

Because I'm criticizing liberalism, people automatically call me a conservative. This is madness! The idea that somehow one cannot critique liberalism from the left, from the left wing of liberalism. I mean, how can people be so stupid?

The Democrat Party today is not enamored of Bill Clinton. They may not even be enamored of Hillary [Clinton]. But the things that jazzed Democrats back in the nineties are nowhere near the things that jazz the Democrats of today.

We have as the president of the United States one of the most radical leftists that's even ever run for office [Barack Obama]. Certainly the most radical, extreme leftist ever to be president. But if people are not told that, they're not going to believe it.

Fascism allegation [to Donald Trump] is not coming from the left. This is coming from the right. It's coming from inside the Republican Party and from within mainstream conservative thought.