Susan Faludi Quotes

From the right, you get demagogues shouting about brown-skinned anchor babies and clamoring to deport the undocumented. From the left, you get advocacy for the oppressed but otherwise, when it comes to national civic identity, mainly silence.

The reason that America was a First World nation was that we had a First World population, and as we continue to be inundated with people from Third World nations, we are going to become a Third World nations….Desperate situations call for rash actions!

Referendums have often turned a country inward

Subjugated and dishonoured Germany came to generate that strange compound we have subsequently seen in many countries: harmless nostalgia for the past glories of the ‘people,’ combined with a lethal fantasy of their magnificent restoration.

Antisemitism comes more naturally to people of Conservative tendency, who suspect Jews of weakening national morale and diluting the national culture. Neo-Tories and political Catholics are always liable to succumb to antisemitism, at least intermittently.

Make America Great Again was a political slogan. It was used before, I believe Ronald Reagan used it before. It was about making America great and rallying America. Unfortunately, I would say 10 percent of the population that voted for President Trump has a different view. They have embraced it as 'Make America White Again.'

During the Brexit campaign there was a deficit of outrage.

The thing is, it's much easier to be a rightwing populist than a leftwing one, because the left always have to explain why things are the way they are. The right can just blame the foreigners.

We discovered that in connection with these figures the German national simpletons and money-grubbers of the Frankfurt parliamentary swamp always counted as Germans the Polish Jews as well, although this dirtiest of all races, neither by its jargon nor by its descent, but at most only through its lust for profit, could have any relation of kinship with Frankfurt.

Hatred is not essential for nationalism. Race hatred will kill the real national spirit.

I think it's fair to say there is a demagogic path that Europeans, South Americans, Asians have pursued, and we know where that leads. It uses xenophobia, it uses paranoia, it uses prejudice, it uses nationalism to really stir people up and to, you know, begin an us-versus-them contrast, which is dangerous and is not something we've had in our politics at a presidential level in America.

We're at a historical juncture: A growing number of people are declaring what has been achieved over the past decades in Europe to be wrong. They want to return to the nation-state. Sometimes there is even a blood and soil rhetoric that for me is starkly reminiscent of the interwar years of the past century, whose demons we are still all too familiar with.

Russia is a name usurped by the Muscovites. They are not Slavs; they do not belong to the Indo-Germanic race at all, they are des intrus [intruders], who must be chased back across the Dnieper, etc.

Trump's "Make America Great Again" program trumpets a national identity built on scapegoating, self-pity and grandiosity, and the promise of a strongman.

Political parties often take advantage of denial and fear in a moment of change. This is a well understood phenomenon that often leads to scapegoat-ism: blaming outsiders, such as immigrants, or racial and religious minorities. The phenomenon is behind Brexit and the violence in the political cycles in the US and EU.

Rebellion flamed up in her soul as the dark hours passed by – not because she had no future but because she had no past.

What is the appeal of Trump, really? It's nostalgic: "Make America great again." Like European nationalists, he has a vision of a "real" America, one which predates globalization, immigration, feminism, the civil rights movement and technological change, an imaginary 1950s to which we can now return. That is actually not very different from the kind of language that Marine Le Pen uses, or parts of the Brexit movement.

Fascistic leaders are aggressively macho and chauvinistic. They are xenophobic about people who they portray as outsiders or some sort of threat to the nation or as weaklings they can denounce.

It's dark and it's divisive - deporting 11 million people, talking about law and order, calling every group of people in America names, talking about cutting taxes on the wealthy, feeling like Donald Trump can bring more nuclear weapons into the world - I mean, everything he's talked about is a form of change.

Most comedians come from a dark past and have a lot of sadness.

Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.

Brexit for me was really interesting because I was in the heart of Yorkshire, which is a "leave" area. It was quite odd actually, a real deep sense of unease. You felt very odd for your country. You have lots of people that are angry. It's a very physical and public stand that these people are making.

If the Holocaust that you talk about was real, why don't you allow the subject to be studied? One can freely research any issue, except for this issue, which is sealed. It is a black box, which they do not allow to be opened or reexamined. They do this in order to exploit it.

There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. [Adolf] Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].

The Jews are the problem. The Jews are the cause of all the problems in the world.