Bret Stephens Quotes

I understand Tea Partyers' anger with the system, but they are in way over their heads and often racially motivated, and I can't be part of that.

The right-wing of the Republican party isn't so much a political agenda as a plea for help.

You do not compromise with the right wing of the Republican party.

I was raised a Republican but I don’t recognize a once proud party that has been hijacked by extremists who are driving it off the flat earth that they pretend we are living on.

There is so much partisan and tribal politics, from not just those seeking office but potential voters as well, that we never get real attempts at solutions to problems.

My own students say they don't trust anyone who voted for Trump. How can you have a democracy with that?

Some of the most hard-working, generous people I've met in my whole life didn't really want to vote for him but did. My calling is to step onto the other side and humanise and portray the struggles of many Trump voters.

There's a real sense - that we have to get past on the left - that every person who voted for Trump is evil.

Trump's divisive rhetoric targets low-information voters and won't play well with the general public, either.

I don't see anything that could happen that could turn Never Trumpers into Trumper voters. They're two dug in on the whole concept that Trump is not even a human being in the realm of politics. That Trump is just the worst guy ever to want to be in politics. He's just repulsive, he's repugnant, he's crass, he's all these things.

It strikes me that presidential campaigns can often bring out the worst as well as the best in us.

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

You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly, highly polarised. It's right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed.

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.

I was ranked the second most conservative member in the House.

People are fed up with the politics where candidates just rip each other apart and then the voters lose in the end because no one really knows what anybody stands for.

I hate Republicans and everything they stand for.

I think it has done us more harm believing in the huge differences between left and right, Democrat and Republican.

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.

I mean, look, we're living in a country where you can't have a non-denominational response. If you're slightly critical of either party, all of the partisans jump on you like you're a lunatic.

In the United States I have always believed that there was a big difference between Conservative and stupid. Boy is it getting harder to prove that one by the minute.

That's what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.

When elected officials and others contribute to a climate and culture that fosters hyper-partisanship, we've got to blow the whistle.

Partisanship particularly increased after the 1994 elections and then the appearance of the first unified Republican government since the 1950s.

I don't trust liberals, I trust conservatives.