Sam Tanenhaus Quotes

This is the classic fight between the moderate Republicans who try to get to the middle by compromise and the conservative Republicans who try to create a new middle by driving the left away.

It's funny how the hippies and the punks tried to get rid of the conservatives, but they always seem to get the upper hand in the end.

Let's stand up. Let's speak with pride about our morals and our values and redouble our effort to elect more conservative Republicans.

In Texas, conservative policies win over stabbing fellow Republicans in the back.

Back during the campaign, there were a lot of questions: Is Trump really a conservative? A lot of questions about it.

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.

In terms of the conservative movement, I do think it would be foolish to deny that Trump has exposed certain aspects of that movement as less healthy than I thought or hoped.

The key to controlling your own political party, so that it does not eat you alive, is to realize that while Democratic and Republican leaders differ sharply, their voters do not.

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.

[The Democrats] can't stop [Donald] Trump. They are in the exact position that the Republicans were in in 2009 and 2010 with [Barack] Obama.

As one person said to me , Republicans know [Donald] Trump is a stain on their party.

If you think about conservative ideas, conservative principles, the fact that Donald Trump goes back at George W. Bush over weapons of mass destruction or gets into fights with the pope, and there's no outreach in terms of growth of the party. I think lots of people fear for the future of the party.

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

The Republican Party's reacting now to the news of [Donald] Trump's dominance in different ways. For some, they are pushing resistance.

I don't think Trump's a conservative, I'm certainly not going to support him.

Heaven's sakes, there's only one party which I call the Property Party. It's got two wings. One is called the "Republican" and one is called "Democratic." It is the same party so it makes no difference whether a Democrat's elected or a Republican's elected. The ownership remains the same.

Over the last 30 odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into the mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby... That's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and civil war re-enactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal.

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.

Twenty-two percent of Americans say their primary news source is Fox News. It's divided our country in a way that we haven't been divided probably since the Civil War, and its empowered large corporations to get certain kinds of politicians and ideologues who are in the United State Congress elected -- the Tea Party ideologues who control the Republican Party.

The Republicans have picked that as the one thing that they want to hang on to to try to gain some political stand, so they have to destroy what they call Obamacare. This is now not all the Republicans, it's a wing of the Republican Party, which is called conservative but in fact is just deeply reactionary.

There are no moderate Republicans left, with the exception of a few who would vote with us when it doesn’t make any difference,” Frank said. “It’s the most rigid ideological party since before the Civil War. … The bumper sticker I’m going to have printed up for Democrats this year is, ‘We’re not perfect, but they’re nuts.’

As one conservative intellectual said to me - he said if the choice is between [Joseph] Stalin and [Adolf] Hitler, I'd pick Stalin, meaning Ted Cruz because he's more predictable. So there's real civil war inside the Republican Party.

That's what the conservative movement has become, is basically an annex of the [Donald] Trump campaign.

The labour party is like a stage-coach. If you rattle along at great speed everybody inside is too exhilarated or too seasick to cause any trouble. But if you stop everybody gets out and argues about where to go next.

The great goal of the backlash is to nurture a cultural class war, and the first step in doing so, as we have seen, is to deny the economic basis of social class. After all, you can hardly deride liberals as society's "elite" or present the GOP as the party of the common man if you acknowledge the existence of the corporate world - the power that creates the nation's real elite, that dominates its real class system, and that wields the Republican Party as its personal political sidearm.