Anne Applebaum Quotes

My view on Democrats is that they're fascists disguised as liberals, or liberal moderates. You're not allowed to say anything they don't agree with. You're not allowed to do anything.

The more entrenched a party in power becomes, the less likely it is to allow the kind of diversity in views that helped it achieve power in the first place.

All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

The party where humorless thought police work to enforce a rigid ideological discipline isn't made up of Democrats. It comprises Republicans.

Do we want our state to be defined by the bankrupt and intolerant values of Donald Trump? Do we want the values of hyperpartisanship and obstruction that we see in the tea party Congress that Steve Pearce has embraced?

Everybody seems to be imprisoned in their own sectarian or political affiliations. They don't seem to be able to rise above these things.

Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years.

I have spent a good part of my life showing what an intellectual bubble the Left lives in.

Arguments only confirm people in their own opinions.

Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.

A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.

'The Sea Wolf' is the story of a man who believes only in brute force. He is so firm in belief in his own ideas that he despises all who disagree with him. He preaches the doctrine of intolerance. He flaunts the notion that democracy is anything but weakness.

It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know.

People of a certain political view tend to read material of only that point of view … except to cast contempt on the other points of view.

Our society has lost its taste for complexity and nuance…. We want simple answers …. We have almost disabled our politicians from speaking.

Stalin is too coarse, and this fault, though tolerable in dealings among us Communists, becomes unbearable in a General Secretary. Therefore I propose to the comrades to find some way of removing Stalin from his position and appointing somebody else who differs in all respects from Comrade Stalin in one characteristic-namely, someone more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and considerate to his comrades, less capricious, etc.

I don’t care for ideological people. It’s like those people just want to stop thinking.

We are so ready to find evidence agaist our political opponents that it snuffs out our charity and possible doubt.

[…] the underlying problem is the soft progressive totalitarianism that seeks to compel submission to its creed. A powerful cultural establishment, now reinforced by political dominion in Washington, won’t tolerate deviance. Instead of learning to live at peace with the reality of pluralism, the essence of a successful democracy, it demands concordance with all of its ever-changing strictures. It ascribes dissent not to honest disagreement, differing experiences, diverse intellectual traditions or the basic human instinct for autonomy, but to malice and ignorance.

Conservatives literally view it as a kind of a weakness to talk to people other than their own. Nothing would bore me more than to sit around talking and listening to a bunch of liberals all day.

Research shows that if people are talking and listening to like-minded others, they become more dogmatic, more unified, and more extreme. Personalized Facebook experiences are a breeding ground for misunderstanding and miscommunication across political lines and, ultimately, for extremism.

The fact is that Democrats cannot stand dissent.

It's these leftwing people, who always put themselves above the rest, who are fascists.

We want to have our beliefs, and we want to enforce them on everyone else, but we don't want to have to think about everything that comes along with it.

Because a lot of people really associate liberalism and Democrats with tolerance, and I found it to be quite the opposite. They're tolerant as long as you agree with them! I felt like not only was I tolerant, I was curious and open-minded.