Quote #29

Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, 'taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power.' History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration.

More from Christopher Hitchens

  1. There is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of 'little guy' or 'silent majority' rhetoric, and it is very…
  2. The reading public isn't born that doesn't think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister.
  3. It was an axiom of 'containment' that no part of the known world could be considered neutral. 'Neutralism' was among the Cold Warriors' gra…
  4. The conservative aptitude for stressing the 'individual responsibility' of all parties except themselves.
  5. We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual obse…
  6. The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. 'Mr.…
  7. It is rather a pity, considered from the standpoint of the professional politician or opinion-taker, that nobody knows exactly what 'credib…
  8. What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while t…

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