"We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the "other" side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it's on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin."
"Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don't know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt."
"An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances."
"But shame didn't stop those who disapproved of public services from using them."
"'Oh, liberals think that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers. They think we're racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat.'"
"He knew liberal Democrats wanted him to care more about welfare recipients, but he didn't want their PC rules telling him who to feel sorry for."
"For the Arenos, religious faith has moved into the very cultural space in which politics might have played a vital, independent role. Politics hand't helped, they felt, and the Bible surely had."
"The Arenos had become stay-at-home migrants. They had stayed. The environment had left."
"I think they overregulate the bottom because it's harder to regulate the top."
"I heard a great deal about freedom in the sense of freedom to - to talk on your cellphone as you drove a car, to pick up a drive-in daiquiri with a straw on the side, to walk about with a loaded gun. Bu there was almost no talk about freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic communities around the 'self regulated' plants."
"Just as Berkeley hippies of the 1960s felt proud to be "above consumerism," to demonstrate their higher ideals of love and world harmony - even though they often depended on the parental money they were 'above' - so too Mike Schaff and other Tea Party advocates seemed to be saying, 'I'm above the government and all its services' to show the world their higher ideals, even though they used a host of them."
"Liberals were telling Americans to 'feel sorry' for recipients, but those were coastal urban liberals trying to impose their feeling rules on older Southern and Midwestern Christian whites."
"This offers a much desired private sector social world - one party based on a different worship: work."
"Word from the Lake Charles pulpits seemed to focus more on a person's moral strength to endure than on the will to change the circumstances that called on that strength."
"Fox gives Madonna and others the news. It suggests what the issues are. It tells her what to feel afraid, angry, and anxious about."
"It's scary to look back; there are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well."
"Liberals are saying your ideas are outmoded, sexist, homophobic, but it's not clear what their values are."
"If you can no longer feel pride in the United States through its president, you'll have to feel American in some new way - by banding with others who feel as strangers in their own land."
"You are strangers in your own land. You do no recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored. And to feel honored you have to feel - and feel seen as - moving forward. But trough no fault of your own, and in ways that are hidden, you are slipping backward."
"racism refers to the belief in a natural hierarchy that places blacks at the bottom, and the tendency of whites to judge their own worth by distance from that bottom."
"Meanwhile, the nearly all-male ares of life - the police, the fire department, parts of the U.S. military, and the oil rigs - needed defending against this cultural erosion of manhood."
"All these social movements left one group standing in line: the older, white male, especially if such a man worked in a field that didn't particularly help the planet. He was - or was soon becoming - a minority too."
"On the heels of these movements for social change, a certain culture of victimization had crept in."
"Across the whole land, the idea is, handouts should stop. The richer around the nation will become free of the poorer. They will secede."
"Such scapegoating reinforces the joyous unity of the gathering. The act of casting out the 'bad one' helps fans unite in a shared sense of being the 'good ones,' the majority, no longer strangers in their own land."
"'The major fault line in American politics,' Reich predicts, 'will shift from Democrat versus Republican to anti-establishment versus establishment.' The line will divide those who 'see the game as rigged and those who don't'."
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