Will Bunch > Quotes

“Ironically, this *was* a kind of apocalypse—not the one that Tea Parties and their allies like Paul Broun had been warning about, but a different kind, a complete breakdown of Washington's ability to get anything done, even staring in the face of serious problems that required complex solutions, and some eventual compromise.”
― Will Bunch, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

“These hard-core conservative and their very own 'days of rage' should not have been that surprising. For a year now, the likes of Glenn Beck had been telling them that the backlash had the power to prevail over the dark forces of socialism (or worse), that 'we surround them'—but that the consequences of failure could be catastrophic, possibly signaling the death of the Republic itself. The reality that—as Obama himself mocked—no such thing was happening was not a source of reassurance but a trigger for even greater anger. A movement that was built atop a pyramid of so much misinformation was not well equipped to deal with the contradictions of its core beliefs, even—or especially—when they became apparent to the rest of the world.”
― Will Bunch, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

“The seeming power of a unified minority in Washington with just enough votes to thwart Obama was also a source of strength and, arguably, arrogance and self-importance. Even after Brown's election, the Democrats held 59 percent of the U.S. Senate, 59 percent of the House of Representatives, and 100 percent of the White House. But the GOP's forty-one Senate votes—representing, it must be noted, no more than 37 percent of the American public (thanks to Republican popularity in smaller states)—seemed paramount, because it offered just enough votes to kill any piece of legislation through the delaying tactic known as the filibuster. These representatives of 37 percent of the country wielded unprecedented powers because of something the likes of which this nation had never seen before: their ability to stick together on every single issue with the sole purpose of obstructing Barack Obama and his Democratic allies. It was an 'I Hope He Fails' strategy hatched in the ratings-driven studios of talk radio, but now rigid legislative fealty to the on-air musings of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck had ground Washington to a total halt.”
― Will Bunch, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

“He was “authentic.”
― Will Bunch, The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream

“often perplexing their parents, who hewed to more traditional liberalism.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Like many Jewish Americans, she didn’t lose any close family members in the Holocaust but heard grim tales of more distant relatives, and read other horror stories from the war years. Those feelings were triggered as she watched Trump on the 2016 campaign trail, lashing out against Mexicans and other immigrants and stoking violence at his rallies.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Ultimately, changing America for good will start with changing our mindset, the one that arbitrarily—and foolishly, we can now see—picked the age of eighteen for flipping the switch that turns education and growth from a public responsibility into a private one,”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Nobody knew anymore where this thing was headed—toward a second American Revolution of just the next school board election in Sussex County.”
― Will Bunch, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

“Public approval of scientific research spiked to 88 percent in the mid-1950s. It would never be that high again.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“the eighteen-year-old cutoff for free public education seems not only arbitrary but cruel.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“The then-teenager was blown away by the curvaceous, modernist design of Temple’s student-activities center—so much so that it made him want to learn more about architecture.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“College started becoming more expensive and less accessible right at the very moment it became critical for getting a good job.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“a bill offering aid to returning troops would be stacked against women;”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party make me feel bad about myself . . . Donald Trump makes me feel good about who I am.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Yes, shifting the burden to make higher education a public good would look very expensive on paper. But how can we afford not to?”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“women also hold a greater proportion of America’s $1.7 trillion college debt burden.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“People are looking for outlets—as we become more digitized, we become more isolated from tactile experiences, yet a lot of people want and need that.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“And the smart elites who promoted this myth of a meritocracy apparently weren’t bright enough to see that that resentment would become the driving political force of the twenty-first century.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Americans saw college through the narrowness of their carefully constructed silos.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“The revolution comes when young people throughout the world take control of their own lives and when people everywhere begin to look each other in the eyes and say hello, without fear. This is the revolution, this is the strength, and with this behind us no politician or general will ever stop us. We shall win!”
― Will Bunch, The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream

“Today, we’ll need to address the societal inequality caused by our past mistakes in failing to provide growth opportunities to all of our young people.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“America’s failure to invest properly in its most valuable, and most fragile, human infrastructure—its young people awkwardly entering adulthood—can only be seen as a gobsmacking failure.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“In Pennsylvania, high public-college tuition caused largely by lack of political support meant that student borrowers had the second-highest average debt of any state,”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“It also seriously undercuts the Reagan myth by showing that when it came to governing, it was the president's often practical side that ruled the day, and that it was this, not his radical conservative instincts, that had the lasting positive impact.”
― Will Bunch, Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future

“In 2020, two psychologists published a survey of the American class divide when it came to happiness; in 1972, the difference between people with or without bachelor’s degrees had been very small, but it had steadily grown to a huge gulf by 2016, the year that, coincidentally or not, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Pennsylvania—spent more money on incarceration than on higher education. That’s the inevitable outcome when a resentful society would rather lock away its young people, like the ones I met sweating and spreading mulch in a West Philadelphia park, than make the effort to give them a second chance.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“Consumed with protecting their gains in both economic and social status, baby boomers and to some degree Gen Xers have been left bewildered”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“large numbers not only faced food insecurity around not having enough to eat—nearly a third at the four-year schools”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“every generation or so, America’s leaders made a consequential decision that moved the nation further and further from the G.I. Bill’s promise that higher education could be a public good.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

“But the government’s college debt was priceless on paper—because Congress could use the make-believe future repayments to balance the budget. To the Congressional Budget Office, the phantom revenue of skyrocketing loans that could never possibly be repaid became an asset and thus a form of “deficit control.”
― Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It