Mike Lofgren > Quotes

“Let’s face it: The Republican Party is no longer a broad-based conservative party in the historically accepted sense. It is an oligarchy with a well-developed public relations strategy designed to soothe and anesthetize its followers with appeals to tradition, security, and family even as it pursues a radical agenda that would transform the country into a Dickensian corporatocracy at home and a belligerent military empire abroad.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“The Republican Party has used objection, obstruction, and filibustering not only to block the necessary processes of government but also in order to make ordinary Americans deeply cynical about Washington. Republicans perpetually run against government and come out on top. But, in the process, they are undermining the foundations of self-rule in a representative democracy.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“Liberals habitually work themselves into a lather about the antics of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, but they are really just political gargoyles looking for ratings as they whip up the GOP faithful. The true danger lies in an ostensibly neutral journalism that most Americans count on to tell them what is going on in the world but which too often acts as a stenographer for powerful and self-serving factions in government operating under a cloak of anonymity.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“Like biblical literalists, Republicans assert that the Constitution is divinely inspired and inerrant. But also like biblical literalists, they are strangely selective about those portions of their favorite document that they care to heed, and they favor rewriting it when it stands in the way of their political agenda.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“[I]f the public wants the military to perform better, give more prudent advice to its civilian leadership, and spend taxpayer money more wisely, it must elect a Congress that will dial down a few notches its habitual and childish 'we support the troops!' mantra and start asking skeptical questions - and not accepting bland evasions or appeals to patriotism as a response.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“A public that pays more attention to reality TV than its status as free citizens cannot withstand an unremitting encroachment on its liberties by calculating, unscrupulous, and power-hungry leaders.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“The United States is now a bloated military empire on the cusp of steady and irrevocable economic decline. Historically, the danger in such cases is that when the fiscal stability of the empire begins to weaken, the governing elites double down on the very policies of military profligacy that caused the fiscal crisis in the first place. And that appears to be what the people who run America would like to do. This”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“Although you won’t find it in their party platform, the GOP’s mission is to protect and further enrich America’s plutocracy. The party’s caterwauling about deficits and debt is so much eyewash to blind the public. In reality, Republicans act as bellhops for corporate America and the superrich behind those corporations.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“Between 1994 and 2008, an individual health-care mandate was a standard GOP nostrum, promoted not only by Mitt Romney, but by Newt Gingrich when he was the highest elected Republican official in the country, and it was endorsed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Now the mandate is the work of the devil, and authoritarian followers of the GOP, like faithful party members in Orwell’s 1984, believe “we’ve always been at war” against mandates.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“Capturing the terms of the debate through the adroit use of language has allowed the GOP to bamboozle millions of people about their own material interests.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“American Exceptionalism: a doctrine whose proponents hold that by divine dispensation America is exempt from all laws governing international norms, physics, or rationality. authentic:”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“It is no coincidence that as the Supreme Court has been removing the last constraints on the legalized corruption of politicians, the American standard of living has been falling at the fastest rate in decades.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are “job creators.” U.S. corporations have recently had their most profitable quarters in history; at the end of 2011, Apple was sitting on $97.6 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most small countries. So where are the jobs? Overwhelmingly, they went to China.4 Another”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“But the larger objective, beyond specific policies, is to blanket the American public with a message of fear. As long as we are fearful, as long as there is an endless list of threats, Pentagon spending can never be cut, PATRIOT Act provisions can never be repealed, and the United States will forever have the right and duty to meddle in every corner of the world.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“Owing to the lack of serious and informed popular interest in real issues, we have the current Republican menu of pseudo-issues: abortion, gay marriage, flag burning, prayer in schools, sharia law, and so on. They are simple to grasp and well within the ambit of the average person who does not follow politics.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“This is the new Republican victimology: The liberal media is maliciously misrepresenting the views of a rough-hewn but sincere salt-of-the-earth conservative, even when his plain words indict him as an ignoramus or an opportunist.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“Its belief in polarizing language and tactics, a militant and militarized foreign policy, and a constant search for mortal enemies, foreign and domestic alike, qualifies the current GOP as a radical right-wing party, not a conservative one.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; to the person fortunate enough to own a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension, and viable public transportation doesn’t even compute. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“The cultural forces that help politically sustain both the militaristic and the corporate function of the Deep State, however, are growing more irrational and antiscience. A military tradition that glories in force and appeals to self-sacrifice is the polar opposite of the Enlightenment heritate of rationality, the search for peace, and a belief in the common destiny of mankind. The warrior-leader, like the witch doctor, ultimately appeals to irrational emotionalism; and the cultural psychology that produces the bravest and most loyal warriors is a mind-set that is usually hostile to the sort of free inquiry of which scientific progress depends. This dynamic is observable in Afghanistan: no outside power has been able to conquer and pacify that society for millennia because of the tenacity of its warrior spirit; yet the country has one of the highest illiteracy rates on earth and is barely out of the Bronze Age in social development. p 260”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“Every time General David Petraeus appeared before a congressional committee, whether to testify about Iraq or Afghanistan or to be confirmed as CIA director, the hearings were largely a waste of time. Members of Congress burned through large segments of their time-limited question periods by tossing verbal kisses to the witness and going on about what a patriot Petraeus was. There was little time to ask serious questions about the strategy of our trillion-dollar military engagement in the Muslim world and to explore alternatives. The fawning of military cheerleaders such as Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham reached such extravagant lengths as would have made Caesar blush.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds. They would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had improved as a result.…And”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“The GOP cares, over and above every other item on its political agenda, about the rich contributors who keep them in office. This is why tax increases on the wealthy have become an absolute Republican taboo. Caught between their own rich contributors and their voters, Democrats are conflicted and compromised.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising. —Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe,”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“The United States forgot— if it ever knew— the supreme virtue of an enlightened realpolitik, which is to keep one’s powder dry, intervene militarily as a last resort (rather than a first), and maintain industrial and fiscal strength at home.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“rogue state: a country that violates international law by committing armed aggression, torturing prisoners, assassinating opponents, and possessing weapons of mass destruction.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“A politician is a hog grateful to whoever is rattling the stick inside the swill bucket. It is time to take the swill bucket away. p 270”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“A new threshold of sorts was crossed in 2013 when Jim DeMint (R-SC), with four years still remaining in his Senate term, resigned from office to become president of the Heritage Foundation, not only because he could exert more influence there than as a sitting senator (or so he claimed—which,”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“Democrats expressed outrage, and justifiably so, at the sole-source contracts the Bush administration gave to Halliburton after the invasion of Iraq, but what do they say now about the loan guarantees the Obama administration granted to Solyndra, a now defunct solar power company whose campaign donations flowed to the Democratic Party?”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

“study by the Bertelsmann Foundation concluded that in measures of economic equality, social mobility, and poverty prevention, the United States ranks twenty-seventh out of the thirty-one advanced industrial nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted