CoachJim

“The biblical imagery is part of the American tradition, no matter what your personal beliefs are. The Old Testament, the New Testament, it is all woven into who we are, Christian, Jew, or whatever. Religious metaphors and religious language form a kind of common bond in America—you can think of it either in literal or literary terms. Even if you are basically secular, the ideals and principles that come out of religion are essentially what we all should share: what is the right thing to do, what is just, what is fair.
(Page 203)”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“Historical time seems to have accelerated in America.

By the time children graduate from high school, the year in which they went into the first grade seems as remote as some prehistoric age of innocence: before the Fall. Once, the essential circumstances and assumptions of life changed so slowly that one could speak of may generations living and dying in the same age. Now events, non-events, fashions, and moods succeed one another so rapidly that an age can be over in half the length of a biological generation. Already, the twelve years from the inauguration of John Kennedy, in January 1961, to Richard Nixon’s second inauguration, in 1973, have taken on the shape and unity of an age. And the pace is unrelenting. As the United States celebrates its two-hundredth birthday, in 1976, the hopes that President Nixon expressed in his 1973 inaugural speech have been soaked in bitter irony by constitutional crisis and continuing national disunity.

from America in Our Time by Godfrey Hodgson (Page 3)”
― Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon What Happened and Why

“Concentrate not on the eradication of evil, but on the cultivation of virtue.” (Page 99)”
― Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-63

“The liberal hegemony was so firmly ensconced after the 1950s that when the ‘Reagan Revolution’ arrived in 1980, it did not revolutionize things as many anti liberal conservatives hoped and many liberals feared. Reagan’s victory did return anti liberal conservatives to positions of power for the first time since the 1920s, and, perhaps more important, gave them the feeling that they were finally being listened to, which encouraged them to organize and expand their efforts to push back against the liberal onslaught. Many of the institutions that would later play a role in the takeover of the Republican Party in 2016 were hatched and nurtured during the Reagan years.”
(Pages 149-150)”
― Robert Kagan, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again