Top 15 Adam Serwer Quotes

While I was writing this book, I was inspired tremendously by the people who throughout American history have fought to expand the blessings of American democracy to everyone. And I think that what people need to understand is that America is the Declaration of Independence, and it's the three-fifths clause. These are both organic, authentic parts of the American tradition, and they're always going to both be a part of who we are as a country. And all we can do is try to hew as best we can to our best traditions rather than the ones that make us feel shame.

Trump is not essential to Trumpism. The politics of cruelty that Trump's employed are a product of a system that encourages a minority of the country to engineer the government so that they are no longer accountable to the public. And what - Trump's real innovation was showing how much of that the Republican Party can get away with. The only solution to this is for the Republican Party to have to reach out beyond the base that it currently has to serve a more diverse constituency so that it can no longer rely on fomenting the kind of intolerance represented by Trump's politics of cruelty.

We're always going to have disagreements in a democracy. That's what democracy is for. It's for reconciling disagreements. But what is not necessary is a politics where one side is trying to disenfranchise or exclude the other party's voters in order to maintain a grip on power. And that's what I mean when I talk about cruelty on a political level.

most people think of cruelty as an individual problem. And it is that, but what I'm focused on in the book is cruelty as a part of American politics, specifically the way that it is used to demonize certain groups so you can justify denying people their basic rights under the Constitution and exclude them from the political process, which is substantially what the Trump project was about, both as a means to power and also as a policy agenda.

History is not a thing that operates on its own. It’s written by human hands and interpreted by human beings, and that interpretation is substantially mediated by power. For example, after Reconstruction, Democrats in the South saw Reconstruction as a mistake and saw Jim Crow as restoring the proper order of things. That interpretation was challenged by W.E.B. Du Bois and others but it did not begin to be overturned in American public memory until the around Civil Rights era. My book is an attempt to put down a historical record of the Trump administration to show it as I believe it really was; to prevent this kind of manipulation of history from taking place (although, I’m just one person). But the public memory of the Trump administration will be determined substantially by who holds power in the future.

The critical race theory scare is a reaction to the re-evaluation of history sparked during the Obama presidency and the Ferguson protests. They sparked an inquiry into how we have a Black president but still have glaring racial inequalities that have not been resolved. That process was accelerated by the election of Donald Trump because he was so overtly running on the politics of white identity, and then it culminated in the George Floyd protests. That recognition frightened conservatives because the knowledge that racial disparities were caused through public policy, that implies the state should step in and fix it. If you are conservative and you believe that these inequalities are actually the result of in-born natural ability then you don’t want the state to do that. So I think there’s a recognition on their part that this re-evaluation of history would cause people to understand the lingering effects of racism in American life, and to prevent that, they want to make it difficult to teach history that includes the extent that discriminatory policies shaped racial disparities in America.

there are more axes of difference beyond the Left-Right worth exploring, and in some ways, political journalism does not always acknowledge those.

Even as an opinion journalist, I try to give the facts as best as I see them, but I think in political journalism, you often get some version of "one side says the sky is green and the other side says it’s blue." I think that is in part a product of longstanding journalistic traditions regarding objectivity but also a lack of diversity in the newsroom that has led to certain ideas of what is considered objective is unchallenged.

I think the phrase merely described a phenomenon we had all observed, but the proximate inspiration for it was when the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford. What struck me about the hearing was that she had said the thing she remembered the most was the laughter of Kavanaugh and his friend, and Trump seemed to zero in on that and he was intent on mocking her for coming forward and making the audience laugh at her. He viewed her words as an emotional weakness he could exploit. For that, that’s what crystalized in my mind. But even before then, the phenomenon was clear, I just didn’t have a sure way to describe it.

American religious pluralism, however imperfectly practiced, is centuries older than the European commitment to purging anti-Semitism, which is younger than Israel itself. (p 222)

Since the Civil War, American Jews have built a place for themselves here much the way other minorities have-by holding the United States accountable to its own principles (p 210)

Donald Trump, whose uncritical support for Israel and belief that America is fundamentally a nation for white Christians exacerbates a divide between the two largest Jewish populations in the world. (p 205)

It is not American Jews who have betrayed their Israeli cousins. It is the Netanyahu-led Israeli government that has betrayed Jews outside Israel, by aligning itself with nationalist parties in countries like Poland and Hungary, who are hostile to the ideals that make it possible for Jews in the diaspora to live free of persecution. (p 205)

In the aftermath of the Ferguson protests, it was fashionable to speak of a "new civil-rights movement." But it is perhaps more illuminating to see Black Lives Matter as a new banner raised on the same field of battle, stained by the blood of generations who came before. The fighters are new, but the conflict is the same one that Frederick Douglass and George Ruby fought, one that goes far beyond policing. (p 302 "The New Reconstruction")

The Civil-Rights movement was a rebellion against the law. It had to be. And the police were called upon to crush it. From marches to sit-ins to protests, many of the most iconic images of the era were representations of police brutality: the Birmingham police siccing dogs on protesters, Alabama state troopers beating marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Atlanta cops manhandling Martin Luther King Jr. after an arrest at a sit-in. These images showed white Americans who had averted their eyes from the realities of segregation-from their restaurants to their schools to their neighborhoods that it was enforced at the point of a gun in their name. (p 259 "Abolish Police Unions")