American religious pluralism, however imperfectly practiced, is centuries older than the European commitment to purging anti-Semitism, which is young… - Adam Serwer

What made Trump unusual was his administration's commitment to barbarism as an end rather than a means, with few of the redeeming features that tempered other presidents' approaches to immigration. (p 135-6)

Win or lose, the dust Trump was kicking up would linger in the lungs. I started poring over old texts about racism, immigration, and nativism, like John Higham's Strangers in the Land. I found disturbing echoes of Trump's rhetorical style in Hannah Arendt's description of Stalinist and Nazi apparatchiks in The Origins of Totalitarianism and had epiphanies about the fragility of American democracy reading W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America. (p xiv "Introduction")

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. (p20 "The Myth of Kindly General Lee")