Fighting Back the Right Quotes

“When libertarian sentiments take a populist form, it looks like this: a mix of anger, fear, anti-intellectualism, and fierce government hostility. Welcome to the Tea Party movement.”
― David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

“Real humans stand no chance of long-term success in opposing corporate power until legal steps are taken to force the corporate sector to submit to the public interest. To do this, a constitutional amendment is necessary.”
― David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

“If corporations are people, they’re not the kind of people you’d want to take home to meet your parents. Imagine a person who is totally self-absorbed, greedy, phony, amoral at best, and downright immoral at worst. And if that’s not bad enough, corporate “people” are also rich, immune from physical injury, and, for all practical purposes, immortal.”
― David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

“Constant pandering, repeatedly telling voters that they live in the greatest nation on Earth, distracts from the actual issues that deserve attention. To an intelligent audience, excessive talk of American exceptionalism from politicians is not flattering but demeaning.”
― David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

“Democracy and healthy debate are important, but allowing publicly traded, multinational corporations to participate in democracy in a way that overwhelms and silences the voices of ordinary humans is not real democracy or healthy debate.”
― David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

“no matter how we dissect the success of modern American conservatism to find its causal roots and ongoing motivating forces, we discover some combination of fear-based thinking, anti-intellectualism, racism and sexism, emotional appeals to religion and patriotism, an unquestioned acceptance of corporate power, and incessant psychological manipulation of the public—with resulting policy that caters to institutional interests over those of real humans.”
― David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

“It's fitting that representative Paul Ryan, a shining star in today's Republican Party, calls his proposed agenda the "Roadmap for America's Future." Considering that almost nobody uses road maps anymore, the metaphor perfectly illustrates how out of touch the GOP is with real life.”
― David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

“As lawmakers consider environmental policy on Capitol Hill, for example, those on the progressive side, out of respect for religion, never simply state the obvious: that their opponents are fools who think the world is only 6,000 years old.”
― David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

“Every high school civics class sings praise to the system of checks and balances within the American governmental structure—each branch holding power to check the others so that no one branch can wield too much—but there is little discussion of the need for checks and balances of external power centers. The awesome power of the corporate sector, which was nonexistent at the founding of the nation but today carries resources and influence that totally eclipse the voice of ordinary people, needs counterbalancing. This notion is not socialist, nor is it an offense to freedom; it is simply a pragmatic, commonsense response to obvious realities.”
― David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

“Most progressives, for their part, believe strongly, and correctly, that religious conservatives have a right to free exercise of religion and a right to participate in the democratic process. But progressives too often go even further by accepting the notion, exemplified by Al Gore’s argument, that religion itself must be “respected.” As such, we’ve gone from the sensible notion of respecting people to the irrational notion of respecting ideas. As we’ll see, there is no reason that an idea should deserve respect just because it happens to be religious. (To be fair, I’ll also mention that no idea deserves respect just because it’s not religious.)”
― David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

“This fundamental concept—that rights are inventions of humans and not a gift from God—is one of the key philosophical differences in the so-called culture wars. It raises the question of whether rights—and, implicitly, morality—are absolute or relative, and it forces us to seriously consider just how we choose to understand history, modernity, and the human condition itself.”
― David Niose, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason