What Were We Thinking Quotes

“They feel empowered by their knowledge that they have not been foolish enough to believe in something larger than themselves,”
― Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

“If conservatism has been hijacked by Trump, as these writers argue, who exactly left it so vulnerable? The Never Trumpers hold everyone responsible for the rise of Trumpism except, in any worthwhile way, themselves.”
― Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

“Speaking in your own terms is resistance against a narrowing of thought, while speaking with those beyond your own circle is resistance against a narrowing of life.”
― Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

“Every immigrant has left a love behind,” writes Suketu Mehta in This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto (2019). “Every immigrant has abandoned a lover or a child or a best friend.… Back home, the grandparents prepare extravagant meals, lay out the table in the garden, light the lamps in the evening for the children who will never come back. Back home, the children wait for their mothers to call every Sunday.”
― Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

“Trump is the sun around which all forms of conservatism now revolve, along orbits of submission, derision, and revision. And yet the Trump era’s most illuminating case for conservatism is one that barely considers him at all, that instead focuses on how to rebuild the essential political and cultural institutions that have lost both the public’s trust and the conservative movement’s interest—losses that Trump has exploited and deepened to his own ends.”
― Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

“Political scientists warned of the death of democracy. Philosophers and literary critics worried about the death of truth. Internationalists fretted over the death of global trade and alliances. Historians, meanwhile, shook their heads and explained to anyone who would listen that we’d all been here before.”
― Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

“people of color—a term that, ironically, has always affirmed whiteness by defining the rest of the world in reference to it.”
― Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

“In a sense, the Never Trumpers are also the Only Trumpers. Only with the rise of Trump did they think to interrogate the conservative dogma they’d long defended. Only with Trump did they begin to reconsider their role in encouraging a frenzied base. Only with Trump did they see the need to restore or reach for higher ideals.”
― Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

“The Never Trumpers write book-length breakup letters to the Republican Party and to conservatism but fail to reckon with their own complicity in Trump’s rise.”
― Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

“Her frustration is not that the people she meets lack individual agency, but that many of them have concluded that even their best efforts don’t make much difference, and that any sense of collective interest or power—that “we” she longs to see—remains an illusion.”
― Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

“to live it in her own way, without the judgments”
― Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era