Cultural Backlash Quotes

The Trump phenomenon is in large part a reaction of Middle America to attacks on its values by intellectual and academic communities. There are other reasons, but this is a significant one.

How long is this endless groveling before every cry of 'racism' going to continue before the whole country collectively throws up?

Trump represented a movement of dissatisfaction, the dissent, unhappiness, division cultivated by years of identity politics and the bullying of arrogant, insufferable, intolerant social justice warriors who used the last two terms to punish anyone who reminded them of Daddy.

September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.

Spike Lee is part of a retrograde movement in this country.

The fueling of anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe is resulting in an anti-European, indiscriminate nationalism in Turkey.

Ailes built a Kingdom of Yes. That was his genius. He understood the id of many white conservatives - their sense of constant persecution and victimization; and their existential fears of an America whose racial makeup, sexual mores and gender roles were careening in the opposite direction of the country of their childhood.

One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism.

Toward the end of the campaign, we interviewed some voters in Raleigh, N.C., which is a generally Democratic city, and I'm thinking of a young couple. They had two kids. They described themselves as Christian. They oppose gay marriage. And they were saying that even though they didn't like Donald Trump, they were thinking of voting for him. And one of the reasons was they felt that they were - their very views were making them socially unacceptable. They were feeling a little alienated from the world.

Every new fad or fashion at once has its denouncers from the pulpit, platform, professor's chair.

2017 may have been that year when identity politics hit a brick wall - and slumped limply on the pavement.

Conservatism is, among many other things, a culture. The most important glue binding it together is a shared sense of cultural grievance - the conviction, uniting conservatives high and low, theocratic and plutocratic, neocon and paleocon, that someone, somewhere is looking down their noses at them with a condescending sneer.

With what's happened in the world the last three years, it's easier to see why it's become popular again to diminish and revile Arabs and Muslims in American popular culture.

I hate to speak for the whole society, but I will. I'm a journalist, it's my job. There's been something of a reaction against political correctness. Needless to say, the government hasn't caught up yet.

I feel like a lot of my aesthetic was in response to feeling the awfulness and cheapness of that [ the 70'th].

A lot of it is backlash against all this political correctness that's going on.

Bill Cosby spoke out against The Simpsons and there was this kind of evangelical, right-wing sect that was against The Simpsons. Fox was a new network at the time, though, so they were going to take risks.

Unfortunately, more and more Muslim voices are calling for boycotts of the United States and its products.

This is the age of the new tolerance and it is producing a bumper crop of anti-Christian and anti-American sentiment.

I do think evangelicals have been under attack.

The great goal of the backlash is to nurture a cultural class war, and the first step in doing so, as we have seen, is to deny the economic basis of social class. After all, you can hardly deride liberals as society's "elite" or present the GOP as the party of the common man if you acknowledge the existence of the corporate world - the power that creates the nation's real elite, that dominates its real class system, and that wields the Republican Party as its personal political sidearm.

As countries grapple with modernization, people who are left behind tend to hold firmer and firmer to their view of the evil of modernity.

I listen to a lot of rap where men talk a certain way about women and I'm not offended. It's meant to be funny. I'm throwing it right back at them with humor, but some people can't take it. They're not used to women talking back.

Any time there is a cultural breakthrough in which this culture transcends what it's supposed to be, there's a violent reaction. So we had a black president, and it's followed by an incredibly violent reaction. It happens over and over.

I found it incredibly disheartening that in the late '90s, suddenly pop culture became even more misogynistic and more homophobic, and so I criticized Eminem for having lyrics that were egregiously homophobic and egregiously misogynistic.