Reagan is held up to us as an example of never raising taxes. Correction: Reagan raised taxes six of his eight years as president. Why? He was a pragmatist, not doctrinaire. He saw problems emerging,...

Elites are once again invoking Reagan, dropping their G’s and saying things in a folksy sort of way that’s meant to capture the hearts of people. And it’s all fraud; it’s all stagecraft. And people...

Ronald Reagan felt very great regret about the deficits to which he contributed on his watch.

My father left Nazi Germany a year after Dr. Kissinger, and so in my household he was very much an icon. He was a kind of immigrant success story, a refugee success story.

I have criticisms of Ronald Reagan, but he lives in another universe from the kind of political theater that is represented by people, like Sarah Palin, who aren’t really public servants.

The Tea Party is a group that rejects deep thinking, it rejects the very complex analysis that is involved in public policy, it rejects the kind of textured decision-making that Ronald Reagan prided himself on.

Reaganism as a political movement has enormous resources behind it and it seeks – through stagecraft and through a tremendous level of effort toward propaganda – to present an image of Reagan that is so...

Reagan has very significant things to teach us – positive lessons and quite negative lessons.

It was natural to see the struggle for dignity for black people in America as a sister struggle of the Jewish struggle. So growing up, it was always a part of my breakfast cereal to...

Ronald Reagan’s legacy is deeply misunderstood because there are political actors in America who, for several reasons, have privately held agendas that they want to sell to the American public in the most appealing way...

Reagan himself, for much of his life, was devoted against the elites. His antagonism to the Soviet Union is antagonism against oppression by the elites of the many.

The thing that happens is that politicians run on tough-on-crime rhetoric. You appeal to the public and say, ‘Let’s put more money into taller fences, tougher laws, tougher sentencing, handcuffs,’ and where does that money...

The prison industrial complex is perhaps, at least domestically, the most striking example of us putting profit before people. It all stems from one basic misunderstanding: that the public good can be shepherded by private...

The prison industrial complex, to put it in its crassest term, is a system of industrial mass incarceration. So there’s what you call bureaucratic thrust behind it. It’s hard to shut off because politicians rely...

He presented himself as the friend to Main Street America, and yet that aw-shucks persona ended up packaging policies and programs that were at times deeply injurious to the very people he swore to serve....

To say that Reagan teaches us that we should be against amnesty for illegal immigrants is to contradict what Reagan himself stood for – that he was in favor of amnesty.

We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.

War is party-blind. It doesn’t care who is in the Oval Office. The forces that drive us to war don’t care whether it’s Republican, Democrat, or other. The fact is, these parties are prey to...

Ron Reagan amazingly qualifies as an honest broker. I asked him if he was a mama’s boy and he said no, more of a papa’s boy. At the same time he was willing to say...

You can call me an Eisenhower Republican. There is a gigantic gulf between an Eisenhower Republican and the kind of fringe brand of Republicanism that is being so vocally promoted today.

If you watch the evening news, Dr. Kissinger is very often brought on to sort of be the statesman of his age and to reflect dispassionately on world events. And so a film challenging his...

Ronald Reagan had many fine qualities and he had many shortcomings. He’s not the simple, folksy figure that he’s often portrayed as.

If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early ’70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. That’s what you’re up against.

It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.

You can’t have a discussion about politics without mentioning Ronald Reagan.

The big lesson of Reagan is: To think that he was some sort of simple figurehead and didn’t do the thinking and simply read a script in front of him woefully underestimates him. Ronald Reagan...

There are people who are trying to advance themselves by wrapping themselves in Reagan.

I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman.

The whole idea of a democracy is that we ourselves, the people, are supposed to make a path of our politics, and it is we who with our feet and our vote and our labors...

Ronald Reagan, whatever his pros and cons were, was a public servant in the end.

I don’t think Reagan is primarily funny, and I don’t think he’s primarily marvelous; he’s complicated.

His track record of pragmatism, depth and candor all speak to a person who would find the Tea Party simplistic, opportunistic and misguided. Reagan was surrounded by some very smart people who gave him very...

As I was growing up, you know, I’m a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother’s family had fled the czars of Russia before that.

It was widespread that the politics of Tea Party people would be foreign to Ronald Reagan and they would be seen by him as frivolous and uninformed.