David Rothkopf

We were Reagan Lite though we thought we were just doing smart political "triangulation" and that the goodness in our hearts would prevail.

David Rothkopf (born December 24, 1955) is an American foreign policy, national security and political affairs analyst and commentator. He is the founder and CEO of TRG Media and The Rothkopf Group, a columnist for The Daily Beast and a former member of the USA Today Board of Contributors. He is the author of ten books

Quotes

• Donald Trump, champion and avatar of the shallow state, has won power because his supporters are threatened by what they don't understand, and what they don't understand is almost everything. Indeed, from evolution to data about our economy to the science of vaccines to the threats we face in the world, they reject vast subjects rooted in fact in order to have reality conform to their worldviews. They don't dig for truth; they skim the media for anything that makes them feel better about themselves. To many of them, knowledge is not a useful tool but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man and woman. The same is true for experience, skills, and know-how. These things require time and work and study and often challenge our systems of belief. Truth is hard; shallowness is easy.
  • "The Shallow State", Foreign Policy (February 22, 2017)

America Is One Gut Punch Away From Throwing in the Towel on Democracy (2021)

"America Is One Gut Punch Away From Throwing in the Towel on Democracy", Daily Beast (December 4, 2021)

• I remember the political gut punches. They were moments that I could not believe were happening in America. They ran contrary to the idea of America that I had been raised with. But they also defied logic and reason.

• The GOP was taken over by the hard right in the 1990s, and the "Contract with America" turned into a scorched-earth campaign that deliberately left Washington dysfunctional (because an inert government is the next best thing to no government at all).

• Bill Clinton...bought into policies that made inequality worse and offered up the coded racism of welfare reform, beefing up police forces and scolding Sister Souljah. We were Reagan Lite though we thought we were just doing smart political "triangulation" and that the goodness in our hearts would prevail. And then we undid Glass Steagall and passed a telecommunications act that laid the groundwork for the rise of monster tech, the behemoths that would, alongside Wall Street, come to dominate in a new age of robber barons in America.

• Bush and Cheney and company embraced torture and rendition and waged a "war of choice" that left hundreds of thousands of innocents dead and America's reputation worldwide in tatters...We weren't the country of the "greatest" generation. Vietnam had already begun to make that clear. But this was war crimes level stuff and somehow, they all got away with it.
• The gut punches came more rapidly during the Trump years. There were the 30,000 lies, the Muslim ban, Charlottesville, the Russia cover-up, firing Comey, the Mueller report and the clear obstruction case against the president, the Barr cover-up of that, one impeachment, Ukraine and a second impeachment, and then the Big Lie and Jan. 6, along with hundreds of thousands dead from a needless public-health catastrophe. For the first time in our history, there was not a peaceful transfer of power following a U.S. presidential election.

• The mid-section of the U.S. will become a collection of anti-science, anti-history, anti-woman, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-federal government theocracies, minority-ruled faux-democracies who will still depend on massive inflows of tax dollars from the blue states they’ll nonetheless loathe and resent.

Jimmy Carter Was Actually a Very Good Foreign Policy President (2024)

"Jimmy Carter Was Actually a Very Good Foreign Policy President", Daily Beast (February 24, 2023)

• Since Carter left office in 1980, the too-easy, misleading, canned analysis of his life was that he was a mediocre president who became an exceptional ex-president...Carter was maligned as a "weak" foreign policy president who fortunately was succeeded by the disconnected, often-befuddled Reagan's "strong" leadership as he allegedly went eyeball-to-eyeball with the Soviet Union and practically brought down the Berlin Wall with a single speech and a sparkling Hollywood smile.

• Carter regularly braved contrary winds of public opinion to speak out against what he saw as wrongs that needed addressing. Nowhere is this more clear than his championing the rights of Palestinians and his having the courage to call out Israel as an apartheid state.

• We have...seen presidents, like Reagan, hailed for accomplishments that were not theirs, for values they neither lived nor understood very well. And in contrast to them all, we have this Naval Academy graduate, former submarine officer, former farmer, former governor, and former president who has lived every minute of his life in the expectation that he will ultimately answer to a higher authority than donors or pundits or the ebb and flow of public opinion. As a consequence, he has remained constant even as we have changed.

External links

• Encyclopedic article on David Rothkopf on Wikipedia