“Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan's brand of leadership was what I call 'a liturgy of absolution.' He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn't want that?”

American historian, writer and journalist

Rick Perlstein is an American historian, writer, and journalist known for his accounts of the American conservative movement after the 1960s. He has 117 quotes on the site. He is the author of five bestselling books. His first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. Politico has described him as a careful chronicler of modern conservatism.