“Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress.”

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.