That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.
Interpretation
Cultural change often involves overcoming prevalent prejudices, which may take time for everyone to recognize and accept.
Rick Perlstein's quote highlights the process of cultural change in America, where societal prejudices are often initially resisted by conservative groups. However, over time, as society evolves, these groups often adapt and rationalize their previous beliefs, ultimately leaving behind their initial biases even if they don't acknowledge their transformation. This reflects a broader trend in which social progress can eventually lead to a collective re-evaluation of outdated views.
In practice
In a discussion about social reforms, this quote could be used to illustrate how societal norms shift over time.
History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.
At the beginning of the 60's our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country. We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone.' But this isn't reality.
The solution of this country's problems lies in black hands.
We were thrilled and we were privileged to be part of a revolution, because make no mistake about it, Ted Turner changed the world with CNN.
If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.
A working woman could save a few shillings a week, and then every five weeks she'd come in and we'd cut her hair. She could shampoo it under the shower, swing it and dry it off or just let it dry by itself. It changed the lives of many young girls who'd never had the opportunity to be styled like that before.
The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage.
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