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 This reflects a broader trend in which social progress can eventually lead to a collective re-evaluation of outdated views.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.
Human beings do metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.
One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes. Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the first time things invisible before become suddenly visible.
It's true that globalization, with all its fantastic improvements in the world and the technological progress linked to it, has increased inequality at country level, especially inside countries. And there are people that were left behind - people, sectors, regions - that has created a sense of frustration in the rust belts of the world.
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.
I believe that worrying about the problems plaguing our planet without taking steps to confront them is absolutely irrelevant. The only thing that changes this world is taking action.
From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
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