1. Alex Zucker, a physicist, was the first person I found to have used this phrase, in 1988, when he was acting director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Alex Zucker, “Toward a Technological Commons,” Oak Ridge National Laboratory Review, vol. 21, no. 1 (1988): 2.
2. Reed Hundt, A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019).
3. Amos 3:10.
4. As Gordon Wood said of the revolutionaries, “There is simply too much fanatical and millennial thinking” to be able to characterize these people “as peculiarly rational and legalistic.” Gordon Wood, “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 23 (1966): 2.
5. Sacvan Bercovitch wrote that, the jeremiad “marked the colonists’ first literary innovation and their most enduring social legacy.” The jeremiad offered “a promise of threat, doomsday, and millennium entwined—that vision of America as an unfolding prophecy.” Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), xii, xiii. See also James Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
6. Or as Abraham Heschel put it, “Their words are onslaughts, scuttling illusions of false security, challenging evasions, calling faith to account, questioning prudence and impartiality.” Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 1999), xi.
7. John Milton, “Areopagitica,” in John Milton Prose, 209.
8. Numbers 11:29.
9. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, 9.
10. King, Where Do We Go from Here?, 181.