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There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.
Zephyr Teachout
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Zephyr Teachout
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: October 24
Journalist
Law Professor
Politician
Seattle
Washington
Zephyr Rain Teachout
Zephyr R. Teachout
Democracy
Plutocracy
Economic
Concentrated
Turns
Corrupt
American
Suspicion
Political
Tendency
Power
Tendencies
Government
Tradition
Long
Turn
More quotes by Zephyr Teachout
I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.
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Integrity is hard work. I do think the internet makes it harder because of the temptations of performance. You can perform and have integrity, but it's easier just to perform. So the temptations of social media lead to some dissonance.
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If you think art is a competitive forum, then you're going to stop doing it if you're not good. But if it's not competitive, it's something that you'll keep doing.
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Things poll well, but people don't believe that politicians are telling the truth. Politicians might mention renewable energy, and the public will think, That sounds good, but I don't believe they're going to do everything they can to build those towers.
Zephyr Teachout
I think that most people have deeply creative sensibilities.
Zephyr Teachout
I think about people and events in terms of archetypes a lot.
Zephyr Teachout
I tend to think that knowledge is preceded by power instead of the other way around.
Zephyr Teachout
What happens in New York affects national policy in very significant ways.
Zephyr Teachout
One of the most dangerous things about Fox News isn't that it's right wing but that it's nihilistic. It takes away the capacity to believe in politics.
Zephyr Teachout
I think part of the reason the Tea Party has resonated is that people feel disempowered. The Tea Party says, You are out of power because of big government. Then some Democrats tend to respond by saying, No, you're wrong, you're not out of power. It's a sense that doesn't resonate with people's lived experience.
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In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.
Zephyr Teachout
New York City is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to climate change, so I see Keystone as the central threat to New York.
Zephyr Teachout
A lot of politics plays at the level of myth, and if you understand that, then you feel like you have access to the secret language of politics.
Zephyr Teachout
I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.
Zephyr Teachout
A combination of working in politics as well as teaching and being [an actor] certainly helped. I became so much more comfortable in front of a crowd. I felt like I was calling on all those other experiences.
Zephyr Teachout
You can have very big local government. By big, I mean very engaged government. Do you measure it in terms of the number of laws? Number of employees? You could make arguments for either one. I tend to think the axis of the size of government is the wrong concern. But I do think that situating power more locally is a legitimate approach.
Zephyr Teachout
I tend to be a kind of left federalist. There's a value to more power of certain kinds being positioned at a more local level.
Zephyr Teachout
History is a series of mistakes. Now the task is to plan for those mistakes so those of us who are populists can actually take over the reins of power when the right mistakes are made.
Zephyr Teachout
There are some libertarians who are really anarchists, but others are more concerned about the distant relationship between themselves and power. They mistakenly think they want to get rid of government when instead they might just want to have greater access to power.
Zephyr Teachout
People think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter.
Zephyr Teachout
