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I tend to think that knowledge is preceded by power instead of the other way around.
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
Instead
Knowledge
Around
Power
Way
Think
Thinking
Preceded
Tend
More quotes by 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'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.
Zephyr Teachout
This is what's so hard about our current politics: things poll well, but people don't believe that politicians are telling the truth.
Zephyr Teachout
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.
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
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. People respond to political characters in archetypal ways. A fun game is to think of a politician and ask, Which god is that? Are they like Aries? Are they like Athena?.
Zephyr Teachout
If those people in power never made any mistakes, we'd be done for as a democracy. But people keep making mistakes. History is a series of mistakes.
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
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
What I see increasingly is that companies are playing political roles. We should actually have our research and our laws map that.
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.
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
It's a lot harder to push forward things, like energy policy. There's a big dream out there about wind and solar power.
Zephyr Teachout
My current goal is to change the way we think about antitrust and anti-monopoly.
Zephyr Teachout
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
People respond to political characters in archetypal ways. A fun game is to think of a politician and ask, Which god is that? Are they like Aries? Are they like Athena?
Zephyr Teachout
Having more candidates come with a creative and artistic sensibility would actually bring more people out to vote.
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
You can't just provide power, you also need public education.
Zephyr Teachout
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
