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I think the reason you see so many people dropping out of politics is because there's an anti-poetic strain in modern political discourse.
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
Politics
Political
Reason
Dropping
Many
Strain
Think
Discourse
Thinking
Poetic
People
Anti
Modern
More quotes by 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
I think that most people have deeply creative sensibilities.
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
What I see increasingly is that companies are playing political roles. We should actually have our research and our laws map that.
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
Having more candidates come with a creative and artistic sensibility would actually bring more people out to vote.
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
I think a lot of the reason people are attracted to the Keystone pipeline is because at least we're doing something. There's a fear that society will collapse if it's not acting. To contrast those actions with other actions is important in making it feel plausible. Maybe we must have the size of the dream meet the size of the threat.
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
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
I tend to think that knowledge is preceded by power instead of the other way around.
Zephyr Teachout
As a school board member, I might have particular views about the ways we might increase the economics curriculum in a local high school, but I'm not sure I should mandate that for the entire country.
Zephyr Teachout
There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.
Zephyr Teachout
I don't have any particular plans in mind. What I see is that you can become so focused on the idea of running that winning becomes your motivation, as opposed to what you stand for being your motivation.
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
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
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.
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
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