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People think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter.

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
Lying
Whether
Doesn
Part
Matter
Think
Thinking
Politician
People
System

More quotes by Zephyr Teachout

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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
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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
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I think about people and events in terms of archetypes a lot.
Zephyr Teachout
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I think that most people have deeply creative sensibilities.
Zephyr Teachout
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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
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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.
Zephyr Teachout
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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
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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.
Zephyr Teachout
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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
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What I see increasingly is that companies are playing political roles. We should actually have our research and our laws map that.
Zephyr Teachout
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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
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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.
Zephyr Teachout
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Oftentimes people get it wrong when they say we need to educate voters first and then give them power. I tend to favor giving them power first.
Zephyr Teachout
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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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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
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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
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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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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
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My current goal is to change the way we think about antitrust and anti-monopoly.
Zephyr Teachout
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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