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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

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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
Made
Series
Never
Democracy
People
Mistake
Making
History
Keep
Power
Done
Mistakes

More quotes by Zephyr Teachout

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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
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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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I think about people and events in terms of archetypes a lot.
Zephyr Teachout
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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
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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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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
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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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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
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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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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
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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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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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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
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What happens in New York affects national policy in very significant ways.
Zephyr Teachout
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You can't just provide power, you also need public education.
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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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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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
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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