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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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Zephyr Teachout
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: October 24
Journalist
Law Professor
Politician
Seattle
Washington
Zephyr Rain Teachout
Zephyr R. Teachout
Hard
Poll
Believe
Current
Things
Politicians
People
Telling
Politician
Politics
Truth
Well
More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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Having more candidates come with a creative and artistic sensibility would actually bring more people out to vote.
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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.
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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.
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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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I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.
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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.
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I tend to think that knowledge is preceded by power instead of the other way around.
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Because jurors have an extraordinary amount of power over the situation and of the people and the story in front of them, they tend to pay pretty intense attention to what's happening.
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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.
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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?.
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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
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?
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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.
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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.
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I think about people and events in terms of archetypes a lot.
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There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.
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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.
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