Zephyr Teachout Quotes
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I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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This is what's so hard about our current politics: things poll well, but people don't believe that politicians are telling the truth.
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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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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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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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I think that most people have deeply creative sensibilities.
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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.
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I think about people and events in terms of archetypes a lot.
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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.
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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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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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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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My current goal is to change the way we think about antitrust and anti-monopoly.
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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.
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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.
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One of the most dangerous things about Fox News isn't that it's right wing but that it's nihilistic. It takes away the capacity to believe in politics.
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There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.
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Public education is so important - resisting privatization and charterization, high-stakes testing, and defunding. It's important for New York, but it's also important for the country.
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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.
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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.