People think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Creativity is essential to any kind of joyful living. Sometimes I act, sometimes I draw, I paint, I write poems. I can't imagine living without it.
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."
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.
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.
I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.
My current goal is to change the way we think about antitrust and anti-monopoly.
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.
This is what's so hard about our current politics: things poll well, but people don't believe that politicians are telling the truth.
I think about people and events in terms of archetypes a lot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.
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.
I think that most people have deeply creative sensibilities.
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.
I tend to think that knowledge is preceded by power instead of the other way around.
There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.