the best parts of its history. This is partly because what I believe helps spur radical social change has to deal with identification, or the way in which people identify with a larger social movement. People respond to particular clubs or parties, which means that for someone like myself, we need to radically reform the Democratic Party as it currently exists and pull out its best strands. We must ask ourselves whether to try to reinvest in the big-“D” Democratic tradition, in the best part of its populist and progressive history. If we do so, I believe, the Democratic Party can lead both to campaign finance reform and to the kind of coalition building that would move the Party outside and beyond its traditional constituency. My personal tendency is to work within an institution and then to aggressively reach out to Republicans as individuals, not institutionally, because I think there is an extraordinary hunger for honesty in politics. That itself can cut through policy differences from time to time. Whether you’re talking about political change within parties or the American system at large, however, I think we can all agree that the moral word corruption must come into play. One of the reasons I believe the language of corruption is so powerful in American politics today is because of the resonance of the opposing ideal, dedication to the public good. I hear people yearning for politicians who say, “You have an obligation when you are in public office to love the public.” That is a personal demand between a politician and his or her voters. It’s not a transactional one. We want to use the language of the founding era in some way, and that language is very much a language of emotion, love, and the ways in which we can create sympathies and identities between those who represent us and the public at large. Extraordinary is what we need at this moment in time. When I was saying, “What do you do when you read the Princeton study on American oligarchy?” I meant to ask: Do you keep organizing the way you were organizing in 1996 if you read a study that says government is not responsive? In 1996, you would try to get the polling up there among the young people. If we could just get the polling to 80 percent, we’d get there. We’d be done. But if you’re in Hong Kong, you don’t think, “Let’s get the polling up.” There is no functioning democracy that you can use to even entertain this idea. You have to do something big instead. We need to risk a politics of the extraordinary. I wrote my book Corruption in America as a letter to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, whom I believe doesn’t understand the moral
Can We Restore American Democracy?
Zephyr Teachout
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