Here’s something you probably don’t know about Zephyr Teachout: she used to go to Tea Party rallies. Teachout, a professor at Fordham University School of Law, is one of the Left’s rising stars. In 2014 she challenged Governor Andrew Cuomo in the New York Democratic primary. Despite having no name recognition, no money, and no organization to speak of—the Working Families Party, which recruited Teachout to run, was so afraid she might not get the fifty thousand votes needed to maintain the party’s line on the ballot they ended up endorsing Cuomo—Teachout got 182,000 votes, over 34 percent of the total, carrying half the counties in the state. Not enough to win, but more than enough to give the previously indestructible Cuomo a bloody nose. Lately she’s been in the news as lead plaintiff in the lawsuit accusing Donald Trump of violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause, meant to prevent federal officials from accepting gifts from foreign governments.* In between, she ran for Congress and waged a one-woman crusade against overweening corporate power.
But in 2009, after watching the Obama campaign transform its grassroots online platform Obama for America (OFA) into a toothless propaganda megaphone for the president’s Wall Street bailout plan, Teachout found herself drawn to Tea Party rallies. “At the time, the Tea Party had lots of different angles,” she says. “Rallies on the border with Joe Arpaio [the Arizona sheriff whose persistent racial profiling got him convicted of contempt of court—and then pardoned by President Trump] that were obviously all about race.
“At the same time, there were others where a deep story was being told about the Wall Street crash. ‘Things are falling apart’—this is the Tea Party speaking—‘I can tell you who did this to you. Who did this to you was government. Government destroyed you. Government made you insecure.’ Remember, I used to be a death penalty lawyer. If you have any kind of criminal trial, and your client is accused, you can always say your client didn’t do it. But it’s a hell of a lot better to say somebody else did it.”
Building on the model Teachout and Zack Exley developed for the Howard Dean presidential campaign, OFA had amassed a list of thirteen million names and e-mails, and raised $778 million—double the total raised by John McCain. After the election David Plouffe,† Obama’s campaign manager, sent an e-mail to all thirteen million names—inviting them to hold house parties to watch the debut video of Organizing for America, OFA’s successor, in which the case for the bailout would be made by the newly anointed chair of the Democratic National Committee, one Tim Kaine.
“I predict,” wrote Teachout, “that there will be perhaps a thousand such parties, then hundreds, then dozens. I think OFA will fail in its mission . . . And I think this is a very good thing . . . This is a good thing because it is not intended to be a representative organization, where people have real power.”199
Being right didn’t make Teachout happy. “So much of the Democratic Party’s response for so long was, ‘It’s not our guy! And by the way, it’s nobody else, either.’ They had no basic story for ‘Who did this to me? Who did this to America?’ There is a true answer to that question: Monsanto and Bank of America and Wells Fargo and Pfizer. They have, one, totally monopolized industries, so that people are just little serfs coming to beg to work for them, and so you can’t bargain for benefits; two, been big drivers pushing for what they call free trade, which is basically a global regime run by big corporations. They did this on purpose, and they did it through taking over big parts of the Democratic Party, and they did it through taking over huge parts of the Republican Party.” And in 2009 you’d have a better chance of hearing such an analysis—or getting a hearing for such an analysis—at a Tea Party rally than at a Democratic Party meeting. So Teachout went to Tea Party rallies. To talk. But mostly to listen.
Two years later she was doing the same thing at Occupy Wall Street, where she spent several months attending the nightly general assemblies at Zuccotti Park, participating in the Spokes Council, and becoming an active member of the Occupy Wall Street Activist Legal Working Group. What she found there was more inspiring—a movement that “created an imaginative opening in the political and economic possibilities for the country.” But also deeply frustrating, as over time Occupy’s consensus rules “not only stopped decisions, but also led to a kind of fetishizing of ‘the process,’ [leading] away from action.”200
When Bernie Sanders declared his candidacy in 2015, Teachout, who grew up in Vermont, was one of his earliest backers. Explaining that she’d first met Sanders “at a brown bag lunch” in Montpelier in 1993, where he’d spoken to voters about how the newly enacted North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would jeopardize their rights, Teachout said she was endorsing Sanders “because of my deep patriotism, my belief that democracy is possible and a thriving economy is possible, and we don’t need to beg at the feet of the wealthiest donors to have a collective life worth living.”201
One of the harder lessons history teaches us is that the good guys don’t always win. I spent election night 2016 in the Rhinecliff Inn, watching Teachout watch as Hillary Clinton’s anticipated victory collapsed. Her own race, in a historically Republican rural district, had been lost hours before, but with a much larger disaster unfolding, Teachout told her supporters, “Once in a generation, we are called upon to restore American democracy. You’ve seen what’s happened across the country tonight. It’s urgent, and it’s going to take all of us. We may have lost this race, but we are not going away.”
Persistence is a trait Teachout has been cultivating all her life. At thirteen she ran in the New England cross-country championships. “You’re not supposed to run out front. But nobody told me that,” she says. Racing against high school students several years her senior, nobody bothered to tell her she wasn’t supposed to win, either. So she did, and went on to win the state title several times. Jim Eakin, her high school coach, recalled Teachout racing through the long winters without long sleeves or tights. “She had a lot of natural talent,” said Eakin, “but her greatest strength was her toughness.”
When Teachout talks about her childhood she describes an almost nineteenth-century tableau of town meetings and church on Sundays, growing up on a farm near Norwich, Vermont, with sheep and chickens and chores for her and her four siblings: Woden, Chelsea, Cabot, and Dillon. Given the unusual names, I’d always assumed her parents were part of the back-to-the-land movement that, beginning in the 1960s, transformed Vermont from one of the most conservative states in the country to the most progressive—attracting and then molding incomers like ex–New Yorkers Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders. But Teachout corrects me.
“That wasn’t my parents’ world.” The Teachouts—the name is Dutch—have been in Vermont for generations. As a law student, her father, Peter Teachout, had spent a summer registering voters in rural Louisiana. An early opponent of the Vietnam War, he was drafted and offered the option of enlisting as an officer because of his law degree. He served three years in Army intelligence, once, says his daughter, giving “a speech in Japan to a bunch of officers and enlisted men about why we were violating the Geneva Conventions in Vietnam, and all the officers stood up and walked out because they were so offended.” For the last forty years, he’s taught constitutional law at the Vermont Law School.
Her mother, Mary Miles Teachout, is a superior court judge. Her parents “will never answer the name question,” she says, “but I often think of it as more a sense of humor than a seventies ethic. They aren’t particularly political. Because my dad cared a lot about it, we did end up talking about race a fair amount, even in this very small, very white community. The deep ethos, I would say, of my family was very much that nobody’s the boss of anybody else.” Apart from the face-to-face democracy of the New England town meeting, Teachout says her own politics were shaped by the experience of “growing up in a Congregational church. One of the distinct features . . . is that the members have power over the minister.”
Born in 1971, Teachout attended her first demonstration “on my own. I took the bus from White River Junction to DC to the Women’s March on Washington” in April 1989. Yet when she graduated from Yale four years later, neither politics nor the law beckoned. “I wanted to become a journalist, or a teacher.” In the meantime, she was working as a waitress. But on the way to hear Sanders speak in Burlington she ended up sharing an elevator with Howard Dean’s chief of staff, who suggested she come to work on his gubernatorial campaign.
“There were only three of us there, so I was able to learn every part of it. I wrote the polls. I created the literature. I think he spent $250,000 on the whole thing.” After Dean won, Teachout traveled to Morocco, where, still interested in education, she put together a database of English-language textbooks. Returning to the US, she worked as a personal assistant and applied to Duke, which had a joint program in law and political science.
“I didn’t become deeply political until after going to law school. I was very troubled by the high levels of incarceration [in North Carolina]. I thought, ‘Well, maybe part of the reason is because you have life sentences which seem trivial compared to a death sentence, and there’s all these problems with the death penalty, so why don’t [I] work on the death penalty?’ So many things you just wander into, and then it has a profound effect. It had a very profound effect on me.”
“There was a guy, Clifton White, about to be executed. This was in my first few months of really working as a lawyer. We’d submitted a request for a pardon to the governor and the governor summarily denied it. But the governor had also been Clifton White’s prosecutor in a prior life, who had pushed for him getting death. That seemed like a pretty basic equal protection clause violation. If you’re going to allow for somebody to be pardoned, they should not [need to] be pardoned by their own prosecutor. You either provide the process or you don’t, but if you do provide it, it can’t be somebody who’s already got his thumb on [the scale].
“A lower court stayed the execution at nine thirty at night. The Supreme Court of North Carolina got together on the phone that same night and dissolved the stay. Clifton White was executed six hours later. It was awful—this incredible carelessness of the North Carolina Supreme Court that they wouldn’t even have a hearing. They just got together on the phone. I had come in a bit neutral . . . on capital punishment, but not neutral on whether the procedure should be fair. I’m no longer neutral on capital punishment. You realize the degree to which law is profoundly political.”
Watch Teachout pressing the flesh at a fund-raiser for Upper Hudson Planned Parenthood, or giving an impromptu stump speech to supporters in New Paltz, and she seems like a natural politician. She’s composed, articulate, and feisty, pulling off the difficult trick of projecting warmth without coming across as fake. Yet she only arrived at politics late and with a certain reluctance. “I love poetry, I like painting, I like art. I hadn’t really thought of myself as a political person—I think in part because I thought everything was okay.
“Like a lot of people in my generation—the [Berlin] Wall came down in ’89—there was a sense that the fundamental problems of democracy had been solved. I came to college and divestment [from South Africa] was happening. These were success stories.” Her death penalty work showed her that things were not okay—and would not improve by themselves. “The worst kind of progressive, I think, is the one who believes that history will solve itself.”
So when, in 2003, Dean announced he was running for president on a platform of universal health care and opposition to the Iraq War, “I thought, ‘Oh, if he gets to become president, I can really have a voice here.’ I auctioned off all the stuff in my apartment in North Carolina” and headed back to Vermont. Despite her rudimentary programming skills, Teachout became Dean’s director of online organizing. “I hired the first programmers for a presidential campaign. At the time, people were still just putting up pamphlets on the Internet. It was unbelievably exciting. At first, there were five hundred meetings around the country. Then there’s a thousand. Then there’s tens of thousands . . . This at a time when Bill Clinton said Dean couldn’t be a serious candidate [because of his opposition to the war in Iraq].”
Though Dean’s campaign eventually ran aground in Iowa, campaign manager Joe Trippi’s experiment in “online populism” lasted long enough for proof of concept. Dean for America—the website Teachout’s team created—became a ten-thousand-dollar-an-hour fund-raising machine, while at the same time providing “Deaniacs” with chat rooms, blogging platforms, and a continuous stream of user-generated content celebrating their candidate. On DeanLink, supporters who typed in their zip codes were given the names of every registered Deaniac in their community, with options to send messages or add them to their list of friends. Clicking on “Go Local” took you from virtual to actual, with invitations to fund-raisers, envelope-stuffing sessions, and doorknocking forays—in your own neighborhood, or, for the more adventurous or dedicated, in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Zack Exley, who took a leave from his job as organizing director at MoveOn.org to advise the campaign, described the Dean staffers as “the antithesis” of typical careerist political operatives. “They just really wanted to take back their country.”202 For Teachout, the campaign was a continuing education in how conventional politics had broken down—and how much could be accomplished outside the conventional model.
“We raised more money than Bill Clinton had—but from lowdollar donations. At the same time, you could see how—in non-explicit ways, without the candidate even necessarily being involved—policy is responsive to big donors. I wrote up an open-source policy‡ and somebody said, ‘Just run it by the head of public policy for Microsoft. He doesn’t have to approve, just see what he thinks.’ All these soft conversations, not explicitly quid pro quo, just a sense that these are important people because they are in our big fund-raising world. Honestly, I thought we were changing everything . . .
“We’d shown how a distributed method of fund-raising could compete. And a model for distributed organizing. I also had a moment of coming up short, thinking, ‘These are really important tools.’ They could either be tools of centralization or decentralization.” In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign used distributed fundraising to amass the biggest war chest ever seen in American politics. But the campaign itself was famously top-down.
“If you don’t allow people to connect and create their own power sources,” says Teachout, “two things follow. One, you actually learn less. But also you build less power.
People disengage.
“They’ll make the phone calls you ask them to for the six months before an election, or show up and do the canvasing that you want them to, because they care so much. But they haven’t then built a political community with real clout that can effect things on the local or state, or even national level.” Which is what happened to the Democratic Party during the eight years Obama was in the White House. “There really was no political organizing, and that hurt our country in a lot of ways,” says Teachout.
After Obama’s reelection in 2012, Teachout tracked several local groups of Obama supporters. “The groups that lasted the longest were often the groups that the Obama campaign never got around to sending staff to, which makes a lot of sense. Nobody told them to start, so nobody could tell them to stop. In Durham, there was an active group that ended up working on local incarceration issues because they had figured out how to be effective . . .”
It wasn’t until the Bernie barnstorms of 2016, and Becky Bond and Zack Exley’s “Big Organizing” model,203 that distributed organizing got another chance to show what it could do. In the meantime, Teachout became preoccupied with a related problem: Since devolving power away from the center is not only good politics, but also effective politics, why is it so rarely practiced?
In her 2015 TED Talk, “What is Corrupt?,” Teachout begins with a confession: “I grew up killing chickens.” Not exactly what the audience expected from the immaculately coiffed law professor in a blue suit. But a clever way to introduce one of the most important concepts in her political lexicon: “chickenization,” which is Teachout’s shorthand for the forces corrupting our politics and strangling our economy.
“I think you can look at the chicken industry as both a truth [for agriculture], and also a metaphor for what’s happening everywhere. The chicken industry looks like, on paper, a profoundly competitive, thriving industry. There are tens of thousands of contract farmers. They are their own business owners. They run chicken farms. They compete against each other. They produce a lot of cheap chickens.”
“In fact, what has happened is the big three—Tyson, Pilgrims Pride, and Sanderson—have effectively divided up the country into little fiefdoms. If you’re a chicken farmer in Tyson’s territory, you can’t sell to anybody but Tyson. Or if you do, the terms are no better.
“Tyson says, ‘We are not going to buy your chickens unless you use our feed, [from] an affiliated company, unless you use our eggs, unless you use our watering system, unless you use our light and dark system.’ Basically, unless you use their entire scheme. Our image of the chicken farmer as this entrepreneur who’s figuring out how to build a better chicken—someone we might be able to go to and say, ‘Hey. I think this is inhumane,’ and who might have the moral agency to say, ‘I hear you. I’ll change this.’—That is not true.
“But then it gets worse, because Tyson then also requires the chicken farmer to sign a contract that says he can’t talk to his neighbors, who are also chicken farmers, about their practices. One of the things about a functioning market is that there’s a lot of competition, but there’s also a lot of communication. Not here.
“Tyson can then use these chicken farmers, because they can’t communicate with each other, to experiment, to say, ‘Okay, let’s send this person some different feed.’ But all the learning happens at Tyson. The learning doesn’t happen at the local level because they’ve just been using them as guinea pigs.”
Farmers also take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to build chicken houses to the company’s specifications. Meanwhile, processors like Tyson pay their contract farmers through the “tournament system,” which “pits farmers against one another by pegging their pay to their ranking, with no accountability or transparency. Farmers know that if they protest or challenge the company, it can cut them off—and sink their livelihood.204 There’s great reporting by Chris Leonard on this in his book Meat Racket.§ I’ve talked to people in the dairy industry who’ve experienced the same thing.
“This procedure, which works very well for Tyson, is called chickenization. It’s called chickenization because the beef and pork industry are taking it up. But I would say this is also Amazon, this is Google. A lot of our big companies are chickenizing all of the people they work with. You want to sell a book? You’d better follow Amazon’s rules and Amazon’s contract, and Amazon can use its contract to learn, to spy on publishers. These distributors have [an] incredible amount of power. It looks like a market, but it’s not a market—and it leads to political fear. Just try to find publishers that are willing to speak up against Amazon.”
Political fear is something Teachout has seen at first hand. As a senior fellow at the New America think tank’s Open Markets program, she wrote policy papers blasting Tom Wheeler, the Obama-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, for wobbling on net neutrality, and criticizing conservative chief justice John Roberts. No problem. Then Barry Lynn, the program’s head, wrote a blog post in June 2017 praising the European Union after it fined Google €2.42 billion for abusing its dominance as a search engine to promote its own products.
Teachout explains: “The classic example is Yelp in this country. It’s really hard to prove, but there’ve been some white papers on this. Organically, TripAdvisor should show up. Then Google decided it wanted to get in the game, so now Yelp is the top search result. This is something that all the anti-monopolists from the Granger period understood. It’s like, ‘Oh, we own the railroad? We are going to make it cheaper for our companies to ship things on this railroad.’ Google flexed its muscles, and within three days Lynn was asked to leave New America, with eight staffers and a few of us fellows.” As Teachout notes, New America’s main conference room is named the Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab, after Google’s chairman, who between his family foundation and the corporation donated some $21 million to New America.205
“I can’t tell you the number of people who have said to me, ‘I can’t help you if you’re working on your Google project because my sibling has a project that depends on Google money.’ These are the normal choices people make. They care more about their sister than they care about taking on the monopoly. That makes perfect sense, but the problem is the system that allows for this incredible fear of these companies, who have the capacity to retaliate.”
Once you start noticing it, the chickenization of the American economy is hard to miss. In Millerton, New York, Teachout introduces me to Lou Saperstein, whose family store has dominated the town’s Main Street for half a century. “I’ve been doing business with OshKosh for twenty, twenty-five years,” Saperstein told me. “I used to go to their offices in the Empire State Building to make my orders. Then they started sending me sheets in the mail. Then they sent a disk in the mail. After they got bought by Carter’s in 2012, I got a letter saying they were canceling my order.”
To retain the privilege of selling OshKosh jeans, Saperstein’s would “need to order a minimum of five thousand dollars” in the spring of 2013, said Lou, “rising to twenty thousand dollars in the fall and fifty thousand dollars a year thereafter.” This in a town with a population of 958.
“There’s a lie that Main Streets all over America are dying because local businesses can’t compete,” says Teachout. “If there was an open market, Saperstein’s could compete. But there isn’t.”
“We are at a revolutionary moment right now,” says Teachout, “about what kind of society we want to live in. An enormous number of people—left and right—are saying, ‘Definitely not this.’ Monopoly and antitrust aren’t just technical sideline issues. These are fundamental swords that you can use to restrict excessive power.
“We just kind of lost the language. It’s like we actually lost the words. After 2008 I was involved in efforts to use Dodd-Frank [the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act] to try to break up eight banks. Even people I really agreed with, they’d say, ‘That’s not antitrust.’ Well, what is it? If you have really important political tools that have no name, then they don’t get used.”
With her professorial suits and Pepsodent smile, Teachout doesn’t exactly fit the image of a radical firebrand. This is a woman who uses “Gee willikers!” to express anger, who on the campaign trail sometimes described herself as a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican”—though to me she referenced a different Roosevelt: “I’m a second-term FDR person.” That would be the term that saw the Democratic Party transformed into the party of immigrants, city dwellers, and African Americans—and the rise of the Roosevelt Republic.
What makes Teachout radical—and indispensible for understanding both what has happened to our country and how to redeem it—isn’t her manner, it’s her message. Which isn’t just that the system is rigged, but how it’s rigged, who rigged it, and why. Not some paranoid fantasy about black helicopters and federal bureaucrats. Or a capitalist conspiracy with Wall Street puppet masters pulling strings (though Wall Street, particularly the banking industry, is a frequent target). But a clear, persuasive, historically informed whodunit laying out exactly how the unchecked exercise of corporate power is destroying our country—and why, back when Donald Trump was still just a reality TV star with improbable hair—things had already gotten so much worse.
“People don’t necessarily know the meaning of ‘antitrust’ or ‘monopoly,’ but they know something is wrong,” she says. The Founding Fathers, Teachout says, were obsessed with the fragility of republican government. They’d all read Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In drafting the Constitution, the founders were acutely aware of what had happened not just to the Roman republic, or the Venetian republic, but to Britain, which they perceived as a failed republic in which the forms of representative government had been hollowed out by corruption, embodied, in the language of the time, by the king and his “placemen”—the term used to describe subservient political appointees.
“By corruption,” Teachout writes, the Founders “meant excessive private interests influencing the exercise of public power. An act was corrupt when private power was used to influence public power for private ends.206 A system was corrupt when the public power was excessively used to serve private ends instead of the public good. A person was corrupt when they used public power for private ends.”
Teachout’s 2014 book Corruption in America is a postmortem for the Roosevelt Republic. Beginning with the story of Benjamin Franklin’s snuffbox—intended as a parting gift from Louis XVI to Franklin after his service as ambassador to France, the diamond-encrusted gold box with an enamel portrait of the king prompted a crisis in the young republic, resolved only after Franklin submitted it to Congress, which after some debate granted him permission to keep it—Teachout traces the decay of our democracy from a country in which lobbying was literally illegal¶ to today’s post–Citizens United dystopia.
Of course the threat of corruption has always been with us. As early as Fletcher v. Peck, an 1810 Supreme Court decision holding that even though the Georgia legislature made certain land grants in return for bribes, the sale of those lands was a binding contract, which a later, reforming legislature could not revoke. The Supreme Court, as this case shows, has long been prepared to protect business interests at the expense of equity (or, in this case, the Native American tribes whose land had been sold out from under them). The Founders may have taken bribery seriously enough to make it one of the only crimes—along with treason and piracy—mentioned by name in the Constitution. Yet Boise Penrose, the early twentieth-century Republican who bought his seat in the US Senate by spreading half a million dollars among the 254 members of the Pennsylvania legislature—his opponent, John Wanamaker, was under the mistaken impression that $400,000 would be sufficient—was hardly an isolated case.207 Thwarting such common practice was why the Populists demanded, and the Progressives delivered, direct election of senators in the Seventeenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in April 1913.
Though they’ve been on the books throughout our history, bribery laws, the muckraking journalist Robert Sherrill pointed out, have mostly ensnared “the small-time operator, the unpopular politician, the fringe power broker. They are not generally used to bring the bigtime operator to a shameful end.” Indeed, by Richard Nixon’s day, the sale of ambassadorships for campaign contributions—a bribe in all but name—was sufficiently well established that Nixon “even set up a kind of ‘complaints’ window. Givers who expected an ambassadorship and didn’t get one”—like Cornelius V. Whitney, who donated $250,000 in hopes of becoming ambassador to Spain, but was opposed by the State Department—“could receive a refund.”208
That’s because, like the War on Drugs, a “War on Corruption” is nearly impossible to win through the criminal justice system—especially when the lines between a bribe and a gift and a campaign contribution are so easily blurred. Instead, the Founders relied on what Teachout calls “incentive structures” like Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8—the “emoluments clause”—of the Constitution, which bars all federal office holders from receiving “any present . . . of any kind whatever” from a foreign government without the consent of Congress.209
Yet beginning with Buckley v. Valeo, a 1976 ruling that struck down limits on campaign spending, the Supreme Court has successively dismantled every effort to contain the influence of money—and hence of corporate power—over our politics. “The hallmark of corruption is the financial quid pro quo: dollars for political favors,” wrote Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1985.210 Where the Founders regarded mere gifts as dangerous and in need of close supervision—in an era when the giving of gifts was an accepted part of the political culture—the court’s 2010 Citizens United decision restricted corruption to actual bribery, since, as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “favoritism and influence are not . . . avoidable in representative politics.”211
The view that government had no interest in preventing influence peddling so long as there was no explicit quid pro quo was reinforced by the Roberts Court in 2014 with McCutcheon, which dismantled the last remaining limits on individual donations.212 The decline reached its denouement two years later, when the court overturned the conviction of Bob McDonnell, a former governor of Virginia, who with his wife had taken $177,000 in loans and gifts from a Richmond businessman. Though Jonnie Williams had given the governor a Rolex watch, the use of his Ferrari, and $20,000 toward his daughter’s wedding reception, paid for the McDonnell family vacation, and loaned the governor $120,000, the court found that Williams was merely paying for “access”—which is apparently no longer a crime.213
Corruption matters. A candidate who refuses to recognize corruption—who insists, as Hillary Clinton did repeatedly in 2016, that “America is already great”—will never be trusted by voters who can smell the stench all around them. Donald Trump’s inaugural promise that “we are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people” may have been a lie. But at least it didn’t pretend the system worked. Offered a forced choice between two paths to their own extinction—the gently managed, technocratically assisted suicide offered by the Democrats, or the savage Darwinian winner-take-all sweepstakes of the Republicans—is it really so surprising that millions of Americans decided not to play along, whether by voting for the candidate who promised an end to business as usual, or simply by staying home?
That Trump’s victory ushered in what may be the most corrupt administration in American history—where oil companies eviscerate environmental regulations, corporate foes of public schools dismantle federal aid to education, billionaires and their congressional placemen rewrite the tax code, and influence peddlers domestic and foreign line up to patronize Trump’s businesses—will remain merely a bitter irony so long as the larger corruption at the heart of our democracy remains unacknowledged. Putting a kleptocrat in the White House only underlines how far we have fallen from a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Corruption, not conspiracy, is the thread that connects the Flint water scandal (where General Motors was given access to clean water from Lake Huron while city children were poisoned) to congressional paralysis in the wake of mass shootings (thanks to NRA lobbying), to the high cost of prescription drugs, to the lack of accountability for police shootings, to the criminalization of marijuana, to the suppression of climate science. A movement that opposes racism and sexism and militarism and economic oppression while ignoring corruption is fighting with its hands tied. Which is why, Teachout says, she’s trying “to bring corruption back. Not as a societal ill—but as an idea.
“Everything I do is about, in some ways, fighting against concentrated power. People might disagree on this. But for me at least, the problem is not the corporate form. The problem is the big corporation.”
She traces her distrust of bigness to her hero, Louis Brandeis. “For many years, the Brandeis-influenced, decentralized power part of the left has been suppressed.” For socialists in love with central planning, bigness seemed like a virtue. Teachout says she always asks such people, “In your ideal society, who will make the shoes?” Any answer that involves concentrated power, she says, “terrifies the hell out of me, and not just because of the Soviet history. This is perhaps where I’m a little more conservative than some people. Because I believe things can get even worse.”
In her own campaign for Congress, Teachout felt the power of Big Money at the sharp end. Though she raised nearly $1 million more than her Republican opponent, former lobbyist John Faso—mostly from small donors giving an average of twenty-one dollars each—the difference was more than made up for by just two billionaires, Robert Mercer and Wall Street financier Paul Singer. The $6.7 million in super-PAC money against her financed an onslaught of hostile television, radio, and Internet ads Teachout was unable to answer. “If you lived in the district and went on Pandora, you had to watch an attack ad on me.” Despite losing her race, she jokes, “I have the same job I was applying for—except without the staff or the authority.”
Yet Teachout remains hopeful. “One of my fears after the election is that people running from Trump would run into the arms of the oligarchs. ‘Save us, Facebook. Save us, Google. Save us, Jeff Bezos.’ This fear is not coming to pass.”
Instead, she’s noticed “some strange bed follows, like labor and small business, which had been seen as antagonistic. Because if your approach to labor is essentially bureaucratic, it’s much easier to organize GM than to organize ten different companies making something. Then there’s net neutrality, which is kind of shocking in how it became a grassroots movement. Thousands of people marching and sitting in and pressuring the FCC? That’s kind of interesting. I feel like it’s post-crash politics.
“There’s no shortcut to a better society,” Teachout says. “It requires rebuilding a structure of local power of Democrats and progressives. It requires taking on these big companies. It will require some really difficult coalitions—the old populist platform coalitions. That can seem a little hard because there’s Trump over here.”
While some commentators have abandoned populism to Trump and his supporters, Teachout is not among them. The sense of revelation she felt reading Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment after Dean’s defeat has never left her. “What’s the opposite of populism?” she asks. “Technocratic elites making decisions? It’s not like there’s this wonderful history of enlightened elites making the best decisions for the rest of us. Actually, technocratic elites also have a long tradition of incredible corruption and racism. If you disrespect people, some form of reaction will arise.”
A week after her defeat, and Trump’s victory, the Washington Post asked Teachout to reflect on what had happened. She was blunt. “In the 1990s, Democrats pretended they could fund their campaigns with cash from Wall Street titans and still remain the party of the American worker and American farmer and American independent business owner. Well, that didn’t work, did it? The rising tides of Wall Street didn’t lift all boats. What it did do was flood the country, washing away our homes and our jobs and our dignity and our sovereignty . . .”
“What should the Democratic Party stand for? In a word, democracy, with equal dignity for each person. That means becoming the party that resists every effort by small groups of well-organized wealthy men to take over our families and our communities and our nation.”
A year later, she gave me a longer to-do list: “Pass an absolute ban on staffers or members of Congress taking jobs in the influence industry. Any [state] legislature can pass laws banning legislators and staffers from holding stock in companies affected by legislation. Congress can clearly define coordination so that independent corporate spending is actually independent. The public can oppose any Supreme Court nominee that supports the logic of Buckley, Citizens United, and McCutcheon. To my mind, the two most important solutions that require no Supreme Court blessing are ideas advocated by Teddy Roosevelt: publicly funded elections and trust-busting.”
Losing an election isn’t always a defeat, much less a reason to quit fighting. “There are no saviors here,” she told me. “That desire to be saved by anybody is itself anti-political and anti-democratic. We actually have to rebuild power.” The good guys don’t always win. Zephyr Teachout learned that the hard way. What matters is what happens next.
* In May 2018 Teachout announced her candidacy to succeed Eric Schneiderman as New York State attorney general.
† After he left the White House Plouffe was fined $90,000 by the Chicago Board of Ethics for failing to register as a lobbyist before contacting Mayor Rahm Emanuel on behalf of Uber, the ride-sharing company, who’d hired him as a strategic advisor. In January 2017 Plouffe became head of policy and advocacy at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the charity set up by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.
‡ Readers interested in a geek’s-eye-view from the outside might want to find Linux Journal editor Doc Searles’s dispatches from the campaign trail, all archived at www.linuxjournal.com.
§ Christopher Leonard, Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).
¶ The Georgia constitution made lobbying a crime; the 1879 California Constitution made it a felony.