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.

You can't just provide power, you also need public education.

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.

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.

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.

You can have very big local government. By big, I mean very engaged government. Do you measure it in terms of the number of laws? Number of employees? You could make arguments for either one. I tend to think the axis of the size of government is the wrong concern. But I do think that situating power more locally is a legitimate approach.

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.