The Triumph of Corruption

Zephyr Teachout is an impresario of the ways that organized people can outflank organized money. In 2014, she challenged New York’s sitting governor, Andrew Cuomo, and took more than a third of the vote in a last-minute, scantily-financed primary challenge in which he outspent her about 40–1. A decade earlier, she shaped Howard Dean’s internet strategy, making his the first campaign to realize the web’s long-touted organizing potential. But while Teachout believes in the twenty-first-century version of shoe-leather politics, she argues in Corruption in America that superior footwork is not enough. Organized money is going to win unless we change the rules of politics, constitutional law, and the economy.