Larry Summers really likes to ask people whether they want to be outsiders, who can speak the truth but can’t have power, or insiders who can have power as long as they don’t say anything that’s unacceptable to the oligarchy. Who knows how many people he’s asked that question. We only know about the ones that have answered “outsider” so firmly that they then tell the world about the question being asked.

“In her book released [2014], Sen. Elizabeth Warren recounted a dinner she had with President Obama’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, in April 2009, when Warren was the outspoken chairman of a congressionally appointed panel probing the government’s response to the financial crisis.

Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. … He teed it up this way: I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule. They don’t criticize other insiders. I had been warned.

Warren ignored the warning.”

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/12/14/elizabeth-warren-is-changing-washington-without-giving-up-her-outside-status/?utm_term=.6808511df256

“[Varoufakis] dramatises his intent throughout the crisis with a telling anecdote. He’s in Washington for a meeting with Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary and Obama confidant. Summers asks him point blank: do you want to be on the inside or the outside? “Outsiders prioritise their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions,” Summers warns.

Elected politicians have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting the system. That was the offer. Varoufakis not only rejected it – by describing it in frank detail now, he is arming us against the stupidity of the left’s occasional fantasies that the system built by neoliberalism can somehow bend or compromise to our desire for social justice.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/03/yanis-varoufakis-greece-greatest-political-memoir

Summers is right to ask that question; it’s an important one. But where he’s wrong is that he implies that “insider” is a morally acceptable answer. If you’re an insider in the sense he means you’re an ally of the oligarchy and thus an enemy of everyone else. And as Warren has demonstrated, you don’t have to be an insider to succeed in politics anymore. The insiders are a lot richer and better organized, but there are a lot more outsiders. We’re coming.