Luke Nathan Phillips's Home on the Web

If you are looking for my 2026 Congressional campaign, please click the website link below:

Luke Nathan Phillips for Congress

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Tour Guide, Outdoor Guide, Reenactor

Professional in Bipartisan Depolarization Advocacy

Writer

My name is Luke Nathan Phillips. Welcome to my home on the web.

My Work

I’m a tour guide, policy professional, and writer from Northern Virginia. I have worked in and around policy world in Washington D.C. since 2017, primarily in the bipartisan depolarization advocacy space, for various civic organizations, nonprofits, magazines, journalists, and researchers.

Tour guiding, conversation moderation, and writing are my primary trades. I spend my time guiding people around the places I love and telling their stories, convening interesting people to explore important questions, and writing and speaking on the subjects which fascinate me most. In everything I do, I try to share my excitement about history, political thought, and civic life with those I work with.

I have been blessed to learn, over long experience, some edifying personal approaches to the social, civic, and intellectual challenges of our time, that there are many ways to be a patriot, and that there are many kinds of creative public service, and in all I do I work to share insights from these experiences with those looking for them.

Feel free to click around the menu at the top to learn about my services. Or feel free to keep scrolling to learn about me.

What I Do

I give customized walking tours of various parts of Washington D.C. and other locales, tailored for the interests of groups engaged in bipartisan, reformist, and civic work, and for a variety of other student, young professional, veteran, and activist groups. I also give private tours, guide outdoor adventures, and portray Alexander Hamilton as a reenactor.

I have organized, hosted, moderated, or chaired many dozens of panels, debates, workshops, and other events geared towards policy experts, activists, young professionals, and students, both in Washington D.C. and across the United States, and many more online. I plan one-off events and event series for various institutions around D.C. I occasionally speak to various kinds of audiences or serve as a panelist, or as a guest on podcasts and radio shows, and I have been a spokesman taking press interviews for organizations with which I have been associated.

I have functional expertise in polarization and civil discourse studies, American political history and biography, and political sociology and ideological development studies. I am interested in and working to develop some working expertise in conservation policy, industrial policy, and foreign policy analysis. I also study and comment on American identity studies in class, geographic, religious, and ethnic analysis, contemporary Asian-American identity, and the masculinity crisis of modern times.

I write essays on, among other things, American intellectual, political, and institutional history, across the entire American national experience; and theories of civic and political life and good citizenship under the changing conditions of the 21st Century. I write commentary on politics, culture, and current affairs through these lenses, and I write on historical themes more generally. I write essays on these and other themes for political magazines, policy journals, SubStacks, community publications, and occasionally my own blog. My writings have been featured in publications including American Affairs, The National Interest, The Deseret News, RealClearPolicy, and The Dispatch, among many more. A peer-reviewed academic article of mine was published in 2023. I do editing, research, and creative consulting for various authors and publications on a contract basis.

I served in the volunteer corps of Braver Angels, the grassroots-led, fully red-blue national civic organization dedicated to reconciliation of Americans across all our divides, from September 2017 to March 2025. I served as Publius Fellow for Public Discourse for Braver Angels from 2021 to 2024. I am also probably the only person, as of 2025, who has been an assistant to both David Brooks and Julius Krein. I have done stints at magazines and research teams, industrial trade associations, civil society think tanks, political campaigns, presidential foundations, and historic preservation conservancies.

I have recently begun volunteer work in conservation policy and public lands advocacy.

Who I Am

I grew up between Western Washington, Southern California, and Northern Virginia, and did my undergraduate work at the University of Southern California. I am a proud alumnus of The Spirit of Troy, the University of Southern California Trojan Marching Band; a proud alumnus of the Philmont Scout Ranch Conservation Department staff, volunteer seasonal staff of the OA Trail Crew program; and a proud former host at The Hamilton Restaurant in Washington D.C., where I have continued to serve as the Easter Bunny every Easter Sunday brunch shift.

I am a devoted patron of America’s public lands, a day-hiker and winter mountaineer and ultra-marathoner. I run road races as often as possible, and occasionally do conservation work. I prefer to travel by car, and have spent many months exploring the various corners of the United States and pilgrimaging to historic sites, observing the tastes and fancies of our culture and enjoying the grandeur and mystery of our continent, especially in the West. I play ukulele and have opened for GangstaGrass. I routinely write poems and make memes, and am an avid consumer of American political biography.

I’m proud of all of it. I’ve been mentored by a good many folks wiser, braver, more temperate, more prudent, more disciplined, and more patient and humble than I’ve ever been, and I owe so much of my success to their unflagging faith in me. I’ve been blessed to cram many fun and interesting experiences into my brief life thus far, and am looking forward to more of them.

Thanks for visiting my page, and feel free to look around. This website is my promotional page for my services, and my primary online archive of written work. I don’t update my blog often, but will do so on occasion. Links to my social media are posted. If you feel the need to contact me for some reason (comments, questions, queries, vicious personal attacks, etc etc etc.) my email address is here as well.

I look forward to meeting you!

-LNP