Author: Luke Nathan Phillips

March 2025

At the grave of John McCain at the U.S. Naval Academy.

I think (for understandable reasons) the interpretation of McCain’s legacy has been largely an amplification of the dynamics of his career from 2009 to his death in 2018. (The people who now endorse him were largely opposed to his legacy of 2001- 2009, and in many ways were tepid about his presence 2009-2018.) That has been helpful in some real ways and unhelpful in many other ways; for example it largely glosses over his less-well-respected tenure from 2001 to 2009, after his defeat by. George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican primary and before his defeat at the hands of Barack Obama in the 2008 election. (The people who supported his legacy in that time have largely forgotten or opposed his legacy from the times since then.)

Personally I think the most interesting part of McCain’s legacy (aside from the formative years up to 1973) is is his early congressional career, 1982-2001, when the maverick independent and bipartisan patriot mythoses were developed, culminating in the 2000 presidential campaign (the single political event of my lifetime I most regret being too young to remember.) In various ways, those have had negative effects (I think they formed the modern political reform mindset, which has been either impotent or actively harmful, as well as the nonpartisan patriotism mindset, which has devolved largely into arrogant dismissals of ethical partisanship.) But the purer forms of those are very, very compelling as myth, and in general do not seem to have been studied or utilized much since then, nor is McCain remembered for those days anymore. (Various of his former staffers have told me that the only political McCain they recognize is the McCain of the Straight Talk Express in 2000.)

Nobody seems to have written on McCain’s circles, either, especially including Robert Gates and Jon Huntsman; the former served his rivals Bush and Obama, and the latter served his rivals Bush and Obama and Trump, and in quieter ways both emulated the old McCain approach to politics. Nor have many written on his bipartisan friendships with major electoral rivals Biden and Lieberman. To be clear, I think that generation of politicians largely failed to reform the old order and put us in the circumstances of oligarchy and kludgeocracy that made the breakdown of the last decade inevitable (note the handling of the crises of 2001-2003 and 2008-2009 among many others, as well as the policy failures for a generation before that.) But the style of that generation is obviously missing in public, no matter how much it might exist quietly under the radar in Congress and the statehouses and the bureaucracies.

But governance is not the measure of political order. Public trust and faith in their governors is. That generation, which once held the faith of the country, lost it over time, and probably refused to admit it, McCain most of all. Yet the model McCain and his generation practiced in style, especially while the public still trusted them, remains I think the beau ideal of the best styles in every generation of American governance, even as it is always a minority among less dignified styles.

Nobody has tried, to my knowledge, to update and practice that model under the conditions of the past decade for our own times, successfully. It would necessarily look quite different from the old, even while recognizably maintaining the spirit. That is something I’m looking for. A good and dour friend told me the old unconditional goodwill patriotism for every American in the Union “died with your hero McCain.” I do not believe that. I am not ready to stick a fork in the American project yet; and even as he watched everything he’d lived for crumble, for better or for worse, as he died, I don’t think McCain was ready to either.

Note: This piece had been bubbling up in me for at least five years before I finally wrote it on August 9^th, 2024, a day after summitting Mount Shasta and about two months before a very deep valley. Having found no publications that would take it, I have finally decided just to put it up here (and in retrospect, that was always the right choice.) It is just a wistful little reflection on Nixon’s Farewell Speech to the White House Staff.

The piece I wrote the same day for The National Interest, a reading of Nixon’s significance for the young people of my generation, is far better.

Read that piece here: “We’re All Nixon Now”

This one, with all its woozy saccharinity, inaccurate metaphor, questionable interpretation, and maudlin indulgence of prose, is far less readable and of much lower quality. But since nobody else seems to have taken the speech seriously for its 50^th anniversary, I am compelled to produce SOMEthing.

-LNP

Nixon’s was one of the great American lives, an epic personal life in the public eye channeling and exemplifying the passions and dreams and terrors and blindnesses of the ages he passed through, a life of high achievement, grand defeat and poignant, mythic moments whose meanings will come to life opaquely in posterity’s literary, physical, and living monuments. As with all truly great Americans, his greatest moments were personal, not public—the two years’ chase of Pat, the nighttime chat with the student protestors at the Lincoln Memorial, the many greatest comebacks—but a few of them hit that little mark where personal and public destiny meet and, for a shining moment, intertwine, and the man stamps his soul on the age. The most important of these happened fifty years ago last summer, August 9^th 1974—the day President Nixon and First Lady Pat left the White House South Lawn on Army One for the last time.

In his last hours as President, Nixon addressed the White House staff, to say goodbye and to thank them for their patriotism and service. He was as awkward as ever—he’d never been an electrifying speaker, and watching the speech today, one feels both heartened and a little strange. He thanked the staff, celebrated their patriotism and their decency, their unconditional and idealistic devotion to public service at the expense of their own personal gain, and linked that decency to the great and simple virtues of Middle America.

And he knew Middle America; he reminisced on the ordinary people he came from, he remembered his father’s honest work and his mother’s unconditional goodwill to all, the suffering they’d been through which so many had been through in the tumults of the century, and the decency they held onto through it all. He recalled the long dark night of his great hero, Theodore Roosevelt, of sadness and perseverance and the vigor of the greatest fights, how he stood as a man, “tempestuous, strong, sometimes wrong, sometimes right,” in all his duties. He was talking about other people— the patriotic White House staffer, the ordinary American, his father and his mother, his models of citizenship and manhood—but beneath it all he was talking about his idea of himself. For in the stories he told were the values and the ways of he life he treasured most in America, values and ways of life by which he measured his own worth.

Anyone who’s spent time with Nixon knows what these were. He genuinely felt for the average American, and unlike the Roosevelts and Kennedys, he knew the average American, for he’d grown up as one of them. He believed, too, in that midcentury ideal of propriety and decency expressed in Frank Capra films and Norman Rockwell paintings—the democratized Cincinnatus, the All-American young man going off to public service with an uncorrupted and admirable innocence and earnestness. He saw these people in his father and mother, in the Republican activists he’d worked alongside his whole life, in the people he counted on for his base to the end of his career. And these people had been swamped as badly as anyone by the Great Depression, that looming experience of Nixon’s young adulthood. So the younger Nixon found in Theodore Roosevelt’s strenuous life in the arena a moral model he intuitively embraced and matured with, as he wrestled with the hardships of his time and his own life’s great defeats.

These great traits—simplicity, earnestness, unflinching perseverance amid great defeat—are indisputably golden virtues. In Nixon they were also aligned with his most self-destructive vices: his paranoia and habitual suspiciousness, sometimes leveed randomly and other times leveed at more serene opponents; his lifelong resentments at those endowed with natural personal magnetism or family wealth or institutional status, and occasional refusal to believe that their motives could ever be pure; his deep, raging insecurities of his own worth, craving for adulation, and unbecoming descent into pettiness. These vices, of course, became the foundation for the cartoon-villain caricature his enemies dogged him with for life, and his awareness of that caricature’s ubiquity probably brought those traits out in him even more. In predicting Gerald Ford’s presidential performance, he’d noted that every President’s “abilities become more obvious, and his faults become more glaring.” He knew of what he spoke.

To his credit Nixon seems to have known this about himself, although he didn’t talk about it often. Which is why it is all the more stunning that as he concluded his speech to the staff, he delivered some of the profoundest and most personally self-reflective words ever uttered by a sitting head of state, anywhere, almost as an afterthought to his sense of self, little words of wisdom from a departing friend:

“Always give your best; never get discouraged; never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

And yet these are not merely hard-earned words of wisdom, won in the crucible of late Watergate and scribbled as an eleventh-hour conversion to the ethos of kindness, the too-little-too-late excretions of a guilty conscience pinned down. It’s more reasonable to say, that Nixon had known and acknowledged the power and danger of his own personality for some time, perhaps since the fund crisis and Checkers Speech in 1952; and had harnessed it and oftentimes indulged it, but never seriously tried to conquer it. His law partner Len Garment had said “Nixon has an angel on one shoulder and a dark angel on the other. He is both.” When the exhaustion and shame of the Watergate scandals, coinciding as they did with his most glorious victories in China and the 1972 election, finally brought everything crashing down and he lay prostrate before the American people, then the fundamental reality of the absolute necessity of inner peace became as undeniable to Nixon as it does to a broken alcoholic. It had been in his head a long time; he knew himself. Grace could preserve his brightest virtues and remove his darkest vices, and his tragedy is that he realized it too late. But the moment he did was captured by history, the silverest lining imaginable. 

Had he followed his own advice—had he never been petty, had he refused to hate those elites who hated and tormented him, had he given his best and not his worst—he still would’ve been hated, the necessary fate of all great men, the currency of power. But he would not have destroyed himself, and the hatred of those he did not hate would’ve been just another tactical piece of his political and geopolitical environments, not a dragon to slay. He’d eulogized his chief Eisenhower as “a man who did not know how to hate.” Those Americans who’ve appeared to hover above the brawling pettiness of public life in their own times, and come down in myth as heroic figures long after their times, all share a sort of serenity amid their rage, a mystique of aloofness, Washington-like, as though they were too contemptuous of contempt to feel contempt, or as Nixon again eulogized Eisenhower, were “too proud to be arrogant.” And these are the ones whose counsels of reconciliation, whether heartfelt or not, have come down in the American civil religion’s expanding yet coherent testaments of scripture, and the quiet but real political psychology and character required for greatness in a free and self-governing people. The two highest counsels—Franklin Roosevelt’s admonition that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and Abraham Lincoln’s invocations of “the better angels of our nature,” “with malice toward none, with charity for all”— point us toward magnanimity, against our fear from one side and against our malice from the other side. “Others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself,” carries the point down into one’s own destiny.

This is not merely a personal bit of heroeology for the true keepers of the Nixonian flame to banter about in the magazines. The nuggets of insight in that final farewell speech have majestic implications for the structure of our civil religion and public discourse, both in historical interpretation and contemporary political practice, and in the lives of each and every one of us touched by politics. We live in a moment when mind-numbing contempt is the norm in politics with no accompanying blessings, when the absolute demolition of mutual trust across populations and within institutions has led to the serious question of whether there is an America anymore. Surely all our leaders and every one of us might have a thing or two to reflect on, had we a few minutes with the chastened Richard Nixon of August 9^th, 1974.

We live, more or less, in the ashes of an era he’d tried and failed to inaugurate, the stulted half-realignment of the 1970s whose dysfunctional structural flaws and decadent cultural neuroses echo louder and louder each succeeding decade. It is not wild to predict we live through the last gasps of the Age of Nixon, something unclear and unborn a little bit over the horizon. But should we learn the structural and cultural lessons but fail to keep the moral lessons of a half-century ago, we will just be punting the question a little further down the road.

But whether anyone takes a moment today to think about Nixon’s last presidential advice or not, it is best not to despair of America even should we all fail. Nixon knew better than anyone that defeat brings the seeds of victory. That he said so as he resigned the Presidency, gives us the second-greatest glimpse we’ve got of the true character of the man:

“We think that when things don’t go the right way… we think that when we suffer a defeat that all is ended… Not true. It is only a beginning, always. The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us, because the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”

I publish unedited some unedited text messages I sent a dear friend several months ago, to keep them easily accessible to myself. This is just a mull on applied political theory.

It dawned on me that I have basically looked at TR’s approach— unsparing on personal standards, unsparing on public honor, total faith everybody can do it, sense that anybody not doing it is in some sense broken, ie hold everyone to highest standards— as the right way of doing things. I have thought about that in all public ethics I have, from bipartisanist public service dignity and patriotism to intellectual integrity to the braver angels way and beyond.

But I am realizing now, as I reflect on Hamilton’s statecraft and view of society, and especially his really complex views about liberty as means not ends of government, and honor as bedrock of systems but cannot be expected of anybody, (he also called virtue ‘the only unmixed good permitted to man,’ complicating things further) I am setting myself up to be disappointed. (Also Lincoln is almost polar opposite to TR on personal worth, thinking about first and second inaugural closings.) Hamilton and Lincoln were more realistic than TR in weirdly opposite directions.

Hamilton is probably right that you really should not expect anyone in public life to behave ethically, or for the American people to behave ethically, at the expense of self-preservation and self-interest etc. (which is why hypocrisy is the norm.) Institutions might help create a functional public ethics but that will not make people in it “good,” nor does it have to actually. And if you don’t expect anyone to behave ethically, you can have a system that doesn’t rely on anyone’s goodness to function. TR would not have this, he would demand people in public life behave with integrity and rail at then if he judged they didn’t.

Lincoln is probably right that regardless of whether people are virtuous or not, they do deserve unconditional reconciliation and understanding for they know not what they do etc, up to and including traitors and blood enemies; and that it is impossible for virtue to be the bedrock of any kind of political identity, including for responsible elites, and impossible for any values structure to genuinely create unproblematic virtue (including for example abolitionism or unionism.) TR would not have this, he would judge people who don’t hold themselves to higher standards and call them weak.

I still don’t know what this means about harnessing anger, ambition, self-interest, etc. for the public good, or harnessing them in ways that make it people’s self-interest to behave with public integrity that in time actually becomes civic virtue. I am poring over McDonald’s Hamilton and trying to comprehend. I used to try that for just depol but now it increasingly is everything, and I am so unschooled in this. You know my classic dialectic of honesty vs responsibility; that’s real, but it also can’t escape the reality of public life, or, I think, Hamilton’s structure. TR just wants people to hold themselves to virtue (which I do too.) Hamilton doesn’t want anyone to tell them to hold themselves to virtue but wants a structure that punishes them subtly for not being outwardly virtuous. That feels hypocritical to me; but is probably more in line with human nature broadly than the self-improvement stuff you and me live in. (But also puts cultivation of virtue in hands of people wielding power, which is easy corruption too.)

All this to say that TR’s standards are the lowest anyone should hold themselves to, and good for leadership inspiration of choice spirit elites maybe, but are as delusional about what to expect from or how to treat most Americans as Woodrow Wilson’s civil religion. Hamilton being dark and not expecting frameworks to need virtue to function, and Lincoln being bittersweet and treating everybody as if they were broken and deserved compassion,  are way more realistic.

If I were to follow my normal path on this stuff I would try to synthesize Lincoln’s and TR’s and Hamilton’s attitudes into an amalgamated personal attitude that was analytically useful and applicable across various political ideologies and understandings, and preach for people to hold themselves to it, and build YP programs off of it. But the Hamilton stuff would not let it stop there; it would have to have a very specific structure of soulcraft at the very least for elite formation, and that in itself would be an argument about society and politics with major implications for how politics should be organized (and I think that last bit is an open question.) like with TR you can have it be basically a personal thing, and even with TR and Lincoln you can have it be basically personal and social.  But with Hamilton— I think probably unlike any other American political theorist, moreso even than Madison— it must also be political, not just personal and social. That terrifies me and goes against a lot of what I’ve preached at Braver Angels, even concedes things that people at BA whose views I’ve considered to be heresy have been pushing for years. But maybe it’s good then that I am no longer there. I might not be betraying my service to braver angels in doing this; it might be that my view of BA could’ve been correct, that BA should remain what it was, but that the problems for America are getting deeper into this and my service must change too.

In the hazy beginnings of any year, when you really should be revving up the fryers of your innate self-improvement mechanisms, it can be very helpful to look over a broad conceptual overview of, like, how to become a better version of yourself over the next twelve months. Really, you should be doing continuous self-improvement year-round for your own survival, and your New Year’s Resolutions and yearlong plans should be extensions of ongoing and constantly-worked-at life goals. But, even if you don’t have some kind of system like that set up, or if you’re falling behind on goals like that, the New Year- whether January 1st, the Lunar New Year, Ash Wednesday, or some other marker- is a great time to recommit to enjoying the rest of your life and being the most useful possible man to your family, friends, community, and every cause you’ll ever love!

The way to do all this is simple, really, and you know all the tropes already, especially if you grew up in Boy Scouts. Keep yourself fit; go to church; read as much as you can; learn new skills; control your spending and your appetites; meet a lot of people and learn as much from them as you can; have goals and push towards them. The lifestyle skills make the moral traits somewhat easier to attain, as well. Whatever your situation, there is a very good chance that you can do some version of all of this. And whatever you’re frustrated about, doing any of these will help you achieve your goals a little better.

I’ve had to learn and re-learn these things myself a few times (it’s shockingly easy to forget everything as soon as your life gets good, so stay vigilant.) But when you fall, if you’re lucky enough to hit a real rock bottom and suddenly see it clear, that there is nothing else you can do but surrender to reality, give up self-pity, and strive to save yourself in any way you know, then you’re ready to take action. Even if you don’t hit rock bottom but are tired of wallowing in the swamps of anomie for too long, you can choose by your own might to take action. And there are always, always guides out there to help you take action.

Some of them are better, others are worse. Follow the wrong ones and you’ll end up worse off than you started. (I have opinions on who you should be thinking about either way, but that’s for another time.) Follow the right ones, and you’ll start to find the tools you need to make your self and your life over again, in the right kinds of ways. There’s more to life than this, but this is an important start.

One quick thing. I sincerely believe that self-improvement for any boy or man must start with working to be a better man, not just a better person. Women can do this stuff well too, and learn from it themselves– I know and admire many women who follow the advice below better than the vast majority of men I know, and I have learned some of this from them. But if you as a man do not follow these, you will end up worse off and stuck at the bottom of your soul, and nobody will pity you, in ways that are not true in the same way for women.

In trying to be a better man, remember: any masculinity that focuses on what women do, and on what society does, is not a masculinity worth practicing. Any masculinity that focuses on what men do, and what the individual does, is the only masculinity worth anything at all.

The three long essays below have helped me realize where I’ve been deficient, and what I’ve had to work on. They’re long– you should take a few hours for each– and full of delicious nuggets of insight, and links to further reading. They’ve helped me over the years, as I’ve returned to them every January and February.

Semper Virilis: A Roadmap to Manhood in the 21st Century

Brett McKay, The Art of Manliness

A general guide to manly self-improvement, focusing on the core habits of exercise and health, the core practices of skill-development, and the core spiritual questions of self-reflection, necessary for an energetic and productive life. Its theory of manhood is also very worth mulling.

Lovers in the Hands of a Patient God

S.G. Belknap, The Point Magazine

A fantastic reflection on the style of romantic love, what to do about your frustrations, how to see the bigger picture, and why that experience is transcendent, not just personal. No, it’s not a pickup artist tract (just do self-improvement, man,) it is a perspective on longing, suffering, fulfillment, agency, and fate well worth mulling not only for love but for life.

How to Get Ahead in Washington: Lessons from the Renaissance and Baroque Eras

Iskander Rehman, War on the Rocks

A reflection on life as an operator-intellectual in the policy world of contemporary Washington D.C., through the scribblings of the great mirrors-for-princes courtiers of the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s not just for politicos, though– the advice contained therein is useful for anyone working to balance being on a team, making a name for themselves, handling superiors, and keeping their souls in any profession.

Read these things as you start your New Year, and I guarantee you you’ll find something worth thinking about.

And happy New Year, my friends. I’m still working on all of this, and I hope I can work on it with all of you, to.

-LNP

DC’s policy world is a complex ecosystem, centered in Washington but with relevant outposts all across the country, including media, activist, political operator and appointee, scholarly, and advocacy communities, but is not reducible to any of them. Think-tanks, policy magazines, and young professionals’ organizations are its chief nodes socially and professionally, and coalitions in this space are typically organized ideologically– the sum total of smart and ambitious folks working across professional domains for some definable political and ideological cause. Policy world’s terms are the cross-sectoral organization of ideological ambition and conflict and its role in interpreting events and creating public meaning in the American public discourse. There is a civic statecraft inherent to influence in that world. There is some respect, camaraderie, and solidarity on professional and expertise lines and across ideological lines, but this is increasingly an exception rather than a rule.

These ideological communities in policy world do not run Washington or America, they do not exert true power over legislation or elections, and they do not necessarily serve as farm-teams for the communities that do. They do something that is far more relevant: they organize conflict in the public discourse, broadly defined, and interpret the meanings of current events and conflicts in short-term, medium-term, and ultimately long-term modes, in ways that filter out to every other community and domain in American life, and ultimately define the parameters of the meanings of current events and trends which everybody else in America consumes. They exert power, in essence, over meaning; and their work is crucial for shaping the ways vast sectors of American institutions think, and in time, how events in our time are interpreted by the mythos of history. 

These ideological communities suffer from neuroses exactly as pressing as those facing any constituency. Ideological, factional, and personal pettiness abound; people who have much to learn from each other avoid each other whether for pride or for fear; whole communities enforce myopic taboos which suppress honest dissent and enforce groupthink and sheepishness. They are as isolated as any elites are from their fellow citizens of diverse walks of life, and as subject to unknowing hypocrisy. While their social function is the interpretation and creation of public meaning, they are as much slaves to fashion as anybody else. The creative energies of the best institutions and communities in this space shine brightly, and some of the best hold themselves to incredibly high standards of decency. These are people who wind up as ministers and mandarins and counselors and cabineteers to the institutional leaders who do hold actual power in this country. 

Swanky policy forums and panels, and social-intellectual events for closed professional communities, are the price of doing business in policy world. Many of them are decadent, partisan, and low-quality. These events be wholesome, fair-minded, and serious, at the very least. In actuality, they must be far more. There is presently no central arena in which every major ideological community in policy world feels invited and compelled to present its case, and engage productively with all other major ideological communities in policy world, in a serious and wholesome style which balances the conflicts and represents the meanings of the events of our time, redeems the public discourse to its highest standards, and establishes the formats and spirits of a political culture for policy world aligned with the highest standards. Whatever project filled that role would need to have a reputation for keeping a disciplined and compelling standard of political culture, intellectual integrity, and institutional creativity known for fairness across ideological lines, creativity in political imagination, and seriousness in intellectual and policy questions, a community and place where this sort of service and culture is expected.

Policy world is thus, in essence, a shadow of the American system of government itself, and of the American political constellation. Its organization of conflict in the public discourse is however far more informal and manipulable than the processes of government and politics; but is no less consequential for maintaining the balance of the public discourse and thus of American public meaning, and especially in cultivating higher norms of political culture.

America in the 2000s underwent bipartisan gridlock, a dysfunction in governance as the major parties ceased to manage the great institutions and great problems of the day with the deftness and skill they once did. By the 2010s gridlock had given way to polarization, a heightened sense of ideological, political, and cultural anger between vast populations of Americans locked in conflict over fundamental principles. In the 2020s, the old verities and assumptions of public life sap away as the world changes, and it appears more than likely that some form of political and ideological realignment—perhaps merely piecemeal, perhaps truly revolutionary—will transform the political landscape. At best, this can rebalance, repolarize, and reorder the conflicts of our time, and bring a new regularity to the institutional processes of American democracy. At worst, this can end in the destruction of cherished institutions and a deepening of the institutional and personal distrust which presently afflicts all our public life. Whatever the case, the stultifying stalemates of gridlock and the policy and political stasis they have caused (best highlighted not only by cold-war parity on major structural issues, but by razor-thin congressional majorities and popular votes oscillating this way and that election by election) are intimately related to the historically-high distrust, exhaustion, and rancor of our political society, and the pressing demands for historic change for a rebalancing of our order.

These three great spirits of the decades—gridlock, polarization, realignment—are usually considered separately, by analysts and activists alike. Those seeking common ground and regular order often emphasize moderation and process, condemn extremism and ideology, and privilege results, a fundamentally political approach. Those seeking diminutions of rancor and distrust tend to emphasize charity and goodwill, condemn attacks on human dignity and free expression, and promote empathy and solidarity through human contact, a fundamentally social approach. Those desiring a rethinking and reordering of the conflicts of the age typically desire that old intellectual and ideological heuristics be deconstructed and replaced, look for new coalitions and constituencies, and privilege institutional restructurings, a fundamentally ideological approach.

Each approach, and each faction within each of these approaches, identifies a fundamental aspect of the transformations of American order since the confidence of the 1990s began to crack, and approaches that transformation alone. Some who emphasize any one of these approaches maintain the conceit that, should the aspect they seek to fix be fixed, the other two will naturally be fixed as a result. Whether or not this is true, a genuine net assessment of the problems facing America ought to take each of these aspects of our present crisis on its own terms, and weigh it alongside the others. Procedural discipline in institutions, personal goodwill in society, ideological realignment in politics—the relationship between these goods may be one of many things, but the insights of each can provide key tools for long-term progress on the problems of our time.

From the study of gridlock, we can cultivate an appreciation for the procedural habits and spirits that have long maintained regular order in American government, balancing interests and factions in the long cultivation of the public trust. Those individuals and institutions often tarred as “the Establishment” offer wisdom on this aspect of our present crisis very well.

From the study of polarization, we can cultivate an appreciation for the diverse tapestry of opinion and understanding across American politics, the various political languages, the roles emotions and perceptions play in politics and in society at large, the fundamental habit of unconditional goodwill as a political necessity. Those individuals and institutions commonly known as “Bridgebuilders” and their allies offer wisdom on this aspect of our present crisis.

From the study of realignment, we can cultivate an appreciation for the contingency of any set of political, policy, and ideological understandings, the processes by which fundamental change moves along in America, the role of political creativity and imagination in adjusting political practices and reforming decaying institutions. Those individuals sometimes tarred as “Populists” in any sense, offer some of the best wisdom on this.

The Establishment, the Bridgebuilders, and the Populists have their blindness, too. The responsible Establishment types often lack genuine political creativity and are uncharitable to the Populists, and are the last to discern the necessity of reform and fundamental change. The Bridgebuilders tend not to take politics, at its fundamental level, seriously in any real sense, and sometimes can be as misguided on the utility of reform as most of the Reformist community. The Populists are usually uncouth and uncharitably look forward to an end of the Establishment, and usually believe there is far more public support for their understandings of politics than there actually is. The simple craving of influence and power, the inevitable destroyer of so much intellectual and personal integrity, is usually the simple culprit. But the excesses of their advocates do not in any way diminish the importance of these understandings, or their utility for navigating the present crisis.

A grand central synthesis of these three approaches threatens to become as myopically tunnel-visioned an ideological approach as any other currently shackling the minds of otherwise-talented and dedicated American activists, polemicists, and public servants. In studying any of them, one should be wary of the temptation to develop an airtight grand narrative, even as new heuristics will inevitably enrich anyone’s understanding of the problems afoot.

It is in this spirit that the temperament of the historian can be most useful to the analyst or activist studying America in the present moment. The best historians eschew any single sociological, political, economic, or ideological mechanism of history, instead using a variety of methods to interpret the record and the evidence, arguing for their own interpretations and their implications, and implicitly admitting the limitation of their approaches—history might inform, but it can never give orders, and action is for the judgment of the present.

But the temperament of the historian can and should inform the activist or analyst looking around their own time, seeking its meaning, interpreting the directions events flow, theorizing the futures possible. Someday, some historian will use the heuristics of gridlock, polarization, and realignment, among many others, to assess what happened in America between the 1990s and the 2020s, perhaps a little bit beyond. By looking around now as they will in their own time, we can broaden our own understandings of our time, and perhaps be a little bit more useful in writing with our lives and causes and work the history they will study, a history which will form the foundations of the America they themselves are formed by.

This CEO assassination in December 2024, more than the Trump assassination attempts and more than the vulgar street violence and Antifa-ism and Capitol riot of the Long Year 2020, more than the festering cells of rightwing militias and radicalized networks across the country, more than the meaningless incel mass shootings and horrific school shootings and terrorist bombings of the past three decades—but only a little bit more, as a kind of final unveiling of the truth—really ought to awaken a lot of people to the nihilistic reality of the moment. And not just the assassination itself, but the public response—the desensitized normalcy of something only a little stranger than the usual fare of our public life, the active sympathy and support of a surprisingly large number of not-quite-radical young Americans left and right, the cackling memes about how chadlike and handsome and sexy this Luigi kid was, how the CEO and all CEO’s have it coming for them. Perhaps there is something vaguely wholesome about the solidarity and bipartisanism of these young, blackpilled internet folks and stymied young professionals who otherwise hate each other, cheering on the violent demise of an old order. They know not what they do.

There’s been a surprising outpouring of commentary following the old pattern on the right, and its new cooptation by the left, of this guy being one of these young men who faces no prospects, who does everything right and can’t rise to the status he deserves, finally breaking and going all Joker as he goes insane and resorts to violence, a kind of well-adjusted incel. Sympathetic[i] in a way my liberal friends, who partake in a fashionable pseudo-radicalism against the institutions they inhabit, can endow on a rightwing-coded anarchist whose cause they can read as adjacent to that which they profess.

But this Luigi guy was the opposite of an incel. His abs, man. His multiple degrees from UPenn and the salary he commanded. The silver spoons his rich haole father in Hawaii bequeathed him. Millennials and Zoomers in tech, in finance, in consulting, with advanced degrees from nice prestigious schools, aren’t the wretched of the Earth; instead of being leaders they can get nice and comfy and rich, and know exactly how. Their artsy classmates who chose to be journalists and activists and define our public discourse (hi) are delusional, and made their own choice to seek fleeting status while forgoing lasting wealth. Luigi’s own salary, his own intelligence, the leisure with which he could actually read Ted Kaczynski’s whole manifesto, and write reviews of it. And like Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, his own understanding of the world and condemnation of its tyrannies and hypocrisies and contradictions are not, in fact, wrong. This guy is not a Nicola Sacco, a Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a Giuseppe Zangara—the incels of the Industrial Revolution. He’s an Osama Bin Laden, the true-believing upper-class radical of the sort that leads every ostensibly spontaneous working-class revolution of the modern age our bourgeois bohemians celebrate, believing themselves impervious allies.

The revolutions of the modern age. Of the various things America’s been kinda-sorta good at in the past century and a half, it’s been weathering technological, economic, and social revolutions that destroyed other regimes, bathed in seas of blood. Our social violence, after the horrors of the Civil War, was always somewhat contained. The South’s suppression of the black freedom movements for a century was ended comparatively bloodlessly, for all the blood it shed. The populist movements and labor strikes of the later 19^th Century, after some early marginalization and intransigence and a few too many assassinations, were funneled into mainstream politics pretty quickly, the decadents of the time realizing compromise was their only survival and, of course, the American way. The exhausted insecurity of the Depression, managed aptly by the second-greatest political genius of our tradition, did not see the mass violence of the Progressive era from the 1880s to the Long Year 1919, the supposed seeds of revolutionary Fascism and Communism in America smothered by the creative impression-management of Franklin Roosevelt, which far more than any successes of the New Deal’s measures, restored the American people’s faith in the system of government that had failed them in 1929. The fruits of the consolidated normalcy of the postwar moment, in the countervailing mass radicalisms of the raging 1960s—mostly channeled politically in their rightwing form of fiery conservatism as a mass movement, mostly channeled in their leftwing form on the streets in the massive AntiWar movement and little cells from Oakland to Brooklyn, surviving into the cynical 1970s in the Weatherman styles of domestic terrorism—raged and sputtered and died under that most improbable of moderates, Richard Nixon, mostly through a series of domestic initiatives that undercut the most radical of the radicals and gave the impression of a government, again, that cared, and the long-drawn end of the war in Vietnam. As Walter McDougall notes, “The ghettos and campuses fell silent.”

Without falling into the tempting sort of cyclical political astrology we each, at some point, try to develop mechanically, it is important we note that the great domestic peacekeepers of these times were all profoundly conservative, profoundly revolutionary, and profoundly progressive all in one. They sought to conservative something sacred to American order by sacrificing a cancerous part of that order which could no longer be preserved, and by creatively realigning reforms, the structure of politics and the state, and the valences of the public discourse to channel the energy and dissipate the chaos of the transformative times in which they governed. Their statecraft was the American version of that of Benjamin Disraeli and Lee Kuan Yew. The age of Lincoln and Grant ended in the age of Theodore Roosevelt; the age of Theodore ended in the age of Franklin Roosevelt; the age of Franklin ended in the age of Richard Nixon. That last age clearly did not create a truly stable order, and sowed the seeds of its own decadence and destruction; it is unclear if we now pass into a new age, or if the age of Obama and Trump is merely the death-rattle of an order too poorly-structured to truly channel its inward violence.

But each of these politicians, far more than imposing any sort of genius policy design, did at least three things—they creatively pushed reforms around that, in different ways, defused the public distrust in the broader system; they managed the public discourse in ways that calmed the earlier storms even while creating new ones; and they accomplished this within the structures and along the traditions of the American system of government, even while redirecting those structures and traditions under the requirements of the new age. (Hence why all Jeffersonian-inflected political traditions despise and distrust them.)

In our own time we face the deepest running crisis the country’s faced since Nixon’s time, exacerbated by the incompetence of the post-9/11 wars and the dearth of any punishment for the accidental architects of our financial and housing crises of the late Bush and early Obama eras, the panic around the election of Donald Trump and the mass institutional neurosis and irresponsibility of the COVID era. All the longstanding trends amid all this—polarization and distrust, anomie and loneliness, institutional dysfunction and policy decadence, rising prices and declining wages, etc. etc. etc.—have tended towards the present crisis. And those good folks in policy world who point to any number of nice economic indicators and other numerical wizardry, those good-faith civic activists pressing for civil-society extensions as a model for our government’s internal business or new united American identities as the spiritual resolution to our crisis, those localists always hawking the decentralization or those national-service types pressing for mandatory national park maintenance jobs for every working American between the ages of 18 and 25 for Kennedyan civic virtue or whatever—they completely miss the point. The revolutions of our time, social and technological and economic, have forced a realignment that only a small segment of our political and cultural elites have recognized, and even they labor under the delusions of elite-replacement theories while often possessing negligible governing experience of their own. The American people trust neither each other nor any of the institutions that have shepherded them and their ancestors for decades, so polarized they are. No strong whole-of-society visions for pragmatic yet principled advance have emerged; the nonpolarized policy agendas merely tinker and cannot truly imagine, the creative structural rethinkings implicitly depend on the suppression of some segment of Americans, be it 1% or 10% or some other population deemed parasitic. Whatever time and stability we’ve been bought by the second election of Donald Trump and its aftermath, the underlying crisis remains untouched, and a bench of flamboyantly, creatively weird internet people does not seem any more likely to steer the country out than the past bench of uncreative old guard public servants.

But again, let it not be mistaken—we are in a great long-running social and political crisis.

Which brings us back to this criminal, this probable domestic terrorist, this icon of an exhausted pair of generations who truly cannot see a place for themselves on the American stage. He has committed the greatest of all crimes against everything that is good and holy about the American Union, the American Republic, the American Democracy—the murder, for political and ideological reasons, of another American, no matter how disgusting that dead American’s actions and office and all he represents might be. It is only the most recent in a long line of far worse incidents of the same crime in our era, especially in the past ten years—the rightwing militia attacks, the leftwing mob riots, the riot at the Capitol, the occupation of whole city blocks, failed and successful assassinations of political leaders left and right, school shootings and truck attacks and bombings and so much more. The novelty of the CEO murder is in the widespread, if perhaps not universal, celebration of it by shockingly large portions of the American public. Violence begets violence; our dark angels are unleashed; the normalization of political assassination, an American Years of Lead, cannot lead to the justice its cheerleaders pretend. It reveals decadence and prolongs it. And then it isn’t only the CEO’s and politicians and the shooters themselves who die, nor only those whose lives and politics grow more corrupting, decadent, pernicious.

Again, this Luigi guy is not by any means the first man in our era to commit a heinous act of political violence—look merely to the last 20 years or so, and a few more before that. What makes his case unique is the chord it strikes in the young Americans of our generation, a generation proving itself now to be precisely as decadent, irresponsible, and unworthy as the Boomers who caused all our public messes and rule us incompetently. Decadence is not a merely elite phenomenon; it goes all the way down the social ladder. To cave into anarchism and brownshirtism—and that is exactly what all this stuff is—is barbaric, unbecoming of civilized people. The murder wasn’t based, it wasn’t epic, it wasn’t the rise of any useful kind of class consciousness, mobilizable for social revolution. It was a criminal assault on the union. Do I really have to read you back your Federalist Papers or your Lyceum Address or, for that matter, some of the speeches of Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders and John McCain and even Donald Trump?

The fundamental continuity, order, and vigor of the American society is the only condition under which any kind of freedom, justice, progress, heritage, or whatever else you identify your politics by might be maintained or advanced. Break the union, kill Americans, kill a lot of Americans, whether they deserve it or not, and you break the sacred bonds and time-tested process by which the great and necessary revolutions of our age are brought about with a minimal loss of human life and general maintenance of the good things of our society. It is conservative, progressive, and revolutionary all in one, and it is not so much a governing agenda or set of principles as a temperament and attitude towards society and toward people, bold and patient and creative and cynical and hopeful all in one. It is the way of the Roosevelts, and the way of the Roosevelts can only start at the level of the personal—that they who would deserve to lead earn it by their conduct.

From Lincoln’s and Grant’s trials we might consider the fundamental constitutional questions of the state, and different Americas in rancor; from Theodore Roosevelt’s, the essential reformism and civic vigor necessary to channel and suppress the discontent of the truly “left-behind” and the culpability of the plutocrats and futurists; from Franklin Roosevelt’s, the essential creativity and juggling necessary for faith in the system to be restored, and the institutional revolutions and class-war balances which alone can tame the revolutionary impulse; from Richard Nixon’s, the channeling and harnessing of great political balances into new and stable alignments, and the long-term bulwark against upheaval maintained by firm light touches. None of these models tolerates domestic political violence against the regime, and resorts to violence against dissident forces mostly in extreme cases; each of these models strives not merely to govern, but to reform and reorient and reorder.

Lincoln’s and Grant’s, and Nixon’s, were conducted by people who were essentially middle-class. The two Roosevelts were complete aristocrats, leading in an age of elites, as was essentially inevitable under the class balance of the time. If you are reading this and aspire to public leadership of any sort, then you are an equivalent form of American elite, even if you were not born as silver-spooned a snob as they were. And you have a responsibility to the sort of responsible patricianism in public service which they embodied. Some folks call this noblesse oblige, which is fine, but smacks of baron envy. Patrician public responsibility is fine.

The Rooseveltian ethos is both personal and political. At the level of the personal, it is more than anything else about unconditional strength, not only moral but even physical, not for the sake of strength alone but for the moral and characterological impacts it has upon the psyche and the soul, and the solidarity it implies with the vigor of the American people. Theodore had his strenuous life hunting beneath the western sky and boxing in the White House, a lifelong flight from the tragedies of his youth; Franklin was an athlete in his youth and a shockingly strong redeemed sufferer from the long moment of his polio diagnosis all the way through his presidency. They wouldn’t have been so genuinely sympathetic toward their fellow Americans down the ladder had they not overcome their physical and psychological weaknesses by the sheer willpower of physical strength, the old and new frontier ways. The moral backbone that strength buttressed was a central font of their contrasting charismas, and a source of the belovedness they each enjoyed. Their origins in New York State’s aristocracy, their fundamental comfort and status and essential imperviousness to bald corruption in a very corrupt age, gave them access to the governing elite which they otherwise likely could not have gotten; and it gave their politics a distinct form.

The essential Rooseveltian style was what a friend of mine has interestingly described as the ethos of true democracy; the representation of all social interests in the system of governance, and the peaceful transfer of power between elites as they cycle. This, the American system of government, in its pluralism and law, has been uniquely capable of doing; and the Roosevelts were among its greatest practitioners. It was political of course in its selections of enemies, not just in foreign jingoism but in cruel denunciations of radicals at home, not all of whom were guilty of near-treason, and political and financial elites at the heights of society, who justly saw the Roosevelts as class traitors. But a great political juggler can condemn the malefactors of great wealth and economic royalists, among others, while reincorporating them, as well as the vulgar domestic extremists, into new orders of a coherent society.

Fundamental social crisis—anomie and meaninglessness, disorientation of identity and decline of community, the psychic terror and vitriolic anger emergent from material insecurity and political hopelessness, vast unbridgeable cultural conflicts, distrust of all the institutions which are supposed to protect those necessary social goods—characterizes revolutionary ages in modernity. The structural and cultural contradictions and insufficiencies that fail to resolve those social crises, instead compounding them, are often set in place by inertia, interest, and total dearth of political creativity and courage. Both Roosevelts, in their own ways, were shockingly talented enough to simultaneously project an optimism towards the social crises which the American people could feel as well, a great political gift, while aligning and destroying and creating new alignments and institutions capable of managing and allaying the sources of structural and cultural dysfunction, and correcting them over time. They restored trust in the dignity of American democracy while setting it on firmer foundations, a double task of statecraft founded on their political genius, which in turn was founded on their ethics of responsibility, which in turn was made possible by their deep reserves of personal strength, freely chosen.

The implications of the Rooseveltian ethos for young aspirants to leadership must be explored in depth. But for our purposes it is sufficient to demonstrate that in an age of crisis and dysfunction descending into violence and exhaustion, a model of politics for both revolutionary and conservative ends, using progressive means, is possible, for a decent transition from order to order without destroying the cohesion of society. And, additionally, that there is a discrete and replicable ethos of statecraft, citizenship, leadership, and personal conduct cultivating the attitudes and habits of that style of leadership.

The ethos of the two Roosevelts is the best existing model. It can and should be updated and practiced; and as our age begins to resemble all the past epochs of crisis in its own ways, the most successful American stewards in those crises ought to be emulated.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s past time some genuinely revolutionary reforms to the American social contract come about, from restoring more of the mid-20^th century financial models to adopting public utility and even partial nationalization models on everything from healthcare to social media, to arrangements in industrial policy, public investments, and regulatory repeal towards a culture of building stuff, modernizing the old decrepit things, unleashing and directing money and resources and manpower, and making America over again. Lee Kuan Yew gave a philosophy and a model of this; it could only work in Singapore, but it is worth adaptation everywhere. The abundance people and the state capacity people are probably right enough, even as their models are sort of blinding flashes of the obvious. I’m not a policy guy and I’ll leave this to the policy guys. But figuring this stuff out on everything from our generation’s student debts to our miniscule wages to our inability to buy our own homes is probably necessary in the long run, and we’re missing chances to be creative, make big policy mistakes, restore the faith of our fellow citizens that the government is trying hard to solve these things. Corporate plutocrats and managerial technocrats would be wise to fall in line and start making these impressions, too.

And I firmly, strongly believe, that Luigi and everyone like him who has committed heinous violence for political reasons, is an American human being who can redeem himself, can be useful to the union, can be useful to this generation and to the American project in all its broken and redemptive glory. The CEO he killed could’ve become a patriot and not a parasite, too, as can all CEO’s, as must all elites. Redemption, not only as a human being but as an American patriot, for any number of American causes and in any number of ways, is possible for everybody. Once upon a time George Wallace did this, apologizing profoundly to John Lewis and throwing his last whisps of political capital to the late stages of civil rights and to reconciliation in the South. James Longstreet, a genuine traitor, did so too, defending Reconstruction and the Union for the federal government, up to the point of firing on his former Confederate comrades in the violent battles in New Orleans as the Civil War’s horrendous legacies throbbed and rattled.

Most of our fellow Americans—not of the older generations, not even of our generation—are not going to be helpful on this. It is not the way of things for most people in any society to aspire to be a leader; there are many, many honorable ways of life, and part of the greatness of America is the sanctity of the simple. But another nice thing about America is that a leader of many sorts can come from anywhere. And we have plenty of models, and the two great Roosevelts are among the greatest of them all. Our times are at present no more tumultuous than theirs, indeed blessedly less so; and we are no less capable of the self-improvement and aspirations for public responsibility as they were. Any young person who craves power or feels pressured to duty has a kind of personal responsibility to study and probably emulate the model, whatever their politics. We still might fear not fear itself; we shall dare mighty things.

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[i] A sympathy they do not extend, incidentally, to the actual no-prospect-facing, status-bottomed, deliriously hopeless and insane violent shooters who actually do fit that analytic mold, the sufferers of the worst mental health crisis and social ostracization in our present American life—the incels. But that, and its violent consequences and the ways out of it, and the reality that their status is not their fault but their escape is their own responsibility alone, is another story.

A friend of mine asked me to send advice she could pass on to a friend of hers who was trying to break into policy world, so I scribbled some polonius-ish babbling from my (fun, not-particularly-prominent-or-influential, clear-conscience, very LARPy, generally nontraditional) past 10 years in and around policy world, in DC and California and in various national networks and industries. I’ve edited lightly for clarity and added some additional tips. I don’t think this advice necessarily applies to or is even practicable by young people who are seeking actual major influence– I know some of them and I think they’d probably strongly disagree with many of these points– but for people with different ambitions and who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing or should want to do, I contend these make up a half-decent starting point.

These are gleaned from my own experience and especially failures, from observations of my colleagues and peers, from advice given me by grizzled men and women of policy world who lived through and worked in the grand historical moments of the past 50 years and worked for and walked with giants, and from long reflection on various of my heroes and their own failings. As with all advice, I don’t expect any young people to follow it; but if any of these tidbits plant themselves in your brain, I hope you’ll remember them some years down the line, when they make more sense than they possibly can now. And with all such tidbits, this is as much advice to myself as to you.

So for all my younger friends and contacts trying to break into policy world, whether we talk much or not, here’s a few little tidbits, not that you asked for them:

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Be willing to work very part-time for no money in multiple gigs (and prove to your target employers that you’re a loyal and enterprising footsoldier,) and know that sometimes this means having to do outside non-policy work that you’ll find humiliating. That outside work to support yourself will be more valuable to you once you succeed than you now can possibly know; and that unpaid work for causes you believe in will amass relationships and favors over time that, had you insisted on labor-for-cash, you never would’ve received.

Socialize around in the part of policy world you want to work in, like genuinely try to be friends with the people you want to be working with in the coming decades; do not ‘network’ and do not expect any contact will lead to a job or an opportunity. Far better to become a part of the community and be seen around it by folks in it routinely over time; opportunity will emerge from your reputation, not the other way around, and people in this world can smell crass transactional obsequiousness on your breath from many miles away.

Randomly email prominent people and ask them how they did what they did; in DC that kinda person lubbbbbbs talking about themselves and will take many meetings with people they can’t get anything but ego-stroking from.

If these people become your mentors, or if people from your past become your mentors, check in with them at least once a year or so, even if you think you’ve outgrown their advice. Don’t forget the people who’ve helped you, and know they didn’t help you for their own self-interest.

Go to free events in DC except networking events. Policy things at think tanks, book talks, speaker things. Never go to talk to the speakers; always go to meet the people in the audience, who will always be way more useful and interesting.

Given a choice between going either to an event where you are centrally prominent to it, or of the community holding it [i.e. your event], vs. going to an event where you are an outsider or a spectator [i.e. someone else’s event], ALWAYS go to the event where you are central; it’ll be a better use of your time, and it will boost your reputation and relationships and asabiyyah, nine times out of ten. (Go to other people’s events as well, but know they’re useful typically mostly by chance and for intelligence-gathering and light world-expansion and meeting people who you don’t know, and are not nearly as useful for the long-term diplomacy and community membership that builds things over time.)

Read everything, write constantly, talk to everybody. More than keeping yourself informed, it is keeping yourself original. Cringe at your earlier work, yeah, but habitual repetition of these skills is the ONLY way you’ll ever get less cringe at them!

Figure out what skills you want to use and what roles you want to fill— fundraising? Editing? Research? Constituent services? Program development? Advocacy? Grassroots organizing? Event planning? — and get really good at them, understanding that what you think and believe won’t matter to anyone until they know you can be boringly, pragmatically useful to them. You’re not going to just walk in and be some bigwig’s national security advisor on the basis of your brilliance alone, which for some reason has to be consistently told to young people, especially young men. This was told me by a former senior official in a hawkish administration, which is lowkey hilarious.

Respect ideas for their own sake, political skill for its own sake, institutional-managerial competence for its own sake, etc. etc. etc. All of these are NOT the same thing, and self-education or credentialing in any one of these skills does NOT translate to self-education or credentialing in any other of these skills. In any of these skillsets you’ve got to work from the very bottom the same way you learned your core skills; and if you puff yourself up like a self-made entrepreneur, start thinking you’re smart because you’re powerful or powerful because you’re smart, the masters in the other skillsets will, again, smell it on your breath a mile away and assess you accordingly. Humble yourself; professions don’t have rules just to gatekeep you and protect their minions. Institutions and their customs develop for a reason.

Get a couple of books of advice, or biography, or professional development, or political theory, to carry around and reference over the years. Their meanings will change and deepen as you do, and older peers can give you tips on which ones are best. And for God’s sake leave Aristotle and Aquinas at home, conservatives!!

Have a couple sacred spots, around town and out of town, to go to think alone, on different occasions. This is overdramatic and emo, yeah. But a little drama and a healthy cycling of activity make the eventual mundanity of policy world a little more lively. The only cure for burnout is variation. And if you have a favorite bar you go to a lot or whatever, you’re already doing it.

Strive mightily to suppress your natural envy and resentment towards those who succeeded and rose faster than you, or won the posts you craved. In the coming years you will discern you followed a path more fitting to your life anyway, even if you feel humiliated right now; and those who succeed too young are more at risk of falling horrendously or otherwise selling out their spirits to the game, especially if they have been through no real dark nights of the soul. Conversely, if you have succeeded early, be wary of your success; you can avoid humiliation if you vigilantly cultivate humility, and that is difficult. And remember you did not earn your success by your talent and labor alone, not in this industry.

Be ready to let go of your ambitions when they cease to serve you, when it’s just you serving them. This is one of the hardest things to learn, and sometimes they must be wrested from you to learn it. But sometimes the things you love and clutch begin to destroy you; and there is always a future somewhere further ahead, even if you can’t possibly know you need it.

Have a life outside of policy world [LOL]. But don’t strive to be interesting for the sake of clout in policy world; that kind of person is obnoxious and will probably lose whatever campaign they’re about to embark on. (Golf and baseball fandom and other elite-insider signals are horrendous to take on if you just pretend to like them to emulate the successful; on the other hand if you genuinely enjoy them they perfect your taste. Do it for the right reason.) You will last sanely in DC longer if you do not actually live in (figuratively, sometimes literally) the District. Also, this basically means putting time into things in your life that you’d put time into if you were driven out of DC and had no future left. Put time into them now.

Remember that the people working for the other side aren’t your enemies, they’re your competitors with their own reasons for working for the things they work for. You have lots to learn from them and you might even find them to be your friends here and there. There are many ways to be a patriot. Politics, the manipulation of mass emotions and hard interests for the construction of new social realities, is in large part about coalitions and intelligence gathering; and cutting off good intelligence, or potential alliances, is stupid. Friendship in politics is underrated.

Power is real and at the end of the day these issues are life and death; nobody would do what they do if it wasn’t. Take other people’s principles and loyalties seriously, especially those whose causes are less influential than yours, and especially those whose causes you find abhorrent. Get a world map of what drives people; don’t waste the wisdom by blinding yourself by your own principles.

Let go of whatever hatreds you might hold, populist or elitist or ideological or cultural or partisan or whatever. And trust me, you have them, even and especially if you think they’re based on love. Love something? An ideal, a community, a future, a heritage? You fear it being destroyed or taken away by other people, and that’s why you’re fighting for it; fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering, etc. etc. etc. (You have no idea how true that is.) Hatred makes you stupid and takes beautiful things and makes them ugly; it pushes talented people to give in to their darkest angels. There is no redeeming quality in hatred, at the end of the day. Drop the hate and you’ll be able to defend the things you love better than you can possibly know. There’s 12-step groups that can help you learn how to do this.

Hold yourself and everyone on your side to the same standards you hold the other side to; give the other side the grace you give your own side, and demand from the other side. Be patient with the barbs. If you can’t do this publicly, do it privately. Seriously, just do it. Principled BothSidesism, in public or in private, is very underrated around here. It isn’t about equivocation and finger-pointing, especially when you suffer from your own side’s wrath when you do it. It is literally about the courtesy due any public servant.

Figure out the top three issues and lines that you can’t betray and stick hard to them, compromise on or ignore everything else. This matters both for what you should work in and when you should leave.

There are many kinds of creative public service, in all the industries in policy world; there are codes and ethoses and standards that anyone in any kind of public service, no matter how apparently sordid, may follow; your sacred honor and the trust of the American people will always hover above you, beckoning you to live up to it. We need good journalists, good lobbyists, good Hill staff, good campaign strategists, good civil servants, good activists, good NGO workers, good military and intelligence personnel, good lawyers, good scholars, good statesmen, good citizens. We need them in every corner of the political aisle, from every walk of life. To be one is your choice alone.

Have substance and be earnest. Lose those things, or lose the ability to earn them back, and everything is lost.

In this industry more than most, personal friendships and professional friendships do and should overlap. Be careful about that of course– “don’t date other conservatives” is a rule that my peers usually fail to follow and usually pay hard for– but accept it and use it. You have no idea how helpful those complex friendships will be both professionally and personally. Think about Pa Watson taking Harry Hopkins to St Matt’s in 1939, in the darkest days of Hopkins’ life; and their subsequent greatness and political service in the Second World War.

At the end of the day you can be politically responsible or you can be personally honest. You can try to be both and get pretty far, and you should; but those two things do cancel each other out in the breach. You need to figure out if you’d rather be a prophet and analyst and thinker, or a statesman and activist and operator, primarily. And again– no matter how close these things are at times, no matter how doing one might help you with the other, no matter how deeply you convince yourself that being a prophet is being a statesman and being a statesman is being a prophet and you’re some kind of demigod who’s defeated the rules of the universe and become better than everyone else, I promise you- I PROMISE you– there is a line, and you’ll have to choose between personal honesty and public responsibility. Figure out now which one matters most, which one is more closely attuned to your own character. And once you figure that out, build your ethics out accordingly, and temper your expectations about being the other one. A mentor told me to amass “fuck-you money” so you can walk away when forced to perjure yourself on either of these, to betray your own conscience or to fail the people you have a duty towards. That can be difficult; but some equivalent is wise.

Most of all: never let the job and the climate sink your dreams. Washington and Los Angeles are the same spirit on different coasts– company towns which exist only for the manipulation of power in its myriad forms, and the aspiring actor/actress and the aspiring policy hand follow the same path from nothingness to greatness, forced to make the same kinds of choices about their causes and their friends and their souls along the way. Policy world can be a soul-sucking Hotel California enslaving you to the grind, and you might think giving yourself over to it completely, conscience be damned, is the responsible thing to do. It is not. You should do what you do because you really, genuinely believe in it; you should remember the romantic capital of dreams you first arrived at to change the world, you should carry it inside you, you should know that every part of policy world from lobbying to media to grassroots to Capitol Hill to the deep state agencies is a sacred public trust that needs idealists and consciences, servants and leaders, and if you ever let your spirit of duty– whether in honesty or responsibility– die in exchange for a promotion or access or a little fiefdom or a nice glossmag profile, you will have betrayed your past and future self, and you will have failed the American people. You are more interesting than that.

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Don’t take any of this too seriously. You’ll figure out what’s true and what’s not for yourself over time. Have fun changing the world! And remember that world will always be more interesting than it seems…

-LNP

Note: My dear readers, this is an unhinged ramblerant pulled directly from the pages of my personal journal, posted publicly only for reference to send around to friends and colleagues. It should not be interpreted as anything other than the delusions of one man’s mind. You will note that the prose style is dense, florid, didactic, and otherwise not fit for general consumption; that is how I write to myself. Again, this is a personal memo I share only for general interest, and not an attempt at polemic or persuasion, nor a statement of policy. -LNP

My practical political ideology—that is, my regime loyalty and my understanding of the principles of that regime, and some caveats of political theory on the mechanics of that regime and of politics in general—as it exists today, might be stated as follows:

The American union, which is in some ways a creed and in some ways a confederation and in all the crucial ways a nation, and must be preserved as such, is the greatest political project in history, and it is uniquely ours.

The most essential principles of that union can be discerned in the historic continuity between the system of government codified by the U.S. Constitution and articulated in The Federalist Papers, the two-party system and practice of multifactional democracy established over time, and the systems of mass-movement representation, technical management, and countervailing power established in the economic and social practice of the New Deal Era.

This living tradition is contiguous with the entire American political tradition, for good and for ill, and its primary promise is, that it does not strive to expunge, but instead to tolerate and sometimes to integrate, those parts of the American tradition with which it is in tension. These have included top-down technocracy and plutocracy, natural-rights libertyisms of all stripes, messianic republicanisms and populisms of all stripes, and all the rest.

Anything resembling coordinative “national” life is only possible inasmuch as it pays deference to this pluralism.

Anything resembling independent “localist” life is only possible inasmuch as it pays deference to and plays ball with this pluralism, for this pluralism channels and tames the rapacities which always are out to destroy the small.

All lower institutions and components of this union are precisely as indicative and valuable as its higher components and institutions, and the nobility of democracy lies in access to these by Americans of any background, and the mutual respect between those leading any of these institutions for each other and for each other’s wards, high or low, local or national, prominent or obscure.

The sophisticated and essentially non-rational and unprincipled, even unsolvable, matrix of national life over time and across space, is a glorious thing worth preserving and defending for its own sake; whatever unalloyed virtues or principles or ideals it might appear to manifest, are not themselves conditions of the union’s worth.

The essence of freedom in union, to the degree it is an independent virtue, is primarily in non-destruction; the value of things not having to make sense, of not having to be fit into higher ordering principles for the sake of some vision of higher good. The tradition of compromising, collaborating, temporary-consensus-building union as American political practice, is far more amenable to the preservation of this freedom of every component part to be itself, than any first-principles-based ideology of order or justice or natural right imaginable. The maintenance of social and institutional pluralism naturally maintains the lived basis of this freedom in American life.

There is no intrinsic “virtue” that presupposes legitimacy, dignity, and sovereignty, to be found anywhere, among any class of people, in any institution, or in any set of ideas, save in the union itself. All people, institutions, and ideas in the union are fallible, corruptible, dignifiable, and prospective, capable in equal measure of nobility and barbarity, decadence and grandeur. They possess civic virtue by no natural right, but only inasmuch as they practice virtues and habits of utility to the union and thus of magnanimity to their fellow inhabitants thereof. It need not be said, that civic virtue is not the only goodness.

Those who would be leaders in the union, in the republic, and in the nation, must practice these true virtues for their own sake; and if they practice the falser virtues, they must be encouraged or compelled to pay outward obeisance to the grander virtues. American political culture can only be healthy and vigorous if such virtues are recalled, cultivated, lauded, practiced, and practiced at great cost, among those who command and staff American institutions.

Such a practice of virtue in culture is best ensured by, first, a countervailing power in social balance, political balance, and economic balance generally prevailing upon American life and threatening the haughty, and second, by the aforementioned virtuous leadership working to maintain it, whether for self-interest or out of self-restraint.

The conditions of the 21^st Century conspire such that greatness in American leadership now would seem to be attainable, not merely in elected office and leadership in American legislative and executive office, but in appointive office and nongovernmental leadership across civil society associations, and including in the discourse-shaping institutions of public life. The ancient role of the counselor, the minister, the lieutenant to the great, has a long pedigree in the American political tradition, and one with a perpetually uncertain place in American democratic constitutionalism, to be reimagined and reforged in every age. Under current circumstances, the opportunities would appear to be ripe for new endeavors on this open stage, with Hamilton, Hay, Pinchot, Hopkins, and Moynihan as a few potential models for consideration.

All those aspiring thisaways will in time discern that there is no essential unity of the virtues, and that a series of dialectics between incompatible and equally binding things—thought vs. action, principle vs. pragmatism, honesty vs. responsibility, private conscience vs. public duty, etc.—chain down all who would serve, think, act, or otherwise engage. The standard American penchant towards “practical idealism,” that messianic hustling which is the normal sidestepping attempt at escape from dichotomies, is as false a hope as any. Political character, like political order and like all things human, is not fundamentally resolvable, and all attempts to finally resolve it, rather than pay deference to its stubborn unsolvability, shall result in sputtering catastrophe. The true glories of political character are to be found in the temporal, limited, and creative ways individuals in multitudes of circumstances address these dialectics, respecting the competing moral claims of different standards of virtue and succumbing to the totalism of none. It encourages a tragic outlook, at best.

Civic virtue on the part of choice spirits and dedicated aristocrats of the soul, cannot be counted upon or expected to exist at any given moment. It can be expected to rise anywhere, from anyone of any background; but it should not be relied upon to preserve the integrity and operation of American government. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. They will not usually be there either. The union must be able to preserve itself in their absence; government must remain vigorous and intrepid for the public good, in their absence. The problem cannot be solved; and no one should expect it can be. We must make do as best we can, and American special providence will do what it shall.

The surest preserve of civic and social virtue, however, in accordance with the best and most ennobling American traditions across time, can be found and encouraged through social practices of vigor, strenuosity, and multitalented preparedness among all willing Americans of any background. Preparedness, for any old thing; Resilience, in the face of all disasters social, natural, political, and otherwise; general familiarity with historical and natural heritage dispersed among the citizenry, in ways that cannot be quite reduced to “education” alone, and institutionalized practices of commemoration whereby the torch of stewardship might be maintained; and a social norm of volunteer leadership in egalitarian local and national organizations, the famed “art of association” applied especially to causes of action, and not only causes of discourse. These are good things in themselves, under any political circumstances and in any regime. They are not in themselves qualifiers for leadership in the present circumstances. But they are a surer reserve of the sorts of grit and virtue our political institutions require, than those institutions are themselves. Anyone pining for their return must walk the walk.

The modes and orders which at any time might solidify and be crafted and tended by great lawgivers to bring order to the storm and speak the whirlwinds into stillness, will inevitably wither in time, either as geniuses pass the stage and cease management of their creations, or far more often, as the dykes and levees of one age are rendered moot by new technological and economic revolutions, new social  and cultural great awakenings, new party systems and constellations of government, new geographies and geopoliticses of order. The rush of modernity and the whiplash of stagnation, and the natural seeds of war and greed and lust etc. sown thickly in the human breast, render this perpetual; and the constitution, party system, and order of countervailing power, provide a stunningly timeless framework for preserving the union amid the unceasing storms.

The union thus always has its place among the nations of the earth, neither separate from them nor lord over them; and the tasks of statecraft in the homeland, and statecraft upon the world stage, are far more like than might commonly be understood, in specific notions of forbearance and prudence.

They who ascertain any of this, who would be patriots for the union across the decades and orders, must resign themselves to their own obscurity, for their fellow Americans will rarely understand these principles of American government, far less the older principles of free government itself. The patriot must be prepared never to be understood nor appreciated nor thanked, but must strive on to serve anyway, in all capacities amenable to his or her talents and attainable by his or her labors. They are an American, and must not lord themselves over their fellow Americans, for it would be wrong, and their fellow citizens would not take it anyway. But they must cherish their times in the wildernesses of society and soul, to see the things Americans forget, to better serve when they walk amongst them. Whatever greater political and social and moral goals they fight and live and die for, they must do it for the glory of the ages, not of their own age, and live for their countrymen and country, and not their own power or esteem or fame. The balance is subtle; but at the end of the day, while they might talk with the ancients and a few modern greats, they must always answer to God, and worse, themselves.

Note: My dear readers, this is an unhinged ramblerant pulled directly from the pages of my personal journal, posted publicly only for reference to send around to friends and colleagues. It should not be interpreted as anything other than the delusions of one man’s mind. You will note that the prose style is dense, florid, didactic, and otherwise not fit for general consumption; that is how I write to myself. Again, this is a personal memo I share only for general interest, and not an attempt at polemic or persuasion, nor a statement of policy. -LNP

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Part of the task of political leadership in media democracy—not just government, but also press, parties, education, civil society, major industries, science, religion, and everything that can possibly have public valence, and that can possibly be polarized—is not only to advise and advocate and formulate and administer policy and action, nor simply to balance interests and factions (those being classic tasks of government in general and representative government in particular) but also, per Publius’s dictum, to maintain and manage public opinion, specifically, to channel the passions of public opinion properly, in accordance with the most prudent maintenance of the political hearth.

As they manage and channel opinion they must not indulge any set of opinion too much, for when a set of opinion is too far indulged, it grows bloated and decadent and tyrannical, a lazy knee-jerk consensus whose insipidity is matched by the poshness of those who cultivate it, and the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of which grow ever clearer and more juxtaposed to the realities of the world the longer and more desperately it is clung to by those who have forgotten how to think.

On the other side, those who manage and channel opinion must not suppress any set of opinion too much, for when a set of opinion is too far suppressed, it grows unhinged and resentful and revolting, all the more compelling for its forbidden allure, and all the more deranged for its lack of responsibility and sanity, thus more dangerous and otherwise more pathetic, and always a distortion of truth and utility, not their encapsulation as its adherents will often believe.

Indulged and suppressed opinions might animate the same bodies of opinion at the same times; public opinion is never unified, but always as fractious and divers’ as the body politick in general no matter what; and so this ought not be seen as a spectrum which opinion might be thought to inhabit, but qualities which ebb and flow constantly throughout the same opinions, and all opinions, in the public discourse.

They who manage the public discourse—and this applies to everyone, for every institution and faction, and in a degree every individual, is a component actor in the public discourse—must play the part of channeling these passions productively, neither indulging favored ones nor suppressing opposing ones, but channeling the expressions of all, in relation to each other, toward a well-mannered hearth of a public discourse where all parts have their place and acknowledge it, and each other. This is not “free speech” although free speech is a general characteristic of this done competently. It is neither an assault on human freedom, so much as it is an accurate assumption, that human freedom takes place in the context of systems of power—we live in a society—requiring some general prudential ordering habits such that freedom might not destroy itself. Pessimistic about plebiscites, optimistic about representation.

And of course, the deepest problem remains that most who pretend to be impartial or responsible arbiters of public discourse, tend to simply indulge some opinions and suppress others, and so many different institutions and factions do this in so many contrary and contradictory ways, that the feared [and in my personal opinion, simplistic and misinterpreted] “post-Babel” world is in fact magnified by our broader discursive sphere, and the decadents and the unhingeds bemoan the end of the republic as they indulge their own fantasies and are suppressed by the acolytes of other fantasies. A little bit of internal self-regulation would fix this among every institution, but most are insufficiently sentient unto themselves to realize it.

So the management of public opinion’s passions—mark, we already do it, we just do it so pathetically badly—is not just an intellectual role, but is as much a political role. It requires personable leadership and all qualities of empathy, charisma, rhetoric, etc., for in some sense the leader in this sphere shouts and harangues their own crowd, calming its flames and redirecting its shouts; and, it requires stately and strategic qualities of grand vision, genius for assessing the parts of the whole, general sense of ends and means, aims and principles, the swathe of history. Beyond these it demands intellectual depth, honesty, and insight, and most of all it requires a sense of measure, an ability and a willingness to see beyond one’s institution’s and audience’s nose, and to speak as frankly as might be done, on the realities of things. Even while such roles are not always political or governmental, they are always public, and so the social ministers of the public discourse are a diverse and crucial lot, who do not even know their task. But it is a task that, if done better, would deeply leaven our society, politics, and whole practice of public life.

This sort of leadership is in some ways open only to the elect few, but in more ways is truly open to all, a requirement of the aristocratic best of citizenship in a democracy. All who would be leaders ought cultivate it. They must assume objectivity and rationality are not independently possible, that subjective feeling and interest and passion cloud and guide all thought, no matter how clear; that public opinion is based not on fact nor on reason, but upon feeling and interest and passion etc., and thus must be “reasoned” with on its own terms, not on others’ terms; that it will not and cannot change, but with deep respect for it and its hearthy sources; that working through and with this reality, vigorous and fair and charitable and spirited places of public discourse, of all dispensations and for all communities and by all interested parties, ought be maintained by strictly applied practice and ruthlessly enforced habit; that dignity, of dissent and of consent alike, and all the rest, is the most important thing to protect in these spaces; that this opinion being the essential basis of all politics, all government, and all sovereign legitimacy, it is the duty of they who would manage it, to hold themselves to the highest standards aforementioned, and beyond; and that this does matter, for here is one of those otherworldly trysts where the purest habits of personal intellectual life and social discourse, and the highest standards of public discourse and common life, despite all their other contradictions, just happen to intersect, and kiss. Here is where honest men and women in public life may perhaps prove themselves; there are vanishing few spots with such prospect.

So for both preservation of one’s own personal virtue and protection of the public good, ye mighty, ponder well the habits and convictions of a decent public discourse.