Author: Luke Nathan Phillips

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.

—

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

–

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.

LNP’s Address to the National History Academy’s high school summer honors program, July 6^th 2022

(Fourth of July Oration) (Not as good as Frederick Douglass’s) (Dedicated to someone who makes me debate with myself)

–

I have often heard said, that America is an idea; a set of pristine principles, an aspirational truth, a great becoming as-yet-unrealized. I have often heard said, that America is a place, a great nation with a great heritage, a lived experience in historical time. There are good and wise men and women, left and right, young and old, who have argued for either of these conceptions—America is a nation, America is an idea—and have brought forth great arguments for either.

My own prejudiced opinion is that America is a nation that believes itself to be an idea, and that from that reality sprouts forth all the messiness and beauty, all the rancor and grandeur, all the banal simplicity and hypocritical vice and redemptive glory that has characterized American life in every decade and will mark American life for every decade yet to come. There never was a golden age and there never will be one; we’ve always been like this and always will be. That’s not to say that things don’t change, or that history’s just one darn thing after another. But it is to say, that if you want to understand America, and that impossible-to-define concept everyone has an opinion about, American identity, you have to look to the past, and be prepared to see the past in the present, the present in the past, and everything in between.

So, “a nation that believes itself to be an idea.” How does that even emerge? What does that mean for us nowadays—should we dislike ourselves, or dislike people who don’t dislike themselves? Should we blindly celebrate ourselves, and be blind to those who decline to celebrate? Don’t we need a consensus, a coherent set of general propositions or abstract truths or civic touchstones that everyone can agree are good and worth venerating, and when we’ve found such a consensus, is it not our right to insist that everyone, every American if they really are an American, agree to that consensus as an absolute minimum and an absolute baseline for participation in the American family and our glorious national community?

I, for my own part, don’t think so. We clearly do not have that now, and have not had that sort of consensus for most of living memory. We didn’t even have any deep consensus in the shocked weeks after airplanes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001, or in the shocked weeks after COVID-19 case counts climbed and governments around the United States commenced lockdowns as the most prominent pandemic of our times spread all over this broad land in March 2020. And the more we look at any of the supposed “eras of good feelings” or “holidays from history” commonly remembered for their supposed unity, the more the true divisions and suppressions and dissensions and decadences of those times remind us, if we care to listen, that our divides today are really nothing new.

Somehow, America has gotten by; somehow, every great achievement and notable event in American history, has happened not by some collaborative emergence of consensus, where everyone got their input and agreed with the final product, and then pushed forward pragmatically in unison to make things happen. No, those great events and achievements have taken place amid, and thanks to, pitched and screeching battles, cast against apocalyptic times, the leaders and citizens of every moment imagining, sometimes rightly, that the very soul of democracy—the very fate of the republic—the very dream of the nation—hung always in the balance, their personal acts and convictions having a real meaning for history, their duty as citizens and as leaders and as activists and as prophets compelling them always to fight with fury for the things they believed in most.

That is, America has always been something of a process; a strange and nonsensical system whose parts, believing and practicing as they did incompatible things, have duked it out against each other in every moment in the past. Sometimes, some of those parts have come a little closer to long-term victory than others; more often they’ve settled into some more-or-less workable compromise with the other parts, and that has begun in time to look more like a consensus than it ever actually was. And in due time these compromises break down; they cease being useful to resolve the problems they once resolved, or new problems arise which prior generations simply cannot wrap their minds around. And when the façade of order and unity finally becomes too contradictory and dysfunctional to maintain, and comes collapsing down, then all that is solid melts into thin air, and the destructive and creative whirlwinds of American politics and society are let loose, and sometimes great geniuses and oftener great movements wring new light from the storm. They speak new orders into existence; by the sweat of their brows and the witness of their hearts they renew America in the times America seems lost, gone, forsaken.

You could even think of America as something of an ongoing great debate—a great debate that is not between any specific contrasting principles, nor between any specific lived realities, but is something bigger; a great debate that is always ongoing—that never ends, in which there can be no final victories, and no final defeats, where every generation renews the old flames—a never-ending great debate whose participants are every single American, every single one of the American people, whether they’re recognized as such or not, whether they know they’re debating or not, whatever the issues and the factions and the sects and the parties and the divisions of the time might be. In this debate, one’s life is an argument, one’s actions are a comprehensive speech, one’s arguments and speeches are little reminders that America—a people in motion, an unfolding revolution, a grand conversation—is always a thing in process. We have inherited things, ideas and experiences, and they have made us what we are, and we see them all around us. But we also are always building something new, pushing the project ever further into the future, practicing in our actions those great political arts which every generation of Americans has learned in its own way.

Some have written this into our political theory. When James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton wrote the Federalist Papers, they looked at this dynamic. When Alexis de Tocqueville described the America he saw, he used this dynamic. When John Dewey tried to establish a new system of education for democracy, he looked at this dynamic, and all sober American political theorists and political historians—whatever their convictions and prejudices—have had to grapple with the fact, that the American system of politics is constantly integrating from the bottom up, building new coalitions from disparate blocks, establishing rules and orders and systems which assume and aspire to fairness and impartiality across the pluralist hearth. It is, after all, our national motto—E Pluribus, Unum—From Many, One. Every American political and social institution worth its salt—from Congress and the legislatures and the federal government in general, to the political parties, to the great civil society institutions and voluntary associations and religious movements that enrich our common life, to fan clubs and advocacies to local communities, to the university itself—operates, in some way or another, in deference to this logic, and when these institutions fail to so operate, they deservedly lose trust among large sections of the public.

So America is in a real sense a debate; every American institution is premised on debate; debate is in a deep and public sense, what we do. More than even voting, it defines the American political experience. It has been our national experience in every major conflict, crisis, division, consensus, and opportunity in our history. And it doesn’t just happen at the highest levels, at grand ethereal heights of power abstract to everyday people. It happens at every level of society, including our own, and we all participate in it in some sense—whether by engagement, understanding, anger, or avoidance, is our own choice—every day and on every issue and across our lives. Sometimes we do it badly, sometimes we do it well. But we do it, and so do all our fellow Americans, just as we always have.

And so debate in itself is something of a sacred ritual for Americans—an expression of the very best qualities of our national soul, our mutual fellowship and our habits of persuasion and our standing for things higher than ourselves in the public eye, by which we create even higher things in cooperation and competition with our fellow-citizens; a glorious moment and process where the life of American principle and nationhood and soul, intersects with the day-to-day life of every American, no matter where they’re from; where every American is given the chance to be an equal participant, with every other American, on the field of public discourse.

“It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men [and women] are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” That was Alexander Hamilton, as the American people in 1788 set out on their great debate on whether there would be a Constitution; on whether there would be a union. When we think of debates in American history, we often think back to those heady days—the Constitutional Convention and its Ratification aftermath—which, it is true, brought forth some of the best argument and oratory and theory and organizing in our history. But when we consign the greatness of debate to that hazy heroic past, a past plastered in paint in our National Archives and our lazy memory, we forget that the power of those men, is our birthright as Americans. Every generation since, every cause since, every movement since—including the generations and causes and movements that ended slavery and saved the union, that reformed and modernized our country as we entered the modern age, that fought the fascists and communists and laid the foundations of world leadership, that brought equality before the law into a deeper lived reality than Americans had ever known—every generation and cause and movement since, has had and has used that same power of debate and deliberation, that ability to organize a free democratic society for higher ends and purposes, for the purposes of their own day. Some had to spend much sweat and sometimes blood for their causes. But their power and habit and process to debate was integral to their ability to organize politically, and every party convention, legislative session, national conference, town meeting, fan club bylines-drafting session, and national student history honors program has in some real sense beat with the living spirits of 1787 and 1788 up to this present moment. They had that power, and you have that power too.

So I exhort you all, to undertake your citizenship in this strange and contradictory and innocent and hypocritical and infuriating and ennobling and wonderful and terrible and glorious American experience of ours, with an eye to the past and an eye to the future, and two hands gesticulating wildly in the grand debates you’ll win and lose, in this great never-ending debate that is the United States of America. You are at the tail end of a great tradition, pushing it forward into an uncertain future. Act worthy of your heritage; act worthy of posterity; act worthy of yourselves. The great debate will never be resolved, and will never stop, and so long as it goes on America will live; and none of us can ever really escape it. So let us go forth and debate, with the enthusiasm, the charity, the humility, and the magnanimity which, at the end of the day, are the prerequisite foundations of true eloquence.

[Braver Angels Member Newsletter, Aug. 15^th 2021; Read for KTAH Jan. 13^th, 2022]

A few weeks ago I was climbing mountains out west. My Braver Angels Debates colleague Clif Swiggett had invited me to climb Tahoma—Mount Rainier—with his sons and their friends, and so I tagged along, following the benevolence, grit, and expertise of these far more experienced mountaineers up one of the most beautiful and prominent mountains in the United States of America.

My trail reading that trek, which I finished while strapping on crampons for our glacier ascent under the glowing northwest summer moon, included German sociologist Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” a hundred-year-old lecture that hasn’t aged a day. 

Included in its closing lines is an admonition that those with a calling for public life “must arm themselves with that staunchness of heart that refuses to be daunted by the collapse of all their hopes.” And, if they’re serious about the business, be “certain that [their] spirit will not be broken if the world… proves too stupid or base to accept what [they wish] to offer it.”

I took this punk-rock-ish advice– to love life, to be undaunted by failure, and to do work for work’s sake– up Tahoma with me. On we crawled through the darkness on ice and the thinning air, up those majestic crags and across the jagged frost-fields and wobbling scree, the lights of Seattle glowing on our right and the full moon beaming from our left, as we traversed steadily up the strange vertical world that greets those who climb great heights. We reached Columbia Crest around 5:30 a.m., as sunlight returned to illuminate the world.

We were greeted not by the narrow, windswept, sawtooth-pointed promontory one is conditioned to expect atop a great western mountain, but by a vast flat volcanic summit whose chief view was itself. There was no single peak. There was nowhere—amid the multiple high points nestled around the top—to spin around and behold a panoramic view of Puget Sound and the Cascades. The very size and prominence of Tahoma that draws so many thousands up its slopes—“Why are you climbing it?” “Because it’s there!”—make the view from the top far less grand than what I’d imagined it might be.

On the slushy slog down in the morning’s melting snow, as we belayed across widening crevasses, it occurred to me that Weber might be analogically helpful here. 

Bluntly, Tahoma has a disappointing summit, the most disappointing of any I’ve ever climbed, especially when compared with the thrill of the ascent. Sometimes (and I’m very guilty of this) we inhabitants of the modern world go to the mountains looking for something and expect we’ll be hit with profound insight or meaning or whatever at the top. 

And so the dry reality that outdoor insight doesn’t just happen by some primal magic logic of nature can be disillusioning. All the more so, when a mountain you’ve longed to conquer for the better part of your adult life turns out to have been better as a journey than as a destination—when at its peak, you don’t even know what you came to find.

That’s not just life or just mountaineering. That dry disappointment in victory, says Weber, is politics as well. It is all of public life, including the public life of those of us who, in good faith, strive day by day to elevate the public discourse and demonstrate for our fellow Americans a better way to live in our democratic republic, to find new heights in our common life.

It’s not just that you’ll face defeat every once in a while. It’s that victory itself is never total; achievement is never final; progress is never complete, and simply cannot be, for all human things come to an end. The only true victory is to be, by your own conduct, a beacon of honest hope in a torn gray world, come whatever may, in victory or defeat.

Those with a vocation for politics, as Weber might have it, or a passion to change the world or serve our country, as we might have it, must always be prepared to know that they may lose, and fight on anyway. Holding oneself responsibly—as a steward of virtues our fellow Americans sometimes forget, but of which they must always be reminded—demands nothing less. And in the uphill fight of spirit we’re all pushing forward as Braver Angels, that fidelity is everything.

I’m back east now, back to work. See you on an America’s Public Forum or Debate soon. And may the ascents and summits of your life reveal their meanings to you in time.

— Luke Nathan Phillips, Braver Angels Publius Fellow for Public Discourse

Author’s Note: A version of this piece first appeared at The American Conservative on August 28th, 2020.

In Review: “Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre,” by Max Brooks, 2020

By Luke Nathan Phillips

It is only human to be scared of the dark, although that doesn’t stop some of us from occasionally finding ourselves wandering alone around the woods without a light, on a moonless night, for no particular reason. The world changes in these sojourns. Your night-vision perks up, only a little, but discernibly. Your hearing does as well, and you realize just how loud nighttime nature is. You’re more sensitive to the texture of the ground beneath you, to smells you hadn’t noticed before; shadows seem to twist and turn as though alive, and if your mind’s overworking itself, you might feel you’re being watched. These kinds of nights, I repeat to myself that there’s nothing else out there following me, even as I quicken my pace until I’m back in the safety of a well-lit spot. Just in case, of course.

One of the mind’s-eye darkness-monsters I’ve feared since my youth as a Boy Scout in the Pacific Northwest has been, predictably, the sasquatch. The primal fear that some damn dirty ape might be stalking me amid the firs and hemlocks was never particularly well-defined, though, beyond the vague, hairy, hulking figure of cartoon lore. What, exactly, was I afraid a sasquatch would do to me, if I ran into one?

It is to this serial nocturnal wanderer’s great anxiety, then, that the inimitable Max Brooks has given us a vivid, visceral depiction of what a sasquatch might do to you. He vividly and realistically depicts his characters’ split-second reactions when, wandering around in the dark woods of the high Cascades, they see things in the night, but can’t be sure of what they saw, or that they saw it. It’s a feeling we nighttime wanderers have all had, and Brooks captures it eerily. That realism pays dividends; it makes easier the suspension of disbelief required for reading a ‘Bigfoot-Destroys-Town’ story, in this case a story that is not just believable or entertaining, but even morally compelling.

“Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre” is, more or less, what its name suggests. It’s a docufiction, found-footage-style account. Brooks informs us that he was tipped off by the brother of the missing Kate Holland to her last testament—a diary she’d kept when she moved to the tiny, idyllic, ecotopian town of Greenloop (population: 11) on the eastern slopes of Mount Rainier. Shocked by the journal’s contents, Brooks interviewed Kate’s brother, as well as the park ranger who led the first search-and-rescue team into the ashen ruins of Greenloop, where her team had discovered 18-inch humanoid footprints, torched homes, shallow graves, and the said diary. Brooks presents the journal chronologically, appending its entries with snippets of the interview transcripts and, interestingly enough, maxims on war from literary history and haunting quips on ape behavior from famous primatologists like Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall. For good measure, other old bits of sasquatch lore—especially the ‘goblin-beast of Idaho’ story recounted by Theodore Roosevelt in The Wilderness Hunter, and the Ape Canyon legend—make their appearances as well.

All these references are arrayed to present a modestly believable theory of the origins of the sasquatch, as a primate.[i] The real-life giant ancient ape of the Asian mountains, Gigantopithecus blacki, is cast as having been an upright walker, not unlike the smaller hominids with which it shared the earth. Those hominids, first Homo erectus and then us, Homo sapiens, evolved alongside Gigantopithecus throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs. When glaciation exposed the Bering Land Bridge tens of thousands of years ago, modern humans crossed from Asia into North America, and so did the apparently-not-yet-extinct Gigantopithecus—the sasquatches. As Kate’s brother muses, “what if… they weren’t just co-migrating along with us? What if they were hunting us? …What if we were stalking the caribou while they were stalking us?”

Early on, in a representative sample of the book’s sometimes maniacally black humor, a despondent and depressed Kate partakes in a welcome-to-your-new-home meditation session with one of the town’s founders. The rich, beautiful, tanned, British-accented, well-connected former model Yvette Durant, is a credentialed ‘psychosomatic illness therapist’ who daily streams virtual ‘integrative health yoga’ sessions to her fans around the world from their secluded, idyllic alpine paradise. After some breathing exercises and new-age gobbledygook, Yvette prods Kate into imagining rushing into the loving arms of ‘Oma,’ the ‘guardian of the wilderness.’ “Feel her energy, her protection. Feel her soft, warm arms around you. Her sweet, cleansing breath surround you.” Kate, entranced, asks if Oma is the same as Bigfoot or Sasquatch; Yvette explains that Eurocentric white men perverted the mythic gentle forest spirit into a hideous monster, “like everything else our society has done to what came before it.” In due time, Yvette does feel those soft warm arms and sweet cleansing breath, while Kate barely escapes them.

The symbolism here—an upper-middle class enclave whose residents seek to live in harmony with nature, suddenly exposed to the pitilessness and fury of the nature which they’d come hoping to live harmoniously with—is rich and delicious. Greenloop has, indeed, forgotten the gods of the copybook headings, and those old gods, soon enough, make themselves known.

Mount Rainier erupts, and as the lava flows slide to Puget Sound they kill thousands of Washingtonians. Thousands more are stranded in communities in the Cascade foothills. Refugees flee to Vancouver or Portland when they can; the majority, trapped in the Seattle megalopolis, soon devolves to food rioting and urban guerilla warfare while the U.S. military and local emergency services are mustered to render aid. Here, Brooks’s wargaming most closely resembles that of his earlier bestseller, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, in examining the social and political effects of unforeseen disasters. But this is all background noise, which Kate and the other residents of Greenloop listen to on the radio whenever they can catch a signal. The lava slides mercifully avoided Greenloop, but have blocked off all its access roads by which the townspeople might escape. And with Washington State and America itself in chaos, there’s no real hope that overworked rescue workers will notice a tiny, isolated, eccentric town deep in the mountains anytime soon. The denizens of Greenloop are low on food, unarmed, unprepared, and on their own.

That’s when Kate starts seeing things. Strange, rancid smells in the woods while she’s gathering berries, and the feeling that she’s being watched. A boulder down the road, as she paces along alone in the dark, seems to move. Strange howls in the night, unlike any she’s heard before. The shattered carcass of a mountain lion, surrounded by footprints. Nobody believes her but her long-suffering husband, Dan, and the sage-like artist Mostar, until the whole troop of sasquatches (yes, Brooks insists on using the technical term for a group of apes) investigates the town at night, the dumbfounded residents watching from indoors. Even then, some of the townsfolk—a retired professor, some vegan advocates, Yvette and her suave husband—convince themselves that the apes might be harmless, even friendly. “I seem to recall that most hominids are herbivorous in nature,” assures the professor. Then the first barrage of rocks comes, and Greenloop’s fate is sealed.

In a nutshell, the journal tells the story of a series of devolutions. First is the devolution of the natural order, as the volcano-displaced sasquatches return as apex predator and hunt the humans who’d technologically marginalized them for millennia. Then there’s the devolution of decadent, advanced civilization to chaos and barbarism—Greenloop is a high-tech, environmentally-conscious, socially cosmopolitan community of the sort you’d imagine Davos and TedX types to hawk as humanity’s inexorable future. It lies in smoking ruin at the end, its inhabitants devoured by primeval monsters, its pretenses burnt on altars of meat and stone.

Then there’s the devolution of human nature amid the breakdown of moral and temporal order; Greenloop’s posh, high-status funder-founders, the Durants, devolve into mindless, drug-addled wraiths as they lose control of the crisis and faith in themselves, and then are gruesomely consumed. Kate and the other suburban middle-class failures devolve, too; they lose their romantic illusions, learn to fight and kill the beasts, and tap into the primal, amoral side of the human spirit reducible neither to selfish genes nor to social constructs. Both transformations are devolutions, with different moral weights. The Cassandra-like foresight and eventual sacrifice of Mostar, who is heavily implied to be a Bosnian war refugee, and the hardiness and eventual survival of Palomino, who is heavily implied to be a refugee Rohingya child (Kate compares her eyes to Sharbat Gula’s,) cast further aspersions at modern elite western decadence. Those who carry tragedy within themselves are more fit to stave off tragedies than those who’ve never suffered.

The gratuitous blood and gore certainly helps drive the point home. Heads are pulled off, bones are smashed to bits, uneaten body parts are hurled at shocked survivors. Sasquatches crush human skulls with the balls of their humanoid feet, and rip out townspeople’s guts in carnivorous orgies. Nothing chimpanzees don’t do to smaller monkeys in real life, of course. The townspeople, meanwhile, bash out some of the sasquatches’ brains, and urinate on others’ corpses in front of their enraged fellow apes.

The line between man-vs.-beast and man-vs.-man is muddied and obscured, very effectively. The reason Mostar’s background as a survivor of ethnic warfare helps her and the town here, of course, is that the troop of sasquatches is an organized foe, capable of planning and executing strategies to achieve its hungry aims—and from rock bombardments to keeping human captives alive as rescue-bait, they do just that, to deadly effect. But the sheer savagery of the warfare—annihilationist rather than attritional, each faction seeing the other as either an existential threat, or an inferior and tasty dinner, to be destroyed entirely—brings it back to the world of the food chain and the natural order’s cruelty.

Survival, rage, hatred, revenge, things we like to think of as irrational, illiberal, and outdated in our cozy modern world, rule this fight. In plowing through the last few (admittedly overdone) chapters of climactic battles between wild man and wild ape, it grows less clear whether you’re reading about a hunt by one species of another, or a battle between vengeful equals. They’re not so distinct, at root. A quick reflection on wartime news from the disordered corners of the earth suggests that this is quite relevant to us today, even amid rival clans of homo sapiens alone. A quick reflection on the long Paleolithic history of human warfare, and its historical aftermath in the last 10,000 years, suggests that that is exactly the point Brooks wants to drive home.

This is not just an action thriller or a survival narrative or a psychological horror story. Beyond those, it is a sly reminder to we moderns of what, in the end, human beings are, whether we like to admit it or not. It serves Brooks’s general purpose—recall, he’s a fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute and the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center—in using speculative fiction for wargaming, and the education of strategists. The central concern of Devolution, indeed, is devolution—what human beings can become when order breaks down and violence breaks out. After all, the majority of wars in the last several decades, as well as many recent bouts of civil unrest and political turmoil, have been more about the breakdown of internal order than the relations of states and empires. The reader of Devolution is prodded into some uncomfortable questions. If I were thrown into that maelstrom, with sasquatches or with sapiens, could I survive? Could I really be civilized on the other side of that? Beneath all our order and civilization, are we really so unlike the killer apes?

 And Brooks concludes the story with some interesting speculations on that. Kate Holland, it seems, survived the last recorded onslaught of the sasquatches, along with Palomino. Brooks and Kate’s brother speculate on their eventual fate, as their bodies were not found in Greenloop’s ruins. Did the sasquatch troop’s survivors regroup and strike again, carrying off and feasting upon the last two humans? Did Kate and Palomino strike off to make their way back to civilization on foot, only to freeze in the mountain snows? Did they, perhaps, make it all the way back to some refugee camp, and simply have not been identified yet?

Or did Kate’s devolution go further? “What if those poor dumb brutes flicked a switch in Kate that’s waiting in all our DNA?” What if Kate and Palomino, emboldened and awakened by some new primal fury, went out to hunt down the rest of the sasquatch troop, now that they knew how to kill them? What if “by some miracle they kept stalking those things, killing them one by one?” Primeval sasquatch genocide is a laughable thought on the face of it, of course, but knowing what we do about human nature, is it so hard to imagine?

The essential questions Brooks raises in Devolution are not far off from the questions analyzed by philosophers of human nature. Brooks’s quiet conclusions seem, on the surface, amenable to the evolutionary psychologists over at the Intellectual Dark Web, and in some ways they are (though for my money, Steven Pinker’s and Jonathan Haidt’s whiggish historical sunniness and faith in bounded rationality miss the deeper, tragic lessons Brooks conveys.) Devolution may appeal as well, for obvious reasons, to the atavistic and carnivorous likes of Jordan Peterson and Bronze Age Pervert, though Brooks’s choice of a female protagonist serves to confound those who’d impute reactionary ideas into his story. The majority of pantheistic environmentalists, of course, might broadly concede Brooks’s naturalistic pessimism, while rejecting its deeper metaphysical conclusions; one can imagine strained, hucksterish reviews analogizing the sasquatch attack to climate change or coronavirus.

But recall again Brooks’s job: he’s a military analyst, a fellow at various strategic think tanks. He tries to help American military planners think more clearly and creatively about the human terrain underlying political and military reality, to avoid the ideological straitjacketing and techno-determinism that have hamstrung our military planners in decades past. If sasquatch-attack survival-horror-thriller is not the most predictable way to teach that, it is certainly a creative and compelling way to do so. Devolution is not ultimately about how to best fight wars or defeat counterinsurgencies or promote peace. It’s instead a haunting reminder of what human beings are, in all our complexity and contradiction, and are capable of reverting to, lest we delude ourselves otherwise.

So be careful next time you’re hiking near Mount Rainier, or doing anything else in human society. There’s killer apes out there.

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[i] Brooks goes so far as to invent a fictional textbook field-guide, Steve Morgan’s The Sasquatch Companion, and cites it liberally as a source.

Note: I wrote this piece a few years back and published it at the now-defunct The American Moderate website. Given that Governor Huntsman is, as of August 2019, planning to retire from the Russian Ambassadorship and presumably will reenter national domestic political advocacy, if not domestic politics in Utah itself, I figure it is useful to have it re-published here on my blog. -LNP

Word on the street in Utah has it that the Beehive State’s favorite living son, former Governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr., will undergo his confirmation hearing for the Russian Ambassadorship very soon, possibly arriving in Moscow as early as mid-September. When he gets there, Huntsman will be adding another distinguished post to his long and ongoing career in public service in the national spotlight, which has included the Governorship of Utah, service to four Presidents (Trump will be the fifth,) and his own 2012 run for the Presidency. Many are wishing the best for the Ambassador, and at age the ripe young age of 57, it can be reasonably assumed that he has ambitions for further influence in public life. But in the opinion of this author, Huntsman should take heed of the life of another long-term, bipartisan, moderate Republican public servant from the 20^th century, to minimize his mistakes and maximize his usefulness and influence- Governor of New York, subcabinet secretary, and Vice-President Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller.

Nelson Rockefeller is typically remembered as a failed presidential candidate and a lingering holdout of a lost liberal Republicanism, but his long career in public service should overshadow his otherwise eccentric flights of wannabe presidential fancy. A scion of the great wealth of the Rockefeller clan, a notable philanthropist, and a modestly successful businessman in the oil industry, Rockefeller entered public service in 1940 and went on to serve four Presidents in cabinet or commission roles, including being Dwight Eisenhower’s Under-Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and as Gerald Ford’s Vice-President. He served as Governor of New York from 1959 to 1973 and ran for the Presidency three times, losing the GOP nomination to the more pragmatic Richard Nixon in 1960 and 1968 and to the heavily conservative Barry Goldwater in 1964. He was the major voice for moderation in Republican politics throughout the “thirty years’ war” for the soul of the GOP between conservative and moderate Republicans that ran from 1950 and 1980. His failure to forestall the transformation of the GOP into a uniformly conservative party was one of the pivotal political events of the late 20^th century.

Ambassador Huntsman should look to Vice-President Rockefeller’s legacy, not least to see where “Rocky” failed at his great quests, and achieved lesser stature and influence than he otherwise might have. Huntsman has taken on himself some of those same quests, and if he is to succeed at them in the interests of the country, he must not make the same mistakes Rockefeller did.

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To begin, Huntsman and Rockefeller both came from great wealth. Huntsman’s father, Jon M. Huntsman Sr., is a billionaire and the founder of Huntsman Corp., a titan in the chemicals manufacturing industry, and of the Huntsman Cancer Foundation. Indeed, Jon Huntsman Jr. has based much of his political career and influence in Utah state politics off of the wealth of his father, and his father’s net worth is probably one of the main factors explaining why Huntsman Jr. can speak the language of Republican moderation without having to please more socially conservative, fiscally dogmatic GOP donors. Additionally, Huntsman counts among his ancestors two major figures in the history of the church of the Latter-Day Saints.

Nelson Rockefeller’s family origins were even more opulent and influential- his tremendously wealthy father, John D. Rockefeller Jr., was himself the son of the legendary figure John D. Rockefeller Sr., who defined both the Horatio Alger mythos of the late 19^th Century and the contours of the American oil industry in the early 20^th Century. Rockefeller’s mother, meanwhile, was daughter of the powerful progressive-era Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich, one of the “Big Four” Republican Senators and a major sponsor of the efforts to create the Federal Reserve. Rockefeller’s privileged youth was one of the main reasons he was able to sustain the political career he did, as well.

The young Jon Huntsman was perhaps more eccentric than the young Nelson Rockefeller- Huntsman evidently dropped out of high school to play keyboard in a rock band called “Wizard”- but both received Ivy League educations (Huntsman at UPenn, Rockefeller at Dartmouth) and rubbed elbows with national political elites while traveling frequently, thanks to their privileged parents. And for various reasons, both seem to have developed temperaments inclined towards bipartisan public service and pragmatic problem-solving by an early age, in both domestic policy and foreign affairs. One can speculate on the old WASP-y cult of public service that animated the “Eastern Establishment” Rockefeller was raised in, and the Mormon Church’s communalistic ethos and Huntsman’s own formative experiences in the Boy Scouts of America. Regardless, compare Rockefeller’s quip in an interview concerning why he accepted Gerald Ford’s offer of the Vice-Presidency, with Huntsman’s rebuke of Mitt Romney in a 2012 GOP presidential debate-

“I felt there was a duty incumbent on every American who could do anything that could contribute to a restoration of confidence in the democratic process and in the integrity of government…” –Nelson Rockefeller

“I was criticized for putting my country first… [Romney] criticized me for serving my country in China, yes, under a Democrat, like my two sons are doing in the United States Navy… I will always put my country first…” –Jon Huntsman

Meanwhile, Robert Connery and Gerald Benjamin’s analysis of Rockefeller’s political style as Governor of New York could be copied verbatim to describe Huntsman’s style as Governor of Utah:

“Rockefeller was not committed to any ideology. Rather, he considered himself a pragmatic problem solver, much more interested in defining problems and finding solutions around which he could unite support sufficient to secure their enactment in legislation than in following a strictly conservative or liberal course. Rockefeller’s programs did not consistently follow either a liberal or conservative ideology.” –from Rockefeller of New York: Executive Power in the State House.

 Of course, it could be argued that most any politician outside of the Ted Cruz/Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican Party or the Bernie Sanders/George McGovern wing of the Democratic Party would claim similar mantles of policy pragmatism and public service. But Nelson Rockefeller uniquely lived up to those mantles, as has Jon Huntsman, as I hope is made clear through the following summations of their lives.

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Rockefeller first entered national public service in his early 30s, appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. He had previously worked in New York county government and had carried on his business career with various petroleum companies. Throughout the Second World War, Rockefeller worked on U.S. diplomatic and public diplomacy efforts in Latin America, and was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs in 1944. (President Harry Truman would fire him from this role, and later appoint him to work on his international development efforts in 1950.)

After a brief hiatus from public service, Rockefeller was appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower to be Under-Secretary of the newly-formed Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, before transferring back to foreign policy when he was appointed as Eisenhower’s Special Assistant to the President for Foreign Affairs. Around this time, Rockefeller met Henry Kissinger, and the two would be close partners until Rockefeller’s death in 1979.

In 1958, Rockefeller was elected Governor of New York, an office he would hold until 1973 and a bully pulpit from which he would launch multiple campaigns for the Presidency and advocate for “Rockefeller Republicanism” against the growing insurgency of conservatives led by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Rockefeller proved himself to be a pragmatic activist in state domestic policy, equaling the contemporary Governors of California Pat Brown and Ronald Reagan in both Brown’s infrastructure and education spending and in Reagan’s emphasis on law-and-order politics and police expansion. His state agenda looked something like a combination of Lyndon Johnson’s investment programs and Richard Nixon’s governance reform efforts.

Over the course of his governorship, Rockefeller ran for President three times. Each time he would strive to influence the direction of the Republican Party, to keep it on the liberal/progressive/moderate track and off of the conservative track Barry Goldwater represented. In 1960 he signed the Treaty of Fifth Avenue with GOP presidential nominee Richard Nixon, aimed at improving the GOP’s civil rights stances. Rockefeller’s speech at the 1964 Republican Convention encouraged Republicans to repudiate extreme conservatives, even as Goldwater announced that extremism “in defense of liberty” was “no vice.” After losing the nomination again to Nixon in 1968, Rockefeller worked to influence Nixon’s domestic agenda towards something more like his own agenda in New York.

Rockefeller worked informally in the Nixon Administration as well, serving on study commissions of Latin America and domestic water quality. After Nixon’s resignation, Rockefeller became chairman of the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans, which was a bipartisan group aimed at studying and promoting new national initiatives in domestic and foreign policy. President Gerald Ford appointed Rockefeller to be his Vice-President, and Rockefeller served in that role through the end of Ford’s term, despite being widely-regarded as a relatively unimportant and uninfluential Vice-President. His career in public life ended, more or less, with his receipt of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. Rockefeller died in 1979.

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In many ways, Jon Huntsman’s career in politics, government, and public life has generally followed similar contours to Nelson Rockefeller’s, and Huntsman has even pursued similar goals and aims in a dramatically different political environment, both in the Republican Party and in the nation as a whole. Huntsman entered public life early on as well, serving in Rockefeller’s great rival Ronald Reagan’s White House as a staff assistant. He entered national public service at a similarly young age to Rockefeller, becoming at age 32 the youngest United States Ambassador in over one hundred years (representing President George H.W. Bush’s Administration in Singapore.) After a hiatus from public life after the Bush Sr. administration, Huntsman was appointed by President George W. Bush to be Deputy United States Trade Representative.

After serving in the Bush Administration, Huntsman ran for Governor of Utah and won, assuming the office in 2004. As Governor, he pushed for a variety of liberal and conservative reforms, on taxation, environmental regulation, immigration reform, and abortion regulations, “sin taxes,” and LGBT issues. The Huffington Post has described Governor Huntsman, in his tenure in the Governorship, as “a conservative technocrat-optimist with moderate positions,” while Politico calls him “moderate by temperament, conservative by ideology, and pragmatist by approach.” He definitely is a child of the Reagan Revolution, having grown to political maturity (with fellow John Weaver clients John McCain and John Kasich) working in the post-Rockefeller era in Republican politics. But he is far less dogmatic on any set of conservative issues than most other Republican elected officials have been, contributing, very likely, to his successes and 80+% approval rating as Governor.

Barack Obama tapped Huntsman to be his Ambassador to China after his election as President of the United States, a post Huntsman accepted and entered in 2009. Huntsman returned from China in 2011 to run for President against his former boss, and it’s been widely rumored that the Obama campaign team regarded the Huntsman candidacy as more serious than any of the other 2012 GOP presidential contenders. Huntsman came nowhere near the nomination, of course, but his star in the national spotlight rose through his brief campaign, and he cashed in on that capital to become chairman of the foreign affairs think-tank The Atlantic Council in 2014, and Co-Chairman of the bipartisan advocacy group No Labels in 2012. He has since been tapped to be President Trump’s Ambassador to Russia.

Through his presidential campaign and through No Labels, Huntsman has consistently called for political reform efforts and for the moderation of the Republican Party’s policy stances and political strategies. Though Huntsman heads no “Huntsman Republican” faction other than his loyal fan-base, he generally has been one of the main voices speaking out for Republican moderation and reform efforts, while being willing and eager to show off working with politicians from both sides of the aisle (for example, there aren’t many contemporary public servants who’d be willing to work for both Barack Obama and Donald Trump.) And as some have speculated, Ambassador Huntsman may well make a fine candidate for Secretary of State in due time, even as he has not denied prospects for a U.S. Senate run in Utah in 2018 or beyond. He may have a further future in public life, and that would be a very good thing- Huntsman is one of the last popular public servants in contemporary American politics to genuinely exhibit the old “country-first” mentality of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush, along with so many other post-Cold War Cabinet Secretaries and Congressional leaders. Perhaps he can succeed where Nelson Rockefeller failed.

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Scions of great wealth and great legend, influential and popular Republican Governors of politically important states, bipartisan public servants in American foreign policy, philanthropic civic leaders when out of government, successful businessmen, leaders in moderate Republican politics- Jon Huntsman and Nelson Rockefeller may well have been cut from the same cloth, born in different times to different realities. And they certainly pursued, at the very least, three of the same goals- the adaptation of U.S. foreign policy to a different and dangerous world, the energetic reform of government in their own states, and the preservation of the moderate/liberal/reformist idea in conservative-dominated Republican politics. They also walked the same path of the bipartisan public servant in the foreign policy and domestic policy spheres, and the path of the civic philanthropist dedicated to pushing for pragmatic policy even while out of office.

No one can know if Huntsman aspires to be a future Senator, Secretary of State, Vice-President, or even President of the United States. But if he does continue his public service, even if he doesn’t climb to higher public office, there are probably a few lessons he can learn from the failure of Rockefeller to fully institutionalize moderate Republicanism, and thereby live beyond his own death the way Barry Goldwater’s conservatism lives on today. Richard Norton Smith’s biography of Rockefeller, On His Own Terms, and Geoffrey Kabaservice’s magisterial history of the moderate Republicans, Rule and Ruin, both can provide greater detail on the arguments here.

First off, don’t anger the conservatives. This actually doesn’t seem to be hard for Huntsman, given that he’s worked in the Reagan and W. Bush administrations and has a propensity to work with everyone. Although he made what was probably a calculated provocation in a 2012 debate, suggesting that conservatives were anti-science on climate change, in the time since then he has been very open to playing in the sandbox with the other kids. His measured words in a 2015 interview with The American Interest magazine evoked sympathy with Trump voters and conservative activists, rather than condemning them as the cause of the party’s problems as others have. Nelson Rockefeller, meanwhile, encouraged his followers to “repudiate” the ascendant conservatives in the Republican Party, and probably justifiably earned the unending ire of those conservatives.

One of the reasons Nelson Rockefeller never really was able to secure the Presidency was because, as Nixon figured out, you can’t win without the conservatives. In a way, Rockefeller committed the cardinal sin Trump is committing as his presidency draws on- not reaching out beyond one’s own base. It is ironic that someone as ideologically uncommitted and flexible as Rockefeller was not flexible enough to bite the bullet and appeal to conservatives. As suggested earlier, Huntsman is probably more amenable to this strategy; but we have yet to see what role he will play in the coming years, and how that role will be shaped by his explicitly non-conservative recent activism.

Second off, don’t waste your time, and other people’s money, on unwinnable campaigns- focus instead on building political infrastructure. Rockefeller never was a real possibility for the presidency in the 1960s due to the ascendancy of the conservatives, and his great wealth and political influence would very likely have been better spent on cultivating a coherent movement on the center-right to oppose the conservative movement’s organizations. Young Americans for Freedom, National Review, and eventually the Heritage Foundation would come to dominate the GOP’s intellectual discourse by the 1980s, against no significant competition from the center outside the legislatively-focused Wednesday and Tuesday Groups.

There were some attempts to establish moderate infrastructure- Geoffrey Kabaservice and Nicol C. Rae have extensively documented the early history of the Ripon Society and its journal, the Ripon Forum. (This author dutifully copied the Ripon Society’s eloquent manifesto, “A Call to Excellence in Leadership,” onto his blog for public distribution and consumption.)  But the Ripon Society, while receiving some support from a few politicians and intellectuals, never came close to receiving anywhere near the support of the conservatives’ infrastructure. Had Governor Rockefeller set up “The Rockefeller Institute for Policy Reform” or something along those lines to counter Heritage, National Review, and YAF, his influence through institutionalized moderate Republican intellectual discourse may well have lived on long past his death in 1979.

Governor Huntsman seems to have done some of this, namely through his chairmanship of No Labels and The Atlantic Council. But The Atlantic Council is a nonpartisan think-tank (in fact as well as on paper) and No Labels, save some blog posts on fiscal policy and a very brief essay by Bill Galston and Bill Kristol on moderate philosophy, has not produced anything like an agenda for moderate reform. It is bipartisan and transpartisan rather than moderate Republican, as well.

Huntsman, with his father’s chemical manufacturing wealth and his dense network of supporters, could quite possibly dedicate some portion of his influence to setting up “The Huntsman Center for Policy Reform” or something along those lines, dedicated to building up a new cadre of Republican policy thinkers and political operatives supporting a moderate, center-right, applicable governing agenda. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker and Tuesday Group leader Congressman Charlie Dent would probably appreciate that. And Huntsman easily has the clout to make such a think-tank respectable, especially were such diverse figures as the Reformicons, the new “Localists,” and the “softer gentler Trumpism” types at American Affairs brought onboard. And this reformist-moderate group of Republicans could mount a real challenge to the now-decadent conservative establishment wing, and the increasingly undirected populist conservative wing, of the GOP. Nelson Rockefeller failed at this- Jon Huntsman might succeed, if he tried.

There are probably other lessons to be taken from the life of Nelson Rockefeller- for example, don’t get into sex scandals, and do take as many opportunities from as many Presidents as possible, two lessons Huntsman seems to have internalized. But these two- working well alongside your opponents, and working on building long-term party infrastructure- are two that Rockefeller failed at, which Huntsman should double down on if he wants to maximize his future influence in American public life.

And who knows? Jon Huntsman will likely never be President, but he could well be, as Barry Goldwater was and Nelson Rockefeller wasn’t, more influential in the long run than many who did attain the Presidency.

Machiavelli and Pangur-Ban

By Luke Nathan Phillips