Luke’s Blog

Note: this is copied and pasted from… Reddit

Some reenactors will blog or otherwise write various things as the characters they portray. I had my first shot at that today, when Adam Dunigan posted a thing on Reddit about our encounter at the HistoryFest. I commented a response as Hamilton; and it was an interesting exercise in interpreting Hamilton’s reflections through my own eyes while mimicking his language enough to sound natural but no so much it sounded forced, as well as trying to follow his subtler habits (in this case, keeping the focus always on proactive action, and having the letter start with the personal and end with the public as his often do.) I do not think I succeeded; but I DID have fun mimicking his (absolutely unhinged lmao) spelling and grammar conventions. Adam’s is below; Hamilton’s is below that.

I am your most humble and obedient servant,

LNP

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Friends, neighbors. Adam here. Running for office, but this post isn’t politicking or about my campaign. Just something cool that happened yesterday that I figure people might smile at. Mods, hope it’s permissible.

So, went to history fest yesterday with my campaign crew to collect signatures and see the cool stuff on display. I’m a nerd for history anyway, so it was a fun morning. Anybody who gets the chance should check the mobile museum out.

After seeing the stalls and buying some local kitsch, we were at the main stage for the morning program. We listened to the acapela choir, heard presentations from local officials, and even got to meet our own resident Nobel laureate. Pretty cool.

But then! At one point, Alexander Hamilton made a surprise appearance and rallied troops to the continental cause. It took me a couple seconds to realize, but eventually it hit me: The guy playing Hamilton was actually my buddy and a fellow (former) congressional candidate.

I’m a Democrat, he’s a Republican, and we disagree on a lot of things. But after seeing each other on the campaign trail several times, we’re definitely friends. He had to end his campaign recently with all the tumult, and I was kinda sad I wouldn’t run into my buddy anymore as the season went on. But lo, there he was on stage, in full period garb, hamming it up as only Hamilton would.

He clocked me in the crowd, gave a wry smile, and shouted me out. There were some vague, humorous allusions to me being his Aaron Burr. Crowd seemed to get a kick out of it. Protecting his secret identity for now, but maybe he’ll see this and check in below in the comments.

I don’t know. Politics seems to be ruining lives daily these days. Being a political candidate has been a slog for everyone in this crazy whiplash election. But at least for a few hours yesterday, there was a pure moment to celebrate history and find some unexpected camaraderie with a friend across the aisle. I enjoyed that. And I hope everybody else in Arlington gets the chance to see the mobile museum while it’s in the area. Figured maybe that was worth sharing. Happy Mother’s Day all.

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Dear Sir,

I have always thought that well-understood maxim– that friendship ought not be terminated for such light and transient causes as the weighty and enduring affairs of state, sect, political description, popular opinion etc. save WANT OF HONOUR alone– might preserve generally the happiness of our empire from the rage and passion which have in so many circumstances proven the wreck of Freedom and suggested to her enemies the unfitness of a People for civil liberty.

I therefore reciprocate your approbation with gratitude, and endeavour to assure you I have felt it warmly for long before the encounter aforementioned. A man sometimes sagacious always honest has told us “the public’s business must be done; if good men do not, others will.” In the present crisis we have suffered the burthen of the prominence of too many great men and those hunters after popularity in their trail, who make traffick of the baser sides of human nature their bread, and beclouding of the public mind their drink. The shades of those contemptible characters known to past ages to be the banes of all Government, wild men with Anarchy in their hearts and weak men with Tyranny in theirs, travel freely in our midst. Therefore tis not merely a private but a public blessing, when aspirants to positions of esteem count each other as friends and comrades, without regard to faction. Indeed government is not possible without such relations. No grand conspiracy for Liberty ever was consummated but that which began as the friendly correspondence of two or three choice spirits in the wilderness. The price of Union in our lands is the practice of Union in our hearts.

Such attitudes cannot be expected to be the natural political bent of the mass of our countrymen, tho’ I have observed they are often inclined to greater charity than their supposed champions might admit. They see rage and they rage; and ought we blame them? Dignity gravity etc. in the magistrates of government, and the energetic discharge of their duties, are the surest guard against those very fields of rage. The sole and sacred duty of the true politician remains: to establish and maintain that trust and faith the People ought hold in their government, and to ensure that that government might remain worthy of that trust and faith.

This being impossible under so decrepit an order as ours, concerning such malignancies as a) the unchecked domination of all domains of life by petty natural oligarchies and the habits of dependency such order inculcates among the people b) this banal aristocracy’s enforcement of an unnatural and arbitrary division of the interests of society within the two great factions c) the general dysfunction and unmanful subservience these misfortunes have engendered in the Legislative, its failure to pursue its own interests and its resultant slovenly dispositions d) the despotic and capricious character thus to be expected in an Executive whose interests grant incredible potency and influence without proscribing the want of concomitant sagacity and benevolence e) the lethargy and inefficacy to be expected of such an executive’s ministers and organs of state, and all the travails of a government unable to establish justice insure domestic tranquility provide for the common defence promote the generall welfare etc. f) the great ills of which then shall arise, our great countrie becoming a mere stage of internal dissensions and revolutions, adventurisms by foreign powers, and finally the disunion whose prevention has been the object of all American patriots since Dr Franklin’s circulars, the work is heaped before us.

The time of CICEROS has not yet turned to the time of CAESARS; we pray your ascension may be further security against so sad an end.

I am ever your most Humble and Obedient Servant,

A. Hamilton

Note: this is from the text of a Facebook post I put up after performing at the Arlington HistoryFest in May 2026-–

Me with Barry Stevens, noted Ben Franklin interpreter–

“A few insights on today, and as I do more gigs like this I will probably develop them further:

1) never underestimate how little the general public knows about history. I had sort of imagined having to be ready with detailed campaign strategy and political history, so I’d spent the past week reviewing stuff on Hamilton’s role on Washington’s staff, timeline of the Continental Army’s campaigns, contents of his writings then, etc. But most people, upon finding out I was Hamilton, asked me about a) duels (which I renounced) b) my wife (who I have not met yet) c) being on the $10 bill (the existence of which I did not yet know) and d) rapping in Hamilton the Musical (which, you know…)

It’s interesting how to work with this stuff. I learned from George Washington many years ago, when I trolled him hard at Mount Vernon, that when asked about the musical you can just express confusion and talk about how you have friends with law offices on Broadway and you have rapped at many doors to gain entry etc. The five dollar bill was a good chance to complain about the mismanagement of revolutionary finance by Congress (“not worth a continental.”) The wife thing was a great chance to pretend to be charming and talk about the social life of young officers; and dueling was a good chance to complain about duels. None of these were about Hamilton himself, which was interesting and affirming.

On the other hand, biographical-specific questions were interesting to work with. I told people about how close Hamilton was as aide-de-camp to Washington, and portrayed his presence here as an inspection tour of the southern American lines. I got to do the political history thing by talking about the Continentalist essays (proto-Federalist Papers Hamilton was writing during the war.) Remember, when you’re portraying a character, you’re not just talking about them; you’re engaging inside their world, as them. The British are always on the other side of the hill; American freedom is not assured. To get back into that mind is fascinating, and that’s not the stuff I got asked very often, and I’m not sure how much it was what anybody wanted, but I did find it helpful for feeling more like Hamilton than myself and hopefully giving that off. I don’t know to what degree that actually works.

2) never underestimate how much the general public cares about history. I found that lots of people wanted to pry deeper into the above sorts of things when we got talking about them, for example.

More importantly, I spent some time at the 1st Virginia’s encampment, and their purpose at these is mostly demonstrating drill and weapons cleaning etc. to people, sometimes talking about revolutionary war tactics, and all that. So I saluted them coming in and stayed at their site for a while, and there were a lot of people— especially smaller children— who came up asking about camp life and tactics and other things out of the blue.

And there’s always a sort of civic undertone to this stuff, with people clearly interested in implications for real politics and citizenship etc etc etc. I’ve mostly seen reenactors recite modern platitudes for this (in large part, I think, because 18th century political language on this subject is difficult even for historians to understand) but the fact that you need to have a response prepared just goes and affirms something that I think is so, blatantly obvious: history matters to the majority of people as a reminder of who they are and how they should behave, even and especially in its simplest versions. The fact that the characters in that history are mythic rather than relatable creates a distance between them and the average person that reinforces that identity question; and reenactment at best brings those figures closer to real life, closer to people being able to relate to them. I’m not sure what the mechanism of civic education/inspiration is on that, but I’m mulling and it’s interesting.

3) anachronism is really interesting to deal with. One of the interesting interpretation issues reenactors deal with is whether they should portray their character over the course of their whole life, or their character at a specific moment of their life (ie, the Hamilton of the Revolution, who does not know about the Federalist Papers, the Reynolds Affair, the Burr Duel, or anything) or their character over the course of their whole life. Both of these have opportunities and challenges. If you’re the former, you have more material to work with and more to respond to. But you also wind up being kind of an exhibitionist museum exhibit, and even talking about yourself in the third person. If you’re the latter, you have to finagle the fact you only are portraying part of the legacy (how to foreshadow future life events is interesting, while still implying you don’t know your own fate) but it’s easier to be a classic character in the middle of a plot with a specific role, which takes the sorta museum set piece dynamic away. Ultimately which is best is determined by context.

Also, at this festival there were other historical figures beyond the Revolution— suffragettes, soldiers from the United States Colored Troops in the Civil War, some WWII-era jeeps, etc. How the heck is a colonial revolutionary to deal with the future???

This was actually interesting, and one of the ideas i had when portraying a very young Hamilton while one of my fellow reenactors last August was a more venerable James Monroe (in reality they were about the same age) was being a “ghost,” like interacting as that character with the whole of their life as fair game but only having the appearance at a certain point of their lives, so like Virgil in the Divine Comedy; and interacting with the future from your own perspective (“tHe FoUnDiNg FaThErS wOuLd tHiNk…”) I told the suffragettes it was good to see Abigail Adams’s letters to her husband had born some fruit. I told the US Colored Troops it was good to see my friend Laurens’s plans had come true. I told the WWII jeep guys it was affirming to see the technological and manufacturing plans I’d proposed in the Report on Manufactures were eventually taken seriously. Etc, etc, etc. Hamilton has a leg up over the other Founders on this, because more than any except Franklin, he really is a prophet of the modern world. It is a sort of challenge to do, but a very wholesome one.

4) how to be “in-character” as a historical figure is really interesting. Some characters have more famously mythic appearance than others and are thus easy to look like in an almost parodic sense— Ben Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln most of all. Others have some leeway, like Washington, FDR, Grant, etc. But it still surprises me that Hamilton is like the vast majority of American historical figures in that everyone has heard his name but there’s not a common mythos of what he looks like, facially. So portraying Hamilton, you have to go entirely on body language and vocal performance, because even if you did like him, you’d still need to explain who you were.

I have Hamilton’s nose and sloping forehead, a better jawline and a worse chin. Most importantly, my hair does not and never will grow the way his did, so I can’t wear it in a queue and powder it like his; i have to rely on that single manual that said officers could wear their hair cropped close to your head. All of which is to say, I can’t pose as Hamilton, so I have to impersonate him.

The fact that we don’t have physical recordings of his style is both good and bad, as is the fact that the descriptions in the public mind are pretty open-ended. You have less to mimic, but more to create; less stuff you can directly copy, but more stuff you can shape how you want. Which is to say that if you know a character well enough— and I’ve spent around 12 or 13 years with Hamilton— you can channel the parts of your personality like theirs into your performance, while suppressing the parts unlike theirs (or consciously changing them in the act.) You are always both yourself and them, you can’t stop being yourself; the trick is to channel yourself into them (and it’s been fascinating to watch people do this.)

I am really not good at this yet, and my impression is heavily reliant on being able to compose walls of words quickly, and be generally amiable; but I can’t do his seriousness or force right. That doesn’t matter quite as much for brief engagements with individuals in a crowd, but it does for sustained stuff with other characters or in front of people. I hope eventually I’m able to leave people with the impression that they actually just saw Alexander Hamilton (and I’ve known Washington’s and TRs like this) but that will be a while.

Sort of related, there seems to always be a natural habit by good reenactors to be funny, at least in small doses. One result of this is relatability so greater ease of attention. I am finding myself wondering to what degree it diminishes authenticity or not; Franklin, Lincoln, and TR had legendary senses of humor so their reenactors doing it is entirely realistic; but should Hamilton, who is said to have been witty but not funny, do the same? What if by being more realistic you become less relatable or less easy for people to be interested in? Etc etc etc.”

All, with resigned pride, I would like to let you know that we have decided to end my campaign for the U.S. Congress, effective today. It has been a good run, very meaningful, very fun, very full of lessons, and I am proud of my team for doing what we did, and grateful to the communities that supported us—those on the ground here in Northern Virginia, and all of you, from all my past lives, who donated, volunteered, spread out the word, and even just encouraged us on this great task we took up. It means the world to me.

I learned many lessons, and soon I will write up a little reflection piece on all this. I learned that when you’re trying to be a politician, you are trying to represent people; and when you try to represent people, you have to understand that your opinions do not matter—only theirs do. You have a responsibility both to lead, and to represent them; it’s not about you. I suppose that seems like common sense. But it’s more pressing than it seems. You give up your ability to just be yourself, and have to become something somewhat higher, in a very specifically public direction. That’s something I’ve never done before, and ultimately I found I wasn’t really a natural at doing it.

I had thought my natural talents and skills and interests and habits would make me a great candidate, and in some ways they did—when I was up on panels, when I was out on the street collecting signatures, when I was doing social media promo, I did great and felt natural. I had a harder time when I was in front of Republicans, not out of any pressure from them, but out of a sense of pressure inside myself that I was supposed to be something that I wasn’t. I also found out that most of campaigning is not being in front of people, but raising money; and as those of you I asked for money may have figured out, raising money is difficult for me, not because of rejection, but because of all the shame it triggers, of my fear of imposing on people unjustly and fear of losing their respect. I know that’s a fear and not a reality; but I couldn’t get past it.

These and many other lessons have sobered me a little, and I now have a LOT more respect for working politicians than I have ever had before. Things that seem slimy and corrupt and deceitful make more sense—both as tragic choices politicians simply have to make if they want any chance at all of doing good, and as signs of respect to those who support them and who they want to work with in the great tradition of haggling and compromise in American politics. You can’t really get that unless you step in the cockpit and try it yourself, and I’m glad I did. These people have spines in ways I couldn’t have known. A lot of the time they’re placed in systems—the party structure, a legislative system that doesn’t function deliberatively anymore, a media/fundraising nightmare whirlpool—that punish those traits rather than reward or channel them. And yet they continue on and still get stuff done for the greater good.

I theorized a while ago that there was a fundamental choice anybody would have to make in public life, between keeping their conscience and speaking truth to power, and sacrificing their scruples to use power wisely. In small but real ways, I found that to be completely true in the campaign, even in the tiniest things like asking someone for their signature. It probably is possible to walk that line very closely, and I saw many people do it. But it’s harder than I’d imagined.

Anyway, I am so very proud of my team. We were a young group, and while most of us had some kind of campaign experience, none of us had ever tried anything quite this big, nor taken responsibility in the ways we each did. Charessa had never managed a campaign before. Heberto had never managed the books of a campaign before. Aaron had run for school board but never been the primary comms guy for a federal level campaign, and there were similar situations with even others who were more experienced than us, Zach and Barrett (who were married in the middle of the campaign!) and Alex and Esther and Sarena and Morgan and Yuichi and Trevor and Paul. What we were able to build and do with the tiny amount of resources and comparatively small experience we had—the social media campaign, the canvassing ground game, the fundraising operation, the campaign structure itself—was great. On the core team, all of us were working multiple gigs, and none of us had turned 33 yet (which is to say, nobody on the campaign was eligible to serve as President of the United States!) This was a totally volunteer-run, completely bipartisan campaign, and I am honored I got to work as closely as I did with all these talented, idealistic, and genuinely public-spirited people.

When we were out there, the support we got—from Republicans, from Democrats, from Independents and Libertarians and Democratic Socialists, from people cynical about politics, from people with deep passions and principles of all sorts—was so, so good. One of the things I learned out here was that way more people than I’d ever imagined, when asked what the biggest issue they cared about was, said “division and vitriol” or something to that effect. People wanted hope and didn’t think they could find it in politics. And at the end of the day, with the eclectic things we were running on, that was all we really could offer—new ideas, a new generation, and new reasons to hope. The policy, the narrative, the demographics mattered too, of course. But hope was the thing.

And there were moments of hope far beyond our campaign. One of my opponents from the other party and I, upon meeting each other on the street for the first time while gathering signatures, decided to put our tables next to each other and invite people to sign both of our petitions to get on the ballot, to show bipartisan decency. One of my opponents in my party, during a tense moment between a member of the audience and another panelist, stood up and gracefully defused an angry situation in the name of decency. All in the Braver Angels Way, all bubbling up from candidates with good hearts and strong wills. All of them are patriots and I am honored I got to be in the race with them. Some of them are now my friends.

I’d imagined this would be a different sort of campaign from the beginning, something more like John McCain’s in 2000 or Andrew Yang’s in 2020 or Zohran Mamdani’s in 2025 in its vigor and memeworthiness. I learned how difficult that is to do. I met Yang on the trail, and when I asked him for advice, he told me the single most important thing you have to do as a candidate on this kind of campaign is “keep it fun for everyone; have a good time, and make sure everyone has a good time.” I don’t know that I succeeded on that the way I wish I had. But I do know I learned a lot.

One of the most important lessons (and I’m glad I learned this now, not 20 years from now) is that I am, surprisingly enough, not temperamentally capable of being a politician. I am a writer, an activist, a host, a guide, an adventurer, but for various reasons I’m not a politician. At first that was a deeply sad realization; it meant that I’ll never be able to match up to my heroes at the end of my life, on the terms on which they achieved their greatness. But when I let go of the race I felt a great weight was lifted from my shoulders, and everything felt okay; and my immediate instinct was a desire to return to those projects I’ve always done by habit. It was a nice reminder. And I have my own path to some kind of creative public service that will not go through a campaign. And that is just fine; there are many ways to be a patriot. And there are many ways to serve the causes I want to serve.

I hopped into the race to serve the interests of the people of Northern Virginia, to help my fellow Republicans be better versions of themselves, and to fight for the national parks and all the public lands. I knew from the beginning I could do that in many different ways, and was under no illusions about my chances of winning the race (although I was perhaps overconfident about winning the nomination and of showing up on the ballot.) I was moved to run most importantly because my party went insane on the public lands issue, and I would never forgive myself if I didn’t try to do something bigger about it, especially given it was the 250^th Anniversary of the American Revolution. It turned out, and became clear throughout the campaign, that running for Congress was not the best way to fight for those causes, and I now return to some other ways I’ve done so in the past. But I don’t regret having chosen to run, not one bit. I tried and I think I got much of what I had initially wanted out of this race; and it was very good.

To anyone who’s considering running for public office—stop considering and make a plan and just do it. It may be one of the stupidest things you ever do and it will be one of the best. You will lose money and may lose a few friends, and some people might take you less seriously than they did before you hopped in. But it will all be worthwhile. And to my fellow young people thinking about it, or angry about something—if there’s something that obviously needs to be said and nobody is saying it, that means it’s your job to say it. Running for office isn’t always the best way to do it; but it can be one way, and certainly can make a difference. There’s nothing quite like a great fight for a great cause with great friends, nothing like being an underdog for something you believe in. Thomas Jefferson was our age when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Alexander Hamilton was our age when he schemed the Constitutional Convention with Madison. George Washington was our age when he went to the Virginia House of Burgesses and began to become the person we remember as George Washington. We are their heirs. We’re going to be the founders of something new.

I’m proud of everything that happened just now; grateful that I spent a good chunk of the 250^th anniversary of the United States of America running for Congress, that I got to stand in the public square for exactly what I believed in and nothing else, that I got to make a few nice speeches and make many new wonderful friends. And I’m grateful that I discovered how much all of you from all my past worlds support me. I will do my best to be worthy of it.

Anyway, I don’t intend to run for office again. I didn’t run hoping to put myself in a place to run again, and given how poor I was at this race, I want to put my time and skills to better use elsewhere. If I ever do run again I’ll be dragged in kicking and screaming. If it’s my duty I’ll do it; but I sense my life will take me someplace else. For now I need to rebuild my finances (I am proud to say that I have joined that venerable and illustrious line of Great Americans who have gone broke in the service of their country) and return to my trades in tour guiding, writing, and hosting. Republican politics and American industry and foreign policy strategy matter to me as much as they always have, and the data centers and other things important to NOVA are getting my attention as well. But my cause is the public lands and historic heritage system, above everything else. I want my party to not be the bad guys on it, and I committed a while ago that I would spend my time and energy taking on that cause. The campaign was the first way I’d tried; now that the campaign is over, I return to the other way—my podcast and media project. We will see where it goes.

If you want to keep up with what I’m doing there, please follow or subscribe to that podcast, Match My Mountains. I’m pouring the energy I can into it this year, and things are getting more urgent. So if you’d like to be a part of that journey with me, I’d love to take you along.

Thank you everyone—my team, my supporters, my mentors, my community, and everybody else. Thank you for believing in me. I will do my best to be worthy of it, onward into the future.

Happy 250^th anniversary. I’ll see you on the trail. May you never run out of mountains…

LNP

Note: A younger friend (S.) sent me a little questionnaire on land policy questions. I found it nice as a practice interview thingie. My answers, very lightly edited, are below.

S: What can young people do to effectively advocate for the protection of public lands?

LNP: The same things you do to advocate for anything! Get educated, find and join the people and organizations working on this, advocate for specific issues (a lot of that is canvassing and calling your electeds etc.,) and I think most important, help get the word out yourself, whether person-to-person or in your own engagement with press or protests, or however else. On this issue, education is probably the most important– public land is a justifiably emotional issue that generates more heat than light, so many complex issues get oversimplified in ways that are ultimately harmful to the cause. The only people who can oppose and correct deficiencies in understanding are the people working to get the word out.

Additionally, Edward Abbey says “Be as I am- a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.”  And I think there’s a deep wisdom to that. You don’t have to be an ultramarathoner or AT thru-hiker or big-game hunter or backcountry conservationist to love the place you live. Just taking a look around, driving through, a quick hike, a minute to read the signs, in your local national park site or national wildlife refuge, or even their cousins in the state and county parks and nonprofit conservancies, puts you in touch with it. And being there, bringing your friends, knowing what you’re defending, is just as important as defending it.

S: The government recently announced plans to relocate the National Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Utah. What are your thoughts on this decision?

LNP: I do not like it, nor do most of the forest rangers I’ve talked to. The USFS and all the other land agencies need to be in DC to maintain high-level interagency coordination of policy (as the agencies each have different mandates) and there is a social lubricant of presence in DC that simply makes getting things done in the policy process easier; ie, when the USFS chief and high command are going to receptions and marathons with congressmen, policy wonks, lobbyists, lawyers, activists, and all the rest, doing something like restoring the Roadless Rule in the next administration becomes more possible than it would be if you just went through the usual channels. 

That said, it’s not as bad as it’s been made out to be. (This is one of those issues where a public better-educated on public lands issues would be more effective in advocating for them.) The move is easily reversible, and relies on an unfriendly Congressional budgeting process and whatever chaos it causes in the short term should be thankfully easier to manage because a lot of agency lower staff will in fact be remaining in DC. Something similar happened to the Bureau of Land Management back in the first Trump admin, and while the agency is still hurting from that, it is still clearly capable of fulfilling its basic roles under a high-pressure situation. 

The really bad things about the USFS “reorganization” are not about the move to SLC (although again, that is a nefarious and stupid decision.) They are about 1) the closure of the research centers, people don’t realize just how important research is not just for science but for management 2) the relocation of regional staff who have spent decades building local relationships and mastering local conditions of land management 3) the cutting-up of previously larger regional budgets to smaller state-level budgets, dividing scarce resources in an underresourced agency and 4) the forced resignations this will cause as all such moves have caused. None of this is fatal but it is definitely a temporary crippling at best. And the fact that it is happening right as the admin is mandating increased resource extraction and Congress is dismantling Land and Resource Management Plans is going to put the agency into deeper dysfunction processing claims and lawsuits, which will allow it even less resources for conservation, infrastructure, visitor safety, wildfire management, etc. etc. etc…. There’s a lot of nefariousness in the admin these days. But the saving grace, as Wes Siler put it, is that the administration’s incompetence will keep the worst stuff exploitation from happening anytime soon. And perhaps by that point Democrats– and, if I have anything to say about it, Republicans who have come to their senses– will be putting the right laws back in place. 

S: How does the Property Clause of the Constitution (Article IV, Section 3) relate to public lands, and why do you think it is often misinterpreted?

LNP: Let me first clarify that I’m a hiker, not a lawyer! I build trail and record podcasts, I don’t sign bills or hand down rulings. But this has been something those Wile E. Coyotes in the Land Transfer movement and the old Sagebrush Rebellions have hit at a lot in the past century, and that the environmentalist lawyers of the past half-century have thought about a lot too. Like most bits of the Constitution it unfortunately seems interpretable for whatever anybody wants… I defer to the knowledge of those wiser than me. And please understand that I do not claim any expertise on either the law or the history here, but here I go:

Historically, it basically means the federal government– not the states– makes the law in American territory not yet organized into a new state. Not just fundamental law, but basic civil law as well (and interestingly, I believe it is the Department of the Interior of all places that, through the Office of Insular Affairs, continues to administer that law in the remaining American overseas territories. Just a side note.) This means that when Congress received petitions from citizens in territorial governments to apply for statehood, Congress was essentially granting those states federal land out of its own goodwill, and continued to own and dispose of or withdraw much of that land itself. Of the land that made a new state, all of it became organized into said state, but some of the land in that state remained under the ownership of the federal government, which also granted some to the new state, and of course some was already owned by individuals or companies. Those lands remaining in the hands of the federal government were usually managed either by the Department of War or more often by the General Land Office. For most of the 19th Century, the federal government just kinda got rid of the land it owned in, say, Indiana or Kansas or whatever, either selling it off to private speculators (which was one of the things the early Congress had in mind for paying of the Revolutionary War debts Alexander Hamilton confronted) or eventually in handing it off for free in 160-acre plots to settlers who’d farm and “improve” it and sPrEaD CiViLiZaTiOn or whatever. The railroads in particular had a bad habit of buying up all these claims for themselves and reselling them for way too much money, and also absolutely destroying the resources in the most inefficient possible ways. The settlers meantime never figured out that you shouldn’t try to farm your 160 acres once rainfall got down to less than 20 inches per year, until it was too late and we had a nice little Dust Bowl on our hands. So for very practical economic and ecological reasons– and eventually for romantic preservationist and ambitious technocratic reasons– the federal government began “withdrawing” public land for special purposes. When the federal government withdraws land it basically keeps it from being sold, and assigns it a specific purpose that outlaws other purposes. These had early on been things like military installations or (in a much more diplomatically complex sense we can’t go into right now) indian reservations. But soon they were dam sites, forest reserves, national parks, national wildlife refuges, and all the other great things we know now. The further west you go, the less it makes sense for land to be in private hands simply due to the sheer amount of capital you’d need to improve it and the unsustainability of that margin. Thus the yuuuuge holdings of the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management from the Front Range of the rockies all the way to the Pacific Slope.

Many great political controversies in American history have had to do with the federal government’s use of public lands. Remember, the proximate cause of the Civil War was the South’s intolerance of the Republican Party’s refusal to tolerate the further expansion of slavery, specifically in the context of the carving-out of new slaveholding states in the western territories, and whether slaveholders had the right to bring slaves into federal territory in which slavery was banned. (Spoiler– if the government said no, the answer was no.) The supremacy of the federal government to legislate on slavery in the territories was usually on the side of anti-expansion in those times, even when the Slave Power controlled all three branches of the federal government (!!!) Bleeding Kansas, Texas’s invasion of New Mexico, mundane fights over whether the Transcontinental Railroad should end at San Francisco or San Diego– all of these were significantly about whether the federal government had supremacy over public lands and the right to regulate slavery upon them. Daniel Webster’s “Liberty and Union, One and Inseparable, Now and Forever” speech was on this topic. Honestly, the public lands movement should really go all Reductio ad Lincolneum on the land thieves more often… And it’s not just these; the Credit Mobilier scandal (stocks in railroads receiving land grants) and Teapot Dome (stocks in oil leases on federal land) scandals that precipitated so much populist opposition to plutocracy and eventual public regulation of major utilities, were about public land issues. Article 4 Section 3, man. The feds have the right. 

I guess I’m saying all this to say that the people who bitch and moan about how NaTiOnAL fOrEsTs AcTuALLy BeLoNg To tHe StAtEs are 1) improperly reading the Constitution 2) horrendously misreading the historical precedent and 3) following the same logic as the slave lords. Make of #3 what you will. 

S: Earlier this year, there were widespread terminations and budget cuts affecting the public land system. Now that it’s April, what have you heard from workers  (that you know) who were laid off? And for those still on the job, what has the situation been like on the ground?

LNP: They all love it and are enjoying their vacations and praise the ultimate wisdom of the Silicon Valley futurist revolutionizers who have benevolently supported humanity etc. 

I’m just kidding. And it was not just earlier this year, it was last year too– the “Valentine’s Day Massacre” will go down in conservation history as one of the greatest omens of the 21st Century, and I hope like a Manassas or a Pearl Harbor in the annals of the great fights for the lands the conservation movement has perennially endured. The NPS’s workforce is still down 25% from 2024 levels (which themselves were insufficient,) and the BLM, USFS, and FWS are similarly understaffed. The USGS and other research agencies have also been hit pretty hard. To cap it all off worst, the Secretary of the Interior has consolidated a lot of DOI staff formerly from the agencies into the Office of the Secretary (which has expanded by like 500% or something ridiculous like that) which sounds either like a stupid-ass Silicon Valley corporate strategy that doesn’t work in government, or a malicious plot to control formerly bureaucratically-dispersed agency high staff directly under the thumb of the most powerful appointees and thus suppress bureaucratic opposition to the admin’s flamethrower policies, or maybe both. 

Nobody likes this. Nobody likes any of it. 

I worked with folks at Philmont and know other folks in Boy Scouts who have since become rangers in the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service. I know a few others who didn’t get RIF’d (Reduction in Force) but saw most of their friends get hit. I know a few GS people in the agencies in DC with some spicy thoughts as well. The RIF’d rangers all eventually got rehired, after having had their lives uprooted for a few months, their workplaces sent into chaos at the beginning of wildfires-and-tourists season, and their years of literal hard labor in public service spit on by a bunch of incels with lame gamertags who’ve never hugged a tree in their lives. (I think the punishment for DOGE Service should be a guaranteed GS-1 job in whatever agency those bastards were hollowing out, Maoist style.) Meantime former rangers told me they were shocked, not just at how bad their old friends were being treated, not just at how precious time managing the lands was lost at a crucial point in the season, but at just how much institutional knowledge was being not lost but actively purged, and people with decades’ worth of public service being left out in the cold. Sometimes it was early-retirement buyouts, other times it was pure cuts, other times it was rehires; the end result was always the same, chaos in the systems that have been developed over decades and work the way they do for a reason, fucking around with which inevitably must bring about performance consequences. (By the way, conservatism has always been about gradual change, appreciation of the absurd, and humility towards the possible virtues of systems more complex than the human understanding can comprehend. So what the fuck, guys?) 

I have heard it said, “never attribute to malice what might more easily be attributed to incompetence.” But again, per Wes’s point I referenced in a previous question; what if it’s both?

S: At Yosemite National Park, during the annual “firefall”, a group hung an upside-down American flag in protest of recent staffing cuts. What are your thoughts on demonstrations like this?

LNP: Yeah that shouldn’t have happened. We have to protect and obey the law, under all circumstances. The land thieves and defilers are breaking all kinds of laws and turning the stewarded west into the wild west again. We in the public lands movement have a sacred responsibility to be the last faint glimmers of of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that once was known as America. If we do not obey the law and follow the rules that made that order (and it was in fact the overcoming of human nature by our submitting ourselves to the proper rules, not some deep ambition or democratic virtue or mystical nature-worship or republican greatness or whatever, that we civilized ourselves out of earlier American barbarism to the land) then no matter how much purer our motives might be, no matter how much greater our cause, what exactly separates us from the vandals who blew up the East Wing or took down the pride flag at Stonewall National Monument? The image of the ranger himself and herself– the comfortable American leaving their comfortable life to go live out in the more rugged more splendid parts, hack dirt and count seeds and save hikers and clean toilets that a patch of American Earth might continue to be enjoyable to millions of people who will never meet that ranger, holding themselves to Leave No Trace and the rangers’ oaths and to their responsibilities to the people, holding themselves to rules that bind them to the land, not some cowboy in the howling wilds but a steward conquering human nature’s proclivities toward destruction– is rooted in a sense of rules. 

Sorry, maybe that’s a lot. The other more practical thing is that there actually ARE sites in many public lands areas where protests are allowed and encouraged, and there are procedures to register protests that the NPS is required by law to follow. Think no further than the protests and rallies you often see on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and the front door of the White House. These exist in other sites around the system too. I recently saw a “First Amendment Site” at a National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. This stuff is built in. 

To my knowledge (and please correct me if I’m wrong) the folks behind the upside-down flag protest were out of order regarding the rules and regulations on this. Which is why I oppose it.

To be clear they are exactly right to protest, though. There are just better ways to do it. Or if you’re going to break law and code for a good cause, just please do it somewhere outside NPS jurisdiction, like hanging an upside down flag in full view of the president’s suite in a swanky hotel or something. Edward Abbey, god bless that man, gained a certain kind of credibility and lost a different kind of it (and to his credit, knew exactly what he was doing and didn’t care) when he engaged in criminal acts against the federal government in defense of his beloved Southern Utah. Monkeywrenching is wrong, even when its cause is sacred. 

S: What do you think is at stake for future generations if public lands are sold/underfunded?

LNP: They would lose the ability to enjoy the pristineness of this nature and enrich their souls in that sweet clean mountain air, test their bodies in the crushing desert heat and the piercing glacier cold, run with the wolves and the bears amid the towering trees in the dark dark greens of our ancient forests, gaze upon the grand vistas the indian and the pioneer alike stood before in awe, feel the glory of our mighty rivers and walk the steps where Americans of every walk of life once walked and feel the spirits of our history and our future coursing through their veins; they’d lose the chance to put their hand on a hoe and the hoe in the dirt and pour their sweat into the trails and bridges and campsites that others could enjoy as they once enjoyed those once built by others like them, they’d lose the chance to live the stewardship and responsibility that makes true citizenship and statesmanship and civilization; they’d lose a place to be, they’d lose who they are, they’d lose who they have been and who they could be; they’d lose the chance to match their mountains. 

Having had the privilege to do that ourselves, I believe our responsibility is to protect that chance for them.

S: What do you see as the biggest current threats to U.S. public lands?

LNP: I really hate to say this because it makes me ashamed to be a Republican, but at this point the single biggest threat to the public land system is the Trump Administration and the mainstream of the Republican Party more broadly. It is also among Republicans where the best work to protect the lands can be done; the longterm cultivation of public lands radicals and both elite and grassroots constituencies for land protection among Republicans, without this project being derailed by the land thieves, is a very low-hanging fruit and would hold an important balance in this fight if it succeeded. 

The second-biggest threat is the specific nexus of political figures around Senator Mike Lee of Utah that keeps coming up with novel ways to undercut legal protections on the lands, destroy the institutitonal infrastructure that stewards the lands, delegitimize the management of the public lands, and actively sell off or otherwise dispose of those lands from public ownership. I cannot wait for these guys to be kicked out of politics for good.

The third-biggest threat is the tendency of extractive industry (drilling, mining, grazing, logging, etc.) to overplay its hand and lobby for more harvest than is sustainable. But I want to clarify that those agencies have been and should be key coalition allies in the proper stewardship of these lands; they have their place in it as much as conservationists, recreation groups, ecosystem services advocates, and everybody else has. They only cease to be helpful when the system itself gets out of whack, and the GOP and Lee people are doing a lot to get it out of whack.

The fourth-biggest threat is the tendency of environmentalist groups to oppose all extraction and development on public lands, to oppose access to these lands by various groups including offroad vehicle users, and to oppose the active management (in hunting regulations, prescribed burn and thinning operations for wildfire, etc.) of many of these lands. I would also add their tendency to turn public lands into a climate change issue rather than leaving it as a land issue. I believe these people mean well and have a deep and profound love of the land for its own sake; but I believe in practice they pursue environmental policy that makes proper stewardship harder, and drive apart the public lands coalition by being vitriolically uncharitable to hunters and offroaders who have just as much an interest in conservation as they do. This is a subtler kind of threat, of excessive zeal; a strange kind of “loving the lands to death.” I hope this group eventually softens out on the edges some, and enjoy engagement with them quite a lot. 

There are other threats, especially the big tech oligarchs who would be most likely to buy these places, local real estate companies around every land area, and foreign resource companies with no ability to have the sense of stewardship American companies can be at least guilted into. Some argue climate change as well.

But perhaps the most insidious threat is the most mundane; apathy, not among any one person but among the public at large. If nobody cared enough to freak out when these places were under threat, those places would be gone by now. I believe God exists regardless of whether anyone believes in him, but if nobody believed in him there’d be no cathedrals and crucifixes and bibles. So it is with the value of the lands. Remember the Onceler upon his redemption, feeling guilt about the Lorax’s admonitions. The Onceler tells you:

“Unless someone like you

cares a whole awful lot,

Nothing is going to get better.

It’s not.”

S: Do you support or oppose the sale or transfer of federal public lands to states or private entities? Why?

LNP: Oppose lol. You need major resources to manage large landscapes and ecosystems under multiple-use/sustained-yield policy and you’d still need lots of resources even if you were only managing them for a single use like conservation. Only the federal government has the capacity to marshal those kinds of resources, and to deploy them for a longterm unprofitable project based on regularity rather than agility. The personnel and institutions who have executed this work for decades have gotten very, very good at it, both by intention and by trial and error; that is something that simply cannot be replaced. 

It is not just that the states and private entities don’t have this backdrop of experience, though. It is also that they are under very different constraints than the federal government. Remember– the U.S. government is sovereign. Its holdings are not assets on a balance sheet; they are integral components of its living small-c constitution. They are parts of it, and thus birthrights of those who own that government, ie the American people. The federal government can go broke and not be forced out of its property. Not so with states, which typically have constitutional responsibilities to balance their budgets, and which have historically had to dispose of much of the land granted them by the federal government and sell them to private owners when they hit fiscal crisis. Which is a goddamn shame, isn’t it? A single bad year for the social construct that is money, and a great and treasured landscape everybody can touch and feel and love and live and die on vanished forever behind the barbed-wire fences, beneath the bright and terrible lamps of the data center empires? 

All the moreso for private and nonprofit entities, which can go bankrupt or otherwise have to be sold. And moreover, private and nonprofit entities possess immense discretion and power over what they are allowed to do with their holdings– build on it? Conserve it? Drill it? Turn it into a different kind of ecosystem?– and, just as importantly, who is allowed to go onto them. Once a piece of public land is no longer public, there is no longer any real chance the public will be able to go onto it, simply because the public no longer has a right to go onto it. It’s private. 

I live in great terror that Philmont Scout Ranch might eventually go bankrupt, or that the BSA’s continuing payments for its lawsuits will have to result in the disposal of the ranch and its closure as Scouting’s Paradise. If that disaster scenario were to happen, I’m sure the Philmont Staff Association or some major donors would move whip-quick to save it under some form, as the place really does change people; I like to imagine it might be declared a National Monument, and run in partnership between the nonprofit and the federal government both for public access and a specific institution’s purpose, as many national monuments dedicated to historical preservation are. But the very fact I have to think that about a nonprofit-run place I love should say something about the public places I love, too. 

It is often said that once public land is gone, it’s gone forever. That is not ENTIRELY true. Most of the public land east of the Mississippi River, for example, has actually been donated to or bought back by the federal government, from private owners, and amost all of it has been rewilded to some degree or another. Several states, notably Texas, whose histories precluded major public land ownership, have made a point of purchasing private lands to set up their own public land systems. And there have been a few cases where something treasured went into private hands for a while, but eventually came back. There is hope. But hope is not a policy, and in any case those cases all took decades and immense amounts of environmental devastation to work out in the long run. Functionally, when land is gone, it should be thought of as gone forever. 

And yeah yeah, conservation easements and environmental laws and everything. Yes– agree that those are there and that those are crucial to all of this, and that they take the project of preservation far into private lands, most importantly with the willing consent of private landowners. That is good. That is no substitute whatsoever for public land ownership. There is currently a promising movement to reimagine conservation as something that takes place across jurisdictional borders, featuring not only federal public lands but state lands, nonprofit conservancies, private landholdings, county and city and local lands, etc. etc. etc., with some bottom-up collaborative management philosophy rather than the existing top-down philosophy. This looks at the public lands as an extended system, which I support. 

…But this simply cannot elide the necessity for the core of the public land system– the 640 million acres of BLM, USFS, FWS, and NPS lands alongside the small holdings of a few other agencies– to be protected, managed, and cherished as the core of American nature. For without that core being well-managed, the expertise, the research, the practice, the public imagination, and the very spirit of American conservation would not be there, not be able to lead and sustain the much less-well-funded less-well-known less-well-protected further non-federal parts of the American land system. Just as Yellowstone is the crown of the national parks, and the national parks are the crown of the public lands, so the public lands are the crown of America; they must be protected centrally if the whole is to be protected at all. 

(By the way, I personally think the crown should be the wilderness areas in the National Forests, for remoteness, ruggedness, and diversity of activity, and the fact that soooo many glorious peaks are in that system rather than in the national parks. But that’s just like my opinion man. I’d add the NPS historic sites as the parallel for historic heritage.) 

S: Can you name a policy proposal from your party that you disagree with on public lands?

LNP: Yeah, lots lol. Name pretty much anything.

 But most recently there’s a bill going around called the Patriot Parks Act, which would codify current Interior Department policy into law and jack up the cost of park entry fees to foreign tourists by $100 or something. (This alongside increasing the cost of the America the Beautiful Pass (access to all public land units for a whole year) by a heck of a lot for foreign visitors.) It would increase revenue for the parks charging it, giving them more dedicated funds for operations and maintanence, and work to make more parks “self-sufficient.”

The justifications of it as not being xenophobic or classist are weaselly greenwashings in my view, but that isn’t even the worst of it. If you tie park budgets to park visitation, you’re putting a band-aid on the 800-pound grizzly bear in the campground– the fact that the NPS budget has not been anywhere near sufficient since 2010, that the current NPS maintanence backlog is something like $35 BILLION, and the nefarious reality that the Trump Administration in particular and the Republican Party in general continues to cut NPS’s quaint $3 billion in a budget somewhere around $7 trillion out of a worship of FiScAL ReSpOnSiBiLiTy or whatever. And EVEN worse, if you tie park budgets to park visitation, you start to set a norm where the value of the park is based on its profitability. Aside from that being literal blasphemy, it also puts hundreds of NPS sites that do not (and could not) charge visitor fees on the list as being “revenue-negative” on the famed “balance sheet” our wise benevolent omnipotent Secretary of the Interior so magnanimously stewards. I don’t know the specifics but I would bet that no more than 200, and probably closer to 100, NPS sites charge entry fees (usually $20 per vehicle or something to that effect.) There are 433 sites in the system, around 250 of which are small history-protecting sites. Should it be decided by a FiScALLy ReSpOnSiBLe Interior Department that some “assets” ought to be “disposed of” to “balance the budget,” which spots do you think are getting iced first? So the whole precedent PPA sets unravels even more than just the immediate insult of checking passports at the entry stations. And that’s another thing– passports, birth certificates at park entry stations? Have you ever sat in the line at Arches National Park in August to get in? And you weren’t thinking of deploying ICE alongside a park ranger, were you?

But I guess the admin’s recent rule change smoothing the process for park superintendents to hire locals outside of the standard national application process is good, and at U.S. Grant National Historic Site and Fort Union National Monument I did notice that the rangers on duty were kids younger than me who’d grown up in the area. So sometimes the GOP’s efficiency/home-first mindset does something good or other. It’s just that is not usually the case.

S: Why did you decide to focus your congressional campaign on conservation and public lands? How is it relevant to the people in VA 8?

LNP: Well, for all the reasons above! And more specifically, I figured an energetic campaign by a young and patriotic outdoorsman right on the doorstep of the nation’s capital in the 250th anniversary of the America the public land system celebrates and serves, would be a good person to call sense into his party and bring the issue to the forefront in the policy class. The folks around here work in government and many like the rangers have been laid off; they travel through NPS sites on the GW Parkway and the National Mall every day. The land is real here, in ways that are subtle, and subtle is good. I believed if there ever was a time and a place and a person to do this, it was me and here and now, and I’d always regret not trying. 

Well, it turns out a campaign is NOT a good way to bring attention to an issue– Andrew Yang was a very strange and unique case. But I don’t regret it one bit.

S: What should individuals holding public office be doing to protect public lands?

LNP: They should read my response to how young people should advocate for public lands and start doing those themselves. 

From their aeries of power they should support the legislation and executive actions that a public lands radical would support, and in a nutshell that is:

-no sales of public lands / no reduction in size of system or number of units

-full funding of the agencies and programs stewarding this

-full staffing of the agencies and programs stewarding this

-protection, surgical reform, and strengthening of the major legislation protecting the lands

and that is just a start. 

But I think most importantly under the present moment, they should do something much simpler. My fellow Republicans, I beseech you– condemn in no uncertain terms your friends and fellow partisans who are actively destroying the lands. Condemn Lee, condemn Burgum, condemn Rollins, condemn Vought and Miller, and condemn Trump. Condemn everyone who is doing anything to destroy the integrity, the existence, and the spirit of the public land system, most importantly those who are doing that while greenwashing their perfidy and daring to wrap themselves in the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt. Condemn them, even if you get hurt for it. Grow a fucking spine and do the right thing. If you’re not willing to put your career on the line for the national parks– how am I even saying that?– you do not deserve to be anywhere near office, anywhere near the trust of the American people.  Just say something and condemn the bastards. 

And if you need a little bit of inspiration, go out to Saint Louis and visit U.S. Grant’s house, a site protected by the National Park Service. That’s one of the spots Grant lived in his early days, and if you’re not aware, he had an early life full of horrible shame and failure. He got hit for doing the right thing, but he endured. But he kept his spine and never stopped serving, and never fell for the evil sirens around him as the crisis rose. And then he saved the union. 

That park doesn’t charge an entrance fee. And on its grounds a sign reads: 

“This place belongs to,

and is preserved by,

the American people”

Note: The excellent folks at Republic.Land issued a call for submissions today, asking for personal experiences with the public land system and what they mean to people. I got carried away and wrote a whole mini-memoir; they are only publishing small snippets of whatever they get, so I am publishing it in full here.

I STRONGLY encourage friends of mine, outdoorsman or not, who have any fond memories in the National Parks and Forests, to submit some photos and thoughts to them. They are doing great work spreading the word about why protections matter, and stories count far more than policies in politics.

–LNP

I tell new acquaintances that it is impossible to understand me without understanding that I am a Boy Scout– in all my formative years, I was shaped by the Boy Scouts of America, through participation in its programs, through the ways it formed my moral imagination and self-image, and through the adventures it granted me far earlier than I otherwise would’ve had the chance to get. My dad was in the navy, so we moved around a lot; and with him, and a long train of increasingly eccentric scoutmasters, my brothers and I grew up on the slopes of the San Bernardinos and across the Joshua Tree savannahs of the Mojave, paddling down Major Powell’s beloved Colorado beneath its mighty red-rock cliffs and following mules to the Havasupais’ ancestral land, piercing the mists of the enchanted Olympic Range and clambering to the thunderbirds’ aeries atop a live volcano the northwest indians once named Loowit. We huddled together, embracing each other in fear, as Hurricane Sandy battered our little Sea Scout sailboat across the wide Potomac, and sighed in snobby West Coast taste at the puniness of the Blue Ridge; and on a little sacred mountain in Shenandoah called Old Rag, my thoughts took me back to the summit of Mount Whitney, which I’d had the privilege a few years before of summiting with those same eccentric scoutmasters (and thank god– it got the American mountaineer’s obsessive Whitney fever out of my system very early on.) My brothers and I saw all these splendid sights before any of us turned 18. 

Add to that all the Yellowstones and Yosemites and Zions and Badlands, the Gettysburgs and Little Bighorns and Jamestowns and Fort Clatsops, and all the other NPS spots our Filipina-immigrant-mom insisted we roadtrip through (so she could get to know her adoptive home) whenever our dad’s duty station changes transplanted us to another side of the country, and we probably saw a whole decades’ worth of NPS souvenir calendar pictures in real life before we graduated high school. The public lands were a cradle to us. We had no idea that most other kids, scouts or not, were not so fortunate.

Scouting also took me to a paradisical little place called Philmont Scout Ranch, where in the single most vibrant two weeks’ worth of Scouting living anyone can ever have, the OA Trail Crew program, I first hacked dirt with a mattock and learned what a backslope was and took the wilderness pledge and swore to Leave No Trace. My foreman was a crazy loud-mouthed ukulele-playing political-theory-reading half-Filipino Virginian, like me, and my young impressionable self decided to be just like him. And the conservation ethic he lived by slowly and subconsciously molded my life, even when I forgot who I was in early adulthood and left the mountains for a time. 

Philmont, of course, is private land, stewarded by Scouting and accessible only to scouts. But the ethic all its visitors and especially staff learn to live by through those otherworldly scouting summers we go out to the Sangre de Cristos, teaches us to love a place because it is there, because it is ours, and because we have a responsibility to it, for we were given it by those who came before us, and owe it to those who will come after us. That is the true ethic of conservation, and of stewardship, and while it imprints quite literally on those rough folks in the Philmont-to-Forest-Service Pipeline, it does the same in spiritual senses to all the rest of us, including those who have chosen in the frontcountry of real life to go into public service. And we are pledged to practice it in all we do in life. And it is, I think, the precise same ethic we Philmonsters must demonstrate by our lives to our fellow Americans. How we treat and ought to treat the National Parks and Monuments, the National Forests and Grasslands, the National Conservation Lands, the National Wildlife Refuges, and all the rest, is the single most literal way we do that. And everybody can do it. Those lands are the common property of the American people. 

I was privileged to grow up with a slew of adult role models and mentors in my life who not only took me through the great American landscapes and wildernesses, but helped me realize they were mine and all of ours, and that there was some undefinable something in a life of adventure and reflection and service that living upon them could do to you. Eventually I met Teddy Roosevelt through Edmund Morris and pieced it all together. But I couldn’t have, had it not been for those landscapes and forests and waters and shrines imprinted on my mind forever. It was my America, and it still is. 

Now, I lost my mountains for a time; I wanted to be a somebody in politics and policy and spent all my time in coffee shops in front of a computer, asking for meetings with people who wouldn’t even bother to pretend to remember my name a few months later, hustling around DC and learning all the lessons of policy world the hard way. I still liked the outdoors in principle but never really spent much time in them, though I kept in touch with the public land system through routine pilgrimages to an increasing number of NPS National Historic Sites and National Historical Parks (still, I think, the most underappreciated part of the public land system, yet in my view the most important for making one realize the system as a whole really is America.) I started to become, without realizing it, one of Ed Abbey’s desk-bound men hypnotized by desk-calculators. My mental illnesses went insane, I drowned in alcohol, I got fat and hated the world, and professional failure after professional failure after professional failure made me increasingly deranged, though I still clung to some grandiose idea of myself as some kind of great noble statesman or whatever. It was bad.

Then at some point five years ago, it all cracked. After a traumatic experience that was certainly my fault, and another week of drinking in shame, I realized I never wanted to hurt myself or anyone else with my uncontrollable demons ever again. To seal my pledge I ran 18 miles through a dark March rain from Theodore Roosevelt Island down the GW Memorial Parkway to Mount Vernon, and over the next six months I got back into all the habits the teenage Boy Scout me had lived and loved, and as I returned to the mountains– Old Rag most often and most importantly of all– I began to remember who I was. That happy six-month ascent ended atop Mount Rainier and then atop San Gorgonio, the two high points of the two western regions whose mountains had forged my soul back in Scouting, where my brothers and I once had climbed. And upon my return to DC, when I climbed Old Rag again amid the yellowing of fall, my life was new.

It’s probably too much to say the public lands saved my life– Scouting, Brett McKay’s Art of Manliness, and God did that. But it certainly is true that my life was saved on the public lands.

Climbing mountains is the most trite and insipid analogy for facing personal challenges of all time, and yet it will always be the best. I’ve destroyed my career a couple of times since then, gone through valleys, broken my pledges, and all the rest. I’ve also hit new summits I’d never imagined, discovered new worlds, committed myself to higher causes and ideals I’d never thought I’d have. And all through that time I’ve gone back out to the mountains that forged my soul in youth, almost every single one of them (except the ones at Philmont) upon public land, my birthright, the birthright of all my fellow Americans. 

Having a post-pandemic career in national nonprofit grassroots work– the age and condition of eternal underpaid remote work– can be a great opportunity for adventure if you make it one. So I did my best. When my brother gave me his old car with the caveat that I had to drive it home across the continent myself, I suddenly had a shot. 

That summer I climbed in the Olympics, slept in the New Mexican desert, ran my first 50-mile trail race (again, at Philmont,) and visited the NPS sites where U.S. Grant and George Washington had met great shame out on the frontiers early in their lives. And over the next few summers, when conference seasons ended and when Congress was out of session and DC life slowed down, I took two-month working road trips in great John-C.-Fremont-style circumnavigations of Stegner’s geography of hope, visiting old friends in their little houses on the prairies and out on the Pacific Coast’s sleek metropoles, taking scouts out into the backcountry as an OA Trail Crew volunteer back at Philmont, and climbing as many great western mountains as I could fit in a roving transcontinental schedule. Tracing the paths of the great explorers and pioneers, continually renewing one’s sense of the vastness of American nature, gives you some perspective.

National Parks are always nice, if a little touristy, but my favorite general type of public land is the Wilderness area in a National Forest. National Forests get less traffic than parks generally, so if you’re looking for solitude I suppose it helps to be there. But more importantly, so, so many of the most gorgeous ranges in the public land system are protected by the U.S. Forest Service, and so USFS-tended Wilderness areas consistently outdo (or “mog,” as the kids are saying these days) NPS-protected areas, by a lot. My favorite kind of outdoor adventure, meantime, is a 20+-mile roundtrip, 5,000+-foot elevation gain day hike up a peak in a National Forest Wilderness area, starting with the sun and ending with the moon, spending maybe an hour or two up at the tippy-top of the vertical world, listening to the whispers on the winds, scoping the painted contours of the earth, enjoying the “sense of being the highest man for hundreds of miles around, cherished by all instinctive climbers” Edmund Morris attributes to TR. These hikes don’t hold a candle to Bob Marshall’s famous heart-stopping 50-70-mile dayhikes, but it is still nice to rush up above the clouds and be back down in time to find a big juicy burger nearby.

Just to rattle off a few, in case you’re hoping to climb something– Blanca Peak in the Sangre de Cristos, the eastern sacred mountain of the ancestral Navajo country, a nice straight uphill march til the marmots let you know you’re almost at the pointy-top summit. Mount Adams, the lieutenant ice-volcano of Washington State, where to stand atop one of the five means to be a god, gazing at the other four snowcapped gods hovering eternities away across a sea of green and beneath a sea of blue. Cloud Peak, lord of the Bighorns, where the Oglalla Lakota will tell you to sprinkle sage along the ridge, where the tarns a couple thousand feet below you shimmer glacier-baby-blue. King’s Peak, whose neighbor ridges are so dry and eroded they offer the climber one of the most fascinating panoramas of stratified geology in the American West (and so it is fitting that it is named after the first Director of the U.S. Geological Survey.) Mount Shasta, from whose summit at sunset you can watch that 100-mile shadow Clarence King saw stretch and stretch until it melts into the purple haze, and where John Muir’s salvific hot springs still boil and bubble and warm. Rocky Mountain in the Sawtooth Range, a mountain-goat’s mountain in one of the strange and slightly scary places in the lower 48 where you can find grizzly bear scat at the summit. (Perhaps the bears have personal challenges to overcome, as well.) 

Another great species of adventure is the 20-mile, 10,000+-foot dayhike. There are not many of these, but let me tell you, there is something charming about the change, hour by hour, of the vegetation around you, while the panorama behind you remains the same. I have not yet climbed White Mountain Peak from the sandy trailhead in the Owens Valley, but it is the quarry I am most excited to hit. 

The Olympics will always be very special to me. My brothers and I went up there with the scouts quite a bit growing up, and it’s one of two geographies that my pre-Peter-Jackson (and correct) mind’s-eye-view of the landscapes of The Hobbit is based upon. (The other, of course, is Philmont!) Olympic National Park, as well as Olympic National Forest, is quite remote; no roads and few trails bisect the range, said to be one of the most rugged on the planet. To get anywhere near the peaks, you usually have to wander up a river valley for 10 miles or more, through enchanted stands of ten-foot-thick old-growth hemlocks and douglas firs and sometimes sitka spruces and western redcedars, the dark quiet of the forest pierced every once in a while by the machine-gun chatter of the Douglas Squirrel. The mossy log-strewn forest floor soon gives way to rocks and wildflowers and Alaska yellow-cedars in subalpine meadows, the old-growths replaced by true firs with their gooey purple and green cones growing straight up out of the branch. 

And then you reach that strange vertical world of shifting scree and barefaced rotten rock coated with the little black lichens clinging on, where the trails end and you pick your way up chutes and gulleys and faces hoping you are on the right track. Inevitably you’ll miss a turn and have to carefully lower yourself down, and turn back up into yet another wrong turn. And then you emerge atop a craggy little peak. The Olympics are unusually foggy for a western range– they are surrounded on three sides by saltwater– which makes navigation a little more mysterious, and the swift, curling mists give each photo-op mountainscape a different look every time you snap the camera. You’ll never get altitude sickness up there; but even without it, the Olympics are some of the most challenging and most rewarding little needles you’ll ever explore. They are my favorite range in America.

I had a nice little thing going there– autumns, winters, and springtimes in the intellectually-stimulating, socially-fascinating, historically-edifying world of Northern Virginia and D.C., visiting the Blue Ridge and sometimes other mountains relatively frequently, and heading west in the summertimes to enjoy the magnificent western National Forests and National Parks. I hope I get to live that way again.

In winter 2025, the new administration began wantonly firing park rangers and forest rangers, including friends of mine from Scouting. The Secretary of the Interior told the U.S. Senate that our lands were a “balance sheet.” A certain pair of U.S. Senators introduced proposals to sell off millions of acres of that “balance sheet,” and when I looked at the Wilderness Society’s ArcGIS map projecting which lands might be for sale, every single mountain I had climbed since 2021 was in or directly adjacent to a parcel on the chopping block. My blood boiled. The vast majority of my fellow Republicans failed to lift a finger, including many who fashionably identified as environmentalists, even as huge majorities of Americans shrieked in collective rage at the blasphemy. 

I had never felt so vitriolically polarized on any single issue before, in 15 tumultuous years of political cognizance. Suddenly the prospect that my mountains, and the forests and deserts and rivers and prairies and all the rest, might soon be held in private ownership, no longer accessible by me or by anybody, felt very real, so nauseatingly real. It dawned on me very quickly that conservation was the cause I didn’t just want to, but had to give myself to in this season of my life. And after a chance encounter with Walt Dabney’s work, and some conversations with Philmont-to-Forest-Service friends, I embarked on a rapid self-education in public lands policy and current conservation issues, since I’d always been only an instinctual conservationist, never actually studying it in policy previously. The well-organized ecosystem of public lands radicals running SubStacks has been an incredibly helpful resource and guide in that process. 

I launched an uphill campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives, in part to start organizing serious pro-public-lands Republicans institutionally. I laid the groundwork for a podcast that will work to polemicize radical public land advocacy for a specifically conservative policy-world audience. I have no idea where any of this is going to go– just that I would never forgive myself if I didn’t attempt to do something for the cause this year, with the resources and skills my career up to this point has given me, for the places and the people and the ideas that have made my America for my whole life. I won’t be able to go out west anytime soon, because of this (though Shenandoah National Park, George Washington National Forest, the numerous NPS sites around DC, and our various National Wildlife Refuges and BLM tracts around Virginia thus grow even more enticing.) But that’ll be okay. 

It’s all just another mountain.

And that’s the lesson I’ve learned in all this, I guess, in personal struggles, professional odysseys, and high adventures alike. I kept climbing and climbing and climbing, trying to see some great new vision, become some perfect version of myself, trying to escape the valleys of my demons and live in the vertical world forever. And there is no feeling in the world like being at the top. But for all the better you become each time, you’re still a human being, and you can’t live on the summit; you might be a mountaineer, but long after you slide back to the valleys, the mountains will still be there, daring you to climb. I’ll never match my mountains. But I’ll always have to try. 

May you never run out of mountains. I’ll see you on the trail.

-LNP

March 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-LNP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay, The Art of Manliness

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

Lovers in the Hands of a Patient God

S.G. Belknap, The Point Magazine

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

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

Iskander Rehman, War on the Rocks

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

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

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

-LNP

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

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

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

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

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