What We're For

Despite what most people who know me personally might think, I grew up as a small-c conservative.

Not religious, not stridently conservative socially, but certainly not in a Democratic household. My dad was what I can best describe as a Northeastern Republican. From what I know, he voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 but quickly became a Reagan guy in the ‘80s, and had voted Republican ever since. There was a certain suburban conservatism about him - personal responsibility, small government, and a stop-taxing-the-shit-out-of-me mindset that becomes more and more understandable as I get into my late 20s. From what I remember from my childhood, he was not a fan of Obama. My earliest memories of political chatter in my house came around 2007 when my dad had plenty of critiques and four-letter-words for him and the Clintons, as the 2008 election loomed and it became apparent that any Republican would have an uphill climb of winning the Presidency that year. What followed was eight years of jabs at then-President Obama as someone, in his view, deeply inexperienced and unqualified to sit in the Oval Office.

In 2016, he made vague notions about supporting Trump:

“Maybe we need an outsider for once.”

“I can’t vote for Hillary.”

“At least he says what’s on his mind.”

My dad was truly a bellwether for the national mood of the country that year, but he ended up staying home on election day. Mostly, I suspect, due to my mom giving him a lot of grief about who he planned to vote for.

In 2020, he voted for Joe Biden, and would frequently call Trump “the next Hitler.”

Whether that’s hyperbolic or not really depends on who you ask, I suppose. But my dad’s train of thought signaled something deeper: this idea that, while the Democratic Party was not his natural home, he was willing to cross party lines in opposition to someone who didn’t represent his idea of traditional Republicanism, his personal values, and who was potentially dangerous to democratic norms. My dad’s train of thought and political journey in the Trump era very much mirrored my own.

I admired and loved my dad, but that wasn’t the reason he and I ended up on the same page in 2020. To me, being a “good Republican” and a patriotic American, at least as I understood it in my childhood and into my early teen years, was about leaving people alone. It was about personal accountability for your successes and failures, a view of the world that was steadfast in its view of right and wrong and willing to fight for it, a disdain for the idea that anybody should be given advantages or disadvantages due to their background, and an emphasis on smart government - a government that was willing to spend money when it needed to, but wanted to make sure those programs actually worked. If you go on YouTube and watch Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2004 speech at the Republican National Convention, it’s probably a good distillation of the kind of mindset I’m talking about.

“If you work hard, and you play by the rules, this country is truly open to you. You can achieve anything.”

That was my dad’s political philosophy, but he was also someone who had a great deal of humility and belief in everybody’s right to retain their own views, and draw their own conclusions. A lot of people posture that they believe that, but my dad walked the walk on it. Though I heard plenty of rants on the failures of the Obama Administration and how the Democratic Party had sold out working people, I also distinctly remember an interaction where my dad had a word with my kindergarten teacher about his open support of George W. Bush in the classroom.

“Look, I like Bush. But this isn’t the place for it,” I remember him saying in a hushed tone that was probably not intended for me to hear.

Many years later, when I was a freshman in high school, he started to notice that I’d level my own criticisms of Obama. Though he probably agreed with every word that flew out of my mouth - they were really his words, after all - he also knew that I was thirteen and didn’t really have any business having an opinion on anything at that point. It also bothered him, I think, that I was just repeating things I’d heard rather than being thoughtful and coherent on my own terms.

“Stas, you don’t have to dislike Obama just because I do. Don’t say things just because I say them.” That sticks with me to this day.

Nonetheless I was completely surprised and devastated that Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election.

In those early-teen years I kept a finger on the pulse of the political world not because I was super interested in it, really, but because I grew up in an evenly-split New York Jewish family where people were not shy about their opinions. It was hard to avoid. But like many kids I just went along with what my parents thought about things. Gradually as things got into 2014 and 2015, I was one of those young kids who got a kick out of ‘feminist OWNED’ compilations and mocking how “woke” Buzzfeed was. Stephen Crowder, Jordan Peterson, and even a bit of Ben Shapiro were all characters that found their way onto my feed. (Although I have to admit, even over ten years later, I still maintain that Buzzfeed was pretty goofy.)

And then, in June 2015, a reality television star and ambiguously-successful businessman by the name of Donald Trump descended that escalator and changed the political world forever - though nobody knew it at the time.

“The guy from The Apprentice?” I remember asking my dad.

I loved that show as a kid, to be perfectly honest, especially Celebrity Apprentice. I distinctly remember watching it on this tiny, probably-20-inch TV with the big back that we still had up in my parents’ bedroom in the early 2000s. Clay Aiken was a character that I still remember fondly in a certain weird, nostalgic way. None of these people were meaningfully known to me - stars of the past who my parents must have known but who were introduced to me as a cast member of this television show. Nonetheless the bombastic personalities on the show - including Trump himself - were fun to watch. And Celebrity Apprentice was forever enshrined in my childhood memory Hall of Fame alongside Deadliest Catch, Top Chef, Pawn Stars, and Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.

That’s what I knew of Trump. A reality TV star and an entertaining character, but someone who wasn’t taken seriously, and certainly not as a candidate for any public office, though he had flirted with the idea many times in the past. People may not admit it now, but that’s how the vast majority of the country - including most Republicans - viewed him on the day of his announcement. “This guy’s a clown, nobody’s going to vote for him,” my dad said. He had been right about a lot of things in the time I knew him - I wish he had been right about that.

By the time the 2016 election was in full swing, I had just finished my junior year of high school. I still didn’t follow politics all that closely outside of the broad strokes of Trump’s rise and Hillary and Bernie sparring on the Democratic side. It was an exciting and interesting time, but it’s not like I was watching the debates or following each contest in the primary. There’s a lot of people who get really into the technical, analytical side of politics when they’re around sixteen or seventeen and then it becomes their whole thing going into college. They quickly become activists, policy wonks, students of history, and young professionals with ambitions for public office. I wasn’t one of those people, but I was observant enough to know that something had shifted in the party that I once considered my natural home. The party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower had now become something else. I didn’t know what yet. But I didn’t like what I saw.

To me, conservative values were about the dignity of family, of hard work, and government leaving people alone. To see the GOP embrace a man who had openly said pretty heinous things about women, clearly benefitted from a very wealthy family, and wanted to use the instruments of government to target people he just personally didn’t like - that wasn’t conservative. The party of traditional values and the sanctity of marriage openly embracing a guy who had openly admitted to assault and cheating on his wives - that wasn’t conservative. Embracing a guy who constantly and verifiably would lie and dig his heels in when things weren’t going his way, a guy who would resort to dishonesty about the integrity of our elections just because he lost one primary state to Ted Cruz - that wasn’t conservative. (People often forget that the ‘everything is rigged against me’ obsession started before 2020).

It wasn’t about policy for me, necessarily. I found myself in a fair bit of agreement with him on a couple of things - namely trade, stimulating economic growth through tax cuts, and weeding out corruption in Washington. On paper, all of this sounded great. But the President of the United States is supposed to represent more than that. It’s about character, and it’s about leadership. There was something sacred about the Oval Office to me back then - there still is, in spite of all the things I can now be cynical about in our politics. On that front, I couldn’t bring myself to seriously entertain supporting him. I couldn’t get past his rap sheet as a man, and as a human being. If you’re from New York, Trump being a bit of a scumbag isn’t exactly news to you. It’s something we’ve known for decades. I think even many of his supporters, today, would openly concede that he’s not exactly the gold standard of being a great person.

But I’m not here to relitigate 2016 or open up conversations that have been had a million times about Trump, his political brand, and the implications of it. That can (and should) be its own separate piece one day. Besides, anyone reading this probably has a strong opinion of him that they’re unlikely to change by now. I’m not a fan, and I’ll leave it at that.

So my natural response was to look to the left. First out of curiosity, and later genuine enthusiasm over the campaign of Bernie Sanders. Not because I agreed with him on every little detail, not because I didn’t still have my frustrations with progressive activists, but because he preached an earnest message that spoke to me. It didn’t hurt that I had a long-standing dislike for Hillary Clinton based on the house I grew up in. You can hardly blame a sixteen-year-old kid for being a fan of the only guy talking about making college more affordable. And, frankly, it didn’t hurt that he was an angry old Jewish guy with a great ability to communicate - my dad and Bernie had more in common than either of them would have wanted to admit.

There was also just a shift in me as someone who had come of age and was just old enough to start thinking critically about real-world issues. You don’t have a whole lot of perspective at that age, but you are able to reason out the beginnings of an ideology and values that you can clearly identify and defend. I wouldn’t say I was a particularly progressive guy at that point. But Bernie represented to me what he represented for a lot of people: someone genuine talking about real economic pain, and the only way out of having to choose between two pretty dogwater candidates in the general election.

There’s been a lot of speculation in the years since about what Sanders’ near-success in the 2016 primaries - and the Democratic establishment’s fierce rejection of him - can truly be attributed to. Whether there was a true hunger for further-left politics or if Clinton’s unpopularity, even among Democrats, was the larger factor. I became fascinated by the ideological split in the party - the moderate, mainstream Democrats that had come about in the ‘90s versus a new kind of progressive populism that Sanders represented. When Trump ultimately won the election, that divide within the party became even more difficult to ignore, with many blaming Clinton’s neglect of midwestern states’ concerns on labor and trade as a defining factor in that election. From my own vantage point - someone who was coming of age in a new era of politics where populism started to supersede traditional notions of right and left, and who saw the value in both Trump and Sanders’ trade policies, it was something I was uniquely hyper-aware of.

The next four years were a gradual shift for me. Trump’s victory was not one that I welcomed with open arms, yet I still didn’t feel at home with the most committed progressive activists that I soon found myself surrounded by in college. Nonetheless I couldn’t confidently call myself a Republican anymore. Over those four years - which lined up almost exactly in sync with Trump’s first term - I found myself much more sympathetic to liberal views. It was a natural shift, especially on social issues, where my sort-of-conservative upbringing had always leaned more libertarian anyway. Still, I wasn’t a hyper-political person. I wasn’t the kind of person who’d go to a protest or get involved on campus. I found those types of people incredibly grating, even if I had begun to agree with their dispositions. I was left-leaning but apolitical, not feeling wholly at home with either party but increasingly pro-Democrat by default.

In the 2018 midterms, I voted for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot.

I still didn’t understand that much about politics at the time, but I knew that the levers of power - an opportunity to halt or at least moderate the President’s agenda - ran through those elections and the opposition party regaining some level of influence in Washington. That effort succeeded, and Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives. Little did I know at the time that four years later, I’d be interning for the House while that Democratic majority was still in place.

I spent the next two years partying, drinking with my friends, and exploring the arts - I was big into acting and filmmaking at the time - with really not much of a care about politics beyond a general anti-Trump attitude. I still wasn’t someone who would follow debates or the news cycle all that closely. I wasn’t really that interested, and I had other things on my mind around what I was going to do with my life, a budding relationship with my now-fiancee, Lauren, and other experiences that shaped me in more meaningful, personal ways than my political beliefs.

And then, the world got introduced to a little-known virus.

I experienced what a lot of people experienced back then - way too much free time. For me that looked like finally opening up Pandora’s box and engaging with this thing that had been humming in the background my entire life. I spent a lot of time finally diving in: reading articles, watching videos, and listening to podcasts about history and politics. It was impossible not to get pulled in, in 2020. It was a tense time, but in a sort of bizarre, twisted way, it was an interesting time too. A time where a lot of people were reflecting on our history, our political culture, and the divisive rhetoric that had swept the country. That was always the angle I took it from: just a genuine interest in making systems work better, and the government accountable and responsive. It was never heavily ideological for me, though by that point I was a pretty committed, mainstream Democrat on the issues, if not one that was chronically mild-mannered and understanding of conservative schools of thought, even if I’d grown to fiercely disagree with their conclusions.

I was a staunch supporter of Joe Biden as the primaries dragged on, though I still had a soft spot for Sanders on a personal level. I was probably the exact kind of guy Biden’s campaign was aimed at - someone looking for a candidate who was safe, moderate, and electable against Donald Trump. My political identity was finally forming into something coherent: liberal, technocratic, but more interested in well-functioning institutions than pure ideology, while still concerned enough about the President’s rhetoric, personal morals, and his attitude towards the rule of law that I savored the idea of him becoming a one-term President.

As the election approached I spent the fall 2020 semester - my second-to-last in undergrad - exploring policy and politics further. I had an elective to spare that I used on a class called American Public Policies, which to most people would have been unbelievably dry but to me was scratching an itch that refused away. Policy and politics are two closely related but distinct things, and I got a real taste for my interest in the former during that class. I also got involved in my college’s Student Association Senate, where I got to serve a single term and spent that brief time supporting efforts to allocate a budget surplus to buy hygiene products for students that had been effectively trapped on campus due to restrictions related to the pandemic, and hand them out for free. It was a taste of public service - the best parts of it. The parts where you’re actually making a tangible difference and having interesting conversations about the world and your local communities.

November 3rd, 2020 finally came, and I cast my vote in my college’s student union building.

What followed was a suspenseful few days - nearly a week - of awaiting the final results. The delayed process had been predictable to anyone who followed politics closely, in which in-person votes were predicted to favor the President while mail-in ballots were predicted to heavily favor Joe Biden. This was what the political class had dubbed the “red mirage” weeks and months prior. This discrepancy between in-person and mail-in votes based on which party they favor always occurs during elections, but obviously had a more dramatic effect due to the pandemic, and increased use of that voting method.

I’ll say nothing else about this period of time besides this: President Trump has, on multiple occasions, used mail-in ballots himself. Take that as you will.

On November 7th the race was finally called. Fox News had the same basic math as every other news outlet reporting on the results. It was a Saturday. I remember because I was working as a cashier at a local grocery store at the time, and I was in the middle of shift. I found out from a guy coming down my lane with a beaming smile and a handful of Biden 2020 stickers, which he enthusiastically slapped down onto my conveyor belt.

The mood in my very-progressive college town was obvious: celebration. I probably got really drunk that night - not that that was a rare occurrence at that time in my life. I was relieved that the Trump era appeared to be a blip - a footnote in history - in the party I once felt at home in. The party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower. It felt like we were ready to turn the page, and that my grandkids would one day know the name Donald Trump as America’s first true celebrity President, and not much more. I think that was especially the feeling after January 6th - even from a lot of Republican leaders. It’s almost tragically funny to think about how wrong we were.

It’s hard to remember now, but the Biden Presidency started off fairly promising - to Democrats, at the very least. He came into office with around a 56% approval rating, which, while a testament to how divisive politics had become, and not particularly impressive, was about as good as you could get in this era and a few points ahead of Trump’s approval at any point of his time in office.

For my part, I finished up my Bachelor’s degree and got my first taste of real political work - an internship with the reelection campaign of my local County Executive, George Latimer.

George was exactly my kind of guy. A pragmatic type. Someone who was identifiably liberal but was focused on effective governance to solve everyday issues rather than ideological purity - a steady hand. He was the brand of Democrat that I think I most appreciated at the time. It was through that job that I got a taste for all of the typical day-to-day of a campaign - voter outreach, creating materials, and canvassing. His opponent was a staunch Trump loyalist who had been evasive on some of the issues that were clearly liabilities for Republicans at the time - including Trump’s rejection of the results of the previous year’s election. Not exactly the kind of background you’d want running in a fairly blue county.

George was a shoe-in. He probably could have sat at home for the entire election season and still won by double digits. So we turned our efforts away from persuasion and towards turnout - although I still made a point of having amicable conversations with independents and Republicans while we were out canvassing. I felt I was uniquely suited to do that. There were a lot of county legislators, allies of George, who were in tight races. It didn’t do him any good to get reelected as county executive and then have a hostile legislature block his agenda. So we knew that if we got registered Democrats to the polls, the down-ballot effect would carry a few key people over the finish line with him. The coattail effect, as politicos call it. I only spent two months on that campaign, but I got a crash course on politics in practice. I got to meet Andrew Yang through that campaign - who at the time had just finished running for Mayor of New York City and who I got to chat with at a book signing in Manhattan. Yang’s focus on election reform - ranked choice voting and other ideas - had always appealed to me. I finally had some semblance of direction in life. I was in the rooms that important people were in.

I shook Andrew Yang’s hand on a Saturday. That Monday, my dad passed away.

He had spent the entire summer and into the fall in the hospital with respiratory issues and an uneven recovery that kept myself, my mom, and the rest of our family in suspense for months. It had never looked good, but we were filled with the kind of hope that in hindsight seems delusional but at the time is a testament to your love of a family member that you can’t imagine losing.

The significance of my dad dying is hard to overstate. I’m not quite convinced that I’ve truly mentally processed it nearly five years later. I remember him in a lot of ways. His philosophy on politics, tolerance for views other than his own, and how it shaped my own dispositions is a big one. There’s a quiet significance to it. A persistent guiding voice that, even as I became a career Democrat in my early 20s, instilled in me an inherent understanding of the other side of America’s political spectrum and, more importantly, a disposition that despite my own views drifting to the left, a fierce commitment to the fundamental right we all have to have and express our own values. And a certain libertarian tint to my own worldview.

George won the election in a landslide about a month later. The campaign, at that point, was probably something of an escape for me. George had won 62% of the vote and our plan of having the legislators hang onto his coattails had worked. On election night I went down to a victory party in White Plains, New York, to mingle with some of the movers and shakers in local politics, and finally got my long-awaited photo op with George.

A cold November night celebrating George’s victory very quickly turned into an even colder January - and the start of a new kind of commitment to public life.

I spent the first half of 2022 going back to school for a Master’s in Public Administration and working a fundraising job for local Democrats. I enjoyed my classes. There was something satisfying about how practical and real all of it was, compared to my more bohemian background. Budgeting, Public Management, History and Government - all of it felt like a real education in becoming a capable administrator. Someone who knew the system and knew how to make it work. Someone who was getting into public service because he believed in the power of smart government and using its instruments to better people’s lives.

The job, I was less enthused about.

I had gotten the job thanks to a County Legislator who I had become acquainted with and, I think, had taken a liking to me as a young upstart political operator. The job was with the consulting firm that helped him raise money for his campaigns. It was a grunt work job - entering donations in the database, running checks to the bank, and staffing call time.

Nothing against that County Legislator - I actually like him quite a bit. He went out of his way to get a proclamation printed honoring my dad before the legislature, right after he passed, which is something that I deeply appreciate even today. He didn’t have to do that, and I still feel that it wasn’t some kind of cynical political move - he did it because he wanted to do something genuinely nice. That’s pretty classy.

But the goodness of that legislator did not translate to that fundraising job. If the Latimer campaign was a crash course on the cool, exciting parts of campaign work - meeting voters where they are, talking about important local issues, and making a case to materially improve people’s lives - this fundraising job was a cynical exposure to the dark underbelly of political work: the backroom deals, the not-illegal-but-morally-dubious quid-pro-quos, and the unbelievable amount of time that elected officials spend talking to donors rather than the people who actually vote for them. It didn’t help that it was a disastrous operation - I would regularly get paid late or less than I was supposed to, there was a revolving door of associates that would work there for two weeks and then quit, and the principal of the firm was just generally a grating and unpleasant person. All of that amounted to a dramatic disillusionment with political work that eroded the starry-eyed idealism that I had spent two years building.

Maybe that was a bit unfair - maybe this was just a crappy job and I should have conceptualized it that way. But it was the first crack in the armor, and that crack has gotten bigger and bigger since, despite some genuinely cool experiences and moments that I remain proud of in my tenure.

I immediately started feeling a little jumpy. I had, for a long time, considered becoming a teacher. And on my worst days, the thought “you should’ve just been a teacher” would crash into every corner of my brain as I did more and more soul-crushing work for candidates that I increasingly didn’t believe in. Not because I didn’t agree with them on policy - I broadly did - but because I had seen behind the curtain about how backhanded the whole process was. It made it incredibly hard to look at those folks the same way as I would have even a year prior. Nonetheless, I stayed the course. I couldn’t tell you why.

I ended up in Washington DC that fall interning for a Congressman. It was part of the master’s program - a semester in DC doing a full-time internship for six credits along with two traditional courses for another six credits. Maybe that was part of why I stayed - when I had gotten an opportunity to intern on capitol hill I felt it was too prestigious an opportunity to pass up. It was less about any kind of clear sense of career alignment and more about this general feeling that, well, only an idiot would pass that up. If I’m to look back on my experiences with kinder eyes - there is a bit of salt to that. There are people trying to go into politics who dream of interning on Capitol Hill. It almost felt insulting to balk at it and drop out of the program. Teaching will always be there, I reasoned.

So away I went. A small apartment in DC near Eastern Market, a 20 minute walk to the Capitol, and easy access to the city’s surprisingly-good metro system. Those first few weeks were great. I felt like I had some sense of direction, even if it wasn’t fully crystallized yet. I felt accomplished - a hill internship is the kind of thing you can brag about at family parties and have nobody question your path or your upcoming career success. It bought me some time, in a way. More time to avoid being more intentional about what exactly I wanted to be. And the cracks found their way back in pretty fast.

I remember distinctly having a conversation with the Legislative Director of the office - a very accomplished and polished young woman who had graduated from the same MPA program I was in. She must’ve only been in her mid or late 20s at the time, and had already risen in the ranks in convincing fashion. I had a tremendous amount of respect for her - not because I necessarily wanted to follow her exact path, but because I could tell she was someone who got into that work for real, well-intentioned reasons, and more importantly, had put a lot of work into cultivating a skill set that made her incredibly formidable in the fast-moving world of politics. She had clearly earned her spot, and it’s hard not to appreciate someone like that. She’s still active in DC today, in a different role, and probably an even more prominent key player in federal politics than she was before.

We had a conversation about six weeks into the internship that threw a wrench into my brief era-of-good-feelings around the internship. It was a very real, open conversation about a potential future on the hill. The kind of thing I hadn’t earnestly given any thought. The office was very invested in us as interns, very supportive of our career aspirations. She had met with all of us to review our resumes and chat about what comes next, and one thing you learn on the hill is that it’s a lot easier to stay there once you get your foot in the door, than it is to get back in later. If you wanted to work on the hill - my sense, at least - was that you better try your best to parlay that internship into a staff assistant or legislative aide job, otherwise you’ll have to start at the bottom floor again.

So we chatted about all of this: what does my future look like? Would I be interested in applying for X thing that this other Congressperson has open? Would you want to stay and do communications work with us? Where do you see your career going?

There was some moment in that conversation where I was faced with a common yet brutal truth about my early 20s: I didn’t know. All the prestige and outward validation in the world about how I was “successful” on paper wasn’t going to solve the fundamental truth that I had no fucking idea what I was doing or where I was going. Almost four years later, I recognize how ordinary of a problem that is, especially in your early 20s. Being 23 and not knowing what you’re doing puts you in an exclusive club called “everybody,” but that didn’t stop it from feeling apocalyptic at the time.

Now, I recognize a more fundamental truth - I did know, to some level. I knew that I didn’t want to make a career out of engaging in politics the way I had been. Not as a foot soldier for just any Congressman or in high-paced, purposefully-dishonest campaign work. Not in the context of jobs where success looked like making bad-faith arguments to win the next election rather than honest conversations on policy. I wasn’t proud to be working within a system like that. I was tying myself to an identity that I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, defend. I was halfway up a ladder that I had never truly wanted to start climbing.

From that conversation onward, I really struggled. I knew that behind the gravitas of a prestigious internship, I didn’t really want to be there. I knew that, although the staff and leadership in the office were actually fantastic and intelligent people who I liked working with, this wasn’t my path. That was the real tell - that the experience itself was interesting and at times even fun, but that I still didn’t want to pursue it further. I loved the people and believed in service, but more and more I saw a system that was slow, performative, incentive-driven, and often more concerned with messaging than governing. I had spent more time writing tweets about how our political opponents in Congress were morally bankrupt, bad people than anything of substance on the issues. I was having the same three conversations about hot-button issues over and over and over. The same talking points, the same predictable interest groups, and the same “gotcha” moments that grew old very, very quickly. It confirmed all of the most negative impressions I had gotten of the political world while I was in my fundraising job.

Career anxiety aside, I was also just not in a great place. The emotional weight of my dad passing had, I think, finally caught up to me. I had spent most of the year throwing myself into my work - going to grad school and working at the same time had become heavy. I was having a hard time being away from Lauren. I had friends who were still in undergrad seemingly having the time of their lives, and I had been missing how happy and simple things seemed during that time. Things just felt wrong. I was in a bit of a dark place to a level that I don’t think people really understood, even those closest to me. Some people picked up on it. Including my cousin who made it a point to come visit for a couple of days after a few-too-many drunk calls in a row. That was a habit I had gotten during that semester. A word to the wise: alcohol has a tendency to make things easier in the short-term and much, much worse in the long term, mentally. That’s a lesson I’m proud to say I’ve long since learned.

I spent the first half of 2022 going back to school for a Master’s in Public Administration and working a fundraising job for local Democrats. I enjoyed my classes. There was something satisfying about how practical and real all of it was, compared to my more bohemian background. Budgeting, Public Management, History and Government - all of it felt like a real education in becoming a capable administrator. Someone who knew the system and knew how to make it work. Someone who was getting into public service because he believed in the power of smart government and using its instruments to better people’s lives.

The job, I was less enthused about.

I had gotten the job thanks to a County Legislator who I had become acquainted with and, I think, had taken a liking to me as a young upstart political operator. The job was with the consulting firm that helped him raise money for his campaigns. It was a grunt work job - entering donations in the database, running checks to the bank, and staffing call time.

Nothing against that County Legislator - I actually like him quite a bit. He went out of his way to get a proclamation printed honoring my dad before the legislature, right after he passed, which is something that I deeply appreciate even today. He didn’t have to do that, and I still feel that it wasn’t some kind of cynical political move - he did it because he wanted to do something genuinely nice. That’s pretty classy.

But the goodness of that legislator did not translate to that fundraising job. If the Latimer campaign was a crash course on the cool, exciting parts of campaign work - meeting voters where they are, talking about important local issues, and making a case to materially improve people’s lives - this fundraising job was a cynical exposure to the dark underbelly of political work: the backroom deals, the not-illegal-but-morally-dubious quid-pro-quos, and the unbelievable amount of time that elected officials spend talking to donors rather than the people who actually vote for them. It didn’t help that it was a disastrous operation - I would regularly get paid late or less than I was supposed to, there was a revolving door of associates that would work there for two weeks and then quit, and the principal of the firm was just generally a grating and unpleasant person. All of that amounted to a dramatic disillusionment with political work that eroded the starry-eyed idealism that I had spent two years building.

Maybe that was a bit unfair - maybe this was just a crappy job and I should have conceptualized it that way. But it was the first crack in the armor, and that crack has gotten bigger and bigger since, despite some genuinely cool experiences and moments that I remain proud of in my tenure.

I immediately started feeling a little jumpy. I had, for a long time, considered becoming a teacher. And on my worst days, the thought “you should’ve just been a teacher” would crash into every corner of my brain as I did more and more soul-crushing work for candidates that I increasingly didn’t believe in. Not because I didn’t agree with them on policy - I broadly did - but because I had seen behind the curtain about how backhanded the whole process was. It made it incredibly hard to look at those folks the same way as I would have even a year prior. Nonetheless, I stayed the course. I couldn’t tell you why.

I ended up in Washington DC that fall interning for a Congressman. It was part of the master’s program - a semester in DC doing a full-time internship for six credits along with two traditional courses for another six credits. Maybe that was part of why I stayed - when I had gotten an opportunity to intern on capitol hill I felt it was too prestigious an opportunity to pass up. It was less about any kind of clear sense of career alignment and more about this general feeling that, well, only an idiot would pass that up. If I’m to look back on my experiences with kinder eyes - there is a bit of salt to that. There are people trying to go into politics who dream of interning on Capitol Hill. It almost felt insulting to balk at it and drop out of the program. Teaching will always be there, I reasoned.

So away I went. A small apartment in DC near Eastern Market, a 20 minute walk to the Capitol, and easy access to the city’s surprisingly-good metro system. Those first few weeks were great. I felt like I had some sense of direction, even if it wasn’t fully crystallized yet. I felt accomplished - a hill internship is the kind of thing you can brag about at family parties and have nobody question your path or your upcoming career success. It bought me some time, in a way. More time to avoid being more intentional about what exactly I wanted to be. And the cracks found their way back in pretty fast.

I remember distinctly having a conversation with the Legislative Director of the office - a very accomplished and polished young woman who had graduated from the same MPA program I was in. She must’ve only been in her mid or late 20s at the time, and had already risen in the ranks in convincing fashion. I had a tremendous amount of respect for her - not because I necessarily wanted to follow her exact path, but because I could tell she was someone who got into that work for real, well-intentioned reasons, and more importantly, had put a lot of work into cultivating a skill set that made her incredibly formidable in the fast-moving world of politics. She had clearly earned her spot, and it’s hard not to appreciate someone like that. She’s still active in DC today, in a different role, and probably an even more prominent key player in federal politics than she was before.

We had a conversation about six weeks into the internship that threw a wrench into my brief era-of-good-feelings around the internship. It was a very real, open conversation about a potential future on the hill. The kind of thing I hadn’t earnestly given any thought. The office was very invested in us as interns, very supportive of our career aspirations. She had met with all of us to review our resumes and chat about what comes next, and one thing you learn on the hill is that it’s a lot easier to stay there once you get your foot in the door, than it is to get back in later. If you wanted to work on the hill - my sense, at least - was that you better try your best to parlay that internship into a staff assistant or legislative aide job, otherwise you’ll have to start at the bottom floor again.

So we chatted about all of this: what does my future look like? Would I be interested in applying for X thing that this other Congressperson has open? Would you want to stay and do communications work with us? Where do you see your career going?

There was some moment in that conversation where I was faced with a common yet brutal truth about my early 20s: I didn’t know. All the prestige and outward validation in the world about how I was “successful” on paper wasn’t going to solve the fundamental truth that I had no fucking idea what I was doing or where I was going. Almost four years later, I recognize how ordinary of a problem that is, especially in your early 20s. Being 23 and not knowing what you’re doing puts you in an exclusive club called “everybody,” but that didn’t stop it from feeling apocalyptic at the time.

Now, I recognize a more fundamental truth - I did know, to some level. I knew that I didn’t want to make a career out of engaging in politics the way I had been. Not as a foot soldier for just any Congressman or in high-paced, purposefully-dishonest campaign work. Not in the context of jobs where success looked like making bad-faith arguments to win the next election rather than honest conversations on policy. I wasn’t proud to be working within a system like that. I was tying myself to an identity that I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, defend. I was halfway up a ladder that I had never truly wanted to start climbing.

From that conversation onward, I really struggled. I knew that behind the gravitas of a prestigious internship, I didn’t really want to be there. I knew that, although the staff and leadership in the office were actually fantastic and intelligent people who I liked working with, this wasn’t my path. That was the real tell - that the experience itself was interesting and at times even fun, but that I still didn’t want to pursue it further. I loved the people and believed in service, but more and more I saw a system that was slow, performative, incentive-driven, and often more concerned with messaging than governing. I had spent more time writing tweets about how our political opponents in Congress were morally bankrupt, bad people than anything of substance on the issues. I was having the same three conversations about hot-button issues over and over and over. The same talking points, the same predictable interest groups, and the same “gotcha” moments that grew old very, very quickly. It confirmed all of the most negative impressions I had gotten of the political world while I was in my fundraising job.

Career anxiety aside, I was also just not in a great place. The emotional weight of my dad passing had, I think, finally caught up to me. I had spent most of the year throwing myself into my work - going to grad school and working at the same time had become heavy. I was having a hard time being away from Lauren. I had friends who were still in undergrad seemingly having the time of their lives, and I had been missing how happy and simple things seemed during that time. Things just felt wrong. I was in a bit of a dark place to a level that I don’t think people really understood, even those closest to me. Some people picked up on it. Including my cousin who made it a point to come visit for a couple of days after a few-too-many drunk calls in a row. That was a habit I had gotten during that semester. A word to the wise: alcohol has a tendency to make things easier in the short-term and much, much worse in the long term, mentally. That’s a lesson I’m proud to say I’ve long since learned.

Ultimately, I was more fortunate than most in the mid-2025 job market. I had spent only six weeks fully unemployed before I was offered a job as Campaign Manager for a different Congressional candidate. Not in Palm Springs, but in an area close enough that it made sense for me to join her efforts. It was a lifesaver. Though her rhetoric and dispositions weren’t totally aligned with my more technocratic, reserved style, she had been born, raised in, and worked in the district her entire life, and seemed earnest and well-intentioned in her pursuit of a seat in the federal government. She had a theory of politics that met the moment - offering something different in an era where many people were completely disillusioned by the same-old-same-old. And for me, Donald Trump’s return to power had re-ignited a certain immediate, very-personal irritation and connection I had to the political world.

Not long after I took a secondary job with the consulting firm that was supporting my candidate, and got to work with a number of other candidates running for federal, state, and local office in Southern California. My cynicism about the political process was ever-present, but I was nonetheless fascinated by seeing each of their distinct styles as they campaigned. It was encouraging to see candidates like my own running for reasons that genuinely transcended some kind of power grab. Those people do exist. I have a certain theory on it, by this point, wherein a lot of folks enter the system, enter public life, with decent-enough intentions, only to be corrupted by the very-obvious incentives around fundraising, image, and keeping one's job that would easily corrupt a lot of people.

The experience was mixed. On the one hand I was able to engage with politics with a level of autonomy I never had before. I wasn’t the candidate myself, but I had one hand on the wheel, and to her credit, she gave me a lot of deference based on my prior experience and proven political instincts. She was a very progressive candidate running in a deeply red district - and I knew the math wasn’t on our side. Yet at the same time, I had seen through working with a variety of other people - and interacting with politicians in other contexts through my nonprofit job - that it’s very difficult to run as something you’re not. People have pretty good bullshit detectors (for the most part) - even our current President, for all you can say about him, is certainly authentic in terms of his own personality. Which I think is what he owes much of his success to. My suggestion to my candidate was not necessarily to rush to the center, but instead to talk about her beliefs and policies in a way that did not indict voters on the other side of the aisle but rather promote why they’d be materially beneficial to them. Very often it’s not about what you say - it’s how you say it.

More importantly I advised her to localize the election. The moment the campaign became about divisive national issues, the election would be over for her. Local infrastructure projects, the impacts of Congress’ budget cuts on already-struggling rural hospitals, and consensus-driven solutions to curb gun violence that included incorporating the mental health aspect of the issue - these were not only good policies and ones that I believed in personally, but that I knew could actually land - or at least not sink her - in a district that had voted for Donald Trump by nearly 20 points less than a year prior.

I had, and still have, a good relationship with that candidate. She took my advice on some things and not on others - which is a reasonable-enough return rate to have as a Campaign Manager. Though I enjoyed many aspects of the work - particularly engaging with thoughtful policy ideas, having engaging conversations, and helping her wrangle endorsements - the campaign world remained inherently unstable and distasteful from my view. I very quickly got reminded why, at a high level, I had always struggled to feel good about that kind of work. There was an ever-present aspect of it that relied on deeply disingenuous arguments and finger-pointing that I just found to be unproductive - necessary, maybe, to win an election, but not the kind of thing I wanted to engage in.

I had also gotten an even deeper look at the inner workings of party politics than I ever had before during that campaign: the gamemanship involved in getting party insiders to support your candidate, the pressure to constantly prove your ideological credentials, the outsized influence of petty personal grievances, and the attack-dog mentality that so often seemed to define political engagement. I had gotten into politics to explore good ideas and solve problems. More and more, it felt like everyone else was looking for an enemy. Sometimes that enemy was the other party. Sometimes it was someone on their own side who, for often-trivial reasons, was perceived as insufficiently committed to the cause.

By the end of the year I left the campaign for more stable employment back in New York - as a full-time organizer for a housing advocacy organization working to tackle the state’s affordability crisis. It’s not as if that job isn’t political - it certainly is - but it’s got a certain thoughtful, policy-oriented flare about it that I appreciate.

I also registered as an Independent.

Not because I’m trying to parade around as an “enlightened centrist” or act as if I don't still have a preference between the United States’ two major parties. I certainly do. It’s more so about needing some distance. It’s not unlike how I felt after my time in DC. Just like back then, I don’t really know what my long-term relationship with politics will look like from here. What I do know is that I can’t engage with it the way I once did. I tried that - twice.

I’ve spent many years defining myself mostly by what I was against - be it Trump, corruption, extremism, or unnecessary political dysfunction. Eventually you have to confront what it is you’re fighting for - what’s your vision, really? Building your identity entirely around opposition for its own sake leaves you strangely directionless.

At some point you have to decide what you’re actually for.

Not just politically, but professionally and personally too. What kind of work feels meaningful? What kinds of people do you want around you? What tradeoffs are you willing to make? What values still matter once the performance and branding and tribalism get stripped away? I’m still figuring that out. I think most people are, even when they pretend otherwise.

For me, the path forward probably includes another bout of distance from the political world. More importantly, it means being intentional about what I'm moving toward instead of what I'm moving away from. I don't have all the answers. But for the first time in a long time, I think I'm asking the right questions.