10/09/2024
Career advice on getting into the policy world in DC — from someone who is in policy, in DC!
“A friend of mine asked me to send advice she could pass on to a friend of hers who was trying to break into policy world, so i scribbled some polonius-ish babbling from my (fun, not-particularly-prominent-or-influential, clear-conscience, very LARPy, generally nontraditional) past 10 years in and around policy world, in DC and California and in various national networks and industries. I've edited lightly for clarity and added some additional tips. I don't think this advice necessarily applies to or is even practicable by young people who are seeking actual major influence-- I know some of them and I think they'd probably strongly disagree with many of these points-- but for people with different ambitions and who have absolutely no idea what they're doing or should want to do, I contend these make up a half-decent starting point.
These are gleaned from my own experience and especially failures, from observations of my colleagues and peers, from advice given me by grizzled men and women of policy world who lived through and worked in the grand historical moments of the past 50 years and worked for and walked with giants, and from long reflection on various of my heroes and their own failings. As with all advice, I don't expect any young people to follow it; but if any of these tidbits plant themselves in your brain, I hope you'll remember them some years down the line, when they make more sense than they possibly can now. And with all such tidbits, this is as much advice to myself as to you.
So for all my younger friends and contacts trying to break into policy world, whether we talk much or not, here's a few little tidbits, not that you asked for them:
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Some Professional and Personal Ethical Tips for Those Who Have No Idea What Policy World Is
-be willing to work very part-time for no money in multiple gigs (prove to your target employers that you’re a loyal and enterprising footsoldier) and sometimes this means having to do outside work that you'll find humiliating. That outside work will be more valuable to you once you succeed than you can possibly know; and that unpaid work for causes you believe in will amass relationships and favors over time that, had you insisted on labor-for-cash, you never would've received.
-socialize around in the part of policy world you want to work in, like genuinely try to be friends with the people you want to be working with in the coming decades; do not 'network' and do not expect any contact will lead to a job or an opportunity. far better to become a part of the community and be seen around it by folks in it routinely over time; opportunity will emerge from your reputation, not the other way around, and people in this world can smell crass transactional obsequieousness on your breath from many miles away.
-randomly email prominent people and ask them how they did what they did, in dc that kinda person lubbbs talking about themselves and will take many meetings
-if they become your mentors, or if people from your past become your mentors, check in with them at least once a year or so, even if you think you've outgrown their advice. don't forget the people who've helped you, and know they didn't help you for their own self-interest.
-go to free events in dc except networking events. Policy things at think tanks, book talks, speaker things. Never go to talk to the speakers; always go to meet the people in the audience who will always be way more useful and interesting.
-given a choice between going to an event where you are either central to it or of the community in it, vs going to an event where you are an outsider or a spectator, ALWAYS go to the event where you are central; it'll be a better use of your time, nine times out of ten. (Go to the other sorts of events as well, but know they're useful typically mostly by chance and for intelligence-gathering, not for the long-term diplomacy that builds things over time.)
-read everything, write constantly, talk to everybody
-figure out what skills you want to use and what roles you want to be— fundraising? Editing? Research? Constituent services? Program development? Advocacy? grassroots Organizing? event planning? — and get really good at them, understanding that what you think and believe won’t matter to anyone until they know you can be boringly, pragmatically useful to them. You're not going to just walk in and be some bigwig's national security advisor on the basis of your brilliance alone, which for some reason has to be consistently told to young people, especially young men. This was told me by a former senior official in a hawkish administration, which is lowkey hilarious.
-respect ideas for their own sake, political skill for its own sake, institutional maneuvering for its own sake, etc. etc. etc. All of these are NOT the same thing, and self-education in any one of these skills does NOT translate to self-education in any other of these skills. Any of these skillsets you've got to work from the very bottom the same way you learned your core skills; and if you puff yourself up like a self-made entrepreneur, start thinking you're smart because you're powerful or powerful because you're smart, the masters in the other skillsets will, again, smell it on your breath a mile away and assess you accordingly. humble yourself; professions don't have rules just to gatekeep you and protect their minions. institutions and their customs develop for a reason.
-get a couple of books of advice, or biography, or professional development, or political theory, to carry around and reference over the years. and for god's sake leave Aristotle and Aquinas at home, conservatives!!
-have a couple sacred spots, around town and out of town, to go to think alone, on different occasions. this is overdramatic, yeah. but a little drama and a healthy cycling of activity make the eventual mundanity of policy world a little more lively. and if you have a favorite bar or whatever you're already doing it.
-strive mightily to suppress your natural envy and resentment towards those who succeeded and rose faster than you, or who won the posts you craved. In the coming years you will discern you followed a more fitting path anyway; and those who succeed too young are more at risk of falling horrendously or otherwise selling out their spirits to the game, especially if they have been through no real dark nights of the soul.
-be ready to let go of your ambitions when they cease to serve you and it’s just you serving them. this is one of the hardest things to learn and sometimes they must be wrested from you to learn it. but sometimes the things you love and clutch begin to destroy you; and there is always a future somewhere further ahead, even if you can't possibly know you want it.
-have a life outside of policy world lol. but don't strive to be interesting for the sake of clout in policy world; that kind of person is obnoxious and will probably lose whatever campaign they're about to embark on. you will last sanely in DC longer if you do not actually live in (figuratively, sometimes literally) DC. Also, this basically means putting time into things in your life that you'd put time into if you were driven out of DC and had no future left. Put time into them now.
-remember that the people working for the other side aren’t your enemies, they’re your competitors with their own reasons for working where they do. You have lots to learn from them and you might even find them to be your friends here and there. There are many ways to be a patriot. Politics, the manipulation of mass emotions and hard interests for the construction of new social realities, is in large part about coalitions and intelligence gathering; and cutting off good intelligence, or potential alliances, is stupid. Friendship in politics is underrated.
-power is real and at the end of the day these issues are life and death, nobody would do what they do if it wasn’t. Take other people’s principles and loyalties seriously.
-figure out your top three issues and lines that you can’t betray and stick hard to them, compromise on or ignore everything else. This matters both for what you should work in and when you should leave.
-have substance and be earnest. lose those things, or lose the ability to get them back, and everything is lost.
-in this industry more than most, personal friendships and professional friendships do and should overlap. Be careful about that of course-- "don't date other conservatives" is a rule that my peers usually fail to follow and usually pay hard for-- but accept it and use it. You have no idea how helpful those complex friendships will be both professionally and personally. think about Pa Watson taking Harry Hopkins to St Matt's in 1939, in the darkest days of Hopkins' life; and their subsequent grandeur in the Second World War.
-at the end of the day you can be politically responsible or you can be personally honest. You can try to be both and get pretty far, but those two things do cancel each other out in the breach. You need to figure out if you’d rather be a prophet and analyst and thinker, or a statesman and activist and operator, primarily. And once you figure that out, build your ethics out accordingly, and temper your expectations about being the other one. A mentor told me to amass "f***-you money" so you can walk away when forced to perjure yourself on either of these. that can be difficult; but some equivalent is wise.
-most of all, never let the job and the climate sink your dreams. Washington and Los Angeles are the same spirit on different coasts-- company towns which exist only for the manipulation of power in its myriad forms, and the aspiring actor/actress and the aspiring policy hand follow the same path from nothingness to greatness, forced to make the same kinds of choices about their causes and their friends and their souls along the way. Policy world can be a soul sucking Hotel California enslaving you to the grind, and you might think giving yourself over to it completely, conscience be damned, is the responsible thing to do. It is not. You should do what you do because you really, genuinely believe in it; you should know that every part of policy world from lobbying to media to grassroots to Capitol Hill to the deep state agencies is a sacred public trust that needs idealists and consciences, and if you ever let your spirit die in exchange for a promotion or access or a little fiefdom or a nice glossmag profile, you will have betrayed your past and future self and failed the American people. You are more interesting than that.
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don't take any of this too seriously. have fun changing the world! and remember that world will always be more interesting than it seems...”
—Very insightful and full of gold nuggets of wisdom!
