I’m Back! (Sort of)

Some brief personal reflections on working in politics and updates about the future of this newsletter.

It’s been a while. You probably forgot this newsletter existed. So please forgive this somewhat self-indulgent post about the last few years and my plans for this newsletter. If you just want to know what I plan on doing with it, skip to the end.

In September 2022, I took a job working for Pierre Poilievre as his Director of Communications. It was an unexpected turn of events. So, when I took the job, I paused any public writing and put this newsletter in private mode. The job of a political staffer is to advise and execute for their principal, not to make news themselves. I took this responsibility and role seriously, and thus ceased to say or write anything interesting under my own name.

And I’ll admit, I ended up missing my various intellectual and written pursuits far more than I anticipated. That was why I was always only planning on doing it for so long, because I wanted to get back to these sorts of things.

So, I left after the election was done, having worked on the campaign. It was the right time. I don’t know if I’ll ever do a job like it again, but it was one of the most enriching and intense things I’ve ever done. I think I’ll actually be a better writer and thinker having done it, because it’s hard to imagine what it’s like on the inside unless you’ve actually done one of these jobs.

Lots of armchair quarterbacking is done by people who have no real experience or understanding of the way decisions are made, the constraints you face in these sorts of jobs, and the realities of real world democratic politics. It’s also a grind, and you go through the trenches with people in these roles and, in the process, build relationships that last a lifetime. The job also took its toll on me personally, and I think I come out of it wiser but also quite a different person — in some ways good, and in some ways not so good.

I kept a journal, which I had never done before during the job. It was a place to write down things I wanted to remember, to try and think, and to collect thoughts that I knew I would want to come back to afterward. But it’s hard to describe how all-consuming a job like this was, and as time went on, it made it difficult for me to think clearly about the kinds of things I spent my time thinking about previously because all your intellectual energy and brain power are focused on the job.

As I was flipping through the journal the other day, I stumbled on an entry from when I was sitting with a glass (or three) of wine in a bar in Amsterdam, early in 2024, where I’d gone to try and escape and recharge for a week while dealing with some personal issues. The time and all-consuming nature of the job massively reduced the number of books I’ve been able to read, but I’ve spent the last few years reading the entire corpus of the existentialist novelist and philosopher Albert Camus, and I brought with me to Amsterdam his novel The Fall, which is set in the city. It’s a novel worth reading.

I recall having a little epiphany as I was writing this entry: because my brain had finally disengaged from work, I was thinking again about Camus’ concept of the “judge-penitent,” which has remained with me ever since. But it occurred to me that I was finally able to think about this again, and good thinking requires being able to declutter your brain from the miasma of distractions that consume our days, and if we’re not careful, consume our entire lives.

One insight from ancient wisdom is that philosophy requires leisure time (and why they considered philosophy a pursuit only possible for the privileged few). Good thinking requires lucidity and clarity, and life so often interferes with this. If there was one thing I hated about having done the job, it was that it made it very difficult to declutter my brain and think with lucidity, and I’m enjoying rediscovering this ability again. And I’m enjoying being able to get back to writing and doing public engagement under my own voice again.

Some links to things I’ve done since the election:

The Hub: The Conservatives lost, but the Poilievre coalition is only growing stronger

The Hub: An insider's view of Poilievre's campaign

National Post: King Charles III and the glorious weirdness of Canada's monarchy

National Post: Finding a million more Conservative votes: 'It’s about figuring out a way to speak to women'

Paul Wells: A Poilievre insider on the Conservative message

A Poilievre insider on the Conservative message

The Hub: Canada needs a change agent in charge. The same Liberal playbook won’t fix anything

Also, something that was published during the job, a chapter in a fantastic new book on George Grant that I highly recommend:

Still Lamenting? Canada, Grantian Conservatism in the Twenty-first Century, and the Paradoxes of Grant’s Conservatism in Reading George Grant in the 21st Century.

Which brings me to the subject of this newsletter. Since leaving my role after the election, I have been toying with what to do with it. Substack has opened up a new digital world of letters that I think is very positive. I like that there is a platform where I can write and distribute to people interested without any ‘gatekeepers,’ essays, or pieces about whatever I decide to write, and I think some of the more interesting public writing today takes place on Substack. I subscribe to a few such writers myself.

This newsletter, has a modest but fairly decent subscriber list somehow, and some of the more interesting pieces (I think) I’ve written are here. I don’t want to just erase it all and shut it down. But I also know that, with some of my new professional, academic, and writing commitments (not yet announced), I won’t have the time needed to regularly write standalone pieces exclusively for the newsletter.

In the next few months, I’ll be starting a new job and also returning to finish my PhD at McGill. I will still be writing regularly and plan on continuing with the sorts of things I was doing before. I think there is a desperate need for serious thinking and writing that makes the case for more intellectually grounded conservatism and political thinking more broadly. In whatever small way I can, I want to keep doing that.

So, here’s what I’ve decided to do with the newsletter:

• I will occasionally post essays here, specifically essays that are much more philosophical and abstract — the kinds of things where I still don’t think there are many particularly good places to publish in Canada. I have a few essays I need to find the time to write, and may end up publishing here in the coming months, or share links here if I publish elsewhere.

• Whenever I write something new (or appear on podcasts, etc.), I’ll try to send out a link to it here.

• Any academic papers or publications I have, I will also send links to (though likely paywalled).

• Existing posts and essays on here will remain up, fully public and not paywalled.

In short, nothing changes here other than that all the previous posts are now publicly available again. I remain very open to suggestions and thoughts from readers about anything I write and anything I’ve said here, so if you have thoughts, please do not hesitate to get in touch.