Dispatch from Washington

Hanging Up The Keyboard

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

 

I wrote this incomplete draft way back in 2019 but never finished or published it in the mêlée of law school. Posting the fragments now for completeness.

It may not come as much of a surprise given that over a month has passed since I last published anything here, but the time has come for me to wind down Semi-Partisan Politics.

I won’t say terminate, because I know myself too well – on those increasingly rare occasions where frustration with the state of the world and personal free time intersect, I will doubtless still post the odd article. But the frequency is likely to be markedly reduced going forward.

The primary reason is that writing a semi-regular political blog is simply not compatible with the demands of American law school. I want to become the best lawyer I can be so that I can actually shape some of the national and global conversations which I’ve written about in a more meaningful way – taking part rather than commenting to a small (though highly valued) group of readers. Time spent writing a 2000-word polemic that is read by maybe 2000 people (I estimate that my word:reader ratio is about 1:1) is time that could be better spent immersing myself in the law and actually building the foundation on which something approximating knowledge or expertise might one day rest.

I have been posting my political rants here for nearly seven years. I started eight years ago after my return from Chicago, primarily as an escape and a pressure release valve. I was very green to begin, very much a cookie-cutter Tory boy. Some of my very early stuff – where I tried to pass myself off in tone as a pound shop Andrew Sullivan – makes me cringe to the extent that I won’t look at anything on the blog date stamped earlier than 2015, and precious little of it even after that.

However, I soon developed and improved, my disappointment with Cameron’s Continuity Blairism leading me to argue for a more muscular, conviction based conservatism. I completed my transition from ardent euro federalist as an 18-year-old student to being a firm brexiteer with a strong focus on the democratic aspect, though it took several more years and the invaluable tutelage and guidance of Pete and Dr. Richard North – and the Leave Alliance, with whom I was proud to campaign during the 2016 referendum and which I still support – to help me graduate from boilerplate mutterings about tearing down regulations and igniting a free trade revolution towards (hopefully) more nuanced commentary about the technocratic and geopolitical complexities.

Participating in the online political conversation has become toxic, and increasingly pointless. When an SNP MP sicced his band of rabid Twitter followers on me the day that my wife and I were taking our last walk through Hampstead Heath before leaving Britain for America, I found myself not enjoying the gentle beauty of the surroundings but furiously typing responses on my smartphone and feeling beaten down by the rolling barrage of abuse. Political Twitter is a vicious, angry little bubble where the politico-media class flaunt themselves and everyone else shouts at one another without bothering to listen. It encourages performative declarations and mob justice, not useful dialogue.

 

 

Reflect on writing career.

 

Got quite well advanced into researching a book on the future of British conservatism, but the more I came to see of it through attending various Westminster events and talking to people, the less I cared about whether conservatism in its current form – let alone the present Tory Party – survives or not. In fact, I think the time is overdue for some creative disruption and a political realignment along the new societal faultlines and global challenges which transcend the current party system and which we all know to exist yet spend far too little time discussing, let alone adapting our behavior and institutions to meet these challenges.

 

Some good ppl in Westminster – Chloe SW

 

Blog had some success – linked in NR and TNR, Guardian and others. Some rather less successful tv appearances. Certain series picked up some good traction and therefore delivered the temptation to go “all in” on these areas – notably my “tales from the safe space” series. But there are only so many posts you can write taking outrage at the draconian crackdown on freedom of thought and expression in western universities (and increasingly the corporate and cultural world) before you have said everything there is to say and shouted all the warnings there are to warn. Or at least I think so – others seem content to hang their entire careers on theschtick..

 

But again, these are but symptoms of far larger tectonic forces moving beneath our society. I’ll read Andrew Sullivan or Rod Dreher and occasionally have a useful side thought or counterpoint to make, but I’m not on their intellectual level and to pull myself up to standard so that I could fully participate in the deeper debate is not compatible with studying for a 3 year US law degree.

 

Also disheartening to see the mediocrity which gets to cavort before the Westminster tv cameras and write for the prestige media and those who are banished for failing to flatter and change their positions in order to curry favor. Pete has written acidly about many of these individuals, with some justification, and it always brings a smile to my face to watch them console one another on Twitter after Pete North has hurt their feewings with a precision-guided, often wincingly profane, expertise bomb.

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Society needs a goal, a unifying purpose if it is to hang together in the face of untrammeled multiculturalism and divisive identity politics. Getting the technocracy right matters. Achieving Brexit in a form that does not equal national self-immolation matters. But it is all for nothing if at the end of it all we cannot find a common purpose to unite us beyond the fact that we all pay taxes and expect government services in return.

I’ve written before about an Apollo program equivalent for education, a national commitment to stop shooting for the middle and aim to have the best schools and the most highly educated young people, equipped for an economy and job market which will require lifelong learning. But it doesn’t have to be that. It could be curing a disease. Going to Mars. Building a huge pyramid with a statue of Boris Johnson atop the pinnacle. At this point it doesn’t really matter. There just needs to be something more to unite the people than

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Dispatch From Washington

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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Nothing much to report here

I’m writing this from the desk in my study, where right now just four blocks away in the White House a president whose daily conduct raises legitimate questions about his fitness to govern is raging in helpless impotence. Why? Because some faux-patriot within his dumpster fire of an administration decided to hint to the New York Times about just how bad things have become – supposedly out of civic duty – yet lacked the courage to give the accusation real weight by putting his name to the anonymous OpEd. All this is just today’s drama; no doubt tomorrow there will be some new unprecedented scandal to bump this story down the news agenda.

These are interesting times to be living in Washington, D.C. I must admit that I have not yet gotten over the novelty of watching the bottom of the Washington monument appear in the background of a live TV broadcast, then looking out the window of my study and seeing the top of the same structure mere minutes away. In British terms, our new home is within close earshot of Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster. This means a constant stream of noisy motorcades carrying second-tier officials down the next road, and regular glimpses of Marine One as it ferries President Trump back and forth as he escapes the city to play golf.

It is strange to be living in the modern equivalent of Ancient Rome at the height of its power (or perhaps shortly into its terminal decline), the seat of government of what is effectively the most powerful empire in the world. Many of the buildings here are built in conscious acknowledgement of the torch that was passed from Ancient Greece to Rome, and so on through Britain to the New World. I find myself walking amid the classical architecture in this planned city and wondering what future historians or tourists will say as they pick over the ruins or buried past of this metropolis, many centuries in the future.

Highlights have to include the Lincoln Memorial. Abraham Lincoln has been a particular interest and inspiration of mine since I was a teenager, and since then I have devoured enough books on the 16th American president to comfortably fill a bookshelf. Standing inside that immense marble memorial and reading the inscription above Lincoln’s statue – “In this temple as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever” – is a moving experience. Even when full of screaming children and selfie-happy tourists, there is a sense of power and dignity in that place. While there, it is also hard not to dwell on just how far we have fallen from that ideal in recent years.

Law school has started well. You must forgive me for the lack of blog posts over the last month; road-tripping half way across the country from Texas, establishing a new home in DC and going through law school induction took up all of my spare time, and even now I have thirty pages of Criminal Law reading which I should be tending to this evening. However, for my own mental health and diversion if nothing else, the blog will continue, albeit maybe somewhat more sporadically than before.

Being back on a university campus as someone with a record of speaking out forcefully against the excesses of identity politics has been interesting – I can confirm that all of the warnings I have been giving over the past few years were prescient and on point. There have been no stand-out incidents yet which lead me to believe that my institution is faring worse than any other, but it only takes one supposedly “controversial” speaker invite or student society activity to create havoc and endless protests, so we shall see how things develop. Halloween will likely be a good indicator, given recent controversies elsewhere and the growing conviction that “cultural appropriation” is a harmful, negative phenomenon. Today was the law student organization fair, and reflecting my semipartisan nature I added my email to the law school chapters of both the ACLU and the Federalist Society. I agree with neither organization entirely, but look forward to some interesting debates.

Adjusting to student life has been challenging, but frequently fun. Though I am a graduate student I am still on the generic university email list, so have been receiving helpful daily missives about how to do my laundry and accomplish other tasks now commonly known as “adulting”. On the flip side, there is nothing like living in close proximity to a bunch of eighteen-year-old undergraduates to make you feel your age, and there has been more than one occasion when I look from all these young whippersnappers with their lives ahead of them to myself and wonder momentarily what it is that I am doing, making this mid-life career course correction. Fortunately these moments never last long – I came here with a purpose, albeit a somewhat inchoate one, and many of my classmates have impressive and inspiring backgrounds.

Intellectually I feel like I am holding my own thus far, though the annoying habit of American law schools whereby the first real feedback only arrives in the form of all-or-nothing final exams in December means that I won’t really know precisely where I stand for awhile. Mostly it is just a relief to have made a start, after having done so much preparation and read so many conflicting pieces of advice about how to succeed at law school. There is a satisfaction when the reasoning behind some obscure rule or legal concept finally clicks into place – it is good to be learning again. Growing, hopefully.

We have some pretty eminent academics who teach here, people whom I knew and respected before the thought of going to law school even occurred to me. One Supreme Court justice teaches a constitutional law seminar here, and another is coming to speak next week. Mostly I am awed by a sense of vast new possibility – the law is not really one career, it is a gateway to a myriad of different sub-vocations, almost as different from one another as it is possible to be. And while I can pre-emptively rule out certain options – it is pretty safe to say that I will not be becoming a small-town lawyer or one of those personal injury kings with their face on a billboard above the freeway – the possibilities remain varied.

Anyhow, this will likely be the longest thing that I write for some time outside of law school. Necessity dictates that I will at last have to do what I have often threatened to do on this blog but never quite succeeded at, namely trying to adopt a “little and often” approach to commenting and reacting on stories of interest. At this point you all know what I think about the big issues anyway, and I can always link back to those longer-form pieces when necessary. Time constraints now mean that if I want to say anything at all – and keep the blog ticking over – I had better find a way to condense my opinions into a paragraph or two. It will be good practice; Lord knows that much of what I have written the past six years would have benefitted enormously from an editor’s red pen anyway, if not the shredder.

Finally, while it may be somewhat cheeky to mention this when I haven’t published anything new for a month, I am now technically an impoverished student once again and without a regular income, so any donations to the instant ramen noodle fund are most gratefully received.

 

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