Want to Strengthen Your Service?
Apply now for the American Conservatism and Governing Fellowship
Several years ago, I started a fellowship program for people who want to learn more about the intersection of conservatism and governing. We just opened the application for the 2025 cohort. If this sounds of interest, I do hope you apply and/or share this opportunity with someone who might.
More broadly, though, I’m thinking about the future of this work—that is, how to enable more public-service oriented professionals to read about and discuss governing principles and the work of inside-the-system leadership. We’ve considered expanding the fellowship, including offering a version of the program to organizations that would like to explore this topic as a team. So I welcome not only expressions of interest but also your thoughts about what might come next (use the comments below).
But for now, let me just briefly explain why I created and continue to run this fellowship. It’s really one and the same as my motivation for starting this weekly “Governing Right” column.
I think too little energy is dedicated to developing great right-of-center governing leaders. There are plenty of programs for people who want to think about politics, philosophy, and law. But I believe that commenting on governing is very different than governing and that litigating about governing is different than governing. I believe the practice of researching governing is different than governing and that the practices of polling, podcasting, and campaigning are different than governing.
So I started a fellowship—a yearlong experience built around two four-day seminars—to serve people committed to careers in and around public service. We aim to help them better understand how the principles of American conservatism can inform governing. The group reads a mountain of texts, and then we discuss how the lessons can be applied to their current and future work.
The program does not tell participants what to think or what positions to take on particular issues. In fact, we don’t have a political litmus test to get in, and we don’t require any loyalty oath on the way out. (Every cohort has some folks who are in the middle or on the left of the political spectrum.) Instead, we want to help fellows understand the history and principles of American conservatism and then decide for themselves what that can and should mean for public service today and tomorrow.
In other places, I’ve written about the need for well-informed, curious, prudent, right-of-center governing leaders. Elsewhere, I’ve also written about some of the material we read and discuss in the fellowship. But there’s something else I want to focus on briefly, especially as the election looms and our collective blood pressure rises: Governing is good for you.
I do NOT mean that having power over other people or wielding the authority of a mighty institution will make you happy.
I mean that dedicating yourself to service, having a public duty, and bearing responsibility on behalf of others makes you a better person, neighbor, and citizen. It focuses your attention on the things and people close by instead of causing you to obsess about distant abstractions. It makes you think about and solve problems in concrete terms not in concepts or quips. It forces you to develop the skills and dispositions needed to work with and for others.
I got my first inside-the-government job in early 1999, working as an aide for a state legislature. Since then I’ve worked for a variety of local, state, and federal bodies. I’ve found that something remarkable happens as people govern more and comment less—that is, as they do the work instead of talk about the work. I found the same remarkable thing happens as they work closer to home instead of for a faraway, behemoth institution. Generally, they become more content and more sober-minded and less tribal and less angry.
I think it’s important to tell people who want to be involved in public life that there’s a way to be more content and more sober-minded and less tribal and less angry: Find a way to serve, preferably close to the people and places you care about.
Participants in the program get to read and discuss the works of some of the great thinkers—Burke, Tocqueville, Hayek, Nisbet, and many, many more. They wrestle with what concepts like republicanism, virtue, tradition, federalism, civil society, and ordered liberty actually mean in practice. They discuss statutes, executive orders, rule-making, precedent, and advisory opinions. And they read speeches and essays by governing leaders who’ve had to turn all of this into action.
This fellowship is an opportunity to join a cohort of similarly curious, similarly public-spirited, and similarly highly successful mid-career professionals. According to past participants, it’s a rewarding experience that shapes the way they think about and then engage in the work of governing.
If this is up your alley, please do apply ASAP.
And if you have reactions, thoughts, ideas, or questions, please add them to the comments below.