The Conservative Boot Camp Training Gen-Z for Swamp Warfare

One Friday afternoon in July, two dozen neatly dressed young people trickled into a narrow office on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a few blocks east of the U.S. Capitol. From the outside, the building looked the same as the other stately row houses that line Capitol Hill. But inside, there was the unmistakable ambiance of a frat living room. Along the far wall, a collection of half-empty liquor bottles sat atop a decorative mantelpiece, next to a glass shelf housing a stack of wooden cigar boxes and a Lego replica of the White House. Across the room, a free-standing keg cooler dispensed cold brew coffee into paper cups. The space was mostly devoid of furniture, save for the keg, a fridge, a folding table and a few plastic chairs.

Yet the room’s occupants, all interns from Republican congressional offices and conservative think tanks around D.C., weren’t there to party — or at least not exclusively to party. Instead, they took their seats in the rolling chairs, pulled notebooks and pencils out of their backpacks and readied themselves for the day’s seminar. On the agenda: How to take over the federal government, one junior staff position at a time.

Their host was American Moment, a small but scrappy organization that’s quietly reshaping the conservative establishment in Washington. Founded in 2021 with the backing of now-Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, the group is part of a broader movement that’s underway in Washington to recruit right-leaning staffers to help the next Republican president — whoever that may be — wage war on the “deep state” and entrench the populist political revolt that began with the Trump administration.

But unlike some of its more high-profile partners in that effort — which include conservative heavyweights like the Heritage Foundation and the Conservative Partnership Institute — American Moment isn’t focused on wooing would-be cabinet secretaries or senior White House advisers. With the 2024 election fast approaching, the group is on a mission to recruit and train the next generation of Republican elites by beginning at the lowest levels of the Washington hierarchy — the legislative assistants, press aides and junior staffers who will serve as the foot soldiers in the GOP’s war on the federal bureaucracy.

Saurabh Sharma, the group’s bespectacled president and co-founder, told me that his long-term goal is to nurture a new class of Beltway elites who are steeped in an explicitly reactionary worldview — and who have the institutional knowledge and political acumen to translate that philosophy into policy. “The loaf has to go in the oven and bake for 10 years so that the class of credentialed experts — the people who know the system and know where the levers of power are — are your people,” said Sharma, who, at 25 years old, serves as the notably youthful public face for American Moment. “The way you make senior staff is by making junior staff 10 years earlier.”

According to Sharma and his 26-year-old co-founder Nick Solheim the current crop of young people working in D.C. isn’t up to snuff. Sharma diplomatically described the cohort to me as “less than sufficient.” But in other settings, he and Solheim have been more candid in their evaluations: On a recent episode of the group’s podcast, Sharma attributed the underperformance of many Republican offices to the fact that members are surrounded by an army of “23-year-old shitheads” whose parents “sent them to D.C. to keep them as far away from the family business as possible.” On a different podcast, Solheim described the “common Hill staffer” as “single, unmarried, sad and going on drinking binges every night.” In their view, that was part of the reason that the Trump administration struggled to find young staffers who were both sufficiently qualified to work in the White House and politically aligned with Trump.

And this gathering at American Moment’s office — taking place amidst the liquor bottles and Legos — was an integral part of changing that.

The trainees were participating in American Moment’s three-month summer fellowship, which places aspiring politicos in internships on Capitol Hill or at allied nonprofits. That afternoon, the fellows were slated to attend a seminar about the crisis of masculinity and its effect on the opioid epidemic with the “pro-family” policy wonk Patrick Brown, followed by a training session on persuasive writing with a professional communications coach. During the fellowship, the group would learn other soft skills that, while not immediately relevant to taking over the administrative state, are certainly helpful in doing so: how to draft a policy memo, where to find jobs in the executive agencies, what to wear to job interviews (no tweed, no fedoras).

The fellowship is only one part of the American Moment’s growing network of training programs, all designed to equip up-and-coming staffers with the skills they need to build careers in D.C.’s Republican ecosystem. In the fall, spring and summer, the group runs a 12-week educational program on conservative policy priorities for interns and young Hill staffers. Throughout the year, the group hosts weekly policy seminars featuring prominent right-leaning intellectuals and political operatives like Russell Vought, the combative former director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration, and Elbridge Colby, the hardline China hawk.

Unlike some of the right-leaning organizations that have traditionally trained aspiring Republican elites — groups like the American Enterprise Institute or Cato — American Moment isn’t interested in teaching its trainees to look back fondly to the days of Reagan and Goldwater. Instead, it is militantly focused on pumping out true believers in the sort of populist-nationalist conservatism that came into fashion during the Trump years: protectionism on trade, hawkishness on China, skepticism of neoconservative foreign policy interventionism, restriction on immigration — of both the legal and illegal varieties — and a fierce dedication to fighting the culture war.

“They’re pushing the conservative movement away from a set of economic policies that I think have been bad for working-class people,” said Vance, who remains one of the group’s closest political allies and ideological lodestars, despite formally leaving its advisory board earlier this year. “They’re thinking seriously about how to staff Hill offices and the next administration with people who share the views of our electorate, as opposed to [people who] hate the electorate and what they represent.”

Now in its third year of existence, American Moment’s long game is showing some signs of success. As of this fall, Sharma and his co-founders, Nick Solheim and Jake Mercier, have compiled a database of approximately 1,500 young people who have been vetted by the group’s leaders and who are ready to step into junior or mid-level roles on Day 1 of the next Republican administration. (American Moment declined to make members of its professional network available for interviews, and several program alumni whom I reached out to did not respond to interview requests. Sharma said that the group advises its trainees not to talk to the media in order to avoid drawing attention away from their bosses, and they apparently take the schooling to heart.) On the Hill, American Moment has built close relationships with powerful conservatives including Vance, fellow Sens. Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley, and Reps. Jim Banks and Dan Bishop, whose offices have all accepted interns out of the group’s fellowship program. In April, the organization teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to help launch Project 2025, a $22-million dollar initiative to build a personnel database that could cover all levels of the next Republican administration.

Despite its obvious political affinity with Trump, Sharma told me that the organization is agnostic about who becomes the Republican presidential nominee in 2024. But it’s clear that American Moment’s success hinges in large part on Trump claiming a second term. Though even if Trump does return to the White House in 2025, it’s far from certain that American Moment’s cadre of young staffers will be able to overcome the conservative establishment’s enduring hostility toward some of the populist right’s positions, especially on foreign policy and economic regulation.

Still, the true scope of the group’s ambitions extends far beyond just staffing the next administration. “They are unique in what they do,” said Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a close political ally of American Moment. “The junior people that they’re investing in now … are going to be the mid-career and late-career senior officials of a presidential administration in the 2030s and 2040s. That hasn’t happened ever in the conservative movement.”

Like a lot of American Moment’s followers, I first encountered Sharma through the group’s podcast, “Moment of Truth,” which offers its listeners an unapologetically wonky tour of the political landscape of the populist right. Recent episodes include a 70-minute-long dive into antitrust law with the conservative lawyer Mark Meador and a 65-minute interview with former United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

On the podcast, Sharma radiates a kind of dorky charisma — the enthusiasm of someone who spends his free time talking about the internal politics of the White House Office of Performance and Personnel Management — and when I spoke with him via video call a few weeks after my visit to American Moment’s office, he did not disappoint. Dressed in his typical workday attire of wire-rimmed glasses, white dress shirt, blue tie and a matching pair of striped suspenders, Sharma walked me through his winding path to the right. It began, he told me, in the leadup to the 2016 election, when he caught the bug for politics while watching videos of Trump rallies and Bernie Sanders speeches from his dorm room at the University of Texas Austin, where he was studying biochemistry. He decided to get involved in Republican politics, but he was dismayed by the options available to young conservatives.

“If you were a young person on a college campus in the 2010s, there were a lot of incentives to engage in campus street theater, get on Fox News and then get chewed up and spit out by the conservative look-at-the-libs-on-college-campus machine,” Sharma told me. Instead, he decided to join the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), a youth group focused on state and local politics. At the group’s weekly meeting, he recalled, he would give a short presentation analyzing the ways that the turf wars within Trump’s White House were shaping the administration’s policy decisions — how the Steve Bannon loyalists were duking it out with Mike Pence’s people over immigration, or how Jared Kushner’s squabble with Pence was influencing China policy.

“It was all analysis that I was getting through news articles, but in retrospect, it aged pretty well,” said Sharma, who eventually became YCT’s chair in 2019. “Those were the factions in the early days.”

At a D.C. bar trivia night in late 2019, Sharma — fresh off an internship at the far-right media outlet The Daily Caller — met Solheim, who at the time was working for a digital marketing firm and moonlighting as an expert on arctic geopolitics. (“Expert” was a bit generous, Solheim later confessed to me. “I had read a bunch of books and watched a lot of YouTube videos.”) Earlier that evening at the same trivia, Solheim had been introduced to the woman who would become his wife, Evie, for the first time, but he ditched her to spend the rest of the night talking politics with Sharma instead.

“We shut the bar down together,” Solheim told me. (Evie eventually forgave him.)

A few months later, in April 2020, while the world was still reeling from the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Solheim woke up one morning to a text from Sharma in a group chat with Mercier, who Sharma had met through mutual friends in Washington. “I want to talk to you two tomorrow,” read the message timestamped 3:06 a.m. “Read this before the call.”

Sharma passed along a link to an article by J.D. Vance titled “End the Globalization Gravy Train,” in which Vance described the structural political challenges that conservative populists needed to overcome to entrench the “anti-globalist” revolt that had begun under Trump. Chief among these challenges, Vance argued, was the absence of a robust political infrastructure in D.C. that could support the work being done by populist Republicans on the Hill. If Trump-aligned Republicans wanted to challenge the GOP’s traditional positions on free trade, immigration and foreign policy, they couldn’t just rely on a handful of politicians to do so. They needed to build an entire counter-establishment that had both the resources and political capital to take on “Conservative, Inc.” — the sprawling network of right-of-center donors, think tanks and policy experts that quietly enforced the pre-Trump orthodoxy on the right.

On a Zoom call with Solheim and Mercier the next day, Sharma laid out his vision for a new organization: A hybrid training camp and clearing house for young staffers who agreed with Vance’s critique of the Republican establishment. Sharma knew that a handful of recent college graduates didn’t have the capital to compete with GOP donors or the policy chops to challenge think tanks, but they had access to another, potentially more valuable resource: impressionable young people who were itching to take on the conservative mainstream.

Solheim agreed to sign onto the new gig as chief operations officer, and he and Sharma reached out to policy activist Rachel Bovard, who was then serving as the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). Sharma, who had previously participated in a fellowship at CPI run by Bovard, suspected that the organization was the ideal partner for their new venture: Founded by former U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint in 2017 after his unceremonious ousting as president of the Heritage Foundation, CPI had positioned itself as the institutional home for the inside-the-beltway MAGA movement during the Trump years, serving both as a policy shop and a talent pipeline for Trump’s most committed loyalists. (In the years since, CPI has become a sort of administration-in-exile for former Trump staffers, home to the likes of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows.) When Sharma approached Bovard with their idea, she was immediately sold.

“I think we both had an awareness of a pipeline that was missing in D.C.,” said Bovard, who left CPI in 2022. “For CPI, that was staffing at the middle-level and senior Capitol Hill level, but Saurabh was really focused on [finding] the junior-level people who weren’t necessarily going to end up in D.C.”

Bovard helped Sharma and Solheim secure financial support from CPI, which ultimately donated $336,000 to American Moment in 2021 — close to half of the group’s total operating budget for its first year. (A representative from CPI did not respond to a request for comment.) In May 2020, Vance signed on to serve as a founding member of the group’s board of advisers, and in February 2021, the organization celebrated its launch with a swanky cocktail party at CPI’s headquarters, featuring smoked salmon canapés and a cocktail called the “New Right Old Fashioned.” Reps. Jim Banks, Ken Buck and Marjorie Taylor Greene were spotted amidst the crowd.

Following American Moment’s launch, its founders did some casual outreach on college campuses to find new recruits, but Sharma and Solheim quickly discovered that they didn’t really need to go looking for candidates. As word of the organization spread, a steady flow of interested young people reached out asking to be put on the list. Within a year, the database had grown from 50 names to 500 to close to 1,000. By the end of 2023, the group projects that it will have around 2,000 fully vetted staffers in its personnel database, the majority of whom will already have some experience working on Capitol Hill or at allied conservative organizations.

But even as the group’s database began to grow, it became clear to Sharma and Solheim that solving the staffing problems that plagued the Trump administration would require addressing a whole host of more diffuse problems that are endemic to the culture of young conservatives in Washington. First and foremost, Sharma told me, is the constant turnover of staffers on Capitol Hill — a challenge that afflicts offices on both sides of the aisle, but which poses a particular problem for Republicans, given the fact that fewer young people support the GOP to begin with. The high rates of turnover are driven in part by the perennially low wages on the Hill — though Sharma praised former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for raising the minimum annual staff salary to $45,000 in 2022 — but he said that the bigger problem for Republicans is that there aren’t meaningful social incentives in place to convince ambitious conservatives to stay on the Hill long enough to rise up through the professional ranks.

“Five-hundred roles are getting filled at the junior level every year, and hundreds of them are being afforded to people who have no intention of actually becoming mid-level staff because they’re going to be off to law school,” said Sharma, who scrapped his own plans to go to law school to found American Moment. “You naturally start scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

Sharma is the first to admit that American Moment’s solution to the turnover challenge — namely, its fellowship program — isn’t particularly innovative. But Bovard, who advises the group’s fellows, said that its programming is unique in producing Republican staffers who are ideologically aligned with the populist-nationalist line and genuinely knowledgeable about the ins and outs of the legislative process on Capitol Hill. “They are here to scrap,” Bovard said. “A lot of programs in D.C. [offer] training that people just sort of do as a box checking exercises, … but everything that Saurabh and Nick do for their program is designed around building up a set of intellectual and practical skills that [fellows] can use in Washington.”

“There’s a wide constellation of libertarian, neoconservative and Reagan conservative organizations that have a wide pool of internships and other sinecures and professional help to help advance their co-ideologues,” Sharma told me, alluding to legacy conservative organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute. “Similar infrastructure does not exist [on our part] of the right of center — except for the one that we’re building with our allies.”

Despite bucking the preferences of old-school conservative donors, American Moment hasn’t had much trouble raising money so far. Between 2021 and 2022, its budget grew from just over $700,000 to close to $1.2 million; this year, the group is projecting between $1.5 and $2 million in revenue. Sharma declined to go into detail about the group’s donors, but he told me that, in broad strokes, its benefactors fall into three general buckets: traditional right-leaning donors and legacy conservative foundations, ideologically motivated donors who are aligned the populist-nationalist cause and, finally, first-time donors out of Silicon Valley who have taken a shine to reactionary politics. When I asked Solheim if the group had received any money from Peter Thiel, the enigmatic conservative megadonor, he grinned and declined to comment.

Those funds have allowed the group to focus on recruiting from an atypical demographic in Washington: People who don’t have college degrees or prior experience in professional politics. When selecting fellows, Solheim told me, the group prioritizes candidates who are “immediately employable” — meaning applicants who have recently graduated from school or who are looking to change careers. This year’s cohort included an 18-year-old who had just finished high school and a 29-year-old who had left a high-paying job in finance to come work on the Hill. To support candidates from less affluent backgrounds, the group pays its fellows $3,000 a month — with 401(k) matching — and it allows fellows to cash out the remainder of their stipend as a lump sum if they land a job offer during their fellowship.

“What we’re trying to do is credential people who would otherwise not be able to get here,” said Solheim, who was forced to drop out of college because of financial struggles. “People who didn’t go to elite universities, people who don’t have rich parents.”

One of the most underappreciated challenges facing conservative populists in D.C., Sharma said, is a social one. “We call it Sodom on the Potomac,” Solheim told me, explaining his decision to leave D.C. during the pandemic and move to West Virginia, where he still lives with his wife and young daughter. “It has a way of destroying people’s lives.” As the Trump years made clear, it’s tricky enough to be a young conservative living, working and dating in one of the most liberal cities in America — but it’s even trickier when you’re fighting with members of your own party as well as the opposing one.

“If all the people you hang out with are neocons or arch-libertarians, then it becomes very hard to just be out at war with people all the time,” Sharma told me. “So [a lot of populist-leaning conservatives] don’t come in the first place, or when they do come, they wash out and they leave because it’s just so hostile.”

The group’s solution to this dilemma has been to try to build a social scene in D.C. where like-minded allies can schmooze and hang out with co-ideologues. Once a quarter, the group hosts a themed cocktail party for people in its professional network, complete with an open bar and cheeky party favors. (At its summer soiree, “Hot Havana Syndrome Summer,” the group handed out T-shirts featuring a cartoon drawing of Tucker Carlson wearing a tin-foil hat.) After every party, Sharma told me, he fields a handful of angry messages. “People get mad at me every quarter because I host a cocktail party — like ‘Oh, how dare you, you can’t host cocktail parties and be a real populist,'" said Sharma. “It’s the dumbest argument in the history of the world.”

Before the training sessions at American Moment’s headquarters, I met Solheim on the third floor of the Russell Senate Office Building, where about a hundred summer interns had gathered around circular tables in the ornate Kennedy Caucus Room for the latest installment of the group’s weekly lunchtime lecture series. The speaker that day was the iconoclastic economist Oren Cass, whose organization, American Compass, has become the nerve center of the “new conservative economics” premised on a rejection of free-market absolutism and an embrace of more projectionist economic policies.

Inside the caucus room, Cass guided the interns through an austere PowerPoint presentation, arguing that Republican-backed policies on free trade and government deregulation had hollowed out America’s industrial base, harmed American workers, undermined the “traditional family” and deepened America’s economic dependence on foreign adversaries like China. As the interns munched on boxed lunches from Chick-fil-A, Cass pulled up a slide featuring a picture of Friedrich Hayek, the godfather of supply-side economics, with the caption: “Hayek was WRONG.”

The interns, looking up from their chicken sandwiches, nodded along approvingly.

Free lunches aside, American Moment’s founders have used the group’s growing profile in Washington to position themselves as a prominent participant in the ongoing, intra-conservative debate about the future of the American right. Sharma and Solheim have used the group’s podcast and public events to promote the strain of nationalist-populist conservatism that has come to be associated with the “New Right” of the GOP, built around economic nationalism, skepticism of neoconservative foreign policy interventionism and a full-bore commitment to the culture war. Since early 2022, Sharma and Solheim have become especially outspoken critics of the U.S.’s ongoing involvement in the war in Ukraine, and in April of 2022, American Moment co-hosted a high-profile “emergency conference” of conservative intellectuals and Republican officeholders to urge the GOP avoid further entanglements in the war.

“They’ve added a lot to the depth of conservative intellectual life on Capitol Hill,” said Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation. “They’re going to be considered thought leaders of this movement for a long time.”

Yet despite their underlying agreement with the populist-nationalist agenda, Sharma and Solheim are skeptical of the label “New Right,” and in our conversations, they took pains to distance themselves from it. Sharma said the label is too limiting for their mission, getting in the way of the broader coalition building that American Moment thinks that unorthodox conservatives need if they ever hope to translate their principles into actual policy.

“It’s pretty clear that it is very hard to move national politics around a comprehensive ‘New Right’ agenda,” said Sharma. “The basic approach of ‘Well, we’re going to do our -ism and do politics that way’ falls apart in that situation. You’re basically signing yourself up to be a loud but ultimately defeated minority.”

Sharma also told me that he’s grown frustrated with the intellectualism of the discourse on the New Right, which is prone to elevating abstract philosophical debates over more practical policy questions. This is especially true, Sharma said, of the ongoing debate over conservatives’ proper relationship to the administrative state, which pits small-government libertarians seeking to limit the power of the federal bureaucracy against populists and social conservatives who want to wrest power away from liberal technocrats in order to use it to advance their own priorities.

“[It’s] like arguing over what color to paint my mansion on the moon,” Sharma told me. “Like, that’s great, and I’m sure there’s a very robust debate to be had about it, but there are a lot of steps in between that need to happen.”

One of those steps, said Sharma, will be for the next Republican president to re-institute some version of the Trump administration’s executive order on “Schedule F” employees, which removed job protections for over 50,000 federal workers who play a role in policymaking. But even reinstating Trump’s plan for Schedule F — which Joe Biden repealed upon taking office in 2021 — will only go so far unless conservatives can build a network of competent and committed civil servants to carry out subsequent reforms.

“If implemented, it will be a great piece of any reformist conservative agenda, but it is not the be-all-end-all of anything,” he told me. “It is one chapter in a very long book of things that need to be done.”

In the meantime, Sharma said, the group is growing its footprint in D.C., expanding its personnel database and rolling out new trainings for young conservatives. Sharma and Solheim plan to keep at it for the next decade at least — but, with any luck, not much longer than that.

“It’s an organization designed to solve a particular task,” said Sharma. “The day [we] solve it, we’ll go do something else.”

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By: Ian Ward
Title: The Conservative Boot Camp Training Gen-Z for Swamp Warfare
Sourced From: www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/03/american-moment-conservative-00124178
Published Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2023 04:00:00 EST

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