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I took 10 weeks off from politics and have been much happier and healthier as a consequence. I can’t recommend a news vacation highly enough. But as I’m getting back to (un)reality, it’s clear that a lot has happened, a lot has been said — and so much of the discourse has the following qualities:
mean
asinine
ahistorical
factually incompetent
legally illiterate
hysterical
psychotic
shot through with partisan bias in both directions
So I’m sincerely happy to be back, but only as happy as a pig in shit [ [link removed] ].
My approach to the toxic allure of Washington now is, simply, awareness.
I know politics is crazy.
But she’s hot and I love her anyway.
I hope to use this space, again, to think out loud and make sense of the nonsense. It is a great privilege to be able write things that people read, react to, and then learn from the interaction. I’m so very grateful for it.
I think I will enjoy politics even more now as not a politican. In 2023-2024, I lived a dream at 31 I’ve prepared for since I was 16: run for federal office. It was fun, exciting, brutal, exhausting, and exhilarating. Most of all, it was illuminating — I saw a lot.
Among other things, I learned that politics is an art that requires:
talking as much as possible while saying only what is absolutely necessary (discretion);
hiding what is most important (secrecy);
emphasizing what is most irrelevant (distraction);
saying one thing while thinking another (dishonesty);
doing one thing while being another (hypocrisy).
Making peace with all of this changes how you how process the news. It is the warm blanket of low expectations.
That is not to denigrate the character of practicing politicians. As I’ll share soon, I think Max Weber [ [link removed] ] was right when he wrote — famously and controversially — that politicians must follow an ‘ethic of responsibility’ unique to their craft and that the constraints of everyday, private morality are mostly inapplicable to public life. That classic question, ‘can a good man be a good politician?’, has no answer, and is really not even worth asking, because there is no coherent conception of The Good that connects private and public conduct.
This is not amorality, but a call for a specifically political ethics. More on that later.
The campaign [ [link removed] ] gave me a chance to connect my personal experiences as an immigrant and my intellectual experiences in academia with the real, brass tacks business of hustling for money and votes. Mostly money. In that way, it forced me to grow up.
But being a politician wasn’t a fit. Maybe my feeling will change in the future: I don’t know. For now, the life of a retired politician suits me very well. I love politics. But rather than be a politician, I prefer to observe, analyze, and think about the world from my favorite perch, one I’ve enjoyed for 12 years:
United States citizen.
If you promise to read closely, I promise to write carefully. And I also hope to write well, be brief, and endeavor as much as possible to make every word sing.
—
This, again, is pai’s politics.
Aditya Pai is a 33-yr-old trial attorney [ [link removed] ], writer, and recent Democratic congressional candidate in Orange County, CA. He earned a B.A. Summa Cum Laude from Claremont McKenna College, where he served as student body president, and M.Phil. and J.D. degrees in history and law from Cambridge University and Harvard Law School, under the supervision of Nobel Laureate in Economics Amartya Sen. Pai is a naturalized American citizen from Bombay.

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