Luke Phillips

Luke Phillips

Luke Phillips is a policy researcher and political writer interested in economic policy, government reform, American political and intellectual history, federalism and administration, foreign policy and grand strategy, and political theory. He is based between Southern California and Washington D.C., and has been active in California state politics.

Phillips has been involved in policy research, commentary publishing, and politics for some time. He has done stints and projects at the Richard Nixon Foundation, the John Hay Initiative, Mike & Morley LLC, The American Interest magazine, the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, and various California Republican campaigns, including Duf Sundheim’s 2016 bid for the U.S. Senate and David Hadley’s brief 2018 campaign for Governor of California. He has been involved in various center-right blogging projects over the years, including The Progressive Republican League, The New Hamiltonian, and most recently, The Hamiltonian Republican. He keeps a personal blog on politics, history, ethics, and philosophy called “A Biased Perspective.” Outside of writing and politics, Phillips has marched in the University of Southern California’s Trojan Marching Band, sang in various Catholic choirs, and worked as an OA Trail Crew Foreman in the Philmont Scout Ranch Conservation Department. He is an avid hiker, a mediocre ukulelist, and an occasional poet.
Luke is currently finishing his Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. He commutes regularly to the Washington D.C. Metro Area, where he will be relocating in 2018. Phillips is an Eagle Scout, and a member of the Hertog Foundation Alumni and the USC Unruh Associates.

The REAL War to End All Wars

“The War to End All Wars” is a phrase describing the First World War, typically invoked when someone wants to mock the self-assured sense of destiny of European observers in 1914. After all, the unprecedented bloodshed of the First World ...

Who to Blame for Iraq III

As the United States teeters on the edge of its third invasion of Iraq in three decades, most recently sending 450 advisors to aid the Baghdad government, the situation in-country isn’t pretty. ISIS stalks the borderlands of the Levant and ...

Expanding the Role of Uncle Sam Part Four: The Excesses of the Great Society

In the last article, we covered how the here-and-now instinct in American politics institutionalized by Franklin Roosevelt combined with the utopian rationalism of the Woodrow Wilson presidency to create the partly beneficial and partly malevolent monster that was the New ...

Expanding the Role of Uncle Sam Part Three: The Excesses of the New Deal

In the last article, we covered how utopian dreaming and rationalistic faith in planning undermined the fundamentally conservative nature of the old Hamiltonian tradition and brought about a deformed and idealistic Progressivism. In this article, we will cover how that ...

Expanding the Role of Uncle Sam Part Two: The Excesses of Progressivism

In the last article in this series, we covered the strong-government/pro-business tradition of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. In this article, we shall see how the utopianism of later Progressivism subverted the fundamental conservatism of the original Hamiltonian ...

Expanding the Role of Uncle Sam Part One: The Old Hamiltonian Tradition

By listening to political debates, it would seem that in contemporary America, you have the antigovernment fiscal conservatives on one side and the pro-expansionary government progressives on the other. This sort of ideological polarization rightly drives many citizens to the ...

The Contemporary Geopolitics Series: Continental Dominance, Global Influence

This piece is the fourth and final part of Glimpse’s “Contemporary Geopolitics Series” “Nation-building” is an often-abused phrase that can be construed to mean a variety of things. Typically, it refers to the development of strong institutions to stabilize a developing ...

Toward a Continental System

The US has maintained complete dominance over the North American continent at least since the end of the 19th century and arguably since the year 1865. No foreign power has been able to establish a sustained foothold in North America ...

The Correspondents Weigh-In: The State of the Union

Nathaniel Haas President Obama’s address to the nation on Tuesday night was a timely and timeless reminder that not only is the state of the union strong, but so too is Obama’s resolve to leave a legacy and craft a ...

The Correspondents Weigh-In: The Thawing of US-Cuba Relations

Luke Phillips Finally. Decades after the Castro regime ceased being a true geopolitical threat, the US and Cuba will finally begin the long, slow process of formalizing their relationship, thawing it out of the Cold War-era stalemate and opening the ...