I Thought I’d Love Being A Congressman. I Prefer Owning a Bookshop.

Steve Israel on how divisions on Capitol Hill made him long for a place where he could bring people together.

Ispent 16 years as a member of the House of Representatives. After being elected in 2000, I made my way to Capitol Hill like a modern-day version of Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”: wide-eyed at the grandeur of it all. I found myself in rooms with the newsmakers I’d been watching for years on “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation.”

The business models of social media and cable TV encouraged politicians to prize performance over policy. I didn’t fit in.

On the day I was sworn in, I believed this new chapter would be the most important of my life.

I was wrong. Nowadays, I own and operate a small, independent bookshop on Long Island. I’ve gone from unloading stemwinder speeches on the House floor to unloading boxes in the dank storage room of our shop. I used to work ballrooms to persuade donors to support House Democrats locked in tight races across the country; now I work the floor of Theodore’s Books to convince a reluctant customer to buy a paperback.

I first began thinking of leaving Congress after the 2010 midterms, when a wave of Tea Party candidates hit Capitol Hill. It wasn’t the ideology of these new members that bothered me. It was the belief many of them held that compromise wasn’t a virtue but a vice. I remember asking one Tea Party member to join a bipartisan initiative called the Center Aisle Caucus, aimed at bridging differences. He looked at me as if I had two heads. “Listen, I didn’t come here to put things together, I came here to blow things up.”

I soon noticed that moderate Republicans who respected Congress’s traditions and norms had become an endangered species. They were either defeated in primaries or by Democrats in general elections. And because politics is a kind of physics (a force on one side creates an equal but opposite force on the other), moderate Democrats soon found themselves replaced by the left. As the business models of social media and cable television came to favor warring opinions over actual news, politicians began prizing performance over policy. I didn’t fit in. As I grappled with these changes, I found myself seeking out local bookstores everywhere I went. They were my sanctuaries. No sound bites or donor calls. I could browse my favorite sections, alone with countless authors, characters and ideas. Those therapeutic moments reminded me that ideas are the ultimate power in a democracy—that books are a form of power in themselves.

I’d achieved everything I thought I wanted: not just a seat in Congress but near the head of House leadership; visits to the Oval Office; that shiny congressional lapel pin that attracts reverence anywhere in Washington. Yet, all I could think about was owning my own bookshop.

If I couldn’t convince conservative and liberal House members to talk to each other anymore, maybe I could convince liberal and conservative readers to engage with each other through literature. I became almost obsessed with the idea that the best way to resist the relentless drive toward short, shallow bursts of information was to encourage the slow, deliberate experience of reading books.

I left Congress in 2017. When the pandemic eased, I found a vacant storefront in my hometown of Oyster Bay, not far from where Theodore Roosevelt once lived. I remember being asked, “What do you know about owning a bookstore?” I answered, “What did I know about serving in Congress?”

Nancy Pelosi is famous for saying, “No one ever gives you power, you must take it.” She’s right. But power isn’t confined to the mahogany dais of a committee room.

These days, I’ve found power in bringing together people of all kinds in my bookstore. Democracy requires critical inquiry, which I now enable not through cable-news hits but by putting a copy of “The Federalist Papers” in the hands of a precocious middle-schooler or recommending Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” to a neighbor trying to come to grips with the chaos of our political era.

Being called Congressman remains the highest honor of my life. I still have deep admiration for members on both sides of the aisle. But the title “bookshop owner” has unexpectedly brought a greater sense of purpose. The trappings of power are hard to beat, but they never gave me as much pleasure as putting a book in someone’s hands and saying, “Read this.” Steve Israel represented New York in Congress from 2001 to 2017 and was chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015. He now owns Theodore’s Books in Oyster Bay, Long Island.

“About Face” is a column about how someone changed their mind.

Former Rep. Steve Israel at his bookstore, above, and on Capitol Hill, left.