Reflections on the last 900 years, this last week, elections and the future

Early this week I was in Menlo Park, “The Capital of Venture Capital.” It’s a place so lovely, leafy and wealthy, so obviously preserved in amber by anti-growth regulation, that it might have been created by Walt Disney. It’s America’s real California Adventure. Coming down the elevator of my jewel-box hotel in the city’s Tiffany downtown, I met a venture capitalist couple who once lived in MP. They recently moved just over the state line into Nevada to escape high California taxes associated with their business model. 

Would they consider moving back, I asked? Not a chance – not until Californians “stop electing Bozos and return to sanity,” he said, “until the whole thing melts down” or (he added for emphasis, in case I missed his point) “just burns to the ground.”

His wife said (quietly) precisely what was on my mind: “Yikes.” 

I offered that little good comes out of things entirely burning down. The Bolsheviks rose from the ashes of the eight-month-old Russian Provisional Government they burned to the ground. Fifteen or so years later, the Nazis emerged from the chaos of the Weimar Republic, after (more pointedly) actually burning down their parliament building and blaming it on a Dutch communist. 

In fact, about the only good thing to emerge from a revolution that I could think of is America. And come to think of it, even that’s imperiled – though not for the reasons so many people seem to think. 

“If you can’t fight,” I said, “it’s better to support those who can.” I handed her my business card. And then the doors hushed open and we were admitted into the sun-dappled lobby with fine blond woodwork, stone floors and the kind of music that (if you could smell and see it) indicates aloe and bamboo rainforests. 

I was in Menlo Park for a California Policy Center and National Review Institute-hosted conversation with my friend, the National Review writer Charlie Cooke. He is famously (as he says) “British by birth, American by choice,” and his mellifluous accent only adds gravity to his genius (about which more another time). 

Our audience of 45 or so naturally wanted to discuss the upcoming election and about Russia, China and Iran. Charlie fielded those questions with the acrobatic grace of Dodgers second baseman Tommy Edman. I played Phil Donahue, moving through the audience with my microphone. 

I wasn’t silent because I have no opinions. I figure we should back Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel with pride and overwhelming violence; the Dodgers (I believed that day) were likely to take the World Series in six games; and, like Charlie, I believe the presidential contest is a toss-up and that, whatever comes, America will survive November 5, January 20 and well beyond.

But when I finally spoke, it was to offer the perspective of a lifelong journalist and the president of the California Policy Center. Most of the political news we consume, I said, reflects the old newsroom adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” News is too often crafted to amplify for a carefully curated audience only what the campaigns locked in a dead heat want us to believe: that failing to vote for their candidate will usher in the Apocalypse.   

I work with the California Policy Center because I believe nothing of the sort. While my colleagues and I believe that elections are very important – if you live in California, you know this – we believe that local elections are more important than federal, and that all elections are less important than the work we do every day that isn’t called “Election Day.” The fate of America is never determined by a single election, and no election is determined by the last 90 days of a campaign when our politics become more like Circus Vargas. That’s why insiders (and even onlookers) call this “the silly season.”

The fate of America is written in what we Americans do every day, in the places nearest us.

CPC focuses on the institutions closest to us – not just in Washington, D.C. or even Sacramento but those in our counties, cities, schools, neighborhoods and fundamentally our families. Indeed, the family is the bedrock of civilization; everything else is (or at least ought to be) backup for the family. 

This “subsidiarity” is the idea that most social matters should, as the Dominicans put it, “be handled on the most intimate terms as are possible,” at the most basic level, that is, if possible by oneself, and if not that maybe along with one other person or a few persons. Beginning some 900 years ago – search your Bingo card for “Thomas Aquinas” –– and then spreading more broadly through Protestant religions via Calvinism, subsidiarity flowered in England and achieved its finest expression in America’s founding documents, but only after it had become so deeply embedded in American culture and society. 

In Menlo Park, I suggested that the most important thing that any of us in the room could do was to attend to the problems we face as Californians. And that’s why I’ll ask you to keep reading and to think through this proposition with me:

Unlike any other state in the republic, a weakened California undermines America, and a weakened America means the lights go out all over the world. 

A BRIEF, VERY RECENT HISTORY OF CALIFORNIANS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Never doubt for a moment that we Californians are the linchpin in the struggle between light and dark. We elect the people who, beginning in local office, rise to places of national power and influence. Long before she was a presidential nominee, just out of law school, Kamala Harris was hired as an assistant deputy district attorney in Alameda County. Four years later, in 1994, her boyfriend Willie Brown, using his position as speaker of the state Assembly, appointed Harris to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and then to the California Medical Assistance Commission. She subsequently moved across the Bay to take a job in the San Francisco DA’s office, then joined the staff of the San Francisco city attorney and used that as a springboard into her first election campaign for public office, a run for the top job in the district attorney’s office. She won that race – and won again in 2007. Over that time, government unions contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to her campaigns.

Others have documented her wavering politics thereafter – how she won the race for state Attorney General in 2010, won a seat representing California in the U.S. Senate, ran for president in the 2020 primary, bailed out and then joined the Biden ticket. Our purpose here is to show that, whether you love or loathe her, she is now “presidential candidate Kamala Harris” because of California’s unique political culture. 

Harris has taken madcap California ideas with her to the summit. The tough-on-crime DA has moved through more costume changes than Taylor Swift, with stops for “defund the police” and “tough prosecutor.” Before she became a presidential candidate, in the beforetimes when she was still vice president, she worked in the White House alongside countless other Californians – including former California AG Xavier Becerra (Health and Human Services); Los Angeles-born, Berkeley and Loyola grad Alejandro Mayorkas (Homeland Security); UC Berkeley prof and San Francisco Fed official (now Treasury Secretary) Janet Yellen; and Cindy Marten, formerly a San Diego teachers union president, now federal deputy Secretary of Education. 

FOR EXAMPLE: THE STORY OF JULIE SU

Among White House Californians, you’ll also find California’s former labor secretary, now acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Julie Su. The key word in that title is “acting”: though President Biden appointed her to the top labor post on February 28, 2023, the Senate has refused to approve the nomination. Busting centuries of constitutional norms, Biden has stubbornly refused to back down. So, as is its right, has the U.S. Senate. As of this day, Su has remained in the “acting” role for 612 days, making her the nation’s longest-serving cabinet secretary ever. Harris calls Su her “California sister” and has indicated that, if she wins on November 5, Su will stay in that role.

Like Harris, Su is illustrative of the danger of ignoring state and local politics – and the role of government unions in both – in favor of the blood and drama of global and national politics. While working as a lawyer for a radical Los Angeles nonprofit, Su became famous in progressive circles for her prosecution of a civil case against sweatshop owners in the LA County city of El Monte; Su did not prosecute the criminal case against those bastards, but she did manage to help their victims – men and women who knowingly entered the U.S. illegally – remain in California. Reasonable people can disagree on that point. But her real damage was in crafting a dangerous new legal theory that holds manufacturers responsible for crimes committed by their vendors. With California judge-made law like that, you might begin to sympathize with the Big Lebowski, the man who famously asked, “I just want to understand this, sir: Every time a rug is micturated upon in this fair city, I have to compensate the person?”

Su’s magic act caught the attention of California’s powerful labor unions, especially the Service Employees International Union, SEIU. They saw in Su a powerful weapon in their battle against all California business owners. They boosted her into key positions in Jerry Brown’s administration (where she ran the state Division of Labor Standards Enforcement) and then became Gavin Newsom’s Secretary of Labor. There, she returned the favor to her union backers. She implemented AB 5 (the anti-freelancer law that has eviscerated independent contractors in the state) and campaigned for the unionization of workplaces throughout the state. 

Just as significantly, Su also ignored years of warnings that California’s unemployment insurance program was vulnerable to hackers. When Covid hit and Newsom shut down the state economy, millions of suddenly idled Californians applied for unemployment – alongside prisoners, criminal gangs and petty fraudsters. They fleeced the state for as much as $50 billion. The big winners have been hackers allied with drug cartels and the governments of Russia, China, and North Korea; through her misfeasance, Su funded America’s enemies. 

But there was more. The staggering loss included a $20 billion loan from U.S. taxpayers meant to backstop unemployment insurance fund shortfalls during Newsom’s catastrophic lockdown. When Newsom failed to pay back that federal loan in 2022, the IRS, following federal law, determined that California employers are on the hook for repayment. Business owners (and therefore their customers) will pay escalating penalties on employee federal withholding taxes. A state financial auditor told me that California’s economy is now so chaotic that his department can no longer say when the punishing taxes will end.

Much of this was clear when President Biden airlifted Su out of Sacramento like the last chopper flight out of Saigon. He ultimately dropped her into the top spot at the U.S. Department of Labor. There, first things being first, Su worked with Newsom officials to hide the federal loan loss. Su moved on quickly to implement AB 5 nationwide, restricting freelancers in every corner of the nation. As I write, she is now imposing California’s government-union blueprint on firefighting nationwide and is on the campaign trail as Kamala Harris’s ambassador to union leaders. Su now faces two congressional investigations, thanks in part to the investigative work of the California Policy Center.

Three points: First, California is the tail that wags the dog of national politics. Second, that fact portends bad things for America, and what’s bad for America is bad for the world. And third, because of our generous donors, the California Policy Center is fighting to raise the alarm.

CPC IS HERE, THERE, ALMOST EVERYWHERE

Congress’s investigation into Julie Su is just one of CPC’s successes. The fact is that my colleagues are everywhere you’d want us to be, helping Californians just like you plug in for change. In 2024, we:

• Reduced the money that government union leaders use to finance the campaigns of politicians destroying California. This year, we celebrated the departure of the 400,000th union member from a union. That means California’s government unions have now lost $360 million in annual income since 2018’s Supreme Court decision in Janus v AFSCME. I challenge you to find anyone, anywhere in California doing more to limit the influence of government employees on our government institutions.
• Communicated the message of freedom. In hundreds of publications, podcasts, radio interviews and on TV, CPC staff illuminated government union corruption and the solutions to the problems that bedevil California.
• Represented you in government. This year, we have testified before the U.S. Congress, the state Assembly and Senate, and in dozens of city councils and school districts.
• Produced a wildly popular podcast. Some of you may follow our work on the Radio Free California, the podcast I cohost with CPC board member David Bahnsen.
• Launched our interactive Local Fiscal Health Dashboard. Highlighting the fiscal health of every county, city, and school district across California, the dashboard pairs nicely with our newly developed Municipal Finance Triage Guide – and with red or white wine. If you want to know how well your local officials manage your tax dollars, start here.
• Tracked union money. The left likes to claim that top-hatted and spats-wearing business elites control California politics through hidden “dark money” contributions, our own Andrew Davenport turned the tables: he revealed that government unions launder millions through Democratic Party central committees in small, rural counties in order to hide their grip on political power.
• Trained local education reformers. In March, we welcomed 150 leaders of parent groups to our third Annual Parent Union Summit in Sacramento. Those leaders represent 28 California counties (and even groups in Oregon, Nevada, and Iowa). Our Parent Union has become the model for organizations nationwide.
• Trained hundreds of local officials on First Principles. Through our California Local Elected Officials project, CPC helps local officials understand the constitutional principles behind good government, offers policy support, and sharing of best practices. Hundreds of local elected officials have attended our virtual and in-person trainings.
• Offered solutions to California’s disastrous water and energy policies. Tired of high gasoline prices and water shortages? Senior Fellow Edward Ring’s “What’s Current” newsletter launched this year, with an audience of 2,500 water and energy stakeholders, reporters and policymakers statewide. It’s regularly featured in influential policy newsletters that reach an additional 30,000 readers focused on water and environmental policy.

WHAT YOU MIGHT LEARN FROM MY OWN STRANGE TRIP, PART ONE

I was a communist – an actual member of the Communist Party USA – and when I stopped being a communist, I was a self-declared progressive and then a very liberal Democrat. I was all those things until I realized that no ideology based on sprawling government regulations crafted and deployed by enlightened social engineers – that was combined with outright theft and the redistribution of private property alongside restrictions on faith or the family – none of that will eliminate poverty, homelessness, mental illness, laziness or stupidity. It will not build anything worth preserving nor educate anyone in much that is worth remembering except as a counter-factual. That ideology leads only to ruin – to Soviet gulags, Nazi death camps, and contemporary Chinese “re-education” centers housing upwards of 3 million Uyghurs. 

I saw this because good people who were self-described conservatives and libertarians helped me see it. I saw it because, as a political activist, I watched how government unions of cops, firefighters, teachers and others bankrolled the campaigns of political candidates who, once in office, returned the favor by granting those same unions unsupportable pay, benefits and actual power over government. That legal corruption is the source of high taxes, poor government and all opposition to real reform. I saw this because, as editor of OC Weekly, an avowedly lefty newspaper in Orange County, my own investigative reporters brought the evidence to my desk every day for 12 years, unaware that they were schooling me in the limitations of government. 

But more importantly, I saw through the ideology because I was raised right — by very good people who stayed married despite the fact that one was a Democrat and the other a Republican. 

Because of all these people – people like you – I slowly saw (as if through a new pair of glasses) the whole stupid but undeniably attractive ideology. In place of deploying the blunt tools of government to shape human character, I saw that free people would choose more wisely their own faith, spouses, vocations, friends, purchases, hobbies, music and sports loyalties; I abandoned the belief that knob-turners in Sacramento or Washington D.C. could produce a utopia. 

But maybe most importantly, I simply grew the hell up. I am like  one of those people who inspired someone (often attributed to Churchill, more recently to John Adams) to observe that if you’re not a liberal when you’re 20 you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 40, you have no brain. I honor those of you who did not wait till 40.

WHAT YOU MIGHT LEARN FROM MY OWN STRANGE TRIP, PART TWO

Taking back California requires all of us. Speak to others with humility, as so many did for me, about deeper principles of freedom, of the spirit that animates free people pursuing their own interests, unhindered by government barriers to their independent, voluntary action. You’ll be amazed by the results. We ask you to be a gentle, philosophical/spiritual guide, gently nudging your neighbors toward the truth, even those as misguided as a younger Will Swaim. Read deeply from the classics – I like Calvin Coolidge’s 1925 inaugural as a starting place, but I’m what vice presidential nominee Tim Walz would call “weird.” If you prefer videos – especially short ones, start here. 

You will not be surprised that many of your neighbors and local officials will rebuke you. Not even Elon Musk can say what’s on his mind without California officials using their power to punish him. In July, Musk reposted on X a Kamala Harris parody so infuriating to Governor Newsom that he demanded (and received from the supplicants in the state legislature) a bill that would ban political comedy. He signed the bill into law for immediate action. Just as immediately, a judge wisely concluded that was unlawful. When the Pentagon backed Space X’s proposal to send more rockets out of Vandenberg Air Force Base on the Central Coast, the state Coastal Commission blocked them. Their logic: Musk said nice things about Donald Trump. Musk has sued, and will likely win his federal case on First Amendment grounds. Even Gavin Newsom saw that coming: “Look,” he told reporters, “I’m not helping the [commission’s] legal case. You can’t bring up that explicit level of politics.” (Ouch.)

We at CPC have had our own challenges. When speaking to a business group in the San Fernando Valley a couple of weeks ago, I described the malignant influence of government unions on our legislative process; within 24 hours I was banned from any future appearances before that august body. 

In her personal capacity, my colleague Mari Barke is a member of the Orange County Board of Education. She is an outspoken advocate of parent rights, school choice and charter schools. Because no good deed can go unpunished, a wealthy, retired bankruptcy judge and current teacher union activist filed a multi-million-dollar lawsuit designed to bankrupt Mari. Mari’s “crime”? A campaign filing error, a technical fix for everyone else.

My colleague Julie Hamill, founder of the California Justice Center, sued Los Angeles County over its Covid policies. Julie showed that Los Angeles County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer leveraged relationships with Rep. Adam Schiff in an effort to bully X (then called Twitter) into silencing critics of her universal mask mandate in July 2022. The county’s outside counsel went nuclear. “They put photos of my children into the court record,” Julie says. “Lawyers for the government and Twitter worked together to seal documents showing censorship efforts by members of Congress. The government and its attorneys characterized me and my clients as politically motivated extremists–Republicans who hated masks.” For the record, Julie notes, only one of the founding members among her plaintiffs was a registered Republican. “The rest were Democrats and Independents.”

AND NOW, I SWEAR, THIS IS THE CONCLUSION

Speaking to your neighbors – never mind speaking truth to government – isn’t for the weak. But neither are you. Remember the words of the late, great journalist Edward R. Murrow, the guy who more than any single American took down Sen. Joe. McCarthy: We Americans, Murrow said, “will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”

Elections are important. They require courage and work. But they are not everything. Dare to be unpopular. And if you can’t do that, remember my request of the venture capitalists who left Menlo Park for Nevada: “If you can’t fight, it’s better to support those who can,” people like my colleagues at the California Policy Center. We work every day to take back California.

Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center and co-host with David Bahnsen of National Review’s “Radio Free California” podcast.