Reflections on the last 900 years, this last week, elections and the future
Dear John,
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, as well as 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.
... Continue reading the article by CPC president Will Swaim here.
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Radio Free California #361: Newsom's Gas Pain
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