Jerry Brown: A 1970s Immortal
Nuechterlein, James A.
James A. Nuechterlein Jerry Brown: A 1970s Immortal Three recent books on Jerry Brown" enable us, if not to pin him down, at least to see with which flow he goes. W hen Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown,...
...they mirror our current uncertainties and discontents...
...on the other, he displays a touching faith that government schemes to reduce unemployment are a kind of panacea for all social ills and is unhappy that Brown scotched his plans in California...
...By now, no one entirely trusts him, but the voters of California, at least, have been so intrigued-not to say SJerry Brown: The Philosopher-Prince, Robert Pack, Stein and Day, $10.00...
...His frequent baiting of experts and academics appeals to fashionable neo-populism, as did his establishment of a state arts council that prefers "grassroots" art to the traditional pursuit of excellence...
...His fiscal conservatism is such as to make Ronald Reagan appear by comparison a profligate wastrel...
...Holding out the promise that a bill with a few million dollars, or a few hundred million dollars, is going to profoundly alter family structure, the relationship of various groups in the society, is just not true...
...A political opponent responds inelegantly: "He calls it creative inaction...
...Although much given to random reflections on politics and life, he does not appear inclined to sustained or systematic inquiry...
...one aide refers sardonically to his "whim of iron...
...Of the books on Brown, Orville Schell's best reflects its subject's characteristic style: It is impressionistic and kaleidoscopic in nature, consisting of short, disconnected chapters that record and muse but seldom judge...
...Moreover, his reservations concerning Brown stem in large part from his own lingering Old Left prejudices...
...Distortions in the system are compounded by the particular disorders of our post-liberal age...
...On the Los Angeles college board, he first displayed his mastery of the left/right two-step...
...Here he pioneered in the peculiar upper-middle-class populism of the seventies...
...The long hours he puts in at his office are notorious (and are the dismay of those staff members who, unlike bachelor Brown, have families they would like occasionally to see...
...gins, of course, with his father, Edmund G. Brown, Sr...
...Still, Lorenz is on to something with his emphasis on symbolic politics...
...Though most suspect him to some degree, they also mostly have been persuaded, whatever their political inclinations, that deep down he is one of them...
...In the process, he belittled "sociology or Freudian theory" that excuses crime and casually dismissed the therapeutic approach to incarceration: "Prisons don't rehabilitate very well, but they punish pretty good...
...At the same time, he is often impulsive, even willful...
...Basically shy and introverted, the young Brown seemed lacking in force and in the social graces...
...He managed even to work his way into an obscure corner of the Watergate investigation...
...The child is father of the man, and it seems clear that Brown the politician has perfected the uses of ambiguity first perceived by Brown the student debater...
...beyond that, all is confusion...
...Americans today can specify only their dissatisfactions...
...While voting regularly to limit expenditures, he simultaneously courted the counterculture by supporting the lowering of campus flags in honor of the Kent State Four and the opening of school facilities for rallies in aid of the Huey NewtonEldridge Cleaver Defense Committee, As Secretary of State, he managed adroitly to magnify a glorified clerkship into media prominence...
...There is some substance, of course...
...I call it sitting on your ass...
...In a great many ways, Brown suggests a Eugene McCarthy with energy (Brown supported McCarthy in his 1968 presidential bid...
...He believes in the separation of executive and legislative powers, mistrusts long-range planning, advocates local rather than centralized government initiative and control, prefers locating social functions in families and neighborhoods rather than official agencies, and desires a revitalization of traditional American voluntarism...
...Yet Brown's left hand, if it knows, must be astonished at what his right hand is doing...
...His entourage includes gnomic gurus and refugees from Ken Kesey's band of acid radicals...
...He also supported bills protecting California's coastline from extensive development and limiting and regulating the construction of nuclear power plants (he is in general a practitioner of environmental chic...
...Not infrequently he so balances liberal and conservative gestures in a given policy area as to appear the champion of all factions...
...In light of all this, how account for Brown's success...
...They want someone who is able to say 'no' as well as 'yes' and at the same time be compassionate and open and try to look at the future, not the past...
...He seems often to suppose that thinking about a problem is somehow equivalent to doing something about it...
...He pledges now actually to reduce the role of government and may well act on that pledge...
...critical or even necessarily well-disposed in their attitudes toward him...
...Lorenz locates Brown's leaning to superficiality in the broader context of California culture...
...He has supported salary bills for state employees that give the largest increases to the lowest paid, and has further suggested as a general proposition that income differentials ought to be reduced...
...He has, for example, initiated legislation giving farm workers the right to join unions and bargain collectively...
...Issues," he says, "are the last refuge of scoundrels...
...He has a facility that approaches genius for surrounding issues on all sides...
...Brown's combination of New Politics detachment with old politics activism affords him a broad range of support...
...Brown has never been a liberal in the New Deal tradition...
...Indeed, a number of those who knew him in his youth profess surprise at his later success...
...In any case, Brown, having achieved office on the basis of name recognition, built shrewdly on his opportunities...
...Although he affects a certain disdain for traditional political campaigning, he keeps up a constant round of appearances...
...Lorenz is a shrewd observer in many ways, but he tends to overdrawn and overwrought interpretations and has a particular weakness for mythological metaphors and psychological reductionism...
...The strains of social conservatism that linger in his otherwise "liberated" worldview might be traced there, but it is difficult to see what, if anything, of the substance of church dogma remains...
...He defines himself as an activist, but to him activism consists in ceaseless questioning and probing and not necessarily in resolving and doing...
...Similarly, after the Dow Chemical Company changed its mind about building a major factory in California because of environmental red tape, Brown began to moderate his ecological enthusiasms...
...The Left he holds largely through gesture and style...
...He holds prayer breakfasts featuring meditations on "peyote, snakes, and pregnant goats...
...His friends and associates-past and present-are by no means un...
...Life to him is a "path" without goal or even foreseeable direction, and in politics issues mysteriously "emerge" and "become" out of the endless flow of unfathomable process...
...A current California joke has it that the first priority of President Brown would be the construction of solar-powered granola factories...
...at other times he labels himself as now "more a private quester of spiritual things...
...His administrative habits tend to the chaotic...
...Indeed, he appears currently to bring to the prospect of weakening government all the enthusiasm that Franklin Roosevelt and those who came after him brought to building it up...
...His ambitions are not threatened by ideological commitments...
...He quotes Ignatius of Loyola one moment, an obscure Zen master the next...
...His philosophy, so far as one can make it out, might be characterized as California eclectic...
...He is almost fanatical about avoiding fixed positions and keeping his options open...
...America has always been a liberal society, and the received dogmas of liberalism lie in shambles about us...
...Brown, Orville Schell, Random House, $10.00...
...If his recorded table talk is to be credited, some of Brown's most fundamental instincts are indeed conservative...
...No matter: By 1974 Brown had parlayed minimal substance into maximum attention...
...He hates being scheduled (his tardiness is habitual) and avoids making decisions whenever possible, which keeps his staff in a state of perpetual crisis...
...Brown's personality and style provide uncanny correlatives to our political condition...
...It is not reassuring that the man wanting to lead us who is most like us embodies, at least in his public persona, a condition of perpetual adolescence...
...In his portrayal, California, land of escape and unreality, gets from Brown a political style appropriate to its general condition...
...What we need," Brown would say, "is a flexible plan for an ever-changing world...
...He is not, on the face of it, all that prepossessing a figure...
...Brown's law of politics seems to suggest that for every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction...
...He is not an optimist concerning human nature, and his reflections on the necessary limits of the political enterprise carry distinctly Burkean intimations: Politics is not life, it's a part of life, and fundamental change must begin with the individua' ...I guess some of my cautionary comments come in response to the politics of overpromising...holding out bureaucratic or political solutions to profound human questions that in fact are not answerable with a government program but must be lived with and through as just part of being a human being....I'm trying to rebuild the credibility of the [political] process, and I think it's important to be careful about the language that is used...
...He is blithely unapologetic about avoiding clear stands...
...The difficulty is, does Jerry Brown mean what he says...
...As governor, Brown has fashioned a singular political image...
...Because of his three-and-a-half years in a Jesuit seminary (a typographical error in Pack's book renders it as the "Scared Heart Novitiate") Brown's Catholicism has come under close scrutiny...
...His political appointments have been distributed generously among women, minorities, and the young...
...During his first campaign for governor he promised to hold the line on tax increases, and more orthodox liberals, such as his first job director, J.D...
...We have all-heard endless variations on the theme of California as the land of packaging, plastic, and hype...
...In his unfixed, unfinished, ever-becoming idea system, in his refusal or inability precisely to define himself, and in his skeptical and sometimes petulant response to all inherited beliefs, Brown is the most representative of contemporary American political figures...
...Lorenz speaks of him bluntly as a "lapsed Catholic," though Brown himself-for what one assumes are partially political reasons-is never so direct...
...He resists notions of linearity or causality and speaks semi-mystically of a "traditional wisdom" that underlies all philosophy and all civilizations...
...No politician since Huey Long has been able so aptly to define himself as sui generis...
...He has a good, perhaps too good, sense of the absurd, but he doesn't let it get in the way of old-fashioned electioneering techniques...
...Often he consciously avoids action ("creative inaction" is his term) on the not unreasonable assumption that the interventions of government frequently turn a merely bad situation into a disaster...
...In a political order overloaded with contradictory demands and expectations, and weakened by a long history of "reforms" that have crippled the party system and created fantasies of citizen participation and control, beleaguered politicians turn naturally to ambiguous rhetoric and symbolic gestures...
...It was the paternal name that first set the otherwise ordinary young lawyer apart and which served as his primary, and perhaps sole, asset in his early campaigns for the Los Angeles Junior College Board in 1969 and for California Secretary of State the following year...
...He speaks and lives unconventionally and unpredictably...
...He knows how to make a little seem like a lot, and he has the knack, invaluable in a politician, for being all things to all men...
...Critics may complain that he doesn't actually do much, but he manages to keep busy while not doing it...
...His recent easy reelection as governor of California resulted above all from his selfproclaimed ability to move left and right simultaneously...
...Thus it was not difficult for Brown to assume the role of defender of the public purse and enemy of government growth...
...Pat Brown was a two-term governor of California and the most popular Democrat in the state through most of the 1950s and 1960s...
...all he issued endless press releases indicating his attachment to youth, consumers, women, Jews, farm workers, Chicanos, and the poor-none of which groups had problems touching his sphere of official responsibility...
...He handles press conferences and interviews extremely well, and his personality appears somehow more dynamic before a camera or crowd than it often does in personal encounters...
...There are strains and tensions between the two to be sure, but they seem, at least on the surface, no deeper than might normally be expected in such a situation...
...Brown acts like a New Leftist even when he does not govern like one...
...He comes across rather as entirely ordinary in his successive early careers in high school, seminary, college (Berkeley), law school (Yale), and private law practice in Los Angeles...
...He toys with hippy-dippy technology: He set up a small Office of Appropriate Technology and appointed as its first director a crusader against the flush toilet...
...His cultural style, in other words, is perfectly in tune with the California counterculture...
...As "the vanguard of the symbolized world," the state is especially receptive to Brown's emphasis on image over substance...
...Thus, while opposing imposition of the death penalty, he at the same time pushed for a series of laws cracking down on criminal behavior...
...Lorenz, Houghton Mifflin, $8.95...
...He gathered enthusiastic liberal support when he vetoed a bill reinstating the death penalty...
...Lorenz, were dismayed from the outset by his aversion to new spending proposals...
...His enthusiastic conversion to Proposition 13 after the voters had spoken on property tax reduction evoked considerable skepticism, but it was not in fact all that inconsistent...
...We hesitate to place full trust in those whom it is impossible to anticipate...
...Brown knows precisely how to fashion the kind of brief, punchy appeals that work well on television...
...He ran successfully for governor that year as an antiestablishment candidate committed to nothing more specific than undefined "activism and change...
...He sometimes refers to his Catholic beliefs in the present tense...
...On the one hand, he speaks the new language of distrust of traditional structures and rejection of governmental solutions for fundamental problems...
...He likes to muse on the wisdom of small is beautiful and less is more, managing to suggest without ever explicitly saying so that the new austerity will require fundamental restructuring of the social order...
...and Jerry Brown: The Man on the White Horse, J.D...
...Launching law suits, popular initiatives, and threats of prosecution with great abandon, he championed the fashionable clean government causes of campaign disclosure, control of lobbying, and limits on election spending...
...In our current state of ideological confusion, Brown's unlikely combination of political impulses appears to have considerable appeal, and whether or not he will mount a serious threat to Jimmy Carter in 1980, he and what he represents require attention in any consideration of our political future...
...As usual, he avoids precise self-definition...
...He likes to pose as a kind of cosmic unifier in whom contradictions are resolved and opposites unite...
...He took to speaking of the need for continued private sector growth and had soon launched a "California means business" program in search of new sources of investment...
...Through it...
...Or more precisely, which of the many and often contradictory things he says does he mean...
...He has managed so totally to reconcile contradictory ideological appeals in himself that he defies traditional labelling...
...There has been considerable speculation concerning the fatherson relationship, but that seems attributable more to the papular predilection for vulgar Freudianism than to the nature of the relationship itself...
...Even as governor, he provokes a decidedly mixed response among those who know and work with him...
...Enter Brown...
...mesmerized-by his performance that they suspended their bemused disbelief long enough last November to vote for him in record numbers...
...In politics, pragmatism is a virtue and even a degree of opportunism is unavoidable, but legitimate reservations arise about politicians whose views are so unchartable as to appear entirely random...
...One responds to this with some skepticism...
...Much of Brown's success depends on his mastery of media politics...
...He likes to play with ideas, but that is precisely all he does with them...
...Lorenz complains of Brown's use of simplistic buzz-words and phrases, but ruefully concedes that Brown manipulates them more effectively than most politicians...
...We do not, of course, expect or even desire perfect consistency from our politicians...
...One seldom hears from Brown that rhetoric of heroic endeavor which has so dominated modern liberal thought...
...Robert Pack's interviews of those who knew Brown as a child and young man turned up little of the "even-then-I-saw-hisgreatness" material customary in such recollections...
...W hen Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr., was a high school debater, he liked to conclude his argument-whatever the topic under discussion-with an all-purpose appeal...
...He possessed a good but not exceptional mind, and was at no time considered a natural leader...
...9 Brown covers many of his evasions and ambiguities with a frenetic pace of activity...
...Brown's style of governing coincides well with his unanchored, go-with-the-flow philosophy...
...America's liberal consensus has been shattered, but neither conservatives nor radicals have been able so far to provide an alternative framework for the political order...
...He has his admirers, of course, but even many of these portray him as a marginal and distant personality: self-preoccupied, aloof, easily bored, elusive, devoid of gratitude, oblivious to others' feelings, incapable of deep personal affection...
...Mostly, however, he maintains his liberal credentials through consummate imagery...
...He delights rather in delphic aphorisms, which he issues frequently as substitutes for policy...
...His own aides come disproportionately from backgrounds as public defenders, public-interest lawyers, and civil rights/civil liberties activists...
...When cornered concerning his political purposes, he resorts to utter obfuscation: "Hopefully I can bring the message to the people who don't want new taxes...
...One beJames A. Nuechterlein is associate professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario...
...In the meantime, our politics is reduced to incoherence and aimless rancor...
...Many politicians are essentially nonideological, but most at least have predictable instincts...
...B rown himself seems unperturbed about charges of inconsistency...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
