Many things coming to a head at the moment

All the themes that Precipice regularly deals with are coming to the fore in mid-autumn 2024

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Okay, gang, we’re now less than two weeks out.

I’ll confess that it feels more than a bit weird to have absolutely no emotional investment in the outcome of any race, up- or down-ballot, in any geographic area, in a presidential-year US election. I turned 69 two days ago. I’ve been at least somewhat emotionally invested in every election since 1960, when Vicky Poshard had her little sister Lisa and me ride around the neighborhood in the back of a Radio Flyer wagon singing “Nixon, Nixon, he’s our man; Kennedy belongs in the garbage can!” Four years later, on the morning after the 1964 election, I walked into my fourth-grade class and Billy Stearman started in with taunting me over the vote totals. So I threw him over a row of chairs. By 1968, of course, we were well into the tectonic shift, and my 13-year-old head was filled with the music of Jimi Hendrix and Cream, film footage of the Tet Offensive, the two assassinations, the student takeover of administrative offices at Columbia University and the riots outside the DNC convention hall in Chicago. My square old flat-topped dad had nothing to offer that could compete.

I’m not going to go through every election cycle, and I’ve told my conversion story here several times. I believe this is the latest occasion:

Now it’s time to revisit the moment of my conversion experience, when I realized I was a conservative.

It was 1985. I wasn’t married yet, and what I was doing for a living has little to do with my subsequent writing career. But I was your basic snot-nosed Boomer who thought the leftists were the cool kids. I was basically awash in the dissolute lifestyle practices attendant to the countercultural milieu in which I’d come of age, and I wore my rock and roll bona fides (I’m a guitarist; this was before I studied jazz) like a badge. But when I’d weigh in on a matter of public policy, it was with a leftist position.

I was attending the local Unitarian Universalist fellowship at the time. The congregation didn’t have a minister. We had various kinds of guest speakers each Sunday.

One week, it was a guy from the local “peace fellowship.” He’d just come back from a “fact-finding” tour of Central America.

Now, let me back up just a bit.

I may have had my head . . . um, placed where the sun shineth not, but I’ve always been a curious person. Print newspapers were still a major way people consumed information, and I had a ritual of perusing the Indianapolis Star at a local diner each morning before heading to work. I started to see not only the erudition of the columnists it carried on its op-ed pages, but their humanity and moral clarity as well. Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Michael Novak. Norman Podhoretz. George F. Will.

A topic they all discussed regularly was the Reagan administration’s attempt to keep Soviet Communism from gaining a foothold in Central America. From reading their columns, I was steered to a number of books that fleshed out what was going on.

The first to really open my eyes was Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family by Shirley Christian. Christian was a New York Times reporter who had previously worked for the Associated Press. She’d lived in Latin America for 20 years. The granularity of her work drew high praise from various quarters, even from outlets not inclined to concur with her conclusions.

It was from that book that I learned about Augusto Cesar Sandino, the 1930s Nicaraguan guerrilla who engaged the US Marines in skirmishes. He was never a Marxist-Leninist himself, but he let himself be feted at various gatherings of the international Left.

And the Somoza family, a three-generation dynasty that, among other things, offed Sandino. It ruled Nicaragua corruptly until 1979.

And Carlos Fonseca, the founder, in 1957, of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which was most definitely Marxist-Leninst from the outset. Fonseca went to the USSR that year as a Nicaraguan delegate to the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students.

And Tomas Borge, who met Fonseca in the late 1950s and was an integral part of the FSLN from its inception.

And the Ortega brothers, Daniel and Humberto, who joined the FSLN in the mid-1960s.

Fast-forward to the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979, which disingenuous types tried to paint as a straightforward seizure of power by the FSLN from the Samoza regime. That’s a lie. Many sectors of Nicaraguan society had had it up to here with the Samoza regime. Businessmen like Adolfo Calero, who ran the Managua Coca-Cola bottling plant, and Alfonso Robelo, who’d been rector of the University of Central America, president of the Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce, and leader of the Nicaraguan Development Institute. The Chamorro family, which had published La Prensa, the most widely read newspaper in Nicaragua, for decades. The Chamorro family had run afoul of the Somoza regime to the point where then-editor Pedro Joachim Chamorro Cardenal was assassinated in 1978. The Catholic Church - the real Catholic Church, not the Liberation Theology bunch.

Yes, the Sandinistas were the armed faction among those opposed to Somoza, and therefore important to putting some teeth in that opposition.

But there was a brief period after Somoza was deposed during which matters of power-sharing needed to be sorted out. Christian tells a great story in her book about how Bayardo Arce, one of the nine FSLN comandantes, was invited to a meeting at Calero’s house to discuss it. Calero opened his liquor cabinet and invited Arce to select his libation. Arce said, “I see you bourgeois still have a lot of stuff.” Calero replied, “Yes, and we intend to keep on having it.” (Calero later organized an armed group in opposition to the Sandinistas, one of several groups called Contras.)

Well, the Sandinistas elbowed all these other stakeholders aside and took over the revolution. The nine comandantes’ first move was to fly to Cuba to get advice on how to proceed from Castro.

In neighboring El Salvador, centrist president Jose Napoleon Duarte was struggling to maintain a balancing act between a corruption-prone military and an armed Marxist-Leninist party called the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. (Namesake Marti had, like Sandino, been a 1930s guerrilla, but was definitely a Marxist-Leninist.)

(Duarte’s autobiography is an informative read as well.)

The US Left didn’t want the public to know these particulars. The picture it wanted to paint was of a trigger-happy Ronald Reagan who wanted to to suppress the region’s peasants and keep them working for paltry wages on the banana plantation.

Again, a lie. Ronald Reagan knew from the outset of his presidency that his mission was to dismantle the entire worldwide Soviet project - which he eventually did, with the help of Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher.

Back to the “peace fellowship” guy’s appearance that Sunday morning. When he opened his presentation up for Q&A, I stood up and said, “Mister, you’re not telling these people the whole story by any stretch. In fact, you’re telling some falsehoods.”

Gasps arose from the congregation. In fact, I surprised myself. But I knew at the moment I was a conservative. I soon subscribed to National Review, Commentary, The American Spectator and Insight. I became a think-tank conference junkie. I began work on my master’s degree in history.

All this recedes into the mists of antiquity the further we get out from that a time. US citizens across a wide array of ages have at best a faint idea of how current Latin American dynamics came to be. Some of this is due to the ever-expanding array of technological distractions that characterize daily life. But one cause is damn sure the way Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has been embraced by high school and university history teachers since its first appearance in 1980.

I sometimes think about the “peace fellowship” guy and wonder what he now thinks of the moral preening he did on behalf of the guy who is now smuggling bad actors from around the world to Managua and helping them get to the United States.

And eight years ago, um, the Very Stable Genius came along and refashioned the party of Reagan into a populist party. I was opposed to the project from the outset in 2015. I wrote in Evan McMullen the following year, and Ben Sasse in 2020.

What is my point?

That, at this juncture, all the themes with which Precipice posts deal are swirling together into a portrait of human nature that is pretty damn unflattering.

Come on. What kind of I’m-not-voting-for-a-pastor excuse-making doesn’t sound completely flimsy at a time when the VSG’s recent blurtings have included an assertion that pro golfers used to be amazed at the size of Arnold Palmer’s manhood when they’d shower with him, threats to sic a special prosecutor on Biden and put “treasonous” Liz Cheney before a military tribunal and a suggestion that CBS should lose its broadcasting license because he didn’t like its interview with Kamala Harris.

Now, the problem with the decision by the Charlie Sykes-Liz Cheney-Bulwark-Principles First crowd (and a group I’d categorize as distinct from them - think George Will and Dick Cheney - in that they, so far, have not demonstrated any wobbliness regarding their conservative bona fides) to cast its lot with the Harris-Walz ticket is that she would be no better guardian of the Constitution than the VSG. In fact, Harris’s interest in “reforming” the Supreme Court is a mirror opposite of the VSG’s problem with CBS; she doesn’t like the outcome of some recent cases, so, to her, the solution is to upend the card table.

And let’s dispense with the idea that she’s some exemplar of character able to serve as a foil. She’s the child of left-leaning Berkeley academics (that split shortly after having their two daughters) who took in the lay of the Bay Area political landscape and refined the art of schmoozing to science:

Almost everyone knows about Harris’s relationship with then-state assembly speaker Willie Brown while he was still married. It probably shouldn’t be labeled an “affair” because that term implies secrecy, and there was nothing secret about it. (The June 24, 1996, issue of People magazine reported that, “Since 1981, Brown has been estranged from his wife, Blanche Brown.”)

The first time Kamala Harris’s name appeared in her hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, was in March 1994, when legendary Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote about a surprise 60th birthday party for then-speaker Brown. “[Clint] Eastwood spilled champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris, an Alameda [county] deputy D.A. who is something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a girl. And she’s black.”

When Brown was tuning 60, Harris was 29. The young Harris makes a mortifying quick appearance in a 1995 ABC News Prime Time Live profile of Brown. Asked by someone off camera, “Are you his daughter?” Harris smiles and answers, “No, I’m not.”

Caen wrote about the Brown-Harris relationship regularly; in a June 19, 1995, piece on Brown’s bid for mayor, Caen wrote, “Brown has given up ‘girls’ in favor of a woman, Kamala Harris, who is exactly the steadying influence he needs.” In December 1995, writing about Brown’s mayoral victory party, Caen wrote, “The mayor-elect’s now-famous headgear — the black baseball cap with ‘Da Mayor’ in gold letters — was an election night gift from the new first-lady-in-waiting, Kamala Harris.” But one anecdote might have included some inadvertent foreshadowing:

Mr. B’s after-the-victory party was in the Ben Swig Suite at the Fairmont, which, he said, “should be the mayor’s residence.” When a friend said “Well, it’d be OK for a bachelor,” Willie said, “So what am I?” as Kamala glared from across the room. Keep an eye on these two.

About two weeks later, Caen reported the couple had split:

“It’s all over.” With those words, mayor-elect Brown let word get around over the weekend that his long affair with Kamala Harris, an Alameda County asst. district attorney, has ended. This news came as a shock to many, including those who found Kamala Harris attractive, intelligent and charming. As a mutual friend once observed, “Willie has finally graduated from girls to a woman.” Also flabbergasted: the brain-trusters who found Kamala the perfect antidote to whatever playboy tendencies still reside in the mayor-elect’s jaunty persona. The consensus: “Kamala and Willie just looked right together.

But Harris’s name wasn’t just attached to Brown in the gossip column. On November 19, 1994, the Los Angeles Times wrote about Brown’s appointment of Harris to two state positions:

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, continuing his rush to hand out patronage jobs while he retains his powerful post, has given high-paying appointments to his former law associate and a former Alameda County prosecutor who is Brown’s frequent companion.

Brown, exercising his power even as his speakership seems near an end, named attorney Kamala Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that pays $72,000 a year.

Harris, a former deputy district attorney in Alameda County, was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s girlfriend. In March, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called her “the Speaker’s new steady.”

Harris accepted the appointment last week after serving six months as Brown’s appointee to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which pays $97,088 a year.

The San Francisco Weekly calculated that the two patronage positions in state government paid Harris more than $400,000 in salary over five years — and remember, that’s in 1995 dollars; $97,088 a year in 1995 is roughly $203,487.67 in today’s dollars, and $400,000 in January 1995 would be $839,124.42 in today’s dollars.

Years later, that same publication shared an eye-popping detail of Brown’s generosity during their relationship:

In fact, as Harris later tells SF Weekly, the mayor gave her a 1994 BMW, which she traded in for the 1997 model she now drives. The car remains a tangible link to a man whom many San Franciscans associate with political chicanery and self-dealing — a connection that doesn’t bode well for Kamala Harris.

(Fun fact: Willie Brown once called cult leader Jim Jones, “a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao.” I suppose you could argue Brown was one-for-four in his comparison.)

Harris benefited from the assembly-speaker-turned-mayor’s habit of dating attractive younger women and his tendency to use his powerful positions to help his friends and supporters. In 2001, the San Francisco Chronicle completed a five-part series investigating Brown’s “patronage army,” his ethics violations, his insider deals, and the millions in soft-money donations to his campaigns:

Among the 3,000 supporters who packed Yerba Buena Gardens for his January 1996 inauguration were some whose dreams were far more personal.

They were lawyers, lobbyists, campaign donors and political players — Brown’s “juice clientele,” as one state legislator described them at the time — the mayor’s cronies, as they came to be known.

These insiders would form the core of “Willie Brown Inc.”, a Sacramento-style political machine in which influence with the mayor has been the trump card in quests for hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts, land deals, favorable regulatory rulings and jobs.

The FBI investigated Brown for five years, but no charges were ever filed against him.

By mid 2002, Harris was growing frustrated with her boss, Terence Hallinan, and contemplating a run for district attorney. Hallinan had hired her in 1998 to head up the office’s career-criminals section; she left after two years to go work in the San Francisco city attorney’s office. In her 2003 campaign for the job, the San Francisco Chronicle referred to Brown as Harris’s “political sponsor.”

“I think he opened doors for her. He introduced her to people,” Mark Buell, a prominent developer and philanthropist who played a pivotal role as an early Harris fundraiser, told the Financial Times earlier this year. “Having Willie’s name attached to something is pretty credible.”

Former congressman and California Democratic Party chairman John Burton later told Politico, “I met her through Willie. . . . I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie.”

Burton made those comments in a detailed 2019 Politico profile of this largely ignored but pivotal chapter of Harris life — the story of how she became a rising star in the sharp-elbowed world of San Francisco city politics. The short version is that Harris was exceptional at persuading wealthy San Franciscans to invest in her political rise:

Her rise, however, was propelled in and by a very different milieu. In this less explored piece of her past, Harris used as a launching pad the tightly knit world of San Francisco high society, navigating early on this rarefied world of influence and opulence, charming and partying with movers and shakers — ably cultivating relationships with VIPs who would become friends and also backers and donors of every one of her political campaigns, tapping into deep pockets and becoming a popular figure in a small world dominated by a handful of powerful families. This stratum of San Francisco remains a profoundly important part of her network — including not just powerful Democratic donors but an ambassador appointed by President Donald Trump who ran in the same circles. . . .

As she advanced professionally, jumping from Alameda County to posts in the offices of the district and city attorneys across the Bay, she was a trustee, too, of the museum of modern art and active in causes concerning AIDS and the prevention of domestic abuse, and out and about at fashion shows and cocktail parties and galas and get-togethers at the most modish boutiques. She was, in the breezy, buzzy parlance of these kinds of columns, one of the “Pretty Thangs.” She was a “rising star.” She was “rather perfect.” And she mingled with “spiffy and powerful friends” who were her contemporaries as well as their even more influential mothers and fathers. All this was fun, but it wasn’t unserious. It was seeing and being seen with a purpose, society activity with political utility. . . .

Outfitted in sharp designer suits and strands of bright pearls, Harris kickstarted her drive to become San Francisco’s top cop — in its ritziest, most prestigious locale. Predominantly white Pacific Heights — hills upon hills, gobsmacking views of the Golden Gate strait, mansions built and bought with both new tech money and old gold rush cash — is home to Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom and others, one of the country’s foremost concentrations of politicians and their patrons.

Every ambitious Democrat in San Francisco, past and present, wants the deep pockets of the movers and shakers in their corner. Many try; Harris succeeded in closing the sale.

Chalk it up to charm or charisma, or other people seeing her as a useful vessel for their priorities and agenda. Also note that compared to the rest of the country, the political spectrum in San Francisco runs from A to B. Everyone is a Democrat and almost everyone is a progressive of some stripe. This means that an ambitious candidate needs qualities beyond political stances to stand out from the crowd.

The Financial Times offered some more details:

By day, Harris would toil in the courts. By night, she was gravitating to the glittery world of San Francisco. She might be at the symphony opening with [longtime friend and state assemblyman Mark] Leno or the Getty mansion with Newsom and other swells. She was, by all accounts, bright and beautiful. But there was some other, ineffable quality that made her shine. “It was impossible not to survey the room and have your eyes fixed on her,” said Leno, recalling his first encounter with Harris in a crowded union hall in 1995. “She’s just a presence.”

She never married until ten years ago, and then it was to an entertainment lawyer whose first marriage ended when he impregnated the nanny.

Kamala Harris is every bit as morally vacuous and devoid of character as the Very Stable Genius.

At this point, my reaction to pieces of punditry that strive to cheerlead for either of these candidates - or their equally dismal running mates - is mild bemusement. The things one has to overlook to lend support to one side and focus exclusively on portraying the other as the only side with issues on the levels of coherence, humility and admirability are glaring indeed. Attempts to ignore them are transparently pathetic and pathetically transparent.

So, as I say, all the recurring Precipice themes - character, virtue, an understanding of what the West’s great thinkers have had to say about what makes life worthwhile, an acknowledgement of a transcendent order, the role of beauty, the resentment the non-West harbors against the West, free-market economics - are swirling together as we approach the day of decision.

It’s neck-and-neck, which is one reason I offer no prognostications.

That, plus the only reason the outcome matters is the question of which form post-America’s final ruination will take.

And stop it with the what-do-you-mean-ruination reaction. The economy is what it is. But we are a hopelessly bored, distracted, exhausted, and. of course, polarized - indeed, atomized - people. Outside of a few foreign-policy nerds, no one cares that North Korea is sending 10,000 troops to fight alongside Russia in Ukraine, or that Iran has cut off indirect communication lines with the US. No one outside of a few fiscal-policy nerds gives a flying diddly about the unsustainable national debt, which is entirely due to the nation paying heed to the progressives of 100 years ago, who enticed us away from James Madison’s vision for the scope and vision of the federal government. When we decided government ought to address the challenges attendant to the life stages of individuals, all bets were off.

So a nation in which the overall level at which the citizenry is engaged is one of just plain silliness is about to go to the polls.

Except for me. I won’t be there.

Is this a statement of resignation? I suppose so.

Because we live in a universe which always eventually self-regulates, even if the process is severe, the natural equilibrium, the inherent order on all levels, including the moral, the state C.S. Lewis called the Tao, will prevail.

That’s what keeps me going. Heaven is unshakeable, and there’s a room for me in that mansion.

But, jeez, do us humans - particularly us birthright-squandering post-Americans - ever put ourselves through a lot of you-know-what unnecessarily.