A Reformist and a Futurist
Pat Brown's son, Jerry, was Governor for two sets of two four-year terms each, as the youngest California governor between 1975 and 1983 and the oldest California governor between 2011 and 2019. Brown's political philosophy unifies his two administrations. He was never the backslapping politician of his father's day; instead, he embraced an ethically self-conscious intellectual middle-of-the-road politics energized by Catholic humility, Jesuit inquiry, and a 1970s sensibility to embrace a limits-to-growth mentality. Brown did not aspire to be a philosopher-king; he adopted a democratic philosophy regarding the limits of leadership in a representative democracy. With the people's consent, the Governor must pursue creative strategies to prepare for the future.
Jerry Brown grew up in San Francisco. He was a very religious young man, attending St. Ignatius High School and then studying for the priesthood at the Sacred Heart Novitiate in Santa Clara for three years. Realizing that he wanted to be more involved in secular life, he switched to UC Berkeley and then studied law at Yale. His father's influence helped secure a clerkship with Justice Mathew Tobriner of the California Supreme Court, followed by work as a lawyer in Los Angeles (Newton, part one). By 1969, he had a seat on the Los Angeles Community College Board, and by 1970, he was elected Secretary of State of California. His father's famous name certainly opened many doors for Mr. Brown, but he quickly charted an independent political course. Distinct from a standard New Deal-liberal approach, Brown responded to the challenges of the 1970s in new and more moderate ways than previous generations of Democrats.
First, as Secretary of State, he championed campaign finance reform, leading an effort in June of 1974 to pass Proposition 9, which placed limits on contributions and mandated their public disclosure. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, such good government measures were very popular, and it was not an accident that Brown was running in the primary for Governor in this very same election. Brown won the primary and went on to win in November 1974, becoming the youngest Governor in California's history (Newton 104-106). The strategy of not just riding a new wave of public sentiment but leading it would propel Brown to victory again and again in his career.
In his first term, Brown showed his commitment to labor and environmental causes. Farmworkers acquired better working conditions and the ability to unionize with the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act. State employees were also unionized with his support. Environmentally, the California Air Resources Board (started under Governor Reagan) set more stringent standards for air pollution. With the establishment of the California Coastal Commission, the California coastline gained much more protection from environmental destruction because all new developments had to meet its approval. Spending for schools and welfare increased, and the California Conservation Corps, a jobs training program, was created. The Governor was a careful spender; the state budget soon enjoyed a five-billion-dollar surplus.
Thrift has its rewards, but the increase in tax revenues attracted the frustration of conservatives who believed property taxes were too high. The result in June of 1978 was Proposition 13, an initiative to limit property tax to 1% of the assessed value of a home with no more than a 2% increase each year tied to inflation. Brown opposed the proposition because it was predicted to cause draconian cuts in state programs. However, after it passed and facing re-election in November, he changed his mind and embraced the new anti-tax spirit. Re-elected in 1978, Brown ran into more trouble when he delayed insecticide spraying for the Mediterranean fruit fly in urban areas. Ultimately, he approved spraying as the infestation threatened the viability of agriculture (Newton, part three).
Brown's first two terms in the 1975 to 1983 period reflect the common experience of many elected officials. A governor comes into an office with an ambitious agenda and enjoys support from a broad bipartisan coalition. Then, new political forces, such as the anti-tax movement of the 1970s, enter the political arena, and his ability to implement his vision is cut short. Of course, there is always the possibility of the unpredictable occurring: a scandal, a crisis, a natural disaster, an earthquake, or an insect infestation, undermining the best-laid plans.
Like his father, Jerry Brown always had national political ambitions. He ran for President three times, in 1976, 1980, and again in 1992. In 1982, he ran for the US Senate and lost to Republican Pete Wilson, who would later become California governor in the 1990s. Brown's campaigns for national office were quixotic on the one hand because they were long shots, driven more by personal charisma and philosophical ideas than widespread popular support. On the other hand, Brown was seeking to shift debate within the Democratic Party to embrace a newer politics to address the late twentieth century's emergent environmental, civil rights, and technological issues. Brown's national campaigns did bring attention to these goals and himself as a young leader full of exciting ideas (Newton 198-204). However, by the early 1980s, the political winds had shifted from Jerry Brown's liberalism to a revitalized conservatism. A re-energized Republican party helped elect former California Governor Reagan to become President in 1980. Jerry Brown returned to private life.
In his forties, Brown spent part of the 1980s deepening his intellectual and religious spirit. He started two think tanks, the National Committee on Industrial Innovation and the Institute for National Strategy, focusing on domestic and international policy innovations. Brown studied Zen Buddhism, traveled to Japan, and deepened his Catholic faith by working with Mother Teresa in India. By the late 1980s, he decided to return to California politics, running and winning the office of chairman of the California Democratic Party. He resigned to run in the Presidential primaries, losing to Bill Clinton in 1992.
His return to political office began with his election to be the mayor of Oakland, CA; he then was successfully elected to a statewide office again as Attorney General in 2006. The Governor at this time was Arnold Schwarzenegger, a relatively moderate Republican whose second term ended in 2010. With term limits passed in 1990, "the Governator" could not run for a third term, but Brown, who served as Governor before term limits passed, was eligible to return to the Governor's mansion (Newton, part four).
It was an opportune time for a Democrat to run for Governor. The Republicans had veered to the right, favoring smaller government, an anti-immigrant platform, and rejecting greater civil rights for LGBT people. However, the state was becoming more liberal again, especially as its demographics shifted to an even more ethnically diverse population. Brown ran for the governorship in 2010, promising to address the state's fiscal problems, particularly the considerable deficit, without raising taxes unless he had the support of Californians in the form of a referendum. He won. The youngest Governor had now become the oldest Governor. Twice then, his tenure followed that of an actor, first Reagan and then Schwarzenegger.
In 2011, Governor Brown, now in his third term, confronted a twenty-five-billion-dollar budget deficit with a proposed sales and income tax increase. As promised, he took the proposal to the voters and placed Proposition 30 on the 2012 ballot, persuading voters of the necessity of tax increases. As the economy continued to grow throughout the decade, and with the increased revenues from the tax hikes, the budget was no longer the cause of political crises. The state soon started gaining surpluses that could be put in a reserve account (Newton, part five).
After addressing the fiscal crisis, Brown turned to some other issues needing attention, some of which were of perennial concern and others that were relatively new. The criminal justice system is, of course, one of the longest-standing government issues. Reforms in the 1970s and 1980s in response to crime waves caused many more crimes to result in incarceration and much longer sentences. In his first term, the prison population stood at about thirty-five thousand Californians out of a total state population of about twenty-one million residents. When he returned to office in 2011, there were more than 160,000 Californians locked up from a population of about thirty-seven million ("California Prison and Jail Populations"). The ethics of imprisoning people for so long was questionable on multiple grounds. How many years should someone be locked up for something they committed, most likely as a young person? To what extent was there racial bias regarding who was charged and the length of sentences? Many sentences were due to drug rather than violent crimes. Shouldn't drugs be treated more as a health issue rather than a criminal issue? Did locking people up reduce crime in the long run or just lead to recidivism, as people with felony records found it challenging to find work, homes, and stable lives? Moreover, the California Supreme Court in 2011 (Brown v. Plata) ruled that overcrowding in state prisons violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Brown led several efforts to address this problem, supporting propositions to liberalize get-tough-on-crime efforts such as the three-strikes law (which gave twenty-five years to life sentences even when the third strike was relatively minor) and realigning incarceration to house people committing less severe offenses to county jails rather than to the state system. By the end of the decade, state prison populations had decreased by about thirty percent, and voters were in general support of reforms that lightened sentences ("Public Opinion and Sentencing Reform").
Another issue was environmental protection. In the 1970s, reductions in smog had been led by the California Air Resources Board. Now, this same board was instrumental in tackling global warming by creating a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. First developed by Governor Schwarzenegger and then extended by Brown, it set overall goals for emissions and then created a market for industries to buy a declining number of credits to pollute. California was able to meet its goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2016 (Newton 339-43).
Brown returned to two other infrastructure issues reminiscent of his father's efforts. Just as his father had developed the California aqueduct and freeways, he started the planning for two new projects: a tunnel system to deliver water from the Sacramento Delta to southern California and a high-speed train project to connect northern and southern California. As Brown left office in 2020, the tunnel was still in the planning stages. The construction of the train project from Modesto to Bakersfield had begun.
Brown left office in 2019 more popular with the California people than previous outgoing governors. Brown had a 51% popularity rating, double that of outgoing Governor Schwarzenegger in 2010 ("What Approval Ratings Say about Jerry Brown's Legacy"). State finances were in order due to his engineered tax increases and a growing economy. Brown's popularity was based on performance and also on the more liberal composition of the electorate that sought to distinguish California politics and policies from the more conservative philosophies and policies emerging from the Trump Administration at the same time. Thus, we can attribute the relative success of Governor Brown's second two terms to the ability of the Governor to propose and implement policies that fit the state's politics in the 2011-2019 period.
