John F. Harris is editor-in-chief of POLITICO and author of "The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House."

SACRAMENTO—Nearly a half-century on the national stage surely entitles a leader to some valedictory words, and if Jerry Brown were a conventional politician one could easily imagine what those words might be:

Though the sun is setting on my time of public service, it will always be rising for this great state et cetera, et cetera, and though we face daunting challenges let me assure you that I have never been more optimistic about the endless promise of blah, blah, blah.


But if Jerry Brown were a conventional politician he would never have been on the national stage for a half-century. He would have been shooed off it several decades ago, to a chorus of mockery about his supposedly eccentric style and mournful commentary about faded promise and what might have been.

Instead, at age 80, Brown is leaving the governorship of the nation’s largest state in a few hours, at noon on Monday. If this departure seems a bit reluctant—he pauses slightly, before demurring when I ask him if he wishes he could keep his job—it is emphatically on his own terms. A leader who at times has been treated as a figure of ridicule has vindicated his place as one of the most serious people in American life across two generations.

During an interview with POLITICO at the governor’s mansion here in late December, Brown was indeed serious. He is not full of warm words about the native wisdom of the people: They strike him as scared, easily prone to distraction and cynical manipulation. He is not more optimistic than ever: He is worried the planet is hurtling toward catastrophe.

How does he see the world in 2019? “Dangerous—and we’re lucky to be alive,” Brown said, his voice rising. “Humankind has created—certainly since the invention of the atomic bomb, but also biological breakthroughs, cyber capacities—humankind has the capacity of vast, vast destruction, even the elimination of human beings themselves, all over the planet. That could be in a matter of days, certainly with the nuclear.”

And yet, as he sees it, America’s entire political culture—elected officials, the news media, intellectuals—seems blithely disengaged from the magnitude of the peril, endlessly distracted by trivia. On climate change, nuclear proliferation and the new awareness that technology can be an instrument of oppression as well as individual empowerment, he continued: “The threat is huge; the response is puny; and the consciousness, the awareness is pathetically small.”

Brown has been reading lately about World War I and sees contemporary parallels between the inability of that generation’s elites to comprehend or control the forces thrusting civilization toward disaster: “I find the metaphor most congenial to describing this problem is sleepwalking.”

Brown may be the most brooding of any major figure in American life, as arresting in its own way as President Donald Trump and his jeremiads about “American carnage.” He regards Trump as a dangerous fraud but also “a symptom” of “widespread estrangement” of people from institutions and leaders they no longer trust—a phenomenon he has observed and often agreed with for decades. He wasn’t surprised that Trump stood out from the “pabulum and predictability” that conventional candidates were offering in 2016.

The message is not “Morning in America,” to borrow the phrase of Brown’s immediate predecessor. Ronald Reagan, of course, after winning the governorship in 1974, went on to a job that Brown very much wanted.

Early in his career Brown was widely seen as an interesting figure but too young to be president. Then for a time he was seen as interesting but too weird. Now he is undeniably still an interesting figure—and, in key respects, at last powerfully in synch with the politics of the moment—but too old.

After years as a second-tier issue, climate change is finally moving to a central place in the Democratic debate; Brown has been a prominent voice on energy and environmental matters since the 1970s. Mistrust of big money and corrupt elites is now shaping the politics of both major parties; Brown has been offering a similar critique and promoting citizen empowerment for decades. At the same time, his emphasis on fiscal discipline has sometimes put him at odds with California liberals.

A couple hours before our interview, at an appearance at the Sacramento Press Club, Brown said it was a mistake to run for president three times—“one too many times,” he lamented, of his bids in 1976, 1980 and 1992—and acknowledged a nugget of political wisdom he first learned from another governor, his father Pat Brown: “Everything is timing.”

As a young man, Brown’s timing was marked by impatience. He was elected California secretary of state in 1970, and was just 36 when he was elected to replace Reagan in 1974. He was a late entrant for the 1976 Democratic presidential race in 1976 and did surprisingly well, though never derailed Jimmy Carter’s march to the nomination. In those days, with a full head of hair, his image seemed to be one part Bobby Kennedy and one part Deepak Chopra. His language and enthusiasms were unorthodox, and so was his personal life—famously sleeping in an apartment with a mattress on the floor, and dating singer Linda Ronstadt.

Columnist Mike Royko later recanted his famous description of Brown as “Governor Moonbeam,” but not before it became tattooed on his forehead. In 1981, Johnny Carson asked Gore Vidal on the Tonight Show what he would be giving Brown for Christmas. His imaginary gift would be a book on Brown’s own career, “It’s A Long Way to Mount Rushmore: The Harold Stassen Story, Revisited,” Vidal chortled.

Carson’s audience laughed appreciatively at this comparison to the perennial candidate, no one suspecting the taunts were merely preface to a remarkable story of persistence and rehabilitation. After losing a race for U.S. Senate in 1982, and being thwarted by Bill Clinton in the 1992 race, Brown did not go into law, or serve on corporate boards, or become a college president. He kept running—and became mayor of Oakland, state attorney general and governor again.

Brown belongs with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy as figures who shaped American politics in recent decades more than anyone who did not actually achieve the Oval Office.

It is a rare politician who could generate enthusiasm for offices so much lower than ones he has already held. Why was Brown not too proud for that? “Well, because I’m practical,” he told me. “My skills lie in the political domain. So, outside of office I have less to accomplish and less to do. … I never saw my father work on a car. I never saw him pick up a hammer. I never saw him pick up a broom. But I did hear him talk. I did see him go to meetings. And so I learned the skills of the political and that’s why I pursued it.”

When he returned as governor eight years ago, Brown resolved that he would not be confined narrowly to state issues, and instead would use the office as a platform for existential issues affecting the planet, like climate change and the nuclear peril. He speaks often with former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, for instance, and once burrowed away reviewing a book by Perry arguing that the nuclear catastrophe remains much more probable than people realize.

But Brown says he is not expecting these efforts to loom large in history. My colleagues have noted that Brown is allergic to the word “legacy,” a point he proved in the interview. “Who can remember the legacy?” he said, bristling at my question. “Presidents have legacies in ways that governors don’t. They don’t write the history of governors.”

What follows are excerpts of POLITICO’s conversation with outgoing California Gov. Jerry Brown. The questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

ON CLIMATE AND NUCLEAR THREATS

Harris: Nearly 50 years as an elected official, in public life, and in political life—that’s a long time. And many of the issues that have occupied you in that time are likely to be issues that are going to shadow the next 50 years of our public life. It seems to me, one of the signatures of your term is that you tried to expand the portfolio, expand the impact of the governor’s office, beyond narrowly state issues to national issues and even international issues with respect to climate change, with respect to nuclear and others. I guess I would ask you, how did that go, this attempt to expand the office? Did you feel that it worked? What were the biggest successes, and what were the biggest frustrations of that?

Brown: Well, obviously, climate change was important. California has been a leader in America and in the world, as evidenced by our working relationship with China by the Under2 Coalition. And our Climate Action Summit brought people from all over the world and helped boost the ambition by going into the Conference of the Parties in Poland. So, I think that was helpful. And I think that was very much not just a one-man show, but the institutional capacity of California that has been built up over decades through many governors.

I think it’s had an impact, but I don’t want to overstate it because states are primarily about their own business in these overarching issues. I think climate is a unique one because everybody contributes CO2. It’s not like sulfur pollution that is more localized. You put a molecule of CO2 in the environment in Moscow, Beijing, or Palo Alto, it still has the same warming effect. This is the one issue where we’re all in it together. We have to find a way to transcend all this stuff that separates China, Russia, Europe for that matter, Republicans and Democrats. Because nature and mankind are on the precipice, and that’s why I think I’ve been able to play a role, and why California’s been able to play a role, because there’s a need, there’s an opening here.

Harris: It does not seem like there is an emerging understanding of how to deal with climate change as a public policy issue. And former Defense Secretary Bill Perry, whom you know well, says the threat of a nuclear catastrophe is higher now than in the Cold War. Is there a lot to be pessimistic about?

Brown: There is. It’s dangerous, and we’re lucky to be alive. You don’t know what will happen. Humankind has created—certainly since the invention of the atomic bomb, but also biological breakthroughs, cyber capacities—humankind has the capacity of vast, vast destruction, even the elimination of human beings themselves, all over the planet. That could be a matter of days, certainly with the nuclear. So, yeah, if you take the threat and then you take the focus of the president, the parliamentary leaders, the media, the intellectuals, the gap is—the threat is huge; the response is puny; and the consciousness, the awareness is pathetically small. So, yeah, there’s a lot of room for great concern. Not for pessimism or optimism, but just realism with commitment to doing something.

I find the metaphor most congenial to describing this problem is sleepwalking—and I got that idea reading a book on World War I, I think by Clark. I’m just amazed when I think back that the leaders of Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire all committed suicide in their own way, out of sheer stupidity. But they were well-educated Christians, in some case, Muslim. They should have been able to prevent it. And if those people of goodwill, and even many of them related, couldn’t avoid screwing things up in such a catastrophic way—that even today in the Middle East we’re still suffering from it—then what are we in line for? What stupidities are being harbored in the minds of Trump, the Congress, Putin, Europe, Xi, Japan? What are they doing that could lead us to the same place, only even worse because of the new technologies of destruction that we have?

So, based on all that, I find it absolutely unbelievable that our national leaders spend so little time on the major threats and so much time on the nonsense, the trivia of the news of the day, which, in many respects, is the lifeblood of the media.

Harris: That gap you described between meeting the problem, coming up with the remedies, and the magnitude of the problem, how does it narrow? Government—particularly in the liberal democracies, and the political and media culture around those governments—seems really inadequate to the task.

Brown: It is inadequate. Look at it. It’s all failing. And the people know something’s wrong. The leadership of Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Brazil, Philippines, all these places are in big trouble. And some of that is the breakdown of consensus. The fragmentation, the “diversity” in quotation marks, is such that there isn’t enough coherency in the body politic to sustain a constructive path forward.

Harris: There’s a darkness in how you see the world.

Brown: Well, I don’t know if it’s dark. The sun is out, but there’s a certain—you know, what do they say? Sin weakens the will and darkens the intellect. Actually, that pretty well describes where we are. And I learned about that in grade school.

ON THE ESTABLISHMENT

Harris: I don’t necessarily want to use the word populist, but I would say that individual empowerment against establishment forces has been one theme of your career. And yet, I would note that some of those tools against the establishment turned out to not be so liberal or so benign. They can be used for quite illiberal purposes. But I’m wondering if some earlier version of yourself would say, ‘Well, if we can just disempower the establishment and the way it’s distorted politics, that would lead to a good result.’ We have in a lot of ways disempowered the establishment—

Brown: Why disempower? We need an establishment. You need a certain hierarchy. You can’t work as a mob. You’ve got to have a leader, leaders. And right now, the leadership class, what is it? It’s the wealth class, the corporate class, international arms merchants with their government allies, all going down the same path. Very hard to pull it back. Both parties. You have neocons and you have liberal interventionists, and they’re all agreed—more nukes, more weapons, more sales. I’m sure they would say, just by the matter of time, how much concern is there? We’re more worried about Facebook than we are the obliteration of half the human race. That does not add up to a clear sense of priorities, a sensible list of priorities.

Harris: I’m wondering if your perspective, as somebody who has spent much of your career sort of critiquing the establishment, has changed?

Brown: I critique the establishment for not being established enough. Where is the establishment? I guess the establishment are the banks and McConnell or something. But end of the day, it’s getting very fragmented. I think before, it was more narrow, but it did have a coherence. We have to recapture a coherence on the part of the leadership of America. First of all, we need a leadership, and they got to work together, but it has to be more inclusive than the old leadership, which was limited to white Protestants.

Trump exists because of the alienation from a certain part of the establishment, the status quo. Like it or not, Clinton and Obama and Hillary and the other Democrats are indigestible to 30 to 40 percent of the American people. And on the other hand, Trump is certainly indigestible to the same amount, if not more. And there is our dilemma. We’ve got to find some common pathways without having to go to war.

Harris: Do you regard him as a symptom or a cause?

Brown: A symptom. He’s an effect. No, he’s a causal disease, reinforcing the worst trends. But I think that Trump could not exist unless there was widespread estrangement. How else can you explain the evangelical leaders that condemn abortion, condemn philandering, and demand honesty, taking Trump as their savior? As some of the people say, sent by God to save them from the Obama, Clinton, liberal world. So, somehow, we’ve got to find a way that reconciles people to this late-stage capitalism that we’re in, and this very fragmenting political-cultural landscape. That’s the challenge.

ON HIS CAREER

Harris: Are there things in your career that, in your view, point the way toward that reconciliation that you call for?

Brown: I think, first of all, I have to stay close to our past. We have to know where we come from, who we are. I think that’s important. I think my connection to California’s past is helpful in meeting the chaos of the present. We need somebody that embodies America. People want to make America great again, or compassionate again, or beautiful again, or strong and safe again, whatever it may be. So, we need leaders. Eisenhower is the type of person that comes to mind. Kennedy for the few years, but even he was polarized.

On the one hand, politics is about polarization. It’s about the creation and exploitation of conflict. On the other hand, the governing is the forging of higher unities and an effective consensus—a phrase, which I didn’t like, but was coined during the Kennedy regime, “the vital center.” But it seems something like that may not be possible. Maybe that’s the trouble with the vital center. It’s neither hot nor cold. And as it says in the apocalypse, “Because you are neither hot nor cold, I spit you out of my mouth.”

We need some dynamism. We have a growing inequality, a global financial dependency that is risky, and then we have the threats of climate change and war. Not only nuclear annihilation, but endless warfare. We’ve been in Afghanistan 17 years. And so, how far can a country that’s a trillion dollars in debt every year, with great disunity and contention, purport to rule everywhere from the China Sea to the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Aden?

There’s a big overreach, but you can’t trim your sails or people will think you’re not really up for the American challenge. But if we don’t readjust and realign what our capability is versus what’s sustainable, what’s compatible with other countries, we’re going to run aground.

There are a lot of issues. But the big ones are hard to keep focused, right? You don’t go to Iowa and say, “Now, let’s talk about annihilation.” You wouldn’t talk about climate change. That’s probably going to be a big deal. But you got to make it a big deal.

Harris: We’ve talked about the lessons of your career and your public life, I guess I’d want to ask a question about your personal life. Not many people would, having been governor of California, go to be state party chairman, go to be mayor of Oakland. They’d say, “Well, I’m bigger than that, or I can’t do that.” You did. Why? It seems to me there is some lesson in your career about perseverance. I’m curious what that is about.

Brown: My great-grandfather left Germany, he left Hamburg in 1849 on a ship called “Perseverance.” I think that’s a good sign.

I’m practical. My skills lie in the political domain. So outside of office, I have less to accomplish and less to do. If you were sitting around, and it’s 1993, 1994, and you just lost for president, you’re no longer party chair, what are you going to do next? Well, being mayor of Oakland looks like a good job, and I took it. Then attorney general and governor.

This is what I do. I know how to do this. I learned this. I never saw my father work on a car. I never saw him pick up a hammer. I never saw him pick up a broom. But I did hear him talk. I did see him go to meetings. And so I learned the skills of the political, and that’s why I pursued it.

Harris: “If you were to look back over nearly 50 years of your career, what areas of continuity would you see?”

Brown: I don’t know how we can say that. I’ve been interested in the environment since at least the time I was secretary of state. I was interested in the plight of workers since the time of Cesar Chavez and my acquaintance with the Catholic worker Dorothy Day. I’ve been interested in prison reform since the day I attended a parole hearing in 1960 in San Quentin.

Harris: Would you stay if there were no term limits?

Brown: I don’t think so. I wouldn’t be here without term limits, because it moves everybody along and creates openings. Although, Arnold was probably not going to win. Usually, you run out of gas after eight years. Third terms are not happy. They get you more into trouble because your people begin to take things for granted. You get comfortable with your friends who are trying to influence things. You lose a little bit of your edge. I think it’s hard to keep alert into the ninth and 10th years. I think eight years is probably enough, although I think 16, separated by 28 years, was just about right.

ON TECHNOLOGY

Harris: Do you think American politics is more transparent, more amenable to the citizens expressing their will through democracy now than it was when you got started?

Brown: I find that a difficult question. A citizen expressing their will, that’s assuming there’s a collective will. And what you have is a fragmented—it’s being distorted by the new technologies of media, by all the information flow, by the contending forces, by the lack of any elite agreement on what way to proceed. I mean, there’s a profound disagreement among the well-educated, well-positioned people. And even on the right, you have people who distrust Trump. You have people on the right who distrust our foreign policy. And then on the left side, the Democrats, you have a lot of division. So, it’s hard to say what would be the populist uprising, since the populace is sliced and diced into so many different pieces. It’s fragmentation. And usually in that kind of environment, people look to external threats to mobilize. And that can be very dangerous. Because if we get into combat, it may not be manageable.

Harris: Out of this moment, is there a new politics to be born?

Brown: I hope there is. I don’t know what it’s going to be. … It’s not the deliberations of our Founding Fathers at Independence Hall, which when you go there, it’s shockingly small and intimate, and there you could have the give and take. But today, it’s just digital flows of noise and information that sounds the alarm and scares the hell out of people but doesn’t have a real, clear sustainable path forward.

Harris: Has your own view of that changed? You are governor of California, where many of the big tech companies are located. It seemed to me that 20 years ago, even maybe 10 to 15 years ago, we would have seen technology and the big technology companies as fundamentally benevolent forces, that they were going to make society more transparent; they were going to be instruments to individual empowerment. They may still be some of those things, but I think now there’s much more a sense that they can also be kind of instruments of surveillance, instruments of manipulation and, in the hands of many foreign governments, instruments of oppression.

Brown: And that’s—well, that’s the ebb and the flow. I remember a picture—maybe it was in Time magazine—of Henry Kissinger in the form of Superman, “Super K.” And then a few years later, he became the Lone Ranger. And no one wanted to talk to him. And that’s true of almost everything. Google and Apple and Facebook could do no wrong, and now people in the European Union and Washington, they’re actively starting to attack them. This seems to be part of the distraction of modern society. And there are problems. And I would say the totalitarian capacity is being built up every day and being pushed by the liberals as much as the conservatives.

Harris: What’s an example of that being pushed by the liberals?

Brown: An example would be measuring each individual child from preschool to beyond college, and keeping those as permanent records in the computer, that would measure discipline and mental attributes. Just the general centralization of information, which is being billed as the way to help the poor but which will enable an authoritarian to totally monopolize and control the society.

In fact, we have something called “Cal-PASS,” a state computer, which I kept in check. And I think now it’ll be full throttle to collect as much possible data and measure people in all sorts of ways. I think it’s dangerous. I don’t think it’s very useful, except for academics who have to write theses and do research. We had one on the teachers, which we stopped.

See, the trouble is the computer can collect a lot of information and regurgitate it in many different ways, and people are fascinated by that. Controlling and measuring everything. … We’re all ranked. And who’s it for? Now, if it’s for the academics, they’re relatively harmless. But then it’s going to ultimately be used, at some point, and it has kind of a smell of eugenics, that we want to purify this kind of motley race called human beings and if we can measure all the different attributes, we can then make normative the right path and the right way to be. I think that is the absence of diversity and the absence of freedom.

I would just say, spoken in a somewhat abstract level—it’s not just me who says that. I mean, there are political theorists who notice that the welfare state and the warfare state work hand in hand. They both want to see more power. They want more engineering of things. And, in many ways, that’s mass society, that’s an inevitable trend. But we do need to—we, the government—so that it can function is guard against that. And some of these big issues are not thought about.

Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna contributed research.