Notes from the Bay Area

 
I spent much of last week in San Francisco and Palo Alto, giving talks to various audiences and meeting with scholars and fellows at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Here are a few takeaways.
 
1. Bay Area residents don’t have a great sense of humor about the Golden State Warriors’ collapse after leading 3-1 in the NBA Finals. Someone once told me that it’s a good idea, when giving talks, to establish a rapport with the audience by mentioning something of local interest. So last week I began my remarks by offering condolences for the Warriors’ recent loss. Then, figuring that of course people would value my deep analysis and not just my kind sentiments, I went into some detail reviewing the final three games of the series, paying tribute, of course, to the achievements of LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. And then, when the audience started good-naturedly murmuring, not to say booing, I’d threaten to throw my mouthpiece into the crowd, saying that I’d gathered that was a folk custom of the Bay Area. So the speeches went great!
 
2. Luckily, they’re very forgiving in Northern California (something they learn in their yoga classes), and so the speeches actually went fine. At the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, I engaged in a broad-ranging conversation on American and world politics, moderated by Kori Schake of the Hoover Institution, which–if you have an hour to kill–you can listen to the audio here or even watch the video here. The highlights of the Commonwealth Club visit, though, were several interesting conversations with various attendees, including one with a gentleman who introduced himself as a TWS subscriber and announced that he’d read all 1,000 issues of The Weekly Standard. I told him that really was impressive, somehow more so than merely working on the first 1,000 issues, as several of my colleagues and I have, and that he deserved some kind of medal. He agreed.
 
3. Later in the week I spoke at a lovely San Francisco residence, at an event co-sponsored by Hoover and the Lincoln Club of Northern California. The attendees were conservatives (more or less) under about 45, many working in tech, as you’d expect in that area. Despite their almost uniform distaste for Donald Trump, and their concern about what his candidacy might do to the future of the GOP and conservatism, they were pretty optimistic about the conservative future–even in the Bay Area!–and their intelligence and energy left me encouraged. It really is a best-of-times, worst-of-times situation: On the one hand Trump is a disaster. On the other, the overreach of the PC left, the failure of liberal big-government policies, and the emergence of many attractive young conservative political leaders mean that conservative opportunities are in some ways very great.
 
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