California Dreamin': Steve Hilton is back
David Cameron's former barefoot ideas guru thinks California is falling apart, and has created Golden Together, a policy and advocacy body, to save his adopted home
Full disclosure: I develop a Commissioner Dreyfus-style tic when politicians and other public figures emphasise that they are “non-partisan”, interested in “practical” or “common sense” solutions and are dedicated to pursuing “broad support across the political spectrum”. I touched on this idea in my denunciation of citizens’ assemblies in February: it’s all tied up in what I think of the centrist fallacy, this supposition that any public policy problem is soluble if you can just get enough sensible, reasonable, decent people around a table and talk it through.
That seems to be self-evidently nonsense. In politics, you will often reach a point where people disagree irreconcilably for absolutely respectable intellectual reasons, stemming from different conceptions of how society should work. If we think back to the early 1980s, for example, it would have been ridiculous to suggest that if Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot would just sit down and thrash things out they could come up with a plan for government, and neither of them would have given the idea a moment’s consideration. Each had a distinct Weltanschauung—to use one of my favourite German loan-words—and those were put before the electorate (who made a fairly clear choice).
I place a lot of the blame for the centrist fallacy at the feet of Sir Tony Blair. After becoming leader of his party in 1994, he sought to present himself as post-ideological, framing arguments over ideas as not only abstruse but limited and even somehow dishonest. This was encapsulated in Labour’s 1997 general election manifesto, which boasted that “New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole”. That it superficially inclusive, but if you flip it over, it’s equally possible to read it as saying that if you don’t agree with New Labour, you are not acting in the interests of “the British people as a whole”. You are almost, implicitly, a traitor.
I say all this for a reason, and as a preface. During an internet peregrination, I came across an organisation of which I had not previously been aware, Golden Together. I daren’t even guess what you’re thinking such a body might be, but it is in fact an advocacy group and policy forum headed by Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s former director of strategy, and is concerned that the State of California—where Hilton has lived since leaving Downing Street in 2012—is facing a major crisis.
California is now as famous for dystopian scenes of public squalor as for our magnificent landscapes. Upward mobility—the foundation of the California Dream—is under threat as it becomes increasingly difficult to get on the housing ladder, to afford the basics of the good life. Crime is up. The quality of life is down. In 2022, for the first time in our state’s history, California lost representation in the Congress thanks to the exodus of people and businesses to other states.
Golden Together is a vehicle for developing positive policies to drive California’s recovery: as its website declares, “We need to turn things around. Together.” It advertises itself proudly as “non-partisan, and open to everyone who wants to help restore the California Dream” and will propose “practical policy ideas to help solve California’s problems”.
This is catnip to a certain section of the American electorate. Political parties in the United States have always been extremely broad churches with fluid boundaries and regular exchanges of members. Donald Trump, for example, was a registered Republican from 1987 to 1999, a member of the Independence Party from 1999 to 2001, a Democrat from 2001 to 2009, a Republican again from 2009 to 2011, unaffiliated between 2011 and 2012, and then returned again to the GOP which he now effectively dominates.
Moreover, bipartisanship is held by many Americans to be a signal of virtue, wisdom and moderation, and it is relatively common for presidents to appoint a handful of figures from the other party (and none) to positions in government, often senior ones. John Connally, Democratic governor of Texas from 1963 to 1969 (and in the same car as John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated) but became President Nixon’s secretary of the Treasury in 1971; James Schlesinger was secretary of defense for Nixon and Ford from 1973 to 1975 then served as secretary of energy under Carter in 1977-79; Jeane Kirkpatrick was a close adviser to Democratic senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson but was appointed permanent representative to the United Nations by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1981; William Cohen, a Republican senator from Maine, served as secretary of defense for President Clinton’s first term (1997-2001).
Although the two major parties in the United States have become more starkly divided and polarised over the past 15 years, at the same time those parties, like all political institutions, have declined in public esteem. This has created a substantial appetite for bipartisan and non-traditional approaches to public policy, of which, in a strange sense, Trump was a beneficiary when he snatched the Republican nomination for president in 2016. It also explains some of the appeal of the independent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr in the current election.
Golden Together’s advisory board is a mixed ideological bag. There is a onetime Republican congresswoman, a fellow of the Hoover Institution who has worked on three Republican presidential campaigns, a former Democratic leader of the California State Senate and a private equity specialist who identifies as a Libertarian. And then there is Hilton himself.
Steve Hilton is a vastly complex and often caricatured man. It sometimes seems as if he has been assembled from a novelist’s sketches of several different characters: the son of impoverished Hungarian immigrants to Britain who had fled during the revolution of 1956; an Oxford PPE graduate who went to work in Conservative Central Office after his degree; an unsuccessful applicant for a parliamentary candidacy, losing out in Surrey Heath to Michael Gove in 2005; an iconoclastic, off-beat and ambitious policy thinker who often roamed office buildings barefoot and was satirised in The Thick of It; a Silicon Valley tech start-up founder; the host of a weekly Fox News current affairs show; a Covid-19 conspiracy theorist.
This interview by Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian in 2017 captures some of Hilton’s oddness and apparent contradictions but hints at a kind of appealing energy and restless curiosity. Even in 2017, not owning a mobile phone was both unusual and its own statement of intent: Hilton had disposed of his five years previously. He described his political outlook in terms which were hard to fathom. “It’s hard to pin me down because I’m a bit of Bernie Sanders, a bit of Rand Paul, bit of John Kasich,” he explained, noting that he had supported Donald Trump in 2016 simply because he was the candidate most likely to “shake things up”. The label he had come to prefer by then was “populist”, rarer in 2017 than now and perhaps less derogatory.
I confess to an instinctive suspicion of people who loudly proclaim that they do not fit into a conventional political matrix. It’s not that I doubt that some people do find themselves in such a predicament, but rather that I suspect such protestations of being veiled boasts of sophistication and individuality. It’s true that I have an innate liking and respect for institutions, into which category political parties fall, and so I probably expect to have to squeeze myself into an ideological space without too much complaint. But I do also believe, as I wrote in The Critic earlier this year, that parties are and should be broad churches, familial coalitions within which there can be considerable divergence of thought.
At the same time, I recognise that membership of political parties in the United Kingdom is a rarer choice now than it was in the immediate post-war period: the Labour Party has more than halved in size, from over a million members in the early 1950s to around 366,000 today; the Conservatives, who could muster a staggering 2.8 million members in 1953, now only comprise around 170,000 people; the Liberal Party had a quarter of a million members in the 1950s but their successor, the Liberal Democrats, are today under 100,000.
The United States cannot be judged by the same metric. Its voter registration process gives people registering for the first time the opportunity (though not an obligation) to declare their allegiance as Republicans or Democrats, so political analysts in America will tended to think in terms of “registered voters”—usually in a trifecta of Republicans, Democrats and independents—rather than active party membership. (Conversely, turnout at UK general elections is considerably higher than even in US presidential polls.) In 2022, there were 47 million registered Democrats and 36 million registered Republicans. No other party label attracts even close to a million adherents.
However, it is clear that there is an opportunity in the current American political climate for bodies other than the two major parties to attract substantial support at least in intellectual and financial terms. Although the system for electing a president still heavily favours the bipartite status quo, Kennedy—a strange, contradictory and rather unsettling man—has certainly established himself as a clear voice in the media ecosystem; he has a higher profile than any third-party or independent candidate since Ross Perot, the Texan billionaire who won nearly 20 million votes as an independent in 1992 and eight million under the Reform Party’s banner in 1996. Kennedy is static in the opinion polls at about 10 per cent but in January produced an ingenious argument for why it would be an error for him to drop out of the race and President Biden should instead withdraw in his favour. Unlike Donald Trump and Joe Biden, he has a positive net favourability rating, albeit of only +2.
I have a sense—this is only an impression rather than painstakingly researched—that we have reached a period in politics and public life in which questions are being asked about policies, practices and institutions across the board, often with a nagging feeling that things are no longer working as they should. At the same time, I think we are only in the very foothills of finding answers to those questions.
While the Conservative government seems, to judge by the opinion polls, to be reaching its natural conclusion, the Labour Party is not really offering profound and radical change of a structural or systemic nature. It has talked up the difference of the approach it plans, with proposed bodies like Great British Energy and a national wealth fund, the renationalisation of large parts of the rail network and a painstaking analysis of constitutional reform authored by Gordon Brown. But the “missions” which Sir Keir Starmer so loudly trumpets are couched in very generalised terms of warm aspiration without suggesting a major departure from how the United Kingdom is currently governed.
This (perhaps over-rehearsed) context is why Golden Together piqued my interest. Steve Hilton is absolutely not a non-partisan actor, although his wild spectrum of ideological positions sometimes makes him seem as good as one, but it seems to me at least possible that he is trying to break the mould by addressing public policy challenges in a different way. Of course, there are several factors particular to California which have to be kept in mind.
Firstly, it is huge: with nearly 39 million residents, it would be 37th biggest country in the world if it were independent, fewer than two million behind Canada and larger than—for example—Ukraine, Malaysia, Australia and Saudi Arabia. It is by a long way the biggest state in the Union, more than 10 million souls larger than Texas. It contains two of the five largest “primary statistical areas” in the US: Los Angeles-Long Beach, more than 18 million people, and San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, with nearly 10 million.
California is very diverse in terms of race. The three largest groups are Hispanic (40 per cent), white (35 per cent) and Asian (15 per cent), but change has come at the state fast: in 1980, more than three-quarters of Californians were white, and that was still true only 15 years ago, in 2010. The massive and sudden shift has been in the population of those identifying as “other race” or “two or more races”. There are more than 200 languages spoken and read, and Spanish is treated as California’s “alternative” language, spoken by almost one in three residents.
Politically, of course, it has the largest congressional delegation in the United States (two senators and 54 members of the House of Representatives) and 54 of the 538 votes in the Electoral College. It leans heavily towards the Democratic Party, and no Republican president has carried the state since George H.W. Bush in 1988 (although between 1952 and 1988 the only Democratic president to win California was Lyndon Johnson in 1964). It is 30 years since the state returned a Republican senator, and it is currently represented in the House by 40 Democrats and 11 Republicans (the 20th district has been vacant since former speaker Kevin McCarthy stepped down at the end of last year). Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one.
This is, therefore, a left-leaning state. When we think about the approach and potential influence of Golden Together, we need to balance that preponderant ideological tilt against Steve Hilton’s own ideological kaleidoscope. That said, so far Golden Together has produced policy papers on three areas: wildfire management, universal housing affordability and the business climate. Those are perhaps revealing choices, areas in which people from across the spectrum might have some stake and some vested interests.
What drives Hilton? His explanation is that he wants to return to the arena of doing rather than watching and commentating: last June, he told news website Semafor:
I’m excited to get back into the world of policy and ideas as a participant and not just a commentator. I love California, it’s an amazing place, but everyone can see that we have enormous problems and I think we’re in need of some fresh, creative thinking about how to solve them.
In an op-ed for Fox News, Hilton (cognisant of his likely audience, of course) framed the challenges in populist-friendly terms, identifying “insane bureaucracy, extreme environmentalism and the iron grip of labor unions”. And he invoked a version of the ratchet effect which preoccupied Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph, warning “this destructive dynamic will continue unless we advance a positive alternative… there is no check on the leftward drift”. But he was keen to emphasise the organisation’s political neutrality.
Golden Together is nonpartisan: this is about policy, not politics. We’ll be working on a wide range of issues: affordable homes for everyone; safe communities; boosting manufacturing jobs and trade skills; reliable, affordable energy and water; supporting small business; giving every child the best start in life… the idea is to figure out commonsense solutions that can win support across the political spectrum.
Inevitably, some have posited the idea that Hilton has more specific personal ambitions. He has been an outspoken and persistent critic of the state’s governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, and it has been noted that Newsom’s predecessor but one was, like Hilton, born outside the United States: Hollywood legend Arnold Schwarzenegger ran California from 2003 to 2011. That said, Schwarzenegger was reckoned to have been a relatively moderate and consensual figure, a Republican but not an extremist, but a governor who had little lasting impact on the way California was administered. One academic concluded “he is not divisive nor scandal plagued, but he’s generally fallen short of changing the political culture of Sacramento and the policy course of the state”.
One would expect that Hilton would be significantly less consensual and more willing to push boundaries and topple idols. His most obvious path to office would be to harness the power of right-wing disaffection, the sense of unhappiness and despair that Donald Trump has used to such effect. Whether he would make more of an impact than Schwarzenegger in terms of delivery and administration is hard to say: Hilton has never held an executive position in the public sector. Running Crowdpac from 2014 to 2018 was hardly an exercise is managing a formidable bureaucracy. In his recent memoir, Politics on the Edge, former cabinet minister Rory Stewart drew a vivid sketch of Hilton at work in Downing Street.
He told me rapidly that he wanted to “blow up the Foreign Office”, which he thought was useless, and get rid of the ambassadors. Did I agree? As I began to try to frame what I thought worked and didn’t work about the Foreign Office, he was on to a discussion about technology and the European Union. Almost everything I said seemed to excite him. He would nod furiously or express surprise and pause in apparent wonder at things I would have guessed he had already considered. Later I saw him on the floor, staring at a map, saying: “Fuck me, look how big Scotland is. This is just fucking mad, man”.
There is a place for this kind of frenetic, free-associating mind in the formulation of policy. I am much less certain that the conclusions it suggests about Hilton would give much reason to think he might successfully govern a state of nearly 40 million people. But then, stranger things have happened.
I find Golden Together interesting because it is a novel approach, something perhaps more than simply a think tank or an advocacy group, but avowedly less than a political party: the United States’ political climate is unwelcoming to new parties and has been dominated by the Republicans and the Democrats since the GOP shouldered the Whigs aside for the runner-up spot in the presidential election of 1856. It is also to be distinguished from groups like UKIP and the Brexit Party/Reform UK in this country. They have sought power, or at least influence, through traditional electoral means, taking on the established parties on their ow ground rather than seeking new methods of engagement.
The next gubernatorial election in California is not until November 2026. Newsom is ineligible for re-election, and the absence of an incumbent is always a potential agent of change. Making predictions more than two years out, however, is only for the bold or foolhardy. But if there were a lesson to draw from this, a “take away” in the horrible phrase, it would be this: electorates are discontent and disillusioned, which means they are open to new ideas. At the same time, economic conditions, technological progress, demography and environmental change are combining to put pressure on our existing architecture of administration which, in some cases and some places, it may not be able to withstand. There will be innovators from across the political spectrum, and, as is always the case with change, some will succeed while most fail. But Golden Together at least seems interesting, and Steve Hilton is reliably good value. It is worth making a mental note to monitor its progress as we roll through this year and the next.
Bipartisanship is to some extent forced on politicians by the American political system if they want to get anything done, that is. The 60 vote closure rule in the Senate means that legislation (other than purely financial legislation) requires some degree of bipartisan support to pass. Is this better or worse than the British system where major and controversial legislation can be passed by a narrow majority in the House of Commons which doesn't represent a majority in the country, and the House of Lords are then compelled to acquiesce in it?
Any one who helped that smug oaf when in gvt should be instantly and irrevocably barred from all forms public life bar charity work for life for crimes against the people.