Kate Brown's glasses

A pictorial chronology of courage and self-realization

A liberal glasses revolution decades in the making.

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Life is a journey and Oregon Governor Kate Brown has been on a significant eyewear journey that now approaches, if not defines, the apex of liberal glasses. Below, we will first seek to define the term “liberal glasses,” and, second, follow Kate Brown on her path to those beauties in the photo above.

Liberal glasses defined

I notice (my wife would say obsess about) weird things. There’s my ongoing fascination with Toyota Priuses, the people who drive them, and the speed, or, more often, the lack of speed, with which they drive them.

There’s the frequency with which I think of the older woman - an exceptionally nice older woman - who used to live in our neighborhood and drove around with a life-size decal of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (may she rest in peace) affixed to the rear passenger window of her Audi station wagon, as though the nice older woman was perpetually “Driving Miss Ginsburg.”

And then there’s the glasses, or really a particular style of glasses, by which I mean eyeglasses. I refer here to liberal glasses. Oh, you don’t call them that? How not weird of you. Well, I do, and apparently others do as well. That repository of all that’s valuable in Western Civilization, Urban Dictionary, defines “liberal glasses” thus:

Liberal glasses are the dark and thick-rimmed glasses, typically square in shape, favored by liberals. They are worn in an attempt to appear intellectually superior. Also called "hipster glasses." It is a safe bet that when somebody wears them, they ascribe to a left-leaning ideology. The majority of people who wear liberal glasses are also white.

Can’t wait for the ads I’ll be served thanks to that Google search. Anyway, I’m not sure about the square part or the white part,

but you get the idea. Liberal glasses are prominent, defining accessories. No wire-rimmed, shrinking violets of face-wear, liberal glasses are, as they say, loud and proud.

These,

these (especially in United Nations blue),

and these are liberal glasses,

but definitely not these.

The wearing by some non-liberals of liberal glasses

may be causing a backlash among some liberals,

but any such trend is, as yet, ill-defined (e.g., is there a difference between progressive glasses and liberal glasses?) and outside the scope of this study. We have more important matters to which to attend.

On Kate Brown’s Glasses

Oregon Governor Kate Brown has spent her political career playing catchup in the liberal coastal elite eyewear game. She grew up in Minnesota (the accent is noticeable when she says “mask,” which is, um, not infrequently), which is neither coastal nor known for its coffee shops, which are important - some say essential - incubators of liberal glasses culture. She originally became governor in 2015, when, as Secretary of State, she succeeded to the governorship when forever-Governor John Kitzhaber resigned in the face of an ethics investigation. As such, she has not participated in an open Democratic gubernatorial primary that would have forced her to tack left with her eyewear to compete with the likes of Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek, who for all I know was born wearing liberal glasses.

Kate Brown, to her credit, has largely overcome these obstacles, as we shall see. To truly appreciate where she is with her eyewear today, we must first acknowledge where she started in her journey.

1993

Bill Clinton had, the year before, wrested control of the Democratic Party from the liberals, and charted a more moderate, if handsy, course for the party. Brown’s understated eyewear fits the times. They say, “I’m not saying the era of big government is over, but I’m not saying it’s not over.”

1998

A lot’s changed in five years. Brown is now Oregon Senate Majority Leader and is sporting a new look, without any glasses at all. Indeed, for over a decade, Brown would be frequently if not always photographed without glasses.

While this might seem a setback, as we shall see, Brown appears to have recognized the error of her previous Republican-passable glasses and pressed the reset button. Hard. She needed a fresh canvas with which to work and this time in the glasses-free wilderness would pay big dividends in the future.

2012

Here we go. These are surely not liberal glasses, but they’re glasses. Brown is now Secretary of State, Barack Obama is about to win his second term as president, and this barely-there number whispers, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

2013

Now things are getting interesting. Brown eschews the understated glasses of a year prior and announces she means business with these vaguely retro specs. The wide lenses, slightly blue color and prominent fasteners at the edges announce an embrace of eyewear something to be celebrated, not minimized. There is a “I may look like a 1960s librarian but that makes sense because I’m the Secretary of State, which is kind of like being the librarian for all of Oregon.”

An explicitly retro look has served as a gateway to truly liberal glasses for many. As we shall see, they served this function admirably for Brown.

2016

Brown, now governor, takes an important step from her prior, retro style to a simpler and more modern look. These glasses do not hark back to an earlier era - they stand on their own as a forward-looking fashion accessory. They are prominent but lacking in unnecessary adornment. There is nothing about these glasses to stand between Brown and identifying and ferreting out injustices like businesses greedily failing to adequately fund the state government.

As a bonus, Washington Governor Jay Inslee appears on the right side of the photo which is fitting because his glasses simply don’t measure up. He gets points for their unusually narrow shape, but he looks like he’d be at home in one of those greedy corporate boardrooms. He looks like Rick Perry but with more conservative glasses, which, I mean, come on.

2020

The glasses aren’t what first strikes the viewer of this photograph, but we’re not here to talk about dubious mask decisions. Here we return to a retro look, but a different retro look. In the first year of the pandemic, these art deco-ish glasses remind one of the Empire State Building and thus New York and thus Andrew Cuomo (before, you know, all the stuff) and definitely not Ron DeSantis. Somehow, at least in context with the mask, the glasses say, “In this state, we recognize freedom for what it is: an f-word.”

2021

Now these, these, are liberal glasses. Where does one start? As hexagons (hexagons!) they reject the patriarchal and false confinement to round or square. The colors, a dark red coupled with a lighter red or perhaps pink, mix aggressiveness with caring, as though saying to Republicans, “I can go toe-to-toe with you on red but also have a softer, caring side which you obviously don’t.”

The glasses express two important things at once:

1. Omicron, I’m ready for you. By the time you show up in Oregon I will have locked the place down so tightly dogs would be required to show proof of vaccinations to go to a dog park if their owners weren’t forbidden from leaving the house to take them to the dog park; and,

2. I’m open to either a late-first-term Biden administration appointment or service on the board of a non-profit fighting against the disproportionate impact of climate change on historically under-served populations of unionized public sector employees because, you know, I’m term-limited here.

Liberal glasses will never be the same after this. It took decades, but Brown has redefined the category. Don’t ever let anyone tell you she’s not a transformational leader.