Elegy for the New York Left
BROOKS, DAVID
Elegy for the New York Left By David Brooks You can pick out the old lefties hanging around Ruth Messinger's campaign events, with their battered shopping bags from the Strand used bookstore,...
...All these thinkers see the widening gap between rich and poor as the central issue for the next decades...
...This city can have a new spirit...
...If Messinger's biography epitomizes the Upper West Side liberal culture, it also exhibits symptoms of that culture's decay...
...But in fact most New Yorkers have acquired just that sort of sophistication, or pseudo-sophistication...
...In 1968, Messinger joined the staff of a progressive community school and through that became involved in Democratic politics...
...According to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, Americans with college degrees overwhelmingly approve of the globalization of the economy, while those without overwhelmingly disapprove...
...And she is conducting the most lifeless, vacuous Democratic campaign in the city's history, maybe in the history of the world...
...The energy that used to go into political activism now animates upscale preservation groups like Friends of Terra-Cotta and projects like The Central Park Conservancy that upgrade public facilities with private dollars...
...If only she stirred the old passions—talked about the Triangle Shirt Factory fire, La Guardia, the Scottsboro Boys, any remnant at all of the glorious tradition—they'd carry her on their bent backs and only adore her the more for the hopelessness of her cause...
...Only blacks still say they will vote for Messinger, by 4 to 1.) The trouble is that Messinger has no message...
...They've fought the small fights, striving to do everything they can, in perversely admirable liberal fashion, to ensure their property values don't improve...
...Alas, modern liberalism arms her with nothing substantial to say in response to a guy like Rudy Giuliani, who rejects liberal approaches to crime and hacks away at the municipal budget...
...In 1969 the Messingers bought a five-story brownstone at 66 West 87th Street, and it became a gathering place...
...If they did, Ruth Messinger would be running a better campaign...
...Combine this change with the reelection of the Republican mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, the reforming fame of Indianapolis's Republican mayor, Steve Goldsmith, the triumph of conservative Democrats like Philadelphia's Ed Rendell and Chicago's Richie Daley, and you come to a realization: We are witnessing the nadir of urban liberalism...
...The ghettoization of the Left inside academe has also changed the way politics is treated...
...That is to say, they were pinkos...
...Messinger has always epitomized the type...
...You look at one of the old veterans now and you can imagine him early in the morning in his underwear fantasizing about some Clifford Odets moment— a stirring bit of eloquence to galvanize the working classes...
...She has remarried and moved from the group home on 87th Street to a chic apartment on Central Park West with views of the park...
...He became a teacher and a principal...
...You couldn't have imagined such a pathetic Democratic performance even five years ago...
...Some writers assume that when a neighborhood gets rich it necessarily gets more conservative...
...One reason the unions can no longer count on squads of Columbia students to help canvassing is that the kids are more interested in subverting gender than in forming worker-student alliances...
...For a century progressives have dominated the cities, but suddenly no more...
...He's waving a scarred wooden spoon in the air, now imagining some devastating riposte in front of an angry mob of Nazis or landlords (it doesn't matter which), rewarded with an awestruck embrace from Sadie, the anarcho-syndicalist vegetarian from his freshman philosophy class at City College...
...They are always seeing through strategies, deconstructing realities, considering multiple vantage points and multiple meanings...
...Even Mother Jones magazine has come out against affirmative action and for a liberalism based on class differences...
...That attitude isn't compatible with the utopian commitment that prevailed among the New York liberals...
...Elegy for the New York Left By David Brooks You can pick out the old lefties hanging around Ruth Messinger's campaign events, with their battered shopping bags from the Strand used bookstore, their scruffy vinyl shoes, their ragged gray hair, and, most touching of all, their willing expressions...
...After her own stint at Radcliffe and marriage to Eli Messinger, a Harvard doctor, Ruth earned a graduate degree in social work and had three children, whom she was soon herding along to nuclear-freeze, civil-rights, and Vietnam-protest rallies...
...You need a Ford Foundation grant to buy it...
...A large chunk of the liberal intelligentsia is growing disenchanted with the cultural liberalism prevalent in Manhattan...
...Their radicalism is real, it's just aesthetic, sexual, and academic rather than narrowly political...
...No fire...
...Most of Messinger's fellow liberals are trying to avert their eyes...
...If only Messinger would give them one good reason she and not Republican Rudolph Giuliani should be mayor of New York City, they'd haul their weary bones out for a last liberal crusade...
...Moving around in one of these book- and paper-strewn mazes, you realize a core characteristic of the Upper West Side liberal worldview: no aesthetics...
...One party at the house has become an issue in this campaign: an affair in honor of Dacajeweiah, a felon held in connection with the murder of prison guards during the Attica riots...
...She took her oath of office as a member of the New York City Council in the subway station at 72nd Street and Broadway, to demonstrate her solidarity with the people...
...To their credit, they made sacrifices, and they ride gray steel desks as case workers, assistant principals, public defenders, and counselors at the rape crisis center...
...In the '50s, the leftists used to chastise the apolitical Beats for their alienation...
...This liberalism is hardly radical chic...
...The Greenwich Village liberals were always more bohemian, more fun, sexier...
...We have to show them we haven't become so sophisticated to think that we can't change the world," declared a speaker at a Messinger meeting...
...It's not only that she is trailing Giuliani by 23 points in the polls...
...Her public schedule is sometimes down to two or three events a day...
...But now Giuliani is cruising, Messinger is alone, and the liberal interest groups that have dominated discussion in this city for so long have fallen into a sulky and confused silence...
...These people aren't six-figure foundation-grant junkies...
...Even three years back, Manhattanites were horrified by Giuliani's budget cutting, and the local press was overwhelmingly hostile to him...
...The foundering Messinger campaign is a warning to all those writers and strategists plotting a liberal rebirth...
...Pete Seeger lived nearby and performed for the volunteers...
...It came with its own sacred texts (Trotsky, Niebuhr, the old newspaper PM), its saints (Norman Thomas, Eleanor Roosevelt), its martyrs (the Rosenbergs, Bobby), its sects (the Amalgamated Textile Workers' Union, the NAACP), its satans (the profit motive, HUAC), its crusades (disarmament, rent control, a shorter work week, rights for prisoners, deinstitutionalization, desegregation, reseg-regation), and its heaven (the universal brotherhood of man under socialism—oops, liberalism-in-a-hurry...
...Their political culture—now fading like that of some doomed Amazon tribe—was born in the New Deal, in the cluttered old apartment buildings along Broadway, Amsterdam Avenue, and Riverside Drive...
...Thus has Ruth Messinger's class leftism given way to today's identity leftism...
...Between 1969 and 1986— that is to say, between the ages of 29 and 46— Messinger slept on a mattress on a bedroom floor, practicing an asceticism common among activists of various stripes...
...That isn't the whole truth...
...The golden decade for the Upper West Side liberals was the 1930s, not the 1960s...
...Also, today's professors adopt a cool pose...
...For nearly two decades, Messinger has been New York's leading progressive, a member of the city council and Manhattan's borough president...
...Under the best of circumstances, it would be tough to beat a successful mayor like Giuliani, but in post-liberal New York, the Democrats can't even put forward a respectable case...
...Stanley Greenberg and Theda Skocpol have edited an anthology that also makes the case for the primacy of economics and politics over culture...
...It's not just that she is losing among women, Jews, Hispanics, and registered Democrats, or even that she may be beaten in her own borough and her own neighborhood, the Upper West Side...
...For them, liberalism wasn't just a political team, it was a secular religion...
...The old West Siders, still on the way up, aspired to complications...
...Life in the brownstone was governed by collective arrangements, with families sharing kitchen duties and expenses, even clothing...
...A conservative is still a rarity in Manhattan, especially on the West Side...
...When she was inseminated, she and her partner were careful to secure sperm from a black man so "their" child, like their relationship, would be biracial...
...Upper West Side liberalism was for plodding, earnest people—social workers, municipal workers, and schoolteachers...
...her...
...People moved in and out, crashed for days or months on end, their stays disturbed only by the continual round of peace and justice meetings...
...To get from the bedroom to the bathroom, you always have to go through the kitchen...
...Just a few of the old warriors are still turning out...
...Fred Siegel's superb new book on urban politics is called The Future Once Happened Here, a phrase that captures the old urban liberals' sense of themselves as actors in a world-historical drama...
...Over the past quarter-century, their politics has been unglamorous street-level politics...
...There are no posters around town, no massive rallies, few campaign commercials—this in a city that is 5 to 1 Democratic...
...One year she went upstate to do menial chores at a settlement house...
...Few Manhattanites would admit that the conservatives were right all along about crime, welfare, and the strangling effect of big government...
...That's why they behaved so pompously, ending friendships over tiny doctrinal disputes, sitting through long, contentious meetings...
...Now this smart, veteran pol is fulfilling her lifelong dream of running for mayor...
...These people couldn't care less about beauty and splendor, much less neatness...
...New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has written her off...
...New York magazine's columnist Michael Tomasky wonders sadly what happened to her...
...Many recognize the limits of identity politics...
...The Upper West Side has become an affluent, gentri-fied, yuppified place...
...Barney Greengrass the Sturgeon King is still selling his fish over on Amsterdam, but most of the other neighborhood establishments have been turned into expensive brunch places dressed up as country kitchens for well-heeled lawyers longing to simplify their lives...
...Even small rifts, it was thought, would have large consequences when the Left took control...
...There's one around now called Patheticism...
...She and her husband divorced (he became a lecturer at the New York Marxist School), and in the 1980s she became the liberal foil to centrist Democratic mayor Ed Koch, then in the 1990s to Giuliani...
...And in her vapidity can be discerned the last hurrah of a certain sort of liberalism...
...Michael Tomasky of New York has written a book called Left for Dead, arguing for a return to class liberalism as opposed to identity liberalism...
...If income inequality truly had resonance with people, more New Yorkers would be responding to the class-warfare language Messinger does use...
...In the first place, Dissent, the magazine of the leftie intelligentsia, is now $7.50 an issue...
...Fittingly, Messinger's daughter is a lesbian public-health worker living with a black woman...
...And there's some evidence that they can get mileage out of it...
...They've fought gentrification at every step, fearing that it might hurt the underprivileged, and if you walk around New York with them, they will show you the improvements they opposed, the new buildings, the Barnes and Noble, the Starbucks...
...A neighborhood once enthralled by Odets's "Waiting for Lefty" is now waiting for latte at coffee bars where the service is invariably slow...
...These are oddly shaped apartments...
...They are tiny and boring, and few TV cameras or reporters follow David Brooks is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard...
...They had the future...
...She's not so inept that she wouldn't pick up strong arguments if they were lying around...
...Artists used to belong to a popular front in the class struggle, but now their interests are more elevated and they are shock troops defending ever more obscure artistic sects...
...It's just that they are cultural liberals, so the books they pick up have titles like Representations of Transgender Orgasmic Desire in Pre-war Berlin...
...They are Upper West Side liberals, like her...
...In some ways, the people you see browsing at the neighborhood Zabar's and at Labyrinth Books are more liberal than their forebears, including Messinger...
...They were the sort of people who are described in New York Times obits as "active in social causes...
...Ruth was raised singing the left-wing anthems, and she was sent to socially enlightened summer camps...
...The mid-century liberals didn't need aesthetics...
...David Dinkins was still in City Hall, Mario Cuomo was still vaguely a presidential possibility, and the city was still a liberal holdout...
...There are still plenty of lefties on the West Side...
...But she doesn't...
...Today, that feeling has evaporated...
...People who seemed to reproduce asexually, possibly by signing petitions...
...In your mind's eye, he's standing by the gas stove pouring a can of tomato soup into a steel saucepan, reliving the glorious day a few decades ago when he gave the keynote speech at the Society of Jewish Atheists convention...
...That's what this election's all about," she declares at her appearances, sounding like any other packaged politician...
...Rising in good immigrant fashion, Messinger's father went to Harvard and became a successful accountant, and her mother was involved in the American Labor party...
...The problem is that liberals have no answer to the widening inequality of income...
...Radical parents, lesbian children...
...Instead, the majority has become apolitical...
...Her grandfather went to City College, the then-free and fiercely competitive school in upper Manhattan...
...The Beats won, and the aesthetic sensibility has overwhelmed the earnest sensibility...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 8
