Who Rules New York Today?
Chapin, Jim
New York City politics are at a low point. The city that pioneered in municipal unionism, public hospitals, and a university system, the city that seemed to be a "social democratic bastion" in a...
...in 1981...
...When, in the past, New York City Republicans created a majority by joining with portions of the center and left, in every case pressure from conservative voters was enough to cause them to dismantle the coalition...
...Perhaps this was "no accident," but that such rhetoric was not necessary is suggested by the ability of Cuomo to ignore minorities both in appointments and in policy without creating any serious opposition to himself in New York City...
...Koch is weakest at the center of the Democratic coalition and stronger as you move away from that center...
...The left in New York had major influence in the past because it could attract allies (with rather different goals) from the top of the society...
...No wonder the 1985 mayoral election and the 1986 state election saw the lowest turnouts in history...
...What really made Koch's conservative stance popular was his antiunionism, fueled by the strikes of the Lindsay years and the belief that high wages for city employees were part of the reason for the city's economic crisis...
...Why was Cuomo's 1982 victory over Lew Lehrman probably aided privately in the voting booth by conservative Republican leaders Warren Anderson, John Calandra, and John Marchi...
...Some are even regressive...
...Crises in such agencies as the Human Resources Administration reflect the impact of disastrous Reagan cutbacks rather than traditional Tammany-style corruption...
...A large black turnout is unlikely to lead to a black FALL • 1987 477 A CITY DIVIDED mayor soon, for the simple reason that there is a general election...
...The most recent ethnic change is going in a different direction: the fastest-growing groups are Russian Jews, Portuguese, Greeks, nonPuerto Rican Hispanics, and Asians...
...In almost every other state in the 1890s the major parties joined together to pass anticoalition laws so as to wipe out the Populists (by not allowing joint endorsements of the same candidate...
...We have had other low points...
...They have supported the same candidates for president...
...There are, however, a number of weaknesses in the argument...
...Perhaps the most serious criticism to be made of Koch is that his years as mayor have resulted in such sharply reduced expectations with regard to political life that Cuomo's undistinguished performance as governor can be excused on the grounds that at least he isn't aggravating race problems...
...As television turns politics into marketing and show, politics becomes another sport, and even political leaders imitate the television commentators by "responding" to events outside their scope...
...That such a drive can be found among today's yuppies may be doubted...
...He is also weakest among the two ends of the Democratic party: for instance in 1982 Cuomo beat him in Staten Island and Manhattan...
...Both explanations contain a measure of truth...
...Yet a fiscal crisis might just as well have energized our politics as dampened it...
...Unfortunately, the exciting discoveries of personal corruption have diverted attention from the real scandal of recent years...
...Most of them are well to the right of the older "new groups" of Puerto Ricans and blacks, but hardly to be counted as firm adherents of the national, let alone the local, Republican party...
...As for the 1977 election, the voters were offered a wide array of choices and chose Koch...
...If we are to learn seriously from past coalitions, then alliances with new ethnic groups and "good government" types are both necessary...
...The agenda for such a mayor will have to be built in the experience of the newest ethnic groups, in the civic associations, and by journalists...
...The recent decline of political life in New York City has several causes, some of them contradictory...
...What of the minor parties...
...But now, with Jews triumphant in the city and with the media supporting even an Al D'Amato against a Mark Green (something impossible to imagine a decade or two ago), the reformers find themselves all but helpless...
...That Koch seems to have been expressing personal biases rather than engaging in political opportunism makes his behavior even more remarkable...
...Business, labor, and even (or especially) the media all now support incumbents...
...By now the Liberal and Conservative parties survive only as organs of patronage and, occasionally, political blackmail...
...In the five elections its line for mayor has averaged 11 percent of the vote, with a high of 15 percent (for Ed Koch...
...And when these coalitions won, it was always the conservative part that defected first...
...The American Labor party and its fratricidal sibling, the Liberal party, were Jewish liberal parties as against the Catholic Democrats who were not liberal enough...
...Once there were many competing sources of political news, all urging upon the voters the importance of the political process...
...Now there are relatively few sources of such news, and most of them treat politics with a kind of "objective" contempt...
...Three of the leading institutions of liberalism in 1978 (New York Americans for Democratic Action, New York State New Democratic Coalition, New York Civil Liberties Union) were led by people who had 476 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED supported him in 1977, yet he went out of his way to attack them (despite the fact that, for example, he received 92 percent of the New Democratic Coalition's delegate vote in his general election race against Cuomo and played a major role in the 1978 NDC convention's endorsement of Hugh Carey for reelection...
...Why have the two parties cooperated in maintaining the gerrymandering that keeps the State Senate Republican and the State Assembly Democratic...
...Koch's greatest strength in 1989 as in 1985 will be the divisions among his opponents...
...At present, liberal critics see New York as a once-liberal city ruled by a new conservative alliance...
...now the city has a single unified leadership resulting from a process that incorporates in the same administration both civic reform and "regular" corruption...
...The tendency of the Koch administration to let entrepreneurs carry on needed building projects in return for state favors suggests that local government is "progressing" backward to a precapitalist condition: one waits for the salt monopoly or tax farming...
...Not the old-line Democratic machine but professionals like Deputy Mayors Nat Leventhal, Bobby Wagner, Jr., Stanley Brezenoff, and Alair Townsend have played major parts in the Koch administration...
...similarly, banks could dictate a solution to a city fiscal crisis in 1933, but by 1975 saving the city required the state and the pension funds...
...By contrast, the corruption recently uncovered in the "regular" machine organizations is nothing new, except, in a few cases, for its remarkable stupidity—which may itself reflect the greater difficulty the "regulars" have had in gaining access to the rich founts of cash legally available to real estate entrepreneurs...
...It has been a characteristic of state and municipal politics that ethnicity has overlapped with class but has been more important than class...
...The 1920s and the 1950s, decades when conservative Republicans administered the nation, were also periods when New York Democrats seemed unchallenged and therefore prone to abuses unchecked by constructive opposition...
...And as office holders increasingly are people recently elected as reformers, it becomes harder and harder to get younger activists aroused or involved...
...This is not to say that the new minorities will not affect local elections, just that there is at present no basis to assume a single citywide majority...
...At present almost all the leading Democrats in office are corporate liberals with an austerity streak...
...The alternative is always assumed to be abandonment of the city...
...Liberals have given two contradictory explanations for Koch's win: the death penalty and deals with the machine...
...And Democratic majorities did not mean that there were no opposition parties, as is largely the case today...
...Conservative ethnic bastions like Howard Beach have never been the core of Koch's support (in fact Howard Beach voted for Cuomo over Koch, by two to one, four times...
...Both these men seem obscurely wounded, and therefore fascinate media observers...
...The truly serious problem of the Koch years has been the ascendancy of large-scale "honest graft" tied to real estate, and the extent to which that ascendancy is now taken for granted...
...Defeats of Tammany Hall came from coalitions of left and right: conservative Democratic regimes were periodically thrown out by "fusion" "top-bottom" coalitions of patrician reformers and proletarians that look exclusively left-wing only if you cover one eye...
...Liberal memories of Fiorello LaGuardia focus on the support he received from the American Labor party and his strong pro-union and New Deal policies, but omit his close ties to bankers and such Republican patrons as Samuel Seabury and Robert Moses...
...Today there is no evidence that the conservative Republicans even entertain such a possibility...
...The reformers discover, as well, that their earlier supporters can offer them little help in running the government, while the "regulars" can "fix" things and introduce them to important FALL • 1987 • 473 A CITY DIVIDED contacts...
...It is assumed that the public interest can be secured only by trade-offs with private interests that present New Yorkers with impossible policy choices—mammoth boondoggle projects in exchange for desperately needed subway station renovations and the ever-fading promise of an enhanced tax base...
...In fact, many of the key figures in the Koch administration come from the Lindsay administration...
...They took their strength from an unusual feature of New York State election law that allowed minor parties to endorse the same candidates as major parties...
...Electorally Koch comes from the right wing of reform, which can be traced in New York City mayoral primaries from James Scheuer in 1969 to Al Blumenthal in 1973 to Koch in 1977, with its strongest appeal in just those precincts — Riverdale, Brooklyn Heights, Forest Hills, and above all, the East Side of Manhattan—that used to be the bastions of Fusionism and Republicanism...
...since the 1981 primary elections, blacks have been steadier primary voters than whites...
...Both lost their raison d'être when the major parties were taken over by ideological/ ethnic allies: once the open primary was introduced, these parties really began to collapse, since liberals could win in Democratic primaries and conservatives in Republican primaries...
...When such replacements have been carried out against groups with major roles in the intellectual community, the rhetoric of decline and collapse has generally been invoked, as witness the ability of WASP intellectuals around the First World War era to write entire books about the decline of the city...
...If this happens, then once again the city which is the capital of international finance can also be a center of progressive change...
...And each other as well...
...He lost the liberal whites and the minorities not because of his 1977 campaign or even his record in government, but because of his rhetoric after his election...
...these are traditionally the three arenas in New York City in which new political ideas have been put forward...
...If the prosperity of city government continues, it will be impossible to keep self-interested elites together...
...Equally important in recent years has been the power of television to convey negative images to people who would not in earlier years have seen them...
...11 percent thought he was against it, and 70 percent didn't know his position...
...They have been restricted to Transportation, Ports and Terminals, and a few other lucrative but not important spots...
...From their point of view, popular input on governmental issues should be restricted to such "style" issues as the death penalty and the drinking age, while the basic economic policy—government by and with corporations — continues...
...It is also important to note that the once-missing black vote is no longer missing...
...he then lost the county in the general election when the "regulars" finally endorsed him...
...In fact, there has FALL • 1987 . 471 A CITY DIVIDED rarely if ever been an unabashedly "liberal" era in terms of either our voters or our mayors...
...What of the reform movement in the Democratic party...
...People on the right point to the satisfaction of the majority: many citizens are reasonably well off and don't believe that politics is likely to affect their lives in any significant way...
...On the one hand, public power is now clearly greater than private power, in a way not true in past crises: J. P. Morgan could stop a stock market crisis by himself in 1903, but in 1929 his successors needed federal help...
...It was this, more than anything else, that "seduced" Ed Koch into his coziness with the machine...
...Reagan and Koch comment on their own administrations as if they were outsiders...
...The city that pioneered in municipal unionism, public hospitals, and a university system, the city that seemed to be a "social democratic bastion" in a capitalist nation and a significant factor in establishing the New Deal, is now presided over by a mayor whose public stance, at its worst, alternates between comedian and spokesman for the politics of resentment...
...They couldn't...
...It will perhaps be easier in this environment to recognize that immigrant insurgencies are generally pluralist rather than radical in nature...
...I would argue that Koch's "racist" and "conservative" appeals have not been vital to his political success, but that they were self-chosen and probably even somewhat damaging to him...
...it is more a matter of an attitude toward the political process itself...
...The problem with focusing on the personality of Ed Koch or on the corruption scandal is that it overlooks a more enduring pattern of New York City politics...
...A "regular" endorsement is often a handicap, as Koch recognized in asking Brooklyn boss Meade Esposito to soft-pedal his support in public...
...Koch's politics are as inexorably tied to the 1970s as Lindsay's were to the 1960s...
...Its members are personally agreeable, in many cases knowledgeable...
...The bipartisan incumbent-protection society that has now arisen in the city's electoral politics is a sign of the accommodation reached not only among politicians, but also between major interests that in the past supported opposing politicians...
...While some of its members fight on valiantly, most of those elected have become the establishment...
...The banks' ability to dictate a solution to the city passed in a few months in 1975, and by 1977 their policy demands could be rebuffed...
...The progressive successes of the past reflected times when ethnicity was displaced by working-class unity coupled with a conservative elite drive for honest reform...
...One problem with Democratic reformers is that once elected they seldom face serious opposition again, so that they tend to settle into the habits and pleasures of office...
...The result is "power without responsibility," in the famous phrase of Stanley Baldwin...
...People on the left tend to explain it in terms of the feeling (and reality) of the powerlessness of the dissatisfied...
...This social truce has been reinforced by the media...
...Koch by his unabashed glorying in his own hostile ones...
...Advocates of this theory point out that in the 1980 census, 48 percent of the city's population was nonwhite (counting Hispanics as nonwhites...
...In the past, progressive elements had opportunities when they were part of broadly based coalitions...
...Many of them are not citizens...
...they can help "get things done," in their own way...
...If one notes that the relations between the private and public sector are more important than the ethnicity of those who hold positions in these sectors, it is possible to see that in New York City these are moving in contradictory directions...
...Rival Parties The rule of real estate and the Democratic party was known in the past, but not usually with such dominance...
...After Queens Borough President Manes's suicide, the search for his machine's links to city agencies petered out because there were in fact so few...
...As long as the city economy continues to prosper, no matter how unevenly, and there is no substantive change in national politics, there is little chance of a serious change in the city's direction...
...The dirty little secret of Koch's governance is that in personnel and policy it is hard to distinguish it from what passes for liberalism in its present, extremely shrunken incarnation throughout the Northeast...
...The same thing happened with the minority vote...
...The "regulars" continue to dominate the City Council (of no great import) and the borough presidencies (important only because of their votes on the Board of Estimate, the city's main policy and appropriations body...
...because Cuomo talks the way he does he is identified as a figure somewhat to the left...
...Since Lindsay's primary defeat by John Marchi in 1969, the newly reconstituted conservative Republican party has ceased to be a competitive force in New York City...
...Since modern capitalism is increasingly linked to the operations of the state at all levels, control of the state (or, in this case, of the city) offers a very great prize indeed...
...Many politicians win elections as independents or reformers and then—somehow—the "regular" organization survives and takes over...
...But polls taken by the Abzug campaign two weeks before the primary showed that only 19 percent of likely primary voters even knew that Koch was for the death penalty...
...The crucial endorsements that won the runoff for Koch came from minority leaders like Basil Paterson and Herman Badillo, who became deputy mayors in his administration...
...Reagan's geniality is more important than his deplorable ideas...
...In Queens Koch won his two 1977 primaries against home-boy Cuomo even though the "regular" organization backed Cuomo...
...This latest ethnic replacement will someday lead to another turnover: in another decade, Jewish office-holders in the city will face the fate they or their predecessors meted out to aging Irish office-holders three decades ago...
...What accounts for this coalescence of political and private interests in the governance of the city...
...Despite the dramatic developments in the Parking Violations Bureau and the Transportation Department, "machine" penetration of the municipal bureaucracy is more limited under 474 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED Koch than it was under his predecessors...
...The second argument—Koch's deal with the bosses—assumes they could deliver votes...
...There will then be battles over the spoils...
...If, on the other hand, the economy declines, the current consensus will fall apart because more difficult choices than Koch has been willing to make will be forced upon the mayoralty...
...They must stop mistaking ethnicity for politics...
...The numbers suggest that a black of the type likely to be a candidate in New York City (a regular politician such as Percy Sutton or Denny Farrell, or an "outsider" like Vernon Mason) cannot win the mayoralty, but is likely to prevent another candidate from putting together the actual majority that probably exists against the mayor...
...In this view, the turning point of recent political history was either the fiscal crisis of 1975 or the mayoral election of 1977...
...Because Koch talks the way he does he is identified as a figure on the right of the Democratic party...
...Memories of John Lindsay don't acknowledge that his electoral majority in 1965 was largely a traditional Republican vote, and that his narrow win against divided conservative opponents in 1969 came only after tacit agreements with many of the forces he had fought in his first few years...
...Probably most important is the unity of the city's elites since the near-catastrophe of 1975 — an arrangement hammered out during the financial crisis by banker Felix Rohatyn, labor leader Victor Gotbaum, and Governor Hugh Carey...
...But then what about the covert mutual support that Senator Al D'Amato and Governor Cuomo rendered each other in 1986...
...while ethnicity may be more important than class to voting, economics is more important to governing policy than ethnicity...
...Later explanations tended to stress the role of money, overlooking the fact that Koch spent the same amount as Bella Abzug and half as much as Mario Cuomo in the runup to the crucial first primary...
...0 478 • DISSENT...
...The "regulars" have no access to mayoral judicial patronage, and virtually no access to most of the crucial positions in the city administration...
...If the open endorsements by Republicans and Ed Koch of each other are seen as reflecting only Koch's unusual ideology and personality, then the solution would be simple: replace Koch...
...Finally, and most important, there is the sleight of hand by which Korean shopowners in Washington Heights or Cuban doctors in Jackson Heights are assumed to be prospective members of a coalition working for the interests of welfare mothers in Bedford-Stuyvesant...
...The crucial fact in all these 1977 elections was the Catholic-Jewish percentage in various boroughs, and the only county where Koch did worse than such a split would suggest was Brooklyn...
...That is not to say that the rhetorical differences of the two men do not have real-world consequences...
...Both of course can be true...
...Eager at first to avoid a "Hobbesian war of all against all" that seemed likely as a consequence of near-bankruptcy, now they are content with the city's prosperity, limited as that may be to some segments of the population...
...the Conservative party was a Catholic conservative party as against the Protestant Republicans who were not conservative enough...
...Politics becomes a matter of personality and the ability to keep the media interested...
...If votes are to be increased, it is more likely to be from groups other than the blacks...
...The conservative white ethnic vote has deserted him every time he really needed it: in his four races against Cuomo in 1977 and 1982...
...The key to the "regular" organization is that, although not a successful electoral machine, it is a successful governmental operation...
...If the Board of Estimate is now going to be devalued pursuant to present court orders, the City Council will become an important bastion of "regular" strength, though the mayoralty itself may gain the most power of all...
...Liberals tend mistakenly to attribute the failings of the Koch administration to remnants of the old political system rather than beginnings of a new one...
...But in New York, where the Populists were weak, such legislation wasn't "necessary...
...They must remember that left-wing achievements in the past came as part of broader alliances...
...It would take a microscope to find a major policy difference between Cuomo and Republican Governor Kean of New Jersey...
...Race remains central to the politics of New York City, but the city will probably remain one of the few great American cities not to have a black mayor by the end of the century, largely because New York's ethnicity will continue to resemble a mosaic rather than the one or two colors that dominate in most big cities...
...Those who can't be found by census takers are unlikely to be found to vote...
...Some liberals have tried to make something of Koch and Cuomo as opposite sides of the Democratic party, but it's not a very big difference in the realm of economic policy...
...The callousness of a city in which twenty five-year-old Wall Street bankers making $500,000 a year leave Grand Central Station by stepping over the bodies of the homeless may once more become unacceptable, and a candidate for mayor who can join the interests of disparate groups in a coalition for progressive change will come forward...
...Now, big government and big business stand together on a playing field where no one else seems even to have a voice...
...If you can do nothing real, then politics as show is 472 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED more liable to express negative attitudes than positive ones...
...Right now these allies are missing: there is no serious upper-class opposition, no serious party opposition, and no serious press criticism...
...Koch seems to believe that real estate interests nourished by state capitalism are somehow "entrepreneurs" who represent priFALL • 1987 475 A CITY DIVIDED vate enterprise...
...Once, the media reinforced that process...
...Analysts seriously interested in socioeconomic changes must avoid legends...
...He is stronger among nonDemocrats than Democrats, stronger among all Democrats than among primary voters, and weakest of all among the hard-core primary voters...
...Far more minorities are under eighteen, which may be important for the politics of the twenty-first century, but reduces their present impact...
...his base has remained in moderately liberal areas like Forest Hills, among people who quite probably feel equally negative about the white mob that attacked blacks and the blacks who were attacked...
...The death penalty myth implies an agitated and enraged public, and the "deal with the bosses" a supine, easily led electorate...
...That is not to say that our mayor is forever...
...to this must be added the continuing population shift, and the probability of an undercount of the minorities...
...Jews, Germans, and newer immigrants tended to swing between the parties or into protest movements of the center and left...
...Events of the last year or so have begun to alter the perception of the Koch administration from one fixated on race and ideology to one riddled with corruption...
...but it can be won only by coalitions encompassing instincts and forces many of which may not be on the left...
...It was Koch's decision to break with his deputy mayors (Paterson and Badillo), and to exacerbate relations with the minority community by the things he said...
...In the New York City of 1900, Protestants were Republican or Fusion voters and Irish Catholics were Democratic...
...Later, when the Socialists were strong, it was a convenience for the major parties to join together against them...
...In this sense, they are conservative reformers...
...It is not simply a matter of media support for incumbents and a failure to oppose Things As They Are...
...The reformers always depended (more than they admitted) on both an ethnic base (Jews fighting Catholic politicians) and on the media...
...But in those times at least some opposition forces were visible: radicals, an active press, reform Democrats, the citizens' groups...
...Cuomo fascinates by his (usually failing) struggle with his own bad impulses...
...They must stop making heroes and villains: for it hinders the ability to think about the actual sources of support for the present system or, potentially, for serious change...
...The irony is that by pushing their party closer to the politics of the rest of the nation, they have destroyed it as a force in New York City...
...Which brings us to the theory of the inexorable march of the "minority majority...
...they have supported each other for office except when running against each other...
...Therefore, anti-Tammany coalitions always bore the stamp of "top-bottom" coalitions, a concept not invented by John Lindsay...
...What former Urban Development Corporation head William Stern calls "the commercial party" of law firms, bankers, and construction companies has always existed, but in at least some competition with ideological interests and economic interests...
...now they denigrate it...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
