The Decay of Reform

...But that does not explain the staying power of the conservative coalition erected by Mayor Koch...

...For another, the crude picture of business hegemony over politics overstates the cohesion of big business and the ability of businessmen as individuals or a class to get their way in city politics...

...So the failure of liberal reform in New York City stems not just from government's subordination to the private market or from battles won and lost by various constituent groups, but from the fundamental way political competition is organized—or systematically disorganized— in New York City...

...Shefter argues that too many disparate groups were able to exert a claim on city spending during the Lindsay years, resulting in the political inflation of spending, but not of revenues, which the Lindsay coalition lacked the power to extract to the degree needed...

...First, New York has a weakly organized, one-party political system...

...Koch won 70 percent of the Hispanic vote and an impressive 37 percent of the black vote, despite a challenge from black assemblyman Denny Farrell...

...Mayor Koch has skillfully played on cleavages within constituencies that might support a challenger to him...

...If the politically ascendant issues cause middleclass New Yorkers defensively to protect achievements won, ironically, through past reforms, the future will be bleak for urban liberalism...

...All the ingredients are present...

...For an answer, we must go below the surface of the reigning neoconservative ethnic populism and ask what it is about the way New York's politics is organized that pushes this style to the fore...

...Given relatively low turnouts among nonHispanic Catholics and the impact of voter registration among blacks and Hispanics leading up to the Jessie Jackson candidacy in 1984, Koch was justified in worrying about minority support and spending the bulk of his field operations campaign money in black and Hispanic areas...

...The Marxist explanation may have captured a powerful truth about a certain moment in the mid-1970s, but it has a hard time explaining the subsequent decade...

...As a challenging group, they had a strong incentive to link up with other outsiders to FALL • 1987 . 493 A CITY DIVIDED make up a reform coalition...

...Exit polls suggest that about 23 percent of the 1985 mayoral primary electorate was black and 13 percent Hispanic...

...Second, the post-industrial revolution is producing new cleavages in New York City that Mayor Koch has proven better at capitalizing upon than have would-be liberal reformers...

...The mobilizing impact of emerging social inequalities cannot be discounted, either...

...In the immediate aftermath of the fiscal crisis, many on the left analyzed it as a direct business intervention into politics...

...A close look at the numbers reveals that Jews mobilized at the polls to support Mayor Koch much more than did Catholic ethnics...

...But there is also contrary evidence: the mayor's standing within the corporate elite and middle-class Jewish public opinion may have weakened...

...Meanwhile a new black, Hispanic, and female service-sector labor force has arisen, on which organizations like District Council 37 are based...

...This set the stage for Mayor Koch to organize a conservative accommodation among big business, white-ethnic Catholics, and Jews that could restore fiscal balance under the symbolic banner of disproportionate cuts in programs serving blacks and Hispanics...

...Finally, the reform impetus that arose from the civil rights, antiwar, and citizen participation movements of the late 1960s has dissipated...

...As a result, coalitions are fluid, personality-oriented, and often based on invidious racial, ethnic, or status distinctions...

...His electoral success derives not so much from a general polarization between middle-class white ethnics and minorities (Irish and Italian voters have always been more conservative) as from a shift among Jews away from their traditional liberalism...

...The numbers of native blacks and Puerto Ricans are stagnant if not declining...

...Moreover, between 1982 and 1985 the greatest increases in voter registration, reaching 10,000 per assembly district, were registered in majority black and Hispanic districts...

...But the results of this crisis were not a foregone conclusion...

...And with success, alliances with outsiders became less necessary...

...Organizations that cut across these divisions, such as the public-sector labor unions or the City University, bear a particularly heavy responsibility for the future...

...They must be explained...

...Issues are blotted out...

...The sad effort of the Coalition for a Just New York in 1985 to find a consensus challenger to Koch revealed splits between blacks and Hispanics, male and female black leaders, and Manhattan and Brooklyn leaders...

...The conservative coalition really came to power with the mayor's election in 1977, when the economy was on the upswing and a supportive Democratic president occupied the White House...

...Since then, the symbolic, and in some ways substantive, recognition of black claims, the end of the war, and the growing number of contracts to community-based organizations, caused these ideological appeals to lose their power...

...The business elite had been alienated by a poor business climate...

...In the context of the need to retrench, the mayor's neoconservative populism also pushed it along...

...Another problem with the "political inflation" analysis concerns the conservative shift of the white population and the supposed reconciliation of its Jewish and Catholic elements...

...Minority support for the conservative coalition further undermines the simple image of racial polarization...

...Although vote totals in black and Hispanic neighborhoods tend to be less than in white neighborhoods, these neighborhoods have more young people and more noncitizens...

...And the most rapidly growing racial minority is neither 494 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED black nor Hispanic but Asian...

...Mayor Koch has shown himself a master of southern politics, New York style...

...Either the severe recession of the mid-1970s or the current political scandals could well have triggered the formation of a coalition of underrepresented groups to challenge the established order...

...The feminization of the labor force, the rise of new service occupations, immigration from the Caribbean and Asia, and geographic shifts have produced tensions that simple white/black or middle class/working class distinctions do not capture...

...The late 1960s provided such stimuli...

...It is no accident that Koch has made more senior political appointments from the ranks of the Lindsay administration and nonprofit organizations than from political clubs...

...Gender differences are also important: most male-dominated occupations are growing slowly or contracting, while female-dominated occupations are expanding...

...Finally, it is wrong to view blacks and Hispanics as politically inactive and excluded...

...Will these patterns continue...

...The fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s obviously intervened in the city's political development...

...Contrary to popular wisdom, turnout was highest of all in Hispanic areas, perhaps due to three active Hispanic candidates for the City Council presidency...

...The weakness of blacks and Hispanics in New York City politics thus stems more from division and disorganization than from inactivity and exclusion...

...But these constituencies have been unable to build any organization, or even a forum for discussion, that can cut across the divisions within and between them...

...If neither the Marxist nor the political inflation school of analysis fully accounts for why a conservative coalition dominates New York City politics to the exclusion of a liberal reform realignment, what does...

...Finally, as the pivotal part of the city's electorate, the middle-class Jewish population must rekindle its commitment to liberal reform...

...When all is said and done, a capital strike that decimates a city's economy cannot be used as a precision tool to sculpt day-to-day political developments...

...These differences seem to divide and weaken the effort to mount a liberal reform challenge...

...Most of the variation across white districts' support for A 1982 Brooklyn political leaflet Mayor Koch is accounted for by their Jewish population, not their Irish or Italian voters...

...Certainly, the national political mood and the necessity of local retrenchment demoralized and chastened liberals in New York and provided a field day for those wishing to discredit the Lindsay experiment...

...Although this analysis coincides better with observed trends in New York City, it, too, faces problems...

...It is often forgotten that the late Queens Democratic boss Donald Manes started out as a reformer...

...In fact, local government employment was the single most rapidly growing sector of the city's economy over the last year...

...If, however, the historic bond between Jews and other rising minority groups can once again be forged, then New York's conservatism may be passing...

...This effort was rewarded...

...Before the victories of the reform movement—beginning with the Stevenson and Lehman campaigns and De Sapio's defeat by the Village Independent Democrats—and the Steingut ascendancy in Brooklyn, Jews were still underrepresented in regular Democratic ranks and public office...

...What, to borrow Ira Katznelson's phrase, are the "trenches" that shape the battleground of urban politics...

...For one thing, the post-1977 economic boom has driven the city's tax revenues upward, reduced government's dependence on the private sector, and allowed it to regain its autonomy...

...In the 1985 mayoral primary, white Catholic assembly districts had a lower turnout than black or Hispanic districts...

...The sources of this shift are many...

...As the white population continues to age and decline, as minority groups grow into voting age and become citizens, and as new organizations arise to represent such expanding groups as women service workers, the electoral calculus will continue to change...

...Since the 1950s, the white population has become a minority, and economic restructuring has diminished the white working class and weakened its trade unions and regular party organizations...

...Yet a liberal reform realignment hasn't happened in New York, nor do its prospects seem bright...

...Inexorable demographic changes will also have an effect...

...Most important, white middle-class reformers got what they wanted and no longer needed moral outrage and an assault on the system...

...By these lights, realignment should now be taking place in New York politics...

...He has said he will be elected a fourth and even a fifth time, but long mayoral regimes do tend to decay and lose the capacity to generate new ideas and excitement...

...Kevin White of Boston illustrates how a reform caravan can end up drawing its wagons in a circle...

...They also provide the mayor favorable territory for a divide-and-conquer strategy...

...The mayor's strength amid a scandal that would have brought down many of his predecessors suggests that they may...

...population growth comes largely from West Indian and Dominican immigrants, producing conflict over who speaks for blacks and Hispanics...

...minority groups had become demobilized and vulnerable by their dependence on soft money city programs...

...Martin Shefter's Political Crisis, Fiscal Crisis makes this case best, but so do Jonathan Rieder's work on Canarsie and Charles V. Hamilton's work on black politics...

...But in a deeper sense, success itself may have destroyed the Jewish liberal reform impulse...

...In such an environment, the regular political clubs, despite losing power at the center of New York City politics, can continue to hold sway at the periphery...

...Most important, if political disorganization lies at the heart of the current conservative ascendancy, then serious efforts to construct new kinds of political organization may be able to overcome it...

...In this system, outsiders who wish to make common cause with defecting political insiders have few good ways of organizing themselves...

...It was reaffirmed in prosperous times in 1981 and 1985...

...The mayor is an ethnic politician far more than he is a class or race politician...

...Tensions from the 1968 school strike and racial succession in neighborhoods like Flatbush certainly spurred it...

...The result was fiscal breakdown...

...This explanation is only partly convincing...

...This suggests that business influence is either less than commonly thought or that the city budget is responding to other, stronger political pulls...

...The sheer difficulty of generating even a modest political dialogue among black, Hispanic, and white reformers illustrates the point...

...One concerns the fiscal restraint that business is supposed to have secured from government...

...According to this view, fiscal crisis gave major players in city politics the opportunity, and the tensions of racial transition gave them the incentive, to cut some groups off...

...City spending and hiring increases have outstripped the growth of the city's economy since 1983...

...The Financial Control Board and the other fiscal oversight mechanisms are now a residual phenomenon, despite the fact that city spending and hiring increases are as rapid as they were in the Lindsay years...

...Twenty-nine percent was Jewish and 24 percent non-Hispanic Catholic...

...Controlling for these factors, black and Hispanic turnout in the 1985 primary was actually higher than in neighborhoods with the highest white populations...

...q FALL • 1987 • 495 496 • DISSENT...

...In this view, corporate influence as embodied in the Municipal Assistance Corporation and the Emergency Financial Control Board, the cooptation of public-sector unions by making them the city's new banker, and the 1972 Nixon landslide combined to shift "coalition" politics rightward in New York...

...Challenging coalitions did elect minority mayors in Chicago, Philadelphia, and even Los Angeles...

...Even when victorious, over time their lack of organizational discipline leads to decay...

...In New York, powerful ideological stimuli are needed to overcome the tendency to factionalism...

...As political scientist V.O...

...Since the fiscal crisis, a second set of analysts has tried to take this into account by viewing New York's political development in 492 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED terms of political "inflation" and "deflation...

...The success of reform, however, enabled Jews to dominate the political establishment in four of New York's boroughs...

...Key noted in his famous study of southern politics, such systems rely on factions rather than parties to articulate political differences...

...the white middle class had been alienated by minority political and territorial gains...

...New York City's reform coalitions have always contained disparate elements...