Fred Siegel's The Future Once Happened Here

...Behind those differences, more often than not, are the strong social-democratic movements and parties that the United States notoriously lacks (or corporatist parties that have promoted structurally similar policies...

...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...10017 (212) 595-3084...

...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...

...But to anyone who lives in the America that I do, the notion that "the left" has run urban policy in any meaningful sense, for good or ill, in recent years is—well, more than a little wacky...

...Liberals may have wanted drugs decriminalized, but "moderates" filled the prisons to the rafters with minor drug offenders...

...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...Both violent crime rates and rates of single parenthood, for example, have frequently been at their worst in many southern cities, in some of which liberalism has traditionally been a four-letter word and where the idea that govenment largesse has coddled and demoralized the poor would be cruel if it weren't laughable...

...The claim that liberal policies have caused the mess in the cities, in short, depends on the belief that we have actually had liberal policies...

...Where liberalism has indeed failed the cities, it is mostly here—in the willingness to let the role of government become defined as tending to the dirty work that the market has left behind...

...Once again, the first problem with this story is that Siegel vastly overstates the scope and depth of liberal influence on welfare policy...

...Thus do conservative writers get around the inconvenient fact that the foundering of the cities in the past quarter century has mainly happened on their watch...

...Certainly, there were, and are, plenty of self-serving, venal, and/or misguided elected officials on the left of center (there aren't any, of course, on the right...

...What's wrong with this picture...

...It must be the influence of guilty soft-on-crime liberals that explains why we've built twentyone prisons—and one college—in California since the mid-eighties...

...Siegel's book purports to chart these developments by focusing on three cities—New York, Washington, and Los Angeles...

...In 1993, the highest proportions of single-parent families in the fifty states were in Mississippi and Louisiana, which paid, on average, respectively, $120 and $164 a month to an AFDC family of three...

...Over-generous government, animated by what Siegel calls the "riot ideology"—the post-Watts belief that black violence could and should be bought off by social programs—has wrecked the cities...

...And even a cursory look at the experience of places other than Washington, Los Angeles, or New York drives the point home...

...Meanwhile, they have virtually deregulated personal behavior—winking at crime, drug dealing, and illegitimacy...

...ELLIOTT CURRIE'S most recent book is Crime and Punishment in America (Metropolitan Books, 1998...

...THE SAME curious inversion of the real thrust of recent social policy happens with welfare—unsurprisingly, a major villain in Siegel's story (a "key ingredient in the toxic brew that devastated vast sections" of New York City, among others...

...If we look at urban America as a whole, it loses even that...

...In Siegel's America, powerful but naive liberals and leftists have dominated urban policy since the sixties—and they have run the cities into the ground...

...I'd love to think that those of us who have been doggedly advocating more liberal criminal justice policies in California had carried the day for to these many years...

...That's a real problem, and it's one that progressives haven't taken seriously enough...

...By residual collectivism I mean the tendency in a marketdriven society for the benefits of the market economy to be privatized while its costs tend to be socialized...

...And welfare rolls did indeed increase in most places—though in many states, from shockingly low and even declining levels in the fiftes and early sixties...

...But as Siegel comes perilously close to acknowledging, the growth in public generosity was desperately short lived...

...It's true that some liberals fought in the sixties to extend benefits to the large numbers of eligible people who weren't getting what was theirs by law...

...But it also doubled in, for example, Jackson, Mississippi, and more than quadrupled in New Orleans...

...This could have been a useful exercise...

...But that's a long way from saying that liberal policies were responsible for the grim state of America's cities generally— or that faith in the market will rescue them...

...By the end of the sixties the tide had already begun to turn...

...As a result they inherited both high levels of social pathology and weak mechanisms for dealing with it...

...There they go again, rewarding people for behaving badly) How, in these places, do you make the argument that lavish federal government money for social services "sowed the seeds of self-destruction...

...As a result, urban liberals typically wound up with the thankless and Sisyphean job of managing the mess left by a largely unregulated and heedless private economy...

...we often even see competently delivered public services and public bureaucracies that, on the whole, work pretty well...

...Consider violent crime again...

...But there's an even worse problem with Siegel's analysis...

...At a time when the policies of the right of center have engulfed the cities for nearly thirty years, we're asked to believe that liberals have brought urban America to its knees...

...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...But Siegel wants us to believe something more: that liberal ideology and liberal social policy are largely to blame for the violence, poverty, and job loss that have battered the cities since the sixties...

...Who, exactly, in these places was promoting the liberal policies that Siegel says caused crime, and what, exactly, were those policies...

...As a result, families have disintegrated, dependency has soared, and violent crime has (at least until recently) risen...

...He teaches in the legal studies program of the University of California-Berkeley...

...The key problem, in short, is not that the left had too much influence on urban policy in the United States but that it had too little...

...Or consider welfare again...

...Among other things, this has ushered in "an extraordinary transfer of responsibility from the family to the state...

...If we look around the world at other advanced industrial countries, we see cities that are generally far safer and far less povertystricken than our own...

...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...In Siegel's America, the liberal deregulation of personal behavior brought about a new tolerance of crime and drugs that fueled explosive rises in crime in the cities...

...What it really tells us, of course, is something more complicated: that the public sector won't work well if its main job is to pick up the pieces...

...Not at all...

...they were never able to establish the reliable and universal public services (including health care and family supports) that cushioned the impact of economic shifts on families and communities in many other countries...

...This national reality is obscured by Siegel's choice of New York, Washington, and Los Angeles as exemplars—since, as he notes, all three metropolitan areas are relatively wealthy and all have a substantial tradition of liberal politics (though Siegel sometimes exaggerates this: anyone who thinks of Los Angeles as a quintessentially liberal city probably doesn't live there...

...It's hard to read Siegel's description of Washington's recent political history without squirming a little...

...Were the prison authorities in these states consumed by liberal guilt...

...DISSENT / Winter 1998 117...

...Progressives, of all people, need to be especially tough on bureaucratic incompetence and corruption wherever it's A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...

...The urban problems Siegel portrays—high levels of violence and poverty, dysfunctional public services, bureaucratic incompetence and corruption— are very real, and serious debate about them is always welcome...

...So much that it's hard to know where to begin...

...Indeed, a moment's reflection reminds us that the opposite argument is far more compelling...

...But though there is some interesting anecdotal material here, the overall analysis mainly recycles what is by now a badly shopworn set of conservative platitudes that didn't stand up to scrutiny in the sixties, much less in the nineties...

...But although many cities have indeed had liberal governments, the policies that most powerfully affected them—certainly in such matters as criminal justice and welfare—have lately been shaped mainly by conservatives and mainly at the state and federal levels...

...Am I saying that liberals were never part of the problem...

...And the homicide rate in Washington has indeed been horrendous —from 1970 to 1995, it roughly doubled...

...The numbers here, after all, are plentiful and well known: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits per child in poverty, for example, dropped by nearly a third between 1975 and 1993...

...Too often, we don't insist on higher standards or better management because we do not, at the end of the day, care very much whether the bureaucracies succeed or not— whether their ostensible goal is educating poor kids who don't have much of a place in the market economy, or protecting them from abuse by demoralized and stressed parents, or seeing to it that they go to school in the morning healthy and well fed...

...There is change in the air, however, as growing numbers of elected officials (and others) are rejecting the destructive blandishments of liberalism and looking to markets, rather than government, to save the cities...

...We don't deal with the structural sources of the problems (that's called interfering with the free market), and so we are always pushing the same rock uphill...

...What this suggests, unless one is wearing ideological blinkers, is that the plight of our cities reflects the weakness of American liberalism, not its strength...

...In effect, we turn over the management of the ugly and intractable consequences of market-based inequality and misinvestment to local bureaucracies that are usually poorly funded and poorly staffed...

...The idea that liberal policies brought about the ills of the cities runs up against the stubborn reality that the problems—rising violence, the growth of single-parent families, teenagers having babies—emerged over the last thirty years in most cities across the counDISSENT / Winter 1998 115 try, including many that could be described as liberal only through the most heroic feats of the conservative imagination...

...You'd never know from his discussion that in the real New York, the prison population skyrocketed during these years—in good part because of the increasingly harsh sentences for drug offenses, even low-level ones, mandated under the famous Rockefeller Drug Law in the early seventies, self-consciously touted as the "nation's toughest...

...Hello...

...by the seventies, the already minimal American welfare state was in hasty retreat...

...116 DISSENT / Winter 1998 found, not least because it lends a veneer of plausibility to the knee-jerk rejection of the public sector, of the very idea of public solutions to public ills...

...The idea that the urban crisis was caused by liberal policies is hardly new—indeed, Siegel adds little conceptually to an argument the right has been making since, at the very least, the publication of Edward Banfield's The Unheavenly City in the late sixties...

...Siegel argues that the plight of the cities reflects the spread of what he calls "dependent individualism"—the combination of "an antipathy to economic markets and a faith in a free market in morals...

...Violent crime shot upward in cities throughout the South and Southwest, in states whose policies toward crime were notoriously harsh and where imprisonment rates rose even faster than in the rest of the country...

...We then point with great smugness to their predictable failure as evidence that "government" can't work, or that the public sector is inherently inferior to the private...

...Siegel, again, almost acknowledges that, but lamely tells us that by the early seventies "most of the damage had already been done...

...Siegel points to sharply rising violence in Washington as yet another manifestation of the guilt-driven, lenient welfare state run wild...

...Liberals have never been able to institutionalize an employment policy that could have addressed the disruptive impact of the great internal migrations to the cities from the thirties onward...

...If we focus on these three cities and carefully ignore the rest of the country, the argument that liberalism caused crime and dependency can almost achieve a superficial plausibility...

...It's surely true that in some places incompetent or selfserving politicians to the left of center have made bad situations worse...

...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...

...Siegel won't find much argument on this, certainly, in the case of Washington...

...In the real America, the right, not the left, has had the upper hand in income-support policy for twenty-five years...

...Nowhere is this more true than in his treat114 DISSENT / Winter 1998 ment of violent crime...

...Let's start with the fact that Siegel's argument depends on a highly selective rendering of the recent history of these three cities, in which a narrow focus on the beliefs and actions of some urban liberals on their home turf overshadows the far more consequential march of national and state urban policy to the right...

...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...

...Under the influence of a dizzying mix of guilt, fear, and hubris," liberals have demoralized the urban poor with vast amounts of federal largesse and strangled economic development in a sticky web of regulation...

...He pins part of the blame for New York City's decline in particular on those who wanted to decriminalize various kinds of minor crime and drug use in the sixties (in his account, a curious coalition that ranged from city police chiefs to Herbert Marcuse...

...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...

...Siegel adds nothing new here, but mainly regurgitates the conventional conservative dogma that an outofcontrol welfare state pumped up by liberal advocates for the poor has destroyed families and kept the poor trapped in dependency: the argument, in short, that if we just hadn't given poor black people so damned much money, the cities would be in much better shape...

...But more important in understanding the state of American cities is what we might call "residual collectivism...

...Likewise, Siegel pokes fun at the supposed romanticization of street gangsters and rioters by naive Los Angeles liberals—suggesting that fuzzy-minded liberal tolerance for predators helped to nurture a gang culture that drove the city's violent crime through the roof...

...This is the state whose prison population has risen sevenfold in the past two decades, where a shoplifter with a couple of youthful burglary convictions can be sent to prison for life, and where four times as many black men are "enrolled" in state prison as in state colleges...

...Does anyone seriously believe that this is because police chiefs and sheriffs in, say, Louisiana or Mississippi abandoned the notion of personal responsibility in favor of "moral deregulation...

...Like many other writers on the right, Siegel trots out the stock notion that over-generous income benefits are what caused poor families to break up at high rates and teens to have illegitimate babies— and, like them, simply ignores the many years of serious research showing that the connections are both far more tenuous and much more complicated...

...I'd also like to believe in the tooth fairy...