The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [134]
Ironically, many national conservatives and city liberals have a stake in proving that New York is not unique. But despite the self-serving admonitions—Simon’s to make a conservative point, Governor Carey’s to make a case for federal aid—New York is not America. “A favorite alibi of those who have presided over the disaster of New York City government over the past decade is that ‘all urban America’ is in crisis,” Senator Moynihan proclaims, in one of his many lucid moments. “This is not true. Indeed, it attains to the condition of a political lie. It may make us feel better to tell this lie to one another, but in the end it is mere self-deception. Our urban problems are not unique, but neither are they general. At most they are Northeastern.” And, as we’ve seen, New York’s fiscal and economic ills are more chronic than the Northeast’s. “It is important to recognize,” Richard P. Nathan and Paul R. Dommel state in their study The Cities, “that the United States does not have what can be called a ‘national urban crisis.’ Many large cities are well off. Moreover, most city dwellers live in suburbs or in relatively small cities. What we face, in short, is a situation in which some—though by no means all—central cities and a few large suburban cities are experiencing what can be called ‘urban crisis conditions.’ ” The Congressional Budget Office buttresses this view. After surveying the city’s unique deficits, debt and rapid economic decline, their study found: “All of these peculiar aspects of New York’s situation should make one pause before concluding that the city’s crisis is but the forerunner of those that will occur widely elsewhere.”
New York City is more unusual than its officials care to concede, and less unusual than the rest of the country enjoys believing. Nevertheless, because of the political shift of power away from older cities to the suburbs and the Sunbelt, because of the burgeoning taxpayer revolt against soaring taxes and spreading government bureaucracy, New York and other cities will likely be forced to become more self-reliant. At a time when the people of California and other states are demanding reduced state and local taxes, it defies common sense to believe they would support steeper federal taxes to help New York clean its streets or care for its poor. As long as New York remains unusual, it will enjoy neither a substantive claim to common aid nor the political muscle to win special aid. As long as that is true, much of America will undoubtedly continue to act as “shocked” as Mrs. Johnson was when she surprised the good Doctor.
* Since the fiscal crisis, tuition has been imposed and open enrollment curtailed.
Chapter Seven
The Failure of Democracy
ON THE SURFACE, New York is suffering a fiscal crisis. Scratch the surface and you find a deeper economic crisis. Scratch further and you discover that the fiscal and economic crises symbolize a profound political crisis. What really failed in New York was democracy.* By the mid-seventies, New York could no longer say what Wallace S. Sayre and Herbert Kaufman said in the final sentence of their 1959 classic, Governing New York City: “the City of New York can confidently ask: What other large American city is as democratically and as well governed?”
In New York, the natives proved incapable of self-government, and in 1975 the city was made a ward of the state. To advertise to investors that Mayor Beame now shared power, in June 1975 the state created the business-dominated Municipal Assistance