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By Root 1170 0

and checked by a constituency demanding fiscal restraint. As the city commenced to spend more taxpayer dollars on nonbasic services—municipal hospitals, welfare supplements, housing subsidies—demands for more of these services grew. A more dependent population, naturally, came to view nonbasic services as essential. The city’s budget began to tilt away from such basic services as police, fire, sanitation and public school education. Thus middle- and upper-income residents found the city less attractive. The very constituents who might have demanded fiscal restraint were fleeing to the suburbs. The city had too few homeowners—less than 25 percent—who meet mortgage payments and pay property taxes, and who might have made a connection between city spending and their taxes. The city had too many commuters, people who worked but did not have roots here. Unlike many cities—Rochester, Pittsburgh, Atlanta—New York did not have a homogeneous business community to effectively protest new business taxes or city management policies. Small businessmen quietly went out of business. Larger firms protested with their feet. The multinational and headquarter companies had other reasons to be here. Besides, they dealt with presidents, not mayors and city council members. “Service demanders,” to quote Sayre and Kaufman, replaced “money providers.”

Another potential check—the two-party system—also didn’t work. In New York, Republicans, like the bald eagle, are an endangered species. There are four Democrats for every one Republican. In the 1977 mayoral contest, the Republican candidate got less than 5 percent of the vote. Out of forty-three members of the City Council, only five were Republicans in 1978; of the sixty-five members of the State Assembly from New York City, four were Republicans; of the twenty-six state senators, eight were Republicans. Were the number greater, it might not have mattered. There was scant ideological difference between the leaders of both parties. Governor Rockefeller, the gray eminence of state Republicans, had an alliance with Democratic Mayor Robert F. Wagner, even offering him the Republican nomination for mayor in 1973. His brother, David Rockefeller, later contributed money to Democrat Abe Beame’s 1973 campaign. John Lindsay captured the mayoralty in 1965 as a Republican, but he won with less than 50 percent of the vote in a three-way race in which he was positioned as the most liberal. When such conservatives as William F. Buckley or John Marchi raised their voices to protest city spending, borrowing or tax policies, they were dismissed as loons or reactionaries. In a sense, a nonideological “permanent government,” as Jack Newfield christened it, ruled in New York.

“There are classified Pentagon documents that get more press coverage than the Republican party,” complained Barry Farber just days before voters sentenced his 1977 mayoral campaign to oblivion. “The disease in New York is a one-party system. Whether it exists in the Soviet Union or New York, it’s a disease. I want a party of opposition, like in England and Israel, where the bony finger of indignation is thrust regularly into the face of power. Martin Luther King used to declare, ‘I have a dream.’ I have never heard of a higher local Republican dream than ‘Let’s get a judge.’ ” To get judges and other patronage appointments, the local Republican party often became a wholly owned subsidiary of the local Democratic party.

Whatever two-party system existed in New York was the result of a civil war within the Democratic party. Reformers vs. regulars. Reformers constructively opened the political process and checked the iron power of political bosses, but they didn’t serve as a check against the fiscal and economic abuses of New York officials. After defeating the last boss of the Democratic party, Carmine De Sapio, in the early sixties, the attention of reformers remained fixed on procedural party matters rather than government—they continued fighting the last war. When local procedural squabbles didn’t drain their energies, ending the war in Vietnam,