The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [157]
Such passionate politics leads, inevitably, to a Manichaean view of the world—good guys vs. bad guys, liberals vs. conservatives. To an unusual degree, New York’s politics was bursting with a quasireligious fervor. Rather than questioning which candidate was the most realistic or what policy would work, we often asked who or what was most liberal. Mayor LaGuardia’s truism—“There is no Republican or Democratic way to clean streets”—was ignored. Essentially nonideological local questions—how to balance the budget, provide services, retain and attract jobs, educate kids, control crime—were transformed into moral issues. James Schuer’s 1969 mayoral candidacy began to unravel when the Voice’s Jack Newfield—a valuable muckraker but also a notorious labeler—branded Schuer a “conservative” for raising the “law and order” issue. Yet, that same year, writers Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin were treated kindly by the press when they proposed a frivolous but “liberal’ idea to make New York City the fifty-first state.
Wagner, Lindsay, Beame and Rockefeller got away with their budget and borrowing tricks partly because they were trying to do the “right thing.” Candidates who talked about “the causes of crime” were good guys, even if they ignored the effects of crime. People who talked about balanced budgets were “fiscal conservatives”; those who spoke of incentives for private enterprise worried lest they be labeled “pro-business”; critics of union contracts were dismissed as “anti-labor”; community groups who organized to save their neighborhoods were disparaged as “bigots.”
People who take “moral” positions don’t like to make unpleasant choices. During periods of growth and expansion, these choices were easier to avoid. Liberals could both do good and feel good, could keep their moral edge. Liberalism remained strong because citizens, quite accurately, believed they cared. But when public expectations rose and the economy began to decline in the late sixties, that strength of conscience became a vice. The right moral posture became the wrong governmental position. Those who loosely subscribed to the liberal label, refused to recognize that there were now limits to what the city could spend, borrow or tax; local limits to providing more. The unwillingness to make choices, Senator Moynihan reminds us, was on display when the state offered to assume the city’s welfare and higher education costs in the sixties. But, as he says, the city’s “powerful political culture” resisted for fear of sacrificing administrative control and free tuition. A decade later, the city clamored for a state takeover of these costs. In the spring of 1978, the city’s labor unions demanded raises, though the city faced a huge four-year deficit and was asking Congress for a federal bailout. Labor leaders and the prevailing wisdom in the city held that it would be “an outrage” if raises were not granted. The emphasis was on the “outrage” rather than whether the city could afford it.
The unwillingness to make choices is obviously not peculiar to New York or liberalism. Herbert Allen, president of Allen & Company, one of Wall Street’s largest firms, criticizes “politicians”—yet Allen dubbed President Carter’s advisers “hopelessly naive” for opposing what he calls “dubious payments” to foreign leaders. Americans want free trade—yet they condemn imports which rob American jobs. We want to attract middle-income people back to our cities—but not to outbid and displace poor people from their old yet restorable homes. We want higher farm subsidies—and cheaper food prices. More government spending—and less inflation. More guns and butter. But, as Peter Jay notes, “So far the only road to paradise lies through the grave.”
In New York, the failure to make choices speeded the fiscal crisis. One of the best explanations