The Streets Were Paved with Gold (45 page)

The spreading blight of the South Bronx must be stopped—immediately! Ditto Bushwick. Ditto Bedford-Stuyvesant. Ditto Harlem. Ditto South Jamaica. The answer, declared with absolute certainty, is more jobs, more housing, more government, more money, more inputs. Humility in the pursuit of social justice is no virtue. When confronted with the reality that the people of this country are resistant to new social spending, that President Carter and the Congress will not be forthcoming with the massive funds required—assuming we would know how to spend them if they did—there is a general unwillingness to retreat. To make hard-headed choices about what is do-able as opposed to desirable. So when Jimmy Carter visits the South Bronx and offers a money cure, the city leaps to accept, forgetting that the amount of money Carter offered is inadequate to the task, that there are still viable neighborhoods that could better use limited resources. No, the South Bronx is an outrage! We will not tolerate outrages! While we feel better, neighborhoods like Coney Island or Bushwick slip away.

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 of
why
, not
how
, the city arrived at its present state is contained in a book that does not mention the fiscal crisis. Nor does it mention Abe Beame, John Lindsay, Robert Wagner or Nelson Rockefeller. Nor such nowfamiliar terms as investor confidence, bonds, notes, rollovers, deficits or default. In fact, it doesn’t even mention the City of New York.

The book,
The Morality of Consent
, is the work of the late Alexander M. Bickel, a Yale University scholar. Bickel wrote of a series of decisions and events in the sixties and early seventies: If the public and the Congress had to be deceived to gain support and “defeat” communism, so be it. When reform legislation crawled too slowly through state legislatures or the Congress, the Supreme Court skipped legal precedents and passed its own laws. To protest the war, it was necessary to deny Defense Secretary McNamara freedom of speech at Harvard. After Karl Armstrong bombed the University of Wisconsin, historian Gabriel Kolko apologized: “To condemn Karl Armstrong,” Bickel quotes Kolko, “is to condemn a whole anguished generation. His intentions were more significant than the unanticipated consequences [one dead, four injured] of his actions.” If we had to discriminate with racial quotas to end discrimination, conduct illegal wiretaps or invent “the plumbers” in the name of “law and order”—so be it.

Bickel found a common denominator in these decisions: an abuse of either power or “the process,” as he called it. “The [social] fabric,” he said, “is held together by agreement on means.… The derogators of procedure and technicalities, and other antiinstitutional forces who rode high, on the bench as well as off, were the armies of conscience and ideology.…” The ancient question of means and ends.

What does this have to do with New York? The same common thread stretched through many—not all—of the often well-intentioned decisions which helped hobble the city. It was Nelson Rockefeller’s liberal impulse—not to mention megalomania and desire to get reelected—that drove him to devise “moral obligation” bonds in order to build more housing and avoid the danger of voter disapproval. It was the liberal impulse to centralize executive power that prompted the drafters of the 1961 City Charter to remove the comptroller and Board of Estimate as a check on the mayor’s power to estimate revenues. It was the liberal impulse to reward labor as a valued friend, to tax and borrow and fraud rather than balance city budgets. No one compelled New York State to spend 60 percent more than the national average for elementary and secondary education; to offer scholarship and tuition assistance that is three times that of the next highest state; to offer the most generous Medicaid program in the U.S.—the state has 8.5 percent of the nation’s population yet accounts for 23 percent of all Medicaid spending.

Obviously, these decisions can be attributed to such nonideological truisms as “politics,” weak leadership, a docile electorate or human nature. As noted, New York was the victim of forces and decisions beyond its control. But we learn something about what happened to New York when we also view past local decisions as violations of fiscal and legal restraints—of “the process.” New York forgot about Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that guides a free market and turned it away from city bonds to more secure investments; forgot that expedient means (excessive borrowing and taxation) would inevitably lead to a bad end (deep debt and loss of jobs); that each city is not an island; that the social contract is violated when leaders lie, be it about budgets or Vietnam body counts.

Another failure was at work in New York—an excessive faith in people. Liberals succumbed to the blissful notion, promulgated more than 100 years ago by Marx and Engels, that the concept of “human nature” was silly. The left believed that institutions, society, capitalism, determined how people would behave. “Does it require deep intuition,” they wrote in
The Communist Manifesto
, “to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?”

To acknowledge a people problem is to acknowledge complexity, the futility of relying on just money for solutions. It’s not always society’s or the teacher’s fault when kids can’t read. Contrary to Jesse Jackson’s preachments, few criminals are “political prisoners.” Jobs would have prevented some but not all of the looting after the 1977 blackout. Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold reported that 48 percent of those arrested were employed; more comprehensive studies suggest 65 to 73 percent were unemployed. Whichever figure you accept, it is true that many of the looters were employed. Put more money into the education system and more than likely it will go to increase teacher pay and benefits, not pupil instruction. There is little class solidarity between workers who sacrifice their union brothers to layoffs while they continue to receive salary increases. Even clichés can be true. Welfare
can
create a cycle of dependency; shorter work weeks and more time off
can
make people lazy. Landlords steal, but so do poor and middle-income people in subsidized housing.

Many are the victims of racism, joblessness, hopelessness—of a capitalist system that often punishes the least efficient, the ugly or the old. But some people, determinists prefer not to concede, are bad people, unreachable. Bushwick’s Crazy Homicides, one suspects, would as soon knife you as step on a roach. In just that sense, they are probably little different from the redneck killers of civil rights workers, who killed as a political act. Writer William Bradford Huie once speculated that James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were trying to reason with and appeal to their common humanity when some racist Southerners took them on a back road in 1964 and blew their heads off. The rednecks were as difficult to reach as the Crazy Homicides or the youth gangs of the South Bronx. And yet our schemes to rebuild the South Bronx, for instance, tend to ignore this reality. What if the new South Bronx is torched just like the old?

Most of us are afraid to talk about this problem of an underclass for fear—the most dreaded fear among liberals—of being called “racist.” Pat Moynihan, despite his unfortunate reliance on hyperbole, once tried to show how the breakup of black families contributed to crippling black youngsters. He was roundly condemned as a “white racist,” among the gentler epithets. Senator Ted Kennedy, exercising considerably more skill, escaped the epithets because he did not appear to be blaming the victim when he told Detroit’s NAACP: “Every measure we have tells us that these children
are the most likely to be victims of parental abuse, the most likely to be dropouts from their schools, the most likely to be unemployed, the most likely to be on welfare, the most likely to be delinquent, the most likely to be jailed the most likely to be found in an early grave.”

Interestingly, Kennedy placed a large part of the blame for the breakup of black families on the welfare system devised by liberals. “The heart of the problem is a welfare system that too often works against the welfare of those the system is supposed to serve,” he said. “There is ample evidence that the welfare system itself, in combination with other factors, has helped to produce the very disease we now seek to cure.… we say to this child—wait, there is a way, one way, you can be somebody to someone. We will give you an apartment and furniture to fill it. We will give you a TV set and a telephone. We will give you clothing, and cheap food, and free medical care, and some spending money besides. And in return, you only have to do one thing: just go out and have a baby. And faced with such an offer, it is no surprise that hundreds of thousands have been caught in the trap that our welfare system has become.”

Epithets and scapegoating, sadly, also extend to liberals’ interpretation of the fiscal crisis. On the first page of their book about New York, Newfield and Dubrul ask, “What is killing New York City?” Their answer: dope, highways, Vietnam, the banks, racism, Defense spending in the Sunbelt, Sirhan Sirhan, national unemployment, recessions, Rockefeller’s moral obligation bonds and “a generation of municipal politicians who could not tell the truth.” Of these eleven factors, only the last two were self-inflicted. And even these did not represent a failure of ideology or people, since, according to this view, Rockefeller and municipal politicians were just being selfish. The main culprits were Washington and the banks. A similar approach is taken by Richard S. Morris, an otherwise intelligent political activist and consultant to liberal Democrats. The “real villains of the urban crisis,” he writes in
Bum Rap on American Cities: The Real Causes of Urban Decay
, are not “liberals” but the robber-baron federal government and greedy bankers. He adds, “Liberals are, indeed, taking a bum rap” because New York’s crisis is “not the result of any error in direction or approach.” Former Lindsay administration officials blame “the system” or the “ungovernability of cities”—when they’re not blaming Washington. Beame, as we’ve seen, blamed everyone, and therefore no one. The
Marxian analysis—which is closer to the truth in its analysis if not its answer—is presented by Roger E. Alcaly and David Mermelstein in their book
The Fiscal Crisis of American Cities.
“Ultimately,” they write, “the origins of the urban fiscal crisis lie in the process of capitalist accumulation, in a system of economic growth dictated by capital’s needs to seek ever greater profits.” On the other hand, in the Soviet Union, for example, citizens are not permitted to move freely, a natural consequence of a government-dictated economic system.