The Trouble With New York Liberals

The disorienting, semi-comic spectacle of New York City's official recanvassing of the Sept. 9 Democratic primary has left Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger the nominee for November's election. Few New York liberals greeted this news with relief, however - nor should they. Even though a U.S. District Court judge denied Rev. Al Sharpton's petition demanding to proceed with the scheduled runoff between Messinger and himself, Messinger will still have to wrestle with the prospect that Sharpton's supporters could boycott the November general vote. It's hard to recall any other time a primary victory has turned into such a thankless liability.

Yet these absurd developments are really just the symptoms, rather than the cause, of the Democratic party's city-wide malaise. Once the furor over the primary has subsided, New York's liberal establishment will return to the same long-term political drift that produced Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's victory in 1993, and seems likely to ensure his re-election in this year's contest.

Simply put, Messinger - and the liberal establishment she represents - is offering few exciting ideas to Democrats of any color or economic status. While the strength of Sharpton's showing in the Sept. 9 vote was surprising, it seems clear in retrospect that Messinger was a sitting duck all along for an insurgent primary challenger.

The liberal demise in New York may be one variation on a now-familar theme in American urban politics: the shift of major city governments into the hands of moderate Republican executives. However, its origins are different here. Elsewhere in the country, societal forces such as suburbanization and declining unionization have played a big role in weakening the Democratic party. In New York City, Democrats continue to outnumber Republicans by five to one; unions remain politically powerful; and minorities have increased as a percentage of voters. Democratic control of City Hall should be the closest thing there is to a birthright in national politics. If liberalism can't succeed here, where can it?

What makes the liberal defeat in New York so frustrating is that it's really a default. Liberals have thrown away their power by failing to sustain themselves as a force for reform and innovative public policy. As much as anything else, the dominance of Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani reflects the upper hand that centrists and conservatives enjoy in the war of ideas over city policy.

In a sense, this is both good and bad news for liberal New Yorkers. It's good news in that New York's Democratic party doesn't have a Humpty-Dumpty problem - i.e., trying to reassemble a majority coalition again. With the proper ideas, the party should be able to reign supreme once more. It's bad news in that ideas tend to emerge slowly and a new liberal governing philosophy for New York City will take years to formulate in full.

The political war of ideas has unfolded in New York City much as it has in the country at large, with a few twists. First, an entrenched liberal establishment ran out of ideas and set the stage for its own fall by presiding over flawed government programs with a mixture of arrogance and complacency. Whether it was the city's schools or the public hospital system, leading New York liberals proved incapable through the 1980s and early 1990s of changing over-bureaucratized systems that delivered mediocre services at an enormous cost. Like liberals at the national level, they worried that attacking bad government might give ammunition to conservatives and undermine overall support for the ideal of activist government.

Also, New York liberals were not positioned to spearhead reform for a simple reason: they were too intertwined with the system that needed reforming. The Democratic party never abandoned its quest for social justice, exactly. But as that quest became institutionalized in huge government agencies, liberalism in New York began to look more like a jobs program and less like a political movement. Powerful public-sector unions, a major source of support for Democratic politicians, made matters worse by often blocking reformist initiatives.

As has happened in the national policy debate, conservatives and centrists in New York were quick to capitalize on the torpor that beset the liberal establishment. A main point of these critics was that New York was neglecting its traditional municipal responsibilities - education, police, fire, sanitation, and infrastructure - in order to underwrite expensive social services. In effect, many argued, New York had created its own mini-welfare state and the costs of such compassionate public policy were bankrupting the city. Basic services in the city - along with public safety - were deteriorating even as New York levied local taxes that were far higher than any other city in the United States. While Giuliani's single greatest strength going into the election is the city's falling crime rate, his popularity goes far beyond that single issue: It is driven, as well, by the sense that he is a mayor that stands for reform.

Leading liberals - including Messinger - have so far failed to respond to the ascendancy of Giuliani and the conservative intellectuals with sophisticated new ideas for governing New York. However, in a city beset by massive social ills, including a poverty rate of 25 percent, the ideal of a compassionate and activist government remains as attractive as ever. Liberalism need not be discarded, but it must be reinvented. Today, the pieces of a new liberal grand story exist, even if a narrative structure remains elusive. Over the past 15 years, successful new programs have been developed in New York to build housing, create jobs, reduce juvenile crime, improve education and provide better social services. Many of these sprang from a combination of grassroots efforts and foundation initiatives, and do not hinge on government largess.

A main challenge for liberals is to build on this work, putting forth a vision that stresses decentralized methods of service delivery and less reliance on inflexible bureaucracies. Government must be seen as an initiator and investor, not as the sole vehicle for handling problems.

In practice, this would mean redirecting vast resources. Ideas must be developed for downsizing large public entities and reinvesting funds in alternative programs, many of which have been tried only on a small scale. In the area of housing, for example, community development corporations and other kinds of public-private partnerships have built large quantities of low-income housing in the city. Trying to replicate this model on a much larger scale may make more sense than putting new funds into city agencies. In the case of agencies that cannot be decentralized, ideas for "reinventing" government must be deployed to smash calcified bureaucracies.

Liberal Democrats also must rethink their ideas for keeping the city fiscally sound. If conservatives often forget that New York cannot get by without an extensive social safety net, liberals have often forgotten that the city will not be an attractive place to live if taxes are too high and basic municipal services are neglected. Barring new Federal or state aid to the city liberals must figure out how to provide better government for less money. At the center of a new reform agenda should be a simple bargain: Everybody has to contribute. City employees must learn to live with limits on wages and changes in work rules. Big business must accept an end to generous tax subsidies. And the many non-New Yorkers who work in the city must foot more of the bill, as well. Liberals can be the architects of such a compact, but only if they discard certain shibboleths and move beyond interest-group politics. The alternative is not just more blood-letting within the Democratic party. It is also a City Hall ruled by Republican mayors well into the future.