“The only way to prepare a people for the exercise of political power is to give it to them,” remarked English historian Thomas Babington Macauley.* Which means that it’s a good thing for New York City’s liberals, after enduring twenty long years of authoritarian, neo-con or neo-liberal rule, are back in power once more. As a liberal myself, I can only hope they won’t fall off the learning curve, though de Blasio’s “tale of two cities” inaugural doesn’t give too much room for hope.
The Daily Beast’s Jim Epstein fills us in on the sans-culotte rhetoric that filled the air as de Blasio took office. Everyone’s head, it seems, was filled with sugar plums—the billions they were going to squeeze out of the wicked rich and spend on vast new programs to aid the virtuous poor, employing, of course, thousands of virtuous young experts on less than virtuous salaries. One would never have guessed that New York today employs far more people than it needs, at salaries far in excess of what they deserve..
One can in fact blame Michael “shorter than Rudy but an even bigger dick” Bloomberg for a great deal of this. It was Mike’s exalted ego that commanded him to run for a third term. To buy off the teachers union, Mike signed a disgraceful contract that bumped the average salary and benefits package for New York’s 80,000 teachers to $110,551. It’s doubtful that Big Bill can match that, but he’s surely set to try..
The good news, of course, is that de Blasio will definitely work to dismantle the quasi-police state that Bloomberg constructed. The anti-de Blasio folks are saying that stop and frisk, aka “let’s harass Black and Hispanic kids so they stay the fuck home,” was already on the way out, but it was so because de Blasio was determined to end it. De Blasio is also very likely to throttle back on the abysmal “war” on drugs, which will in fact benefit Blacks and Hispanics both by reducing the number getting hit with criminal records and reducing the number being employed as criminals..
As for the rest of de Blasio’s high-flying program, I’m obviously more than skeptical. Ed Glaeser, writing in the New York Daily News back in October, gave a nice explanation of why the “passionate” de Blasio has got it pretty much all wrong with his TOTC riff:.
But this extreme inequality reflects other extraordinary aspects of New York: the massive global financial markets based here, America’s most accessible public transit system, hyper-dense immigrant communities and broad social services, like public housing. These forces attract both rich and poor to New York, and New York should not be ashamed of that economic diversity..
Rather than seeing the disparity between those at the highest and lowest income levels as a disease, we might consider it a defining feature of a remarkable city with unique assets that attract residents from a range of backgrounds..
If anyone should be cringing, it is our more “equal” suburbs—which often zone out the disadvantaged. New York should never aspire to that kind of uniformity of income.
One wishes that de Blasio would listen to this. But he won’t. So here’s hoping he’s a fast learner..
