Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Bill de Blasio’s Vision: Striking Progressivism
I am not from New York. I do not live in New York. I will probably never live in New York, though I love to visit New York. I remember my first trip there when I was still in college. Those were the pre-Rudy days and I was robbed, but I was young and resilient and romantic. Even in that moment, New York was nothing but glorious for me, a modern day Rome, though I was happy when the city got safer, and I had a very cosmopolitan brother make his way to a little apartment near Battery Park.
When I managed to spend a weekend in his city, he would help me navigate the subways and take me out for the best pizzas and go with me to see up-and-coming plays that were still off-off Broadway. We ate cheese and drank wine from a terrace that allowed a view of the Statue of Liberty if you stretched just a little and squinted. He knew the first magazine to which I ever subscribed with my own money was The New Yorker, so it seemed an irony to us when he built a life in that place while I remained an outsider living in much smaller towns much further south.
Even so, it is with interest that I occasionally look closely at this city that has produced so many strange characters in American politics, including our current president. I will still pick up and read some magazines that are openly New York-centric, and I will sometimes find myself amazed at how much I feel like an ideological foreigner when considering the ideas that swirl around Manhattan. I think it is very important to always engage with ideas, but … whoa.
This brings me to Bill de Blasio. He is the current mayor of what I have always viewed as one of the greatest cities on the planet.
Therefore, it was with great interest that I read an interview of de Blasio in a September edition of New York magazine. I thought many of the answers were politically smart responses to what were real questions, which surprised me.
For example, I don’t know much about de Blasio’s workout habits, though I gleaned they’ve been a matter of some controversy. Standing here thousands of miles away, de Blasio’s statement that “if the worst you can say about someone is he goes to the gym, that’s a pretty good situation in today’s world” sounds imminently reasonable.
But then I got to the questions that showed me who de Blasio is, and I will admit I do not understand why New Yorkers aren’t terrified of him; why they don’t see a man who wants to rob them in plain daylight of their very ability to make their own decisions.
I’ll share just one question and answer from the interview that made me happy I don’t live in the modern day Rome with people who would put into power this mayor who has all the right degrees and all the wrong ideas. The core of what he thinks is … breathtaking. And he was elected with more than 70 percent of the vote when he first ran. It seems he’s on track to be re-elected in November.
Reporter: In 2013 you ran on reducing income inequality. Where has it been hardest to make progress? Wages, housing, schools?
Bill de Blasio: What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development.
I’ll give you an example. I was down one day on Varick Street, somewhere close to Canal, and there was a big sign out front of a new condo saying, “Units start at 2 million.” And that just drives people stark raving mad in this city, because that kind of development is clearly not for everyday people. It’s almost like it’s being flaunted. Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see, and I think what we have, in this city at least, are people who would love to have the New Deal back, on one level. They’d love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day to day reality.
It’s not reachable right now. And it leaves this friction, and this anger, which is visceral. I try to explain the things we can do. It’s a little bit of a Serenity Prayer–let’s talk about the things we can fix. The rent freeze we did reached over 2 million people. I’ve talked to people who were going to be evicted, and we stopped the eviction by giving them a free lawyer. And I’ve talked to people who got affordable housing under our plan for 200,000 apartments.
Wow, right? Just … wow.
Published in Politics
Ballot integrity is OK. The Democrats in NYC are not a “machine” in the 19th century sense. They don’t have to be. New Yorkers will certainly vote for a pro-Wall Street candidate–both Giuliani and Bloomberg were pro-capitalist–and they don’t usually vote based on foreign policy or other issues irrelevant to the five boroughs. But they are socially liberal, and other than Giuliani and Bloomberg few Republicans pass through that eye of the needle. That’s how come Schwarzenegger could win in California.
Ah. That certainly makes sense to me, but I don’t understand how they can risk so much of their liberty–which is what they are doing–to protect their rights to do what? Have abortions? Have same sex marriages? Those things are outside the powers of any mayor to undermine. It is not outside of his purview to impact property rights–though this is limited by the history and laws which he cites in the interview–and this is the power to impact New York more.
I’m just surprised, I guess, at how much those social issues mean to New Yorkers?
I also wonder a little about the communities. What makes New York so socially progressive in the first place? I can say religion has influenced conservative leanings in the South. What happened to Manhattan?
Of course it’s beyond his purview to impact property rights. It’s one of the many reasons why this dope is the worst mayor of my lifetime, even including Dinkins. But it illustrates what happens when one party becomes all but unthinkable as the alternative. Giuliani and Bloomberg left no successors in place. National Review and the smart, capable Buckley-esque group at City Journal are real assets to the brains of the city but have no substantial base in the city’s middle class. Any Democrat who can get nominated can win right now, and Di Blasio is far from loved by almost anyone outside of his immediate family.
You know who would have been a sensational mayoral candidate in the Nineties? Trump. If he’d done a bang-up job rallying the city after 9/11, or really been, as Rudy had been, “the Patton of Manhattan”, he would have been famous enough and abrasive enough to have made real changes, as Giuliani did and as Bloomberg basically continued. He also would have been the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination in 2008. That is, if he’d have run as a Republican.
They think you’re risking your personal freedom–read, sexual freedom–and voluntarily tossing in your liberty–yep, sexual liberty, and for what? The right to buy more handguns? They’d say, you call that a freedom? You can imagine the argument. Yep, they think that gay rights is more important than Confederate statues. But very few of them wake up in the morning with either of those things on their minds. I don’t think there’s much that’s all that specific to New York here. Seattle, Santa Monica, Ann Arbor, Boston and a fair chunk of Miami would be little or no different.
I’d once read that a constant theme of comedy since the times of the Romans has been city folk versus country folk, with the same lessons in AD 17 that you’d laugh at in 1017, or 2017; the country people, simple on the surface, are more religious and shrewder about human nature and wiser about the unchanging ways of animal nature; the city people tell wittier jokes, can afford to indulge in wacky kinds of strange foolishness, but do know a few facts of science from time to time that baffle the stubborn country folk. That’s what Rob Long calls, “Set Up. Joke”; today’s culture just updates the idea a little.
Thanks for a really interesting answer @garymcvey.
Did you mean not? I.e. there are a lot more rent controlled buildings in NY now, which is a massive stepping on top of property rights.
Purely because of the social issues?
When I was still a student, I’d have the conversation in class about why there aren’t more conservatives in academics. The super Left professors would say something along the lines that it’s inevitable you are a progressive when you are smart and educated and dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. The more thoughtful responders would say more nuanced things about how conservatives tend to like other professions, especially those that involve running businesses, those in which they worked for themselves. That seemed to have at least a ring of truth to it.
So much business is done in NY, that I’d think there would be more people whose fiscal conservatism trumped social wedges.
Also, I think that I’m not surprised at all that Democrats took over City Hall again after a really, really long stretch of Republican rule. Rudy and Michael were at the helm for what amounts to a generation, yes?
In truth, Bloomberg–per how I understand his time in office–also had some “government knows better than you” aspects to his tenure.
It’s the suuuuuuuuuuuper extreme ideology of the current guy who surprises me.
I mean, aren’t there lots of Democrats in the city who are fine with killing babies and having any kind of sex while also understanding basic economics? Who get that Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel benefit from the Gellar family’s rent controlled apartment while Joey and Chandler’s rate is hiked higher across the hall because they don’t have the same deal? Who understand why the landlord ignores problems in buildings that generate so fewer profits than other holdings? Who like carriage horses??? And work out in their own neighborhoods???
I think Trump would have been a great candidate to run against this Bill character now. I’m not a big Trump fan, to be fair, but I think he would’ve been happier running NYC than living in the White House. I mean… maybe his ego is too big, but I really do think that would have felt good to him. And those things he said on the campaign trail that alienated a lot of New Yorkers? He wouldn’t have said them in quite the same way in that different kind of race.
At least NYC wouldn’t have rent controls re-surging.
I am re-engaging with The Republic, and as much as I hate tin tyrants like the current mayor of NYC, I suppose the older I get the more sympathetic I am to Plato’s disdain for the masses–in city or country settings–and democracy.
Given this is accurate, does the unprecedented population of our urban centers todays indicate a need to be governed much differently from our rural areas. It seems this is a need for which our federalism was suited, to a degree, but those possible benefits have been forfeited. All can see that the New York political scene is replicated in our big urban centers. The discussion topic on property rights is a good one. Is what goes on in the cities regarding rent control,as an example, consonant with America’s constitutional system and concept of property rights?
I don’t think so, but people seem to have forgotten Locke’s conceptions about property as the cornerstone of liberty… that good man Locke having been such an influencer of Founding Fathers.
In 1990, Dinkins’ first year in office, there were 2,262 murders in NYC. In 2016, there were 335.
In Chicago in 2015, there were 468 murders. But the white police superintendent was replaced because he was perceived to be presiding over a racist police department. In 2016, the number of murders exploded to 762.
In Baltimore in 2011, there were “fewer than 200 killings for first time in decades.” By June 12 of this year, there were already 159 murders, “the highest recorded mark by that stage of the year since at least 1990, even though the city’s population was much bigger then than it is now.”
De Blasio is a far-left jerk, but he has not been totally incompetent or anti-cop. De Blasio yesterday on Twitter: “New York City won’t stand for the vile anti-police rhetoric of Michael Isaacson and neither should John Jay College.”
The mayor touts how crime is falling in the New York interview. I would find it more useful to know what the murder rate was as the last mayor was leaving, not going back to 1990. As
I said, I was surprised to find some things that I found sympathetic/positive per the mayor’s answers, even while I also found some of his ideology completely, absolutely, and totally wrong-headed even if not totally “wrong” per what New Yorkers actually seem to endorse when it comes down to casting their votes.
Bloomberg’s last year: 332 murders.
de Blasio:
2014 – 328
2015 – 352
2016 – 335
“Pregnant woman believed among 4 shot dead in Brighton Park rifle attack”
This is the result of Rahm Emanuel capitulating to BLM.
Stuff like this shows me that some reporting on NY has been blatantly dishonest, whatever the feelings of the police as they turned their backs on the mayor.
(It is important to be honest about someone’s record, even if one disagrees with a mayor’s philosophies about even very important issues like policing.)
New Yorkers so deserve this guy and everything he does.
Voters always do deserve what they get when they indicate that’s what they want. Good and hard, right? Geez. ;)
For the comments in that article, de Blasio needs to be beaten from Fort America and left alone to fend for himself, in the wilderness.
What the man has tried to do to education is a travesty. He cloaks his positions in “fairness,” but he tries to deprive poor kids from getting the best education possible. The man is a servant to the teachers unions.
I was thinking of Dinkins when I said that. Dinkins was more incompetant but actually a little less ideological than De Blasio. De Blasio is a political bully while Dinkins was not. De Blasio knows how to throw political power around, which makes him very dangerous.
Plus… Am I the only person who ever heard Dinkins’ name and thought it was the perfect moniker for a Keebler elf? It’s very hard to find a guy with that name scary. One just wants to get out the tea and ask for cookies.
The loping giant, on the other hand….
(I apologize for all ad hominem attacks. I just… Dinkins really makes me think of elves–NOT the beautiful kind from LOTR–and Bill makes me think of giants with the capacity to eat up everyone else’s things…)
I just wish said NY’ers would stay put and not move down here and proceed to recreate the horror they left here with the “that’s not how we do things in New Yawk”…..
No I don’t.
I secretly think this podcast about the mayor’s race in New York was put here because my essay was uploaded to the Main Feed, but I know that’s the kind of thing that would be thunk by a guy like Mayor de Blasio. :)
It’s actually just cause the race is right around the corner, and I’m not the only person who finds it interesting.
If you’re wondering about what’s going on in NYC, the 10 Blocks pundits taught me some things. For example, that whole parking pass thing with teachers is super interesting. And I, too, am left a little baffled about why crime rates are still so low, so I do think we have to consider if some conservative assumptions about “stop and frisk” were/are correct.