Quote of the Day (Nicholas Kristof, on the Counterproductive Tendency Towards Renaming)

“I…worry that the liberal penchant for renaming things is counterproductive. When we employ terms like ‘Latinx’ and ‘A.A.P.I.’ or we fret that it is offensive to refer to ‘the French’ or ‘the college-educated’ or we cite ‘people with uteruses’ rather than ‘women,’ the result is meant to be inclusive but actually leaves many Americans feeling bewildered and excluded. The way to win elections is to engage voters rather than wag fingers at them.”—Opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof, “In the Age of Trump, It’s Hard to Be Humble,” The New York Times, June 18, 2023

Quote of the Day (Carolyn Heilbrun, on Expectations of Change, Left and Right)

“Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.”—Feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun (1926–2003), Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973)

Let’s see what the present moment brings…

Quote of the Day (Alan Brinkley, on Historians’ Treatment of Conservatism)

“While historians have displayed impressive powers of imagination in creating empathetic accounts of the past, they have seldom done so in considering the character of conservative lives and ideas.” —Columbia University professor of history Alan Brinkley (1949-2019), “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review, April 1994

The history department at Columbia University was one of the principal factors attracting me to the school in the late 1970s. Looking back on my four years being taught by its excellent faculty, I have no regrets whatsoever.

Well, okay, maybe one. Because he didn’t arrive at Morningside Heights until nearly a decade after my graduation, I never had a chance to take a course with or even attend a lecture by Alan Brinkley.

Brinkley—who died on Monday at age 70—quickly became one of the university’s most acclaimed teachers, and even, despite his professed distaste for academic administration, even provost of the school for a couple of years.

His influence on a generation at the university, then, was considerable. But so was his impact on how historians came to view liberalism, conservatism, and the catastrophe that redefined these movements for nearly the next century: the Great Depression.

Brinkley’s article for American Historical Review might not have significantly kick-started the intensive study of conservatism that has occurred in the last two decades (surely, the electoral success of Ronald Reagan might have had something to do with that). 

But it instilled a sense in academe that conservatism should be examined in all its varieties, with at least something approaching the same rigor and seriousness accorded liberalism.

But Brinkley had already exerted influence early in his career through his first book, Voices of Protest (1982), an outgrowth of his doctoral thesis that ended up winning him the National Book Award for history. 

Though conceived as an analysis of two populist movements of the past—Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth Society and Fr. Charles Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice—it should be read now as a warning of the discontents with the latent potential to disrupt the American political landscape that was finally realized in the last Presidential race:

“This casual mingling of themes commonly associated with opposite political poles did not originate with the Long and Coughlin movements; nor did it end with them. The populists, from whom both men derived so much ideological strength, had exhibited similar contradictions; so did later political phenomena: the George Wallace movement of the 1960s and the New Right of the 1980s, which combined populist rhetoric with cultural conservatism. Underlying all such movements in varying degrees has been a common impulse: the fear of concentrated power, the traditional American resistance to being governed—whether by private interests or by public institutions.”

And this sentence seems especially ominous: 

“Were these many protest movements to unite into a single force, they might be capable of toppling the entire structure of traditional party politics."

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ Anticipating Today’s Left-Right Divide)

Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor): “We got civil war, Maude! We got riots in the streets!” 

Maude Findley (Edith Bunker’s visiting cousin, played by Bea Arthur): “Because of poverty and unemployment.”

Archie: “No! Because of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the first creepin' socialist.”

Maude: “He brought the country back from the Depression.”

Archie: “And dumped us right into the middle of World War II.”

Maude: “Which he won as our commander in chief.”

Archie: “No! That's a lie! General MacArthur won that war. And Roosevelt fired him for it.”

Maude: “That was Truman.”

Archie: “Under secret sealed orders from F.D.R.!”

Maude: “Oh, come on!” 

Archie: “That's a fact, Maude! Just like that other fact-- that he sold us out to Joe Stalin at Gibraltar.”

Maude: “They met at Yalta!”

Archie: “He sold us out there too!”—All in the Family, Season 2, Episode 12, “Cousin Maude’s Visit,” original air date Dec. 11, 1971, teleplay by Phil Mishkin, Michael Ross, and Bernard West, directed by John Rich

Quote of the Day (Theodore H. White, on the Past GOP and Liberalism)

“Now that the Democrats have captured the liberal imagination of the nation, it is forgotten how much of the architecture of America’s liberal society was drafted by the Republicans.” — Theodore H. White, The Making of the President: 1960 (1961)

Watch or read about this week’s GOP convention and think how far removed it is from “the architecture of America’s liberal society”—then go weep for the loss of the once-great Party of Lincoln, not to mention a more egalitarian and humane United States.

Quote of the Day (Rudy Guiliani, on John Lindsay)

“John Lindsay defined an era in the life of New York City. He embodied the hopes of a generation after the death of John F. Kennedy, a time of discord, rebuilding, and re-birth, when all the action in our nation—for better and for worse—seemed to be taking place in our cities. He made New York City a symbol for urban America, by speaking out about what he believed was wrong, discussing what he believed could be made right, and proposing solutions whose legacy we live with today. There is no question that he had an enduring impact on the City that he loved. His energy, his optimism—and yes, his charisma—made him a national figure during the time he lived at Gracie Mansion.”— Rudolph W. Giuliani, Eulogy at the Memorial Service for Mayor John V. Lindsay, Friday, January 26th, 2001, delivered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

The half-lives of politicians—how, step by step, their vibrancy ebbs once they are out of the public eye—are rarely a happy sight. But John V. Lindsay’s seemed particularly sad and harrowing, especially in light of the “energy…optimism…and charisma” rightly noted by his fellow GOP member who followed him to Gracie Mansion two decades after he left it, Rudy Guiliani.

Lindsay died on this day 15 years ago in Hilton Head, S.C. He was far from the city that had elected him mayor twice, and, at age 79—battered by financial reverses, two strokes, Parkinson’s Disease and complications from pneumonia—even further away from the golden 44-year-old politician whose initial City Hall candidacy had inspired the memorable Murray Kempton line, “He is fresh, and everyone else is tired.”

Expectations, created by the likes of quotes like this, had become unrealistically high by the time he took over in January 1966. ''John Lindsay was the best mayor New York ever had before he took office,'' a press aide to his predecessor, Robert F. Wagner, is supposed to have quipped, according to the New York Times obit after Lindsay's death.

That predisposition to give Lindsay a pass because of who he was rather than what he had done is not unlike the rhapsodic reception accorded Barack Obama when he became President (including a Nobel Peace Prize awarded before the latter had completed even one year in office). The problem was that Lindsay not only had to campaign but govern. There, the magic vanished.

The similarities between Mayor Lindsay and President Obama did not end with great expectations. There is another, equally important one: the electoral coalition they hoped to count on. They were, in essence, much the same: the young, African-Americans, women, and liberals.

Fred Dutton, a former aide to Robert Kennedy who had moved on to advise George McGovern by the early '70s, saw these newly emerging groups as a means of shedding the Democratic Party’s union leaders, urban bosses, and related groups deemed too blue collar and reactionary. Seeing increasingly little room in the Republican Party for his brand of urban liberalism and this "new politics," Lindsay had switched parties in 1971 and run in the Democratic Party’s primaries the following year.

Lindsay’s electoral problem was not in failing to anticipate the future promised by these new groups (one on which Obama successfully capitalized in 2008 and 2012) but in not negotiating the here and now beforehand. He actually ran to the left of McGovern in 1972, but the South Dakota Senator had stolen a march on him in winning the support of these voters by using recent rule changes regarding composition of convention delegates to his advantage.

Worse than that, Lindsay disastrously exhibited early in his administration an almost aristocratic disdain for unions. This immediately complicated his relationship, in his first days in office, with the fiery Irish-born Transport Workers Union head Michael J. Quill, who contemptuously referred to the new mayor as “Lindsley.” 

The resulting strike, which lasted 13 days, immediately cost the city, in lost productivity and wages, an estimated $1.5 billion. Moreover, the eventual deal--$52 million for two years, double the size of any transit pact negotiated by Mr. Wagner—set a standard that other unions would try to match.

Over the following eight years, Lindsay would contend with strikes or sick-outs by the city’s police, teachers, bridge workers, sanitation workers, and firemen. To close the growing deficits spawned at least partly by these work actions, he pressed for a new municipal income tax--along with a new commuter tax--that managed to simultaneously alienate two groups who could not normally agree on anything: business leaders and blue-collar workers. (See a prior post of mine that contrasted the 1966 strike with one that had a more successful outcome: the 1980 transit strike under Ed Koch.)

For all his fierce unpopularity with a large portion of the electorate, Lindsay was fortunate that he didn’t have to face them when the bills for all this labor largesse had to be paid. By 1971, according to Ken Auletta’s The Streets Were Paved With Gold, the Lindsay administration had not only vastly overestimated its forecast of federal aid, but also issued more than $300 million of budget notes to cover inflated revenue estimates. The following year, it rolled up these notes with a new set. Through these budget gimmicks, the city was living beyond its means, setting the stage for the 1975 municipal bankruptcy crisis.

Inevitably, any historical assessment of Lindsay must take this fiscal irresponsibility into account. That does not bode well for his ultimate reputation. But other aspects of his work and career need also to be entered into the ledger. Ironically, the person who made one of the most eloquent and surprising cases for him is someone he had precious little in common with him.

In some ways Giuliani can be thought of as the ultimate anti-Lindsay: ethnic Catholic rather than WASP; a charm-challenged figure versus one whose affability was effortless and genuine; a Republican who quelled his maverick instincts enough to remain within the party fold, rather than one who found a more congenial home in the Democratic Party; a baseball rather than tennis fan; a politician whose base was the outer boroughs rather than Manhattan; and a chief executive acclaimed for rising to the occasion in a crisis, instead of one who seemed to fold his tent quickly when pressed by opponents. 

But once in awhile, politicians can sound unexpected grace notes. Guiliani’s came not merely in how he spoke of Lindsay after his death, but in how he had come to his aid before that.

Lindsay left City Hall a spent force in 1973, with even Kempton now calling him a "splendid flop." His last campaign, for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1980, ended with his defeat in the primary. Then, in the 1990s, two law firms with which he had been associated went bankrupt.  Surprisingly, a man associated with patrician, prep-school privilege had no health insurance and, under city rules of that time, no pension eligibility. All of this occurred as his health began to fail.

Enter Guiliani. Upon becoming mayor, he had been impressed by Lindsay’s graciousness in a long chat they had at Gracie Mansion. Amazingly, he even felt something of a kinship with the liberal as another politician who had tried to reform the old political system. Now, with other friends, he was able to secure for the former mayor a position as special counsel to the City Commission for the United Nations, with health coverage, a $25,000-a-year salary, and, under rules that had more recently gone into effect, enough time to qualify for the 10 years needed for a city pension.

In one sense, Guiliani may have been overly generous in stating in his eulogy that his predecessor had “an enduring impact on the City that he loved.” Unlike Fiorello LaGuardia, Ed Koch, Guiliani or Michael Bloomberg, Lindsay was not a transformative figure who either left the lives of New Yorkers demonstrably better off or changed the physical or operational landscape of the city. The perception grew under him that, far from being the “Fun City” he hailed, New York was an ungovernable one.

Yet Guiliani was also correct in recognizing, as even many who vehemently disagreed with his policies did (including a conservative friend of mine who told me he was the best interview he ever had) the essential decency and humanity of Lindsay. The problems of race that overshadowed his eight years in office have hardly vanished in America or New York, as events of the past year have shown. The one great achievement of his tenure can be phrased as a negative, but it remains significant for all that: unlike other American cities in the late 1960s, New York did not burn.