Who Guards the Guardians?
One lens through which New York City government in the 20th Century has been viewed is the decades long clash between elected officials who were products of political machines and self-styled “reformers” The classic discussion of this history is Sayre and Kaufman’s “Governing New York City: Politics in the Metropolis.” Today, there seem to be no reformers – no public voices who advocate for what they regard to be in the best interest of all New Yorkers. They have been replaced by advocates for particular communities and personal interests. How did that happen and is it important?
The machines were political operations built up from neighborhood organizations that whipped votes for their candidates in exchange for patronage and contracts. Jimmy Walker, William O’Dwyer, Robert Wagner and finally Abraham Beame were products of the city’s organization political clubs. The machines generally dealt in ethnic politics and rallied around Irish, Italian and Jewish candidates. The machines were regarded by reformers as corrupt, inefficient and exclusive – particularly excluding Black and Hispanics from power. The most famous reformer was, perhaps, Fiorello LaGuardia. Both John Lindsey and Ed Koch came up each through reform ranks. Reformers saw themselves as advocates of merit hiring, competitive contracting and professional public administration. Before LaGuardia, New York was exclusively a machine politics town.
The reformers had supporting them an array of political and civic organizations. There were “reform” as well as “organization” neighborhood political clubs that gathered nominating petitions and supported their own candidates in elections. But also, importantly, there was a range of “good government” civic organization, the boards of which were dominated by the city’s commercial and social elite, like the City Club, the Women’s City Club, the Municipal Art Society, the Regional Plan Association and the Citizens Budget Commission, among a dozen others, that advocated for merit hiring, competitive bidding of contracts and high-quality service delivery of government programs. [It is interesting to note that among the most high-profile reformers of the first half of the 20th Century, at least at the beginning of his career, was Yale graduate, Robert Moses]. There was a kind of yin and yang between machine and reform control of city government throughout the second half of the 20th Century in mayoral elections. The electorate went back and forth between choosing mayoral reformers and organization candidates.
However, this began to break down with the election of the city’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, who came up through a parallel Black political organization – and was not part of the conventional white ethnic political clubs. With the advent of media driven mayoral campaigns, the strength of the machine and reform organizations broke down, with advertising replacing organizing in turning out the vote. While many of mayor Michael Bloomberg’s initiatives mirrored the priorities of earlier reformers, he was independent of political organizations (in part because he was able to finance his own campaigns) and didn’t come out of reform political clubs (and ran as a Republican, as did Lindsey). But Rudolph Giuliani and Bill DeBlasio and would be difficult to locate on a machine/reform scale.
Our current mayor, Eric Adams is a product of a multi-racial Brooklyn old style political machine which has continued to function into the 21st Century. He is also, importantly, a former city employee and union member. But significantly, there is no reform counterbalance to his old school political policies. Like previous machine operatives he places loyalty and ethnic politics ahead of reform type of “professional” government. An interesting argument that Mayor Adams occasionally makes is that there isn’t much evidence that “professionally” managed government was actually more responsive to local communities or delivered better services than did community embedded local political club driven machines. I am unaware of anyone today, either elected officials or visible civic organizations, advocating for traditional good government policies. Criticism of Mayor Adams is either political or personal.
Where are today’s “reformers.” There aren’t any, as far as I can see. I would argue that just about everyone involved in local government today has a vested interest in the way things are. There are no serious voices that advocate in “the public interest” in local politics. While there is an important argument that the past promoters of reform were actually advancing the interests of the white, privileged New York establishment (aka “the ruling class”), and there is nothing besides self-interest governing politics and government, I am not so totally cynical. I do believe that there is a place for merit and professionalism in public administration. This absence of activism for professional local government has created a troubling vacuum in our discussion of how local government best might function.
Public spirited individuals came into high profile during the city’s fiscal meltdown of the 1970’s, when people like Felix Rohatyn (an investment banker) and Richard Ravitch (a real estate developer), wealthy, white, Jewish men from prominent families, pretty clearly selflessly got involved in attempting to rescue city government from bankruptcy – with not much in it materially for them. They were willing to take the risk of the possibility of failure and diminished reputations. They were prepared and able to speak truth to power. At that time there were other high-profile leaders who were in it to advance themselves, and who were, by contrast obsequious to power. But there were also a number of individuals who, in my judgement, were selfless and brave in their efforts. Perhaps that’s a difficult distinction to draw, or even bad form to do so, but after decades of work in and around city government, I think I’m in a position to make such an important judgment fairly – between the good guys and the bad guys. I would venture to say that there isn’t anyone around today who could or would want to play that “good guy” role.
Some of this lack of civic leadership has to do with corporate globalization, which has produced business managers who tend not to feel a connection with any particular place. Just for example, while Chase Bank is headquartered in New York, I suspect its CEO, Jamie Dimon, would likely tell you that he is a citizen of the world, and is concerned with national and international issues affecting the bank. This is in contrast to David Rockefeller, a previous Chase CEO (although it was at the time a much more local and smaller enterprise) who was in the 60’s and 70’s active in New York affairs and founded the civic organization, The New York City Partnership. The leaders of the two great New York City universities also, I would guess, regard themselves as world citizens, and likely couldn’t name the Borough President of Manhattan. There are some people today who style themselves as local civic leaders, but I can’t think of one who isn’t using the public sphere to attract attention to themselves, is concerned about staying on the good side of the powerful and seeks principally to advance their personal or institutional interests through their civic involvement. They all have an agenda. They aren’t Rohatyn or Ravitch.
In the past, the boards of civic organizations were very much a creature of the business and institutional elite. Their leadership were personally and financially independent of city government and in a position to be critical of its operations. I might note that I believe essential to being able to play the role of independent public citizen is/was a certain amount of independent wealth. One needs to be in a position to not care about what powerful people in government and the media think about you.
Today, strikingly, the boards of those organizations, while they include a few corporate leaders, have a disproportionate share of lobbyists who very much have a stake in the status quo, and not running afoul of those in power locally, who are the object of their lobbying on behalf of various commercial interests. For example, the highest profile civic organization in New York today is probably the Citizens Budget Commission – which sets itself out as a private sector monitor of the city’s fiscal probity. My recollection is that in the 1990’s its board was composed of representatives of entities with a stake in the business of municipal finance, investment banks and law firms. They had an interest in the fiscal integrity of local government, particularly as an issuer of tax-exempt debt. Today the chair of the CBC is a corporate lobbyist, and I count 11 other such lobbyists on the organization’s board. Because of the nature of lobbying, staying on the good side of elected officials is essential to the business. The same is true in the real estate industry, which is deeply reliant on local government and has about 26 members on the CBC board. It seems unlikely that CBC can be effectively critical of government operations given its governance.
It is worth noting, though, that recently, when Mayor Adams thought that the city was likely to face a serious shortfall of revenues, his first impulse to cut the budget in order to get it into balance. This was not how Mayors Lindsay and Beame operated (that is, deficit spending was seen as a legitimate policy) – and mayoral fealty to balanced budgets is a significant advance in the institutional culture of local government.
Some of the retreat of civic organizations from controversy also has to do with the twelve years of Mayor Bloomberg’s time in City Hall. Mayor Bloomberg came from the business and social world of the boards of civic and cultural organizations – and, importantly, he shared their values of merit-based, data-driven public administration. As a result, the boards of those groups were made up of many friends and social acquaintances of Mayor Bloomberg and were loath to criticize him. This was most visibly true of the Municipal Art Society, which prior to the Bloomberg administration, had been in the business of suing city government when municipal actions were at odds with its advocacy of good public design, intelligent zoning, and historic preservation. MAS fired its in house attorney and dissolved its law committee early on in Bloomberg’s tenure are mayor.
Now, when we have returned to a form of machine politics, there seem to be no prestigious voices articulating the public interest – no contemporary analog to Rohatyn and Ravitch. The city’s personnel and procurement systems are highly dysfunctional. There is no powerful group with the ability and interest in identifying those problems and offering solutions that would require a major overhaul of local government (structural challenges that Mayor Bloomberg, who was professionally ideally suited to address, may have chosen not to take on because they appeared so intractable to him and his team. Bloomberg seemed to be focused on addressing problems he was confident his team could solve during a mayor’s ordinary tenure). The groups that now exist on the public scene have extremely narrow agendas, like the present incarnation of the City Club, which is anti-development and anti-institutional and is exclusively involved with using litigation as a tool to advance its positions.
The diminishment of local press coverage is also a part of the problem. The New York Times, long a bastion of local good government opinion articles, also sees itself playing on a world stage. Most of its voices on local issues have narrow, “progressive” agendas. Certainly, there is no one at the Times with any knowledge (or interest) of the nitty gritty of how local government operates. The Post isn’t a serious newspaper, as actual facts seem to not be a priority in its reporting. The Daily News is both resource constrained and consumed with mayhem and scandal. NY1 relies on a coterie of New York City lobbyists with vested interests to offer opinions on local politics and is oriented towards personalities and horse races. There are a number of independent websites now covering local government in a sophisticated way, like The City and Gothamist. But they have a limited audiences and even more limited resources.
The worst part of this situation is that I don’t see a solution. Almost everyone who cares about New York City government today is someone who has an interest in it and doesn’t want to antagonize it. One of the things I learned mid-career is when there is government dysfunction it is not because public officials are incompetent, it is because those systems are the way they are because it is in someone’s interest for them to be that way. There is always someone or an interest group to oppose almost any change in the status quo. Those who don’t have a direct interest, aren’t interested.
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