Richard Ravitch is an extraordinary man. He’s an intelligent, indefatigable, honest, honorable, accessible, and personable fellow who, for 45 years, has played a key role in rescuing New York’s jerrybuilt fiscal structure from its own failings. Yes, that’s my personal opinion of the man who has…
First, a matter of numbers and nomenclature: Bill de Blasio, who is being hailed like Eliot Spitzer before him as the new face of American liberalism, won his race to be New York City’s next mayor with a near-record victory margin but also record low turnouts in both the primary and the general…
Greenwich Village has always been a matter of geography imbricated by doctrine. Exempted from the 1811 grid plan for numbering Manhattan’s roads north of 14th Street that came to define most of the island, Greenwich Village, bordered on its west by the Hudson River, retained a crazy-quilt layout of…
Not long ago Thomas Edsall told readers of the New York Times that the 2012 Obama campaign had essentially given up trying to win the support of white working-class voters. The Democrats, explained Edsall, had become a top-and-bottom coalition of highly educated professionals, many of whom work…
Rough Justice
New York governor David Paterson, beset by charges of witness tampering in the case of a close aide accused of assaulting an ex-girlfriend, has spoken of legalizing ultimate fighting as a revenue raiser to help close the state’s $8 billion plus budget gap. But New Yorkers looking for brawling…
In what may be best remembered as the "shrug of the shoulders" election, New Yorkers in a low-turnout stunner last Tuesday expressed their strong preference for none of the above. With three-quarters of the electorate staying home despite balmy weather, incumbent mayor Michael Bloomberg garnered…
Ever since the 1972 Democratic convention nominated George McGovern over the objections of the AFL-CIO, the standard wisdom has been that organized labor's power in American politics has declined dramatically. The failure of the current Democrat-dominated Congress to pass labor's highest…
The folks over at Newsweek have a sly sense of humor. They put New York mayor Michael Bloomberg on the cover of their November 3 issue and let him dispense fiscal advice to the next president. In the article, Bloomberg, who has presided over record levels of spending and debt increases, chastised…
A popular media narrative last week was that the sordid revelations that brought down New York governor Eliot Spitzer were a total shock to New Yorkers because he was universally regarded as a paragon of probity. The prostitution scandal was the fall of Mr. Clean, as CNN and Reuters put it. We were…
The Liberals' Moment
Tough Liberal
Even by the scandal-pocked history of New York politics, Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace is extraordinary. A mere seven months into his term after a landslide victory, the Empire State's brash new governor is openly ridiculed as a liar and worse. An astonishing 80 percent of respondents tell…
New York
The publication of It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis's Depression-era novel of how homespun fascists took over America, was greeted with extraordinary praise. The New Yorker described it as "one of the most important books ever produced in this country . . . It is so crucial, so passionate, so…
The publication of It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis's Depression-era novel of how homespun fascists took over America, was greeted with extraordinary praise. The New Yorker described it as "one of the most important books ever produced in this country . . . It is so crucial, so passionate, so…
Mencken: The American Iconoclast
The Vital Center:
The Flight of the Creative Class
Free World
LIKE ALL HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT CONFLICTS, the war in Iraq has produced its share of "winners" and "losers." Yet beyond the fates of individuals or organizations--Jacques Chirac, Jean Chrétien, Brent Scowcroft, the New York Times, the BBC, the National Organization for Women, the Congressional…
Leadership by Rudolph W. Giuliani Miramax Books, 407 pp., $25.95 SIR RUDY GIULIANI has become such a commanding figure that the reviewers of his book "Leadership" have spent far more space on his persona than his policies. The reviews almost invariably buy into the line about 9/11 bringing forth "a…
The Shield of Achilles War, Peace, and the Course of History by Philip Bobbitt Knopf, 919 pp., $40 A FEW YEARS AGO there was hue and cry over the loss of academic interest in the subject of war. The complaints were premature. Philip Bobbitt's "The Shield of Achilles" will see to that. It's a book…
THE New York Review of Books has a fabulous record of getting it wrong. These are the characters who announced "The End of American Affluence" in 1997, just as the economy was ascending into the stratosphere. They were sure that welfare reform would lead to bodies in the streets; sure that…
Heaven on Earth The Rise and Fall of Socialism by Joshua Muravchik Encounter, 417 pp., $27.95 Holy Madness Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries 1776-1871 by Adam Zamoyski Viking, 512 pp., $34.95 THERE ARE TWO KINDS of radical: the consolable and the inconsolable. The consolables are those whose…
NEW YORK Call it the New York Paradox: Politically, it's always 1968. Racial tensions, though far lower than they were thirty, or even ten, years ago, still define city elections. In Gotham, explains Jim Andrews, the campaign manager for Ruth Messinger's failed 1997 mayoral bid, "race isn't just…
Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Harvard University Press, 478 pp., $18.95 paper SINCE LAST SPRING, the publishing sensation on the American academic left has been Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's "Empire." Its many critics--in magazines from the New Republic to the New Criterion--have…
THE IDEA THAT LOS ANGELES is the Ellis Island of the late twentieth century was brought home to me a few weeks ago when Antonio Villaraigosa won the first round of voting to become the city's next mayor. Villaraigosa, the son of Mexican immigrants, who has Clinton-like charm and the backing of a…
Seven years ago, New York City under Mayor David Dinkins stood on the edge of social and economic breakdown. Elected in 1989 as a symbol of racial healing, Dinkins conducted a largely symbolic mayoralty. Put in power by liberals whose exhausted policy program had been replaced by identity politics,…
New York, the open city, the city created by its harbor, has always been both invigorated and imperiled by disorder.
Stephen Goldsmith
Never have so many been so wrong about so much for so long with so little consequence Starting in the mid-1960s, alarmed by Vietnam abroad and racial rebellion at home, American journalists and academics prophesied that Western liberalism -- or "late capitalism," as many chose to call it -- was…
ome time in the last 30 years, liberals and conservatives switched places in the poverty debate. It is conservatives -- market Republicans and new Democrats -- who are now most optimistic about incorporating the poor into main-stream America. Meanwhile, traditional liberals -- like Herbert Gans,…