AMERICAN COMMENTARY
The limousine liberal
AUBERON WAUGH
New York—Wherever serious people meet in New York City, they end up discussing the question whether the city can survive. This usually comes up after the fifth or sixth martini, when the company has exhausted discussion of the dwindling peace dividend (Mr Nixon has cleverly shown that the end of the Vietnam war will release practically no funds at all for other government pro- grammes), the Negro problem (nowadays called law and order) and ON Calcutta!, the Tynan nudie show for which tickets are now changing hands at sixty dollars a piece.
To a visitor from England, the question whether the city of New York can survive dwindles into insignificance beside the won- der of the fact that the city does survive, from day to day, a miracle of illogicality and hubristic denial of natural order. In the four years of Mr Lindsay's mayoralty, the city has been stricken with four huge catas- trophes, and is now permanently in a state which would be judged by European stan- dards to represent a breakdown of law and order. Yet New Yorkers preserve their extraordinary resilience and vitality. There is none of the all-pervasive fear which one reads about in more colourful accounts by visiting British journalists. Perhaps my colleagues find the combination of martinis, shell-food and air conditioning hard to cope with. The only tangible result of all the disasters, in fact, seems to be a more or less universally spread dislike of Mayor Lindsay.
This may be unjust but it does raise the question—more immediate than that of New York's ultimate survival—whether any mayor of the city can hope to survive more than one term of office. It is true that of the four major disasters—the trans- port strike and the power failure of 1966, the garbage strike of 1967 and the snow crisis of last winter, only one (the snow crisis) can be laid directly at his door. On that occasion the Mayor was apparently warned of an impending fifteen-inch snow- fall during the weekend while he was swim- ming, skin diving and eating lotuses in pri- vate, and neglected to do anything until after the snow had fallen, with the result that the whole city was paralysed for three weeks. It is also true that Governor Rockefeller helped to aggravate the garbage strike by refusing to send in National Guardsmen on the grounds that it was a city affair. It might even be true, arguably, that the un- fortunate Mr Lindsay had done nothing to justify his identification in the minds of middle and working class white 'ethnics' (the Italians, Poles, Irish, etc.) as the Negroes' candidate. But every chicken in New York has come to roost on the Mayor's head, just as every pigeon does on the head of Father Duffy's statue in Duffy Square.
At present, his only chance of survival would appear to rest on discrediting his two opponents, the official Republican John Marchi and the Democrat Mario Procaccino. This would not appear difficult for anyone of reasonable political acumen. Marchi is practically unknown, hailing from sparsely inhabited Staten Island, while Procaccino's gaffes are a by-word. On one occasion, searching for le mot juste to praise a Demo- crat party worthy, Procaccino announced ')ur friend grows on us all, like a cancer'.
Last week, he announced the sacking of his public relations advisers on the grounds that they had been implicated in some shady deal- ings or other. But the sad truth about Mayor Lindsay is that since leaving Congress he has shown a serious lack of political awareness.
His campaign is gravely hampered by hav- ing lost the Republican party machine ,to Marchi in the New York GOP primary. This, in itself, was the result of a stupendous mis- calculation at the cop convention at Miami last June. Then he was approached by Governors Romney of Michigan and Rhodes of Ohio and asked to present himself from the floor against Mr Nixon's choice of Spiro Agnew for Vice-Presidential runner. When the Nixon camp learned of this, they approached him to second Agnew, expect- ing him to trade this support for a promise . that there would be no conservative rival in New York's mayoral primary. Instead, Mr Lindsay meekly agreed to second Agnew. The Nixon administration still rubs its eyes at such disingenuousness. Nor has President Nixon affronted the East Coast liberal Re- publican establishment (whose darling Mr Lindsay remains). He supported Mr Lind- say's candidature in the GOP primary to the extent of reopening a naval dockyard in New York. Even this advantage was thrown away by the Mayor's ineptness over the snowfall incident, and now the White House will not at all mind seeing New York City go Demo- crat again, since it will give the Federal authorities an opportunity to move in with its long-promised investigation into rackets which will discredit everybody for miles around in the Democrat party machine.
Mr Nixon's political balancing act has become one of the marvels of America. He has sold his new welfare scheme to the right wing of his party on the two propositions— both forceful enough, if not easily recon- cilable—that it was a scheme to make the poor work on the one hand, and that noth- ing would be done to implement it for a number of years, if ever, on the other. Reci- pients of welfare in the United States have a tradition of not voting, and only hardcore liberals really believe that further social security benefits will do anything but aggra- vate the problems of law and order.
The liberals of New York are far less electorally significant than might be sup- posed, for the good reason that nearly all of them live in New Jersey or Connecticut and therefore have no vote in the city elections. The remaining middle class, whose members would almost certainly describe themselves as liberal if asked, have largely deserted Lindsay for a rather discreditable reason. Among fashionable, trend-setting liberals there was considerable disappointment that Norman Mailer did not win the Democratic nomination, and so he remains their man. -even though he is no longer running, which gives them an excuse to be rude about Lind- say. Lindsay's supporters (in Washington and in the rich, disfranchised suburbs) claim that this is really explained by jealousy. Be that as it may, the unfashionable pseudo- liberal middle classes, who would never have dreamed of supporting Mailer, have caught the idea that it is fashionable to be rude about Lindsay, and so they are, although the real reason for their disenchantment is al. most certainly the unfortunate image that Lindsay has allowed himself to develop of being the poor man's friend.
On top of all the other aggravations of New York life, this is really too much. Liberalism can only go so far, and the most significant fact about New York politics—or, indeed, about most American politics, I dare say—is that the rich vastly outnumber the poor. The relationship of this to the fact that the poor seldom bother to vote involves us in one of those chicken- and-egg puzzles which it is scarcely the task of a visiting journalist to untangle. The great majority of voters in both parties tacitly accept Barry Goldwater's dictum that in the Land of the Free the poor are poor because they lack ambition. The crime wave and the sheer mindless violence of the black ghettoes in New York are seen not as the first stirrings of frustrated ambition but as a delinquent form of self-indulgence which can flourish only in default of firm action by Mayor Lindsay. The carrot is already there, but for the system to work it is necessary to resort also to the stick— or, as Professor James Burnham puts it more elegantly, the free society can afford to maintain even a substantial quota of parasites, but only at the cost of cracking down firmly on saboteurs.
For an English political correspondent on his first visit to the United States, the most remarkable thing about New Yorkers is their sang-froid. They travel on commuter trains with windows shattered by bricks, bullets and beer bottles thrown at random by total strangers who may or may not be trying to establish some abstruse point of socio- economic theory. They accept that it is no longer safe to walk in the streets after dark, and they also—more reluctantly— accept that one in twenty-five households will be burgled this year. To an Englishman it seems extraordinary that these restrictions are not found intolerable, justifying even the most extreme counter-measures. To New Yorkers, the inconvenience can be evaluated and quantified, like everything else, and it is no use pretending that the present system is without its compensations. at any rate for the majority of New Yorkers. To a great extent, they are even prepared to accept that there is little or nothing which city, State or Federal government can do without imposing other even less acceptable inconveniences in their place. All they expect from politicians is that they should make the right noise and not aggravate the existing problems either by wrongheadedness or by incorn• petence.
What they are not prepared to accept, no top of the schools problem, the crime, the filth of the streets, the strikes, the electri shortages and even—latest development 0 all—the collapse of the telephone system, is a politician who appears to be guilty on both counts. Mayor Lindsay's only chance of re-election, as I have said, is to convince people that his two opponents would be even worse. Under normal circumstances, this should not be a difficult task. He is certain of a large proportion of the women's vote, and he should be able to rustle up enough from those who are appalled by the spectacle of Procaccino, the Demo- crat, and who are not by nature inclined to Marchi, the anonymous conservative Re- publican. It is very bard to distinguish any difference in the platforms of these two men, but they are recognisably making the right noises. Lindsay's campaign has not caught fire because he has nothing to ig- nite, and the only dynamic in this election comes from those at each end of the poli- tical spectrum who cry: 'Dump Lindsay, the limousine liberal'.
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