Wash, rinse, repeat

People are voting for the same policies that caused New York City to declare bankruptcy 50 years ago — why?

On one level, the story of New York City’s bankruptcy in 1975 is straightforward. For a decade, the city government spent more than it collected in taxes, borrowed to fill the gap, and in April that year, lenders said, “No more.”

But this only begs the question: If New York’s politicians were pursuing policies so obviously harmful to the city — and William F. Buckley had declared city spending “irresponsible” and warned that it would go “bankrupt” during his failed bid for the mayoralty in 1965 — why did voters keep electing them?

One explanation is what one might call “materialist.” According to this interpretation, so many people depended on city government spending for all or a significant part of their income that they were financially committed to keep voting for more.

“There are over a million people on welfare in this city,” Theodore H. White wrote in November 1975:

Our 260,000 city employees have wives, or husbands, and children. Most of them vote — and they are all united in the one great purpose: “More.” No one can be elected in this city who promises “Less.” So all our politicians for 20 years have promised more — more police, more schools, more playgrounds, more guidance counselors, bigger pensions, more hospital beds, more admissions to our university system. Together the welfare population and the city employees dominate our electoral politics. As in a giant soviet, they elect their bosses and paymaster.

No doubt this explains many votes, but even in New York in the 1970s, most people were neither on welfare nor employed by the government. Indeed, some of the most vociferous demanders of “more” were rich enough to receive little of it, like those satirized by Tom Wolfe in his 1970 New York magazine article “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” and those a few rungs down who aspired to being satirized by Tom Wolfe. “Materialism” does not explain their votes.

The other explanation is what one might call the “spiritual.” According to this interpretation, people voted for destructive policies because it made them feel good. These voters were, Irving Kristol wrote in December 1975, “liberal-minded people and politicians who want not only to do good but to feel good and look good while doing good.” “Suburbanites in slacks descended upon Harlem, five thousand strong, to clean and paint for the residents,” Charles R. Morris wrote. “Businessmen solemnly sported black and white ‘Give a damn’ buttons.”

“[I]t is obvious to everyone who looks objectively at New York’s plight that what the city’s poor need, far above all else, is jobs, jobs and more jobs,” Kristol continued:

It follows that the overriding purpose of social policy in New York should be job retention and job creation. Unfortunately, achieving this purpose means, in the shorter term, offering encouragement to the non-poor — i.e., to businessmen and business firms. Such a policy is utterly repugnant to those who have an inflamed sense of political compassion. It may end up doing good for the poor, but it does no good whatsoever to affluent men and women who need to feel good while they are seen to be doing good for the poor. Such people cannot postpone their moral gratifications, and this moral delinquency — created by a kind of elephantiasis of the moral sentiment itself — is what makes New York’s state of mind so self-destructive.

“[T]he political and cultural elites in New York have made a huge investment in that ideology and are struggling desperately against the prospect of a massive write-off,” Kristol concluded:

They cannot believe they did harm when their consciences — magnified and rebroadcast to them by their media — assured them they were doing good. Unless and until this state of mind is itself reformed, the city will move inexorably toward that destiny which it seems to have chosen for itself: to be a moral theater for the affluent, an urban reservation for the poor. And all this in the name of equality.

Any similarity with contemporary Minneapolis is purely intentional.

One of the great oddities of modern political debate is that the side that says there is no social problem that cannot be solved by simply spending a sufficient amount of money routinely castigates the other for its “materialism.” Conservatives have, in fact, often argued that “spiritual” deficiencies can be as socially pernicious as material ones. If conservatives often, rightly, reject “materialist” explanations for poverty, for example, as reductive, they should not quickly embrace them for voting patterns.

As people in different times and different places from New York City in 1975 grapple with the same question — why voters keep electing people with obviously counterproductive policies, whether in economics, energy, education, or public safety — they ought not to neglect the “spiritual.” Man does not vote by bread alone.