‘There’s nothing a member of the liberal Establishment hates as much as a conservative anti-Establishmentarian.’
THE battle royal over police brutality that has erupted in this city in the wake of the Diallo shooting is actually the same battle Rudy Giuliani has been waging since he took office – just in another guise.
After all, who was the first major figure busted in the self-righteous arrest-a-thon down at police headquarters? None other than his rival in the 1989 and 1993 elections, David Dinkins.
That in itself should have made it clear just how bitterly personal the supposed ”civil disobedience” campaign really was. But for the enemies of Giuliani, the personal is political.
For example, how many times have you heard in the past few months that Giuliani can’t possibly understand minority feelings about the police because he doesn’t have enough black or Hispanic friends?
We’ve just spent a year being told by the same people that a politician’s private life isn’t anybody’s business, but apparently that’s only true for Democratic presidents with active sex lives, not Republican mayors who fail to brandish their acquaintanceships with people of color as human shields against illegitimate personal assaults.
And consider the complaint, heard over and over again until Giuliani finally relented last week, that the mayor had somehow shown disrespect to the entire black community by refusing to meet with Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields and state Comptroller H. Carl McCall. The idea, obviously, was that Giuliani wouldn’t deal with these two officials solely because they are black.
Giuliani didn’t want to meet with Fields and McCall not because they’re black, but because he believes them to be enemies. And is he wrong to think it? Both are partisan Democrats and strong supporters of his old rival, Dinkins.
If you believe New York’s mayor has a particular obligation to meet with the Manhattan borough president and the state comptroller, fine, attack him for that. But those who have been letting Giuliani have it on this point evidently believe that Fields and McCall deserve some kind of special treatment from Giuliani just because of their skin color.
In fact, the attitude of the political Establishment in New York these past two months has been that Giuliani is insensitive to the complaints of minorities because he isn’t paying enough patronizing deference to those complaints.
The mayor honestly and truly does not believe that the NYPD is routinely abusive and horrible toward minorities, and so he doesn’t say it. He has the facts on his side, tons and tons of facts. What has defeated him is that ”the facts don’t matter,” as the Village Voice’s Peter Noel has repeatedly said. What matters is that minorities are feeling oppressed, so obviously they are oppressed.
In this circumstance the only thing a politician can possibly say is ”I feel your pain” – and Giuliani has come very close in the past week to uttering those Clintonite words.
From the beginning of the Diallo mess, the mayor has been under fire and standing almost entirely alone. That’s nothing new for him. Ever since he defeated Dinkins in 1993, Giuliani has been an amazingly solitary figure in the city, fighting for change against a political and cultural Establishment that neither wants nor sees the need for change.
Indeed, the fact that he is a conservative and his enemies are mostly liberal does not obscure the truth: Giuliani is an anti-Establishment politician.
And there’s nothing a member of the liberal Establishment hates as much as a conservative anti-Establishmentarian. That’s why he so enrages his foes, to the point that they happily march alongside caricatures depicting him as Hitler. That’s why, in the interest of discrediting him, they are willing to make common cause with Al Sharpton, whom they would ordinarily revile.
What is the liberal Establishment in New York City? It’s the umbrella term for the institutions and people who believe in the conventional wisdom about what’s good and bad for the city, whatever the conventional wisdom happens to be at any given time. Its leading institutions include forces as various as the New York Times, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Planned Parenthood, the American Jewish Committee, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the professoriat from Columbia to CUNY.
Giuliani’s entire mayoralty is a rebuke and a challenge to the prevailing consensus of this liberal Establishment, a consensus that governed the city in the 30-plus years before he took office. According to the consensus, the primary obligation of city government was to provide rather than to protect.
That idea, which probably sounds perfectly acceptable to you, was actually a revolutionary change in a democratic society like ours. Rather than serving as the protector of last resort – policing streets to maintain public safety, picking up garbage and putting out fires to maintain public health, building schools and libraries to maintain a citizenry with the ability to govern itself – New York became a provider.
As provider, the city government was explicitly given the power to act as parent and spouse and doctor and minister to city residents – who were seen less as self-governing citizens than as dependents who needed to be taken care of. The means: welfare, nursing care, hospital beds, an unlimited ”right to housing,” you name it, the city was to provide it. Any argument to the contrary – that these policies destroyed character and individual initiative – was deemed heartless, vicious, unfeeling.
Giuliani has actively sought to reverse this, to return the city government to its original role as protector, not provider. That’s the reason the liberal Establishment hates him, and that’s why it has used the horrific killing of Amadou Diallo as a way to destroy his effectiveness – and end his political career.
