The Political Currents Mailbag, Fall Edition

You ask, I answer

Photo: Getty Images

It’s been a while since I did one of these. The rules were simple. You submitted questions, I answered them. I did my best but didn’t have time for every single one.

I’ll try to make the mailbag a more frequent affair. Names of the questioners are not being published. So if you want to submit in the future, you’ll enjoy sweet anonymity.

Now onto the questions!

Do you think you'll ever leave NYC? Asking as lifelong NYCer who gets asked this anytime I complain about the city -- which I think is the typical love/hate experience of native NYers. 

I was born in New York City and have lived here my entire life, excepting the four years of college I spent at Stony Brook University, on the east end of Long Island. I’ve lived in three neighborhoods, two boroughs (Brooklyn and Manhattan), and spent a year working for a local newspaper in another borough (Queens). I’m still, to this day, awed by the bigness of the city, and I’m reminded of this whenever I travel elsewhere. The sheer diversity of people, the dizzying number of neighborhoods, the culture, the opportunities—every other American city, at best, has one sizable downtown, and there are at least five in New York, maybe more. My career has flourished in New York. The city has been quite good to me.

But I don’t begrudge anyone who leaves. If you are of the millenial generation or younger, you’ve spent your life effectively frozen out of the New York City housing market. You can always rent—I’m a lifelong renter—but buying is virtually impossible unless you’ve reached the upper middle class or have become, through great skill or wild luck, wealthy. I am just at the point, despite my professional success, where I could buy a one-bedroom apartment in a select number of far-flung outer borough neighborhoods. Houses are an impossibility—in the neighborhood where I grew up and now live, where gritty Saturday Night Fever was filmed, even modest homes cost north of $1 million—and I’ve made peace with the fact that if I ever want to own a home with multiple bedrooms, a backyard, and a driveway, I will have to spend at least part of my time away from New York City. When we talk about the affordability problem in New York, taxes are inevitably brought up, but taxes are only the problem of the homeowning incumbent. Within New York City, property taxes are quite low, given the extraordinary home values. (Westchester and Long Island can complain.)

For a bulk of the twentieth century, homeownership was not a challenge, in New York, once you reached the middle class. That is simply no longer true. It wasn’t true when interest rates were at 1 percent and it’s not true now that they’ve hit 7 percent. I can rent forever, but if I ever want to do more than rent, I have to think hard about how long I can live here.

Anything else that can bug me about New York—noise, dirtiness, an unreliable subway—would matter far less if it was a lot easier to rent or buy here.

I recently read Marty Baron's "Collision of Power," his book about editing the Washington Post during the Trump Era. The parts that interested me the most, however, dealt with generational conflicts in the newsroom. Felicia Sonmez comes off terribly (as expected). Dave Weigel too.

Baron conveys the impression, without quite saying it, that the younger Washington Post reporters are bratty and they misunderstand their role. He was trying to uphold a simple social media policy aimed at protecting the paper's venerable reputation, and many (perhaps most) of their recent hires weren't on the same wavelength.

I think of other media controversies too, involving Mike Pesca, Donald McNeil, and the NYT editor who was fired for printing an op-ed by Tom Cotton. In every case, it seems to me that the fired journalists were treated unfairly; they were victims of a mob mentality during a period when the country was going through a weird time, and the old guard capitulated to unreasonable demands. 

Your view? 

The generational conflicts in newsrooms were very real and my sense is, as we near 2024, they’ve calmed down. Newspaper bosses have reasserted themselves. The New York Times has a much stricter social media policy and it’s willing to go against the hopes and desires of the unruly youth to enforce it. They’ve come to realize, in part, the internet is something of a paper tiger—controversies there matter, but not that much. Having come up in digital media, I know what’s it like to work in an environment where reporters and editors are, quite literally, treating Twitter as real life. That’s not good.

I’m glad the temperature is coming down. Dave Weigel, a great political reporter, shouldn’t have been almost canceled. It was foolish to force out Donald McNeil, the leading Times science reporter, and Mike Pesca, one of the best podcasters of his generation. Marty Baron, in his own way, fed into this dynamic by transforming the Washington Post into a resistance-style publication and taking up the self-important “democracy dies in darkness” slogan. The Times has navigated the Biden years much more adeptly, and I think there’s a reason they’ve remained financially healthy while the Post is laying reporters off. I’ve taken an increasingly dim view of a lot of Trump era journalism and commentary.

As someone who does both straight reporting and opinion writing for a living, I’d be a hypocrite if I cried out for more “view from nowhere”-style news. The old ways were flawed. But you can’t turn every single news organization into Vox or Teen Vogue or even The Nation. Opinion-driven journalism can be great, and I’ve done a lot of it. But the Times and the Associated Press and others have to walk a different line and even, to an extent, safeguard their institutional brands. The Times is bigger than any one journalist or editor or internal protest. They forgot this in 2020, but they’ve reasserted themselves since.

Thinking along the lines of The Power Broker, who do you think is the most powerful unelected person in New York City right now, and who do you think is the most powerful person most New Yorkers have never heard of? (Could be the same person, or could be two different people.)

New York Magazine recently built a power issue around this question, and my pick was Peter Ward, the former Hotel Trades Council boss who is now lobbying on behalf of Genting, the gaming giant trying to get a full-fledged casino at Resorts World in Queens. Ward, more than any single individual, might be responsible for crushing Airbnb here. But he is no Robert Moses—and no one is. The reality is that power today is both much more diffuse and actually concentrated in the hands of elected officials. Kathy Hochul, as governor, is the most powerful person in New York State. She is not as domineering as Andrew Cuomo and hasn’t yet figured out how to pull every lever, but the institutional might is there. It comes with the office.

Generally speaking, 2020s New York is somewhat devoid of unelected political “characters” who hold great sway and command media attention. There is no successor to Al Sharpton—Sharpton, in his own mellowed way, still has his role. Curtis Sliwa, who has also been on the scene since the 1980s, has been seeking a higher profile position for himself as a nativist reactionary since he ran for mayor in 2021. Sliwa, strangely, was less this way in the 2010s, when he used to joust, good-naturedly, with the journalist Gerson Borrero on NY1. Within the current world of organized labor, Henry Garrido, the DC37 president, might be the most powerful union boss you’ve never heard of.

People know Kathryn Garcia since she almost became mayor, but she could fit the bill as a powerful, relatively anonymous bureaucrat, since she is Hochul’s director of state operations. Her role is both influential and nebulous. No news story has pinned it down well and if I ever have time, I might just have to figure out what exactly she does. If she runs for mayor again, she’ll have real questions to answer, since state government isn’t as efficient as it should be.

What practical steps would you advise for DSA to bring in more members who work in labor-type jobs (union or not), those without degrees, the “working class,” in other words? I go to so many meetings in which almost everyone (like me) has a masters degree, and works in some professional field. It runs contrary to the class struggle motivations of socialism! I would benefit from your thoughts on this matter.

This is hard one, since leftists in the U.S. have long struggled with trying to bring a populist working class into their fold. One challenge for DSA is that it is not patriotic. People in unions without college degrees really like America and DSA, made up of college graduates schooled in neo-colonialist theory, disparage America. DSA would never do something like display an America flag or even talk about their goals within the context of making the United States itself a greater country. Most in DSA believe we’re a failed nation already.

I’ve written very critically, throughout my life, of the United States. But for DSA to grow and become a working class movement, it will have to lean into Eugene Debs-style patriotism and recognize that, for most normal people, America is something to believe in. It is a secular religion. Recent immigrants are very patriotic. Most people revere military service.

Most in DSA would never speak this way, but a smart thing to do would be to say that we, in the Democratic Socialists of America, have American values. It should be American to guarantee every person healthcare and a safe place to live. It should be American to protect the rights of the worker.

In time, DSA will have to become integrated, organically, into working class communities. The old Democratic machines had clubhouses and meeting halls. If DSA can afford more physical spaces in towns and neighborhoods where the working and poor congregate—and if they can be seen as helpful, as providing a non-governmental service—this will go a long way.

Consider, too, Christian socialism!

Setting aside the inevitable questions of whether this is even logistically possible, and whether it violates the Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights Act, do you think ranked-choice voting in New York City would be better if you could use some of those choices to cast negative votes against candidates that deducts from their vote total? When I get to my fourth or fifth choice, my enthusiasm for the remaining candidates has less valence than my antipathy for other candidates that I wouldn’t rank under any circumstances. Casting anti-votes in a RCV primary may better reveal the preferences of the electorate than just the positive ranking of candidates.

I think the system is good as is and would get much more confusing if you had room for “anti-votes.” A “none of the above” option could be fun. You also don’t have to rank five candidates. If you only like one or two, just pick those and move on. I’m glad RCV exists in city elections now and we’ve solved, at last, the vote-splitting problem. New Yorkers are still learning it, so it’s better not to introduce any other wrinkles.

Are these budget cuts by the Adams administration really due to the cost associated with the influx of migrants into the city and, if not, is this rhetoric more about getting help from the federal government or just trying to place blame on something?

My sense it’s a mix of bad and genuinely disorganized budgeting—this is not the most well-run administration—and a ploy to force the federal government to pay for more. Should the federal government do more? Sure. The Biden administration has been weirdly disengaged from all of this, though granting TPS to the Venezuelan migrants will help as more of them enter the workforce. Eric Adams, though, has burned his bridges with Biden officials and there’s little chance he’s going to bait them to do more for New York City. He’s on his own.

I would like to see the Biden administration step up and start strategically relocating migrants to towns and cities that have experienced population loss and need an infusion of fresh labor. Many of these migrants will become taxpayers and want to settle their families in the U.S. We’ve got a lot of land! I’ve been writing on this for a while. The migrants are an opportunity to revive all kinds of places.

Do you think the death of newsstands with the covers of the NYPost and Daily News across the city and drop in NYers with cable/access to NY1 creates an environment where politicians don’t have to be as accountable? I don’t sense NYers are aware of what’s going on with Mayor Adams.

I think they are! His poll numbers have tumbled badly since early 2022. More media coverage would be helpful, but it’s not as if Eric Adams is wildly popular. New York voters have caught on. If the right candidate comes along, Adams is in trouble.

If, hypothetically, a progressive Democrat a la Jamaal Bowman were to run for Governor and defeat Hochul, what kind of power would they have to reshape the Democratic Party in New York? Could such a governor unilaterally fire Jay Jacobs? Would centrists be able to reorganize new local party clubs in ways that cut the Governor out?

Gov. Bowman would actually have a lot of power to reshape the party. Governors can, virtually unilaterally, hire and fire state party chairs. Jay Jacobs would be gone very quickly.

Centrists in the legislature and on the local level could try to frustrate a progressive governor, but it would be much harder than frustrating a progressive congressman. This is why progressives and leftists have to think much harder about winning executive offices. A governor really can do a lot. The levers of power are numerous and the governor has tremendous leverage over New York City. If a governor cared enough, he or she could build a state party on the scale of what’s been seen in Wisconsin or Nevada. Bowman, as governor, could do it. He could punish his centrist enemies too. He might have to beat George Latimer first, though.

Do you think you would like baseball if you didn't grow up watching it?

I hope so. My father inculcated my fandom but who knows if he had loved hockey instead. New York, though, is such a baseball town. I’d like to think that, no matter what, I would’ve found my way to the game. I wrote about my love for baseball earlier this year and how, until I was fourteen, all I wanted to do was play in the Majors.