Commentary In American Life

4. Commentary and the City: Getting It Right, Getting It Wrong

4Commentary and the City Getting It Right, Getting It Wrong Fred Siegel T he 1990s should have been banner years for Commentary and its critique of urban liberalism. For a quarter-century, Commentary and its young nephew The Public Interest had engaged in a sustained critique of what might be described as the Great Urban Leap Forward of the 1960s. As in China, the attempt to rapidly engineer a vast social transformation had ended in disaster, with the consequent need to cover over the failure with re-education. In the early 1960s, Commentary responded to the foibles of urban liberalism from within a liberal perspective, but gradually, as its disenchantment with the fruits of liberal policy grew, it moved into a full-blown critique. This was a period when the magazine gave rise to an extraordinary intellectual ferment. Political and policy debates about urban issues have been defined ever since by what Commentary wrote in those years. Commentary’s impact, if not unparalleled, was exceeded only by the impact the Muckrakers had on the Progressive era. Commentary stepped into the breach created by the intellectual collapse of academia. The politically correct campus of the last twenty-five years was anticipated in the 1960s and 1970s by reactions to arguments that strayed from the 74 Fred Siegel 75 liberal line on race and urban issues. The 1965 publication of the Moynihan Report on the breakdown of the black family, which suggested that white racism might not be the only source of black poverty , was greeted with a torrent of abuse. Open discussion, already stifled, was further closed off seven years later in response to Edward Banfield’s critique of urban liberalism, entitled “The Unheavenly City.”1 Banfield’s critic, William Ryan, of “blaming the victim” fame, recruited, in his words an “army” of “ideological shock troops” to shut down discussion with accusations of racism. Ryan largely succeeded. “The commitment to the substance of supporting marginal groups,” explained James Q. Wilson (June 1972), “overwhelmed the form of university life organized around debate.”2 With academia shambling into a high-blown marginality, Commentary achieved unprecedented importance. What began with questioning particular policies, such as urban renewal and school busing, evolved, as the evidence of urban collapse mounted, into not just a critique of liberalism but an understanding of race and cities grounded in the experience of what had made America into a successful society. The issue, as Commentary saw it, was not whether the country and its cities had a special obligation to help African-Americans but, rather, how they should to help. Then and now, the question was how far we should move from traditional American values to discharge that obligation. By the early 1990s, Commentary’s critique of urban liberalism had been vindicated in practice, if not in academic theory. Liberal policies and politicians had been defeated across the country in cities large and small. In New York and Los Angeles, Republican moderates were victorious over the candidates of liberal multiculturalism. In Detroit and Cleveland, black moderates won the mayoralty, and in Chicago, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and Jersey City, reform mayors were beginning to provide examples of successful innovation. All of these new mayors talked about restraining taxes, enhancing police protection, and shaking up the bureaucracy. Some even spoke of privatizing city services and instituting education vouchers to break the stranglehold of the education establishment. The Commentary critique of the last twenty-five years was bearing fruit, yet the magazine, apparently in the grip of an overriding pessi- 76 Commentary and the City mism about the future of the cities, was silent about the new wave of mayors. There were articles on urban issues, but with the exception of some optimism about the effect of new immigrants on neighborhoods , they were on riots in Los Angles and New York, black antiSemitism , educational failures, and homelessness. Burned by the disappointment of New York mayor Ed Koch’s last six years in office, from 1983–1989, and by the spectacle of David Dinkins’s election on the basis of a platform that said, in effect, “allow me to heal the city’s racial wounds or else there will be trouble,” Commentary’s stance seemed to have been defined by Charles Murray’s bleak 1988 article, “The Coming of Custodial Democracy.” Barring a dramatic shift in policy, Murray argued that the underclass was going to be a...