The Prince of the City

Incomplete Guide

If his writing is any guide, Fred Siegel is a fighting liberal of the best kind -- tough-minded yet compassionate, fiercely opposed to demagoguery of any stripe, ever mindful of self-serving hypocrisy, and deeply knowledgeable. For that reason alone, his work is indispensable. As an unabashed urban romantic, Siegel's rage at urban decline has resonance. He never bashes the great cities. He agonizes over the slow destruction of what had been a uniquely rewarding way of life.

So why has Siegel written such a conventional and uninspired hagiography of one of the most puzzling, infuriating, alienating, remarkable men in American public life? I'm referring, of course, to Rudolph Giuliani, who will forever be known as "America's mayor" after singlehandedly steeling a nation's resolve following the 9/11 terror attacks. Among the pitiful time-servers who pass as our leadership class, Giuliani stands out as perhaps the only contemporary political figure with the Shakespearean shades of a Bobby Kennedy or even a Churchill. Like Walt Whitman's America, Giuliani contains multitudes. Siegel's The Prince of the City, alas, contains platitudes. Considering that Siegel is not only a chronicler but also a major player in the Giuliani story -- his sharp polemics gave intellectual heft to the reform movement that paved the way for Giuliani's success--one would hope for something grander in scope and ambition.

I hasten to add that The Prince of the City is worth reading. It is a useful compendium of information about a very strange time. Had The Prince of the City been written by anyone else, it would have been an admirable effort. But for those who've been anticipating this book, it comes as a disappointment.

From The Future Once Happened Here to The Prince of the City, Siegel has made his reputation as a champion of older American verities, not as a detached and dispassionate scholar. There is in Siegel's work a longing for the "little platoons," the thriving neighborhoods and churches and schools that gave unremarkable citizens a sense of self-respect through self-government. Like Louis Brandeis (whom you might call the first New Democrat), Siegel tempers his egalitarianism, which runs deep, with a hostility to overweening, overmighty centralized power, even when wielded with the best of intentions. Through this ideological prism, Siegel's intense distaste for urban liberalism as we know it comes as no surprise. So does his warm embrace of Giuliani, who very deliberately cultivated a reformist image, offering himself then and now as a second coming of Fiorello LaGuardia or Theodore Roosevelt, depending on his mood and the audience in question.

Surveying New York BGE, i.e., Before the Giuliani Era, Siegel paints a nightmare portrait of a city plagued by poverty pimps run amok. Armed with the rhetoric of compassion, a generation of highly educated policy entrepreneurs, members of an idealistic and sometimes self-sacrificing elite, clientilized the children and grandchildren of hardworking immigrants and sharecroppers who fought their way to New York. Middle-class aspirations faded, and a crippling combination of anger and entitlement took its place. Worst of all, this was very nearly a deliberate policy. Siegel refers to this bien pensant consensus as "dependent individualism." Rather than envision society as a delicate latticework of mutual obligations, the unencumbered self was the future, liberated from the constraints of family and community by the promise of a generous municipal welfare state.

Well, not quite. "Community" still mattered, but not the old communities, where the adults looked out for the kids while everyone played stickball. The old ethnic patronage machines, which though corrupt served as engines of assimilation, had been supplanted. The new ethnic patronage machines trafficked almost exclusively in ever-escalating claims of victimization, and assimilation was a liability. Better to keep the community on a slow boil. Thus was born the era of the multicultural shakedown, perfected by Al Sharpton, who figures prominently as Siegel's most colorful villain. Under the gentlemanly David Dinkins, very much an accidental mayor who stumbled into office as the default choice of Harlem's Democratic machine, the new regime achieved its fullest expression in rising ethnic tensions that occasionally erupted in violence, a municipal budget larded with kickbacks and waste that was heading straight for yet another fiscal crisis, and, for long-suffering New Yorkers of modest means, a pervasive and palpable fear of crime.

Giuliani, who first ran for mayor in 1989, was drafted into this kabuki theater. Painted by opponents as an apologist for racist cops, if not the second coming of Bull Connor or George Wallace, Giuliani could easily have become the white Sharpton -- a mouthpiece for the resentments of white ethnics and the fears of privileged professionals. Diehard Giuliani-bashers continue to see him as exactly that. But not Siegel, and not the hundreds of thousands of disillusioned New Yorkers who voted for Giuliani. Shortly after his inauguration, the mayor moved aggressively to make his campaign slogan ("One Standard, One City") a reality. Along the way he bruised egos (quadruple digits at least) and bent slow-moving municipal bureaucracies to his iron will.

Siegel tells this story through thematic and roughly chronological chapters marking Giuliani's various battles -- against the Board of Ed, the mafia, welfare as we knew it, the ossified CUNY establishment, and, above all, crime. These chapters, which constitute the heart of the book, read like lumpy oatmeal. The summaries are perfectly decent, and they're held together by an argument of sorts, i.e., that Giuliani was and is awesome, but they fail to answer two crucial questions.

The first, oddly enough, is one Fred Siegel and his comrade-in-arms (and TNR Online contributor) Joel Kotkin have been answering so well elsewhere -- namely, why did Giuliani fail? Why is New York backsliding so soon? As Siegel briefly notes, Giuliani's legacy is incomplete to say the least. The sharp decrease in violent crime continues, and New York is in unquestionably better shape than it was when he first came to office. And yet the sinews of the city -- particularly the working-class and middle-class neighborhoods that put Giuliani in office -- are weakening. As Kotkin has argued, Manhattan-style economic polarization is leaving its mark on Brooklyn, where attracting footloose singles to glitz and glamour is the new economic strategy. Creating a better business environment, the kind that just might generate decent jobs at decent wages, is an afterthought. Isn't that what conservatives like Giuliani are for?

The second issue Siegel fails to address is what Giuliani's mayoralty tells us about his possible future. Sure Giuliani could exhaust, enrage, and outmaneuver West-Side liberals and racial militants, but, bluntly speaking, does he have what it takes to be president? Giuliani's accomplishments are prodigious by any standard. But as with Siegel, Giuliani's intellect and energy inevitably lead us to expect more. And to the extent The Prince of the City is a brief for a Giuliani presidency (a notion that, in the spirit of full disclosure, fills this native Brooklynite with glee), Siegel is obligated to concede Giuliani's possibly fatal flaws. True, Siegel never fails to offer caveats; but you sense a certain reluctance on his part. He never seriously addresses Giuliani's clannishness and narrowness, and the way his loyalties blind him. For instance, in describing Giuliani's relationship with Bernie Kerik, he zeroes in only on Kerik's admirable qualities, not on Giuliani's failure of judgment.

Giuliani's brash self-confidence, the quality that allows him to acknowledge mistakes and to change tactics as necessary, and his devotion to a small circle of talented men and women are, simply put, responsible for his extraordinary success. Without these qualities, he'd be an obscure law partner living comfortably in the suburbs. These same qualities, however, may very well doom his national ambitions.

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