New York Politics ’93 — Summary

This August 1993 piece is a short polemical election essay: Rothbard surveys the New York City mayoral cycle, with side attention to the public advocate and comptroller races. Its central thesis is that New York politics is less an arena of ideas than a theater of ethnic balancing, patronage, racial antagonism, consultant-managed image, and symbolic language. Rothbard frames the 1993 election as the consequence of a long leftward urban decline intensified by the collapse of older machine controls.

New York is of course a famously left-wing city, and has therefore, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, been going down the tubes for decades.

The essay’s first conceptual move is to treat “democracy,” especially primary elections, as a solvent of brokered ethnic compromise. Rothbard contrasts the old party bosses, who could assemble balanced tickets in “smoke-filled rooms,” with the post-primary order, where group conflict appears more openly. The point is not nostalgic civic pluralism but a hard-edged account of politics as coalition arithmetic.

Now, however, that primaries, in the name of "democracy," have destroyed the old-time pols and their control of the political parties, ethnic and racial conflict has become naked and unalloyed.

From there, Rothbard reconstructs the 1989 election as a contest of style rather than doctrine: David Dinkins, leftist but soft-spoken, defeated Ed Koch and then Rudolph Giuliani because he appeared to promise racial healing, while Giuliani, nearly as liberal on substance, had only the persona of prosecutorial toughness. By 1993, however, Dinkins’s mayoralty is presented as a failure marked by poverty, street disorder, and racial conflict. Yet Rothbard insists that incumbency survives because the opposition has not supplied an obviously compelling substitute.

And yet, oddly enough, Dinkins is still the favorite, largely for lack of an attractive alternative.

The strongest section analyzes Giuliani’s remade campaign under consultant David Garth. Rothbard’s interest here is structural: Garth revives the old New York “fusion” pattern by attaching Giuliani to Liberal and Republican lines, while assembling a ticket balanced by borough, religion, ethnicity, and party. Giuliani is the Manhattan Italian Catholic Republican-Liberal; Susan Alter supplies Brooklyn Jewish Democratic respectability; Herman Badillo brings the Bronx and Puerto Rican identity while crossing party lines. Rothbard’s irony is that “reform” and “clean government” function as electoral branding for groups temporarily outside the trough.

More substantive, however, was Garth’s brilliant decision to revive the old New York City tradition of “fusion” campaigns.

On the Democratic side, the essay emphasizes fragmentation rather than strategy. Andrew Stein’s failed mayoral effort becomes Rothbard’s example of elite miscalculation: a wealthy, well-positioned candidate damaged by poor consultants and by an ideological mixture Rothbard regards as electorally thin—market-friendly economics plus social liberalism. Stein’s collapse leaves him fighting for his own public advocate seat against Mark Green and others, while Dinkins avoids endorsing anyone. The absence of a coordinated Democratic slate contrasts sharply with Garth’s managed fusion coalition.

Hence, there will be no “ticket” on the Democratic side.

The remaining races reinforce the essay’s picture of politics as personality, revenge, and faction. Liz Holtzman’s comptroller fight involves Badillo, Alan Hevesi, and Geraldine Ferraro’s hostility; Roy Innis appears as a conservative black candidate whose value, Rothbard says, lies not in winning but in saying racially charged things Giuliani cannot say openly. The final movement turns to Crown Heights and the fight over whether the violence should be called a “riot” or “pogrom.” Here Rothbard’s broader claim becomes explicit: late-modern politics is a struggle over symbolic classification.

Our age is all too often a battle over the politics of language, and its Political Correctness, and the big issue now is what term to use in referring to the Crown Heights riot of blacks against Jews in the late summer of 1992.

The relevance of the essay lies in its snapshot of pre-mayoral Giuliani, post-Crown Heights New York, and the right-libertarian/paleoconservative reading of urban liberalism as patronage, disorder, and ethnic theater. Rothbard’s prose is intentionally abrasive and racially charged, but analytically the piece turns on a consistent claim: official issues matter less than identity blocs, symbolic wounds, ballot lines, consultants, and the language used to name conflict. Its closing sentence condenses the whole argument.

Talk of politics as the triumph of symbolism over substance!