Sultan Knish
New York City mayors excel at banning everything from salt to carriages,
but they are not very good at cleaning up the streets and roads after a
snowstorm.
There
are two ways of looking at a major city; as a mechanical matter of
buildings, streets and sewers to be maintained or as a social problem of
misbehaving people. The mayors of the mechanical city understand that
they need to clean the streets, but the mayors of the social problem
think they have to fix the people.
Mayor Bloomberg flubbed the
snow challenge badly. Instead of preparing road salt, he banned salt in
restaurants. Instead of having a snow strategy for the winter, he had a
Global Warming strategy for the next fifty years. Instead of doing his
job, he kept trying to transform the people.
And his successor is no better.
Bill
de Blasio's focus after his petty and mean-spirited inauguration was a
ban on carriage horses in Central Park at the behest of a real estate
developer who backed his campaign and has his eye on their stables, a
tussle over who will get the credit for Pre-K with Governor Cuomo and
the beating of Kang Wong, an 84-year-old man, over a jaywalking ticket.
The
media had lavished praise on Bill de Blasio after his first photo op
shoveling snow and celebrated his call to implement Vision Zero, a
Swedish plan to cut traffic fatalities to zero, even though there was no
remote possibility of reducing traffic fatalities to zero in a major
city filled with cars, pedestrians, cyclists and even pedicabs.
Instead
of preparing for the snow, Team De Blasio launched a crackdown on
jaywalking in Manhattan where three-quarters of the residents don't own
cars. And so the Upper East Side, which didn't vote for Bill de Blasio,
became a snarled and unplowed mess and the jaywalking enforcers put an 84-year-old man
in the hospital after arresting him for the tall order of "jaywalking,
resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration and disorderly
conduct."
Jaywalking is as much a part of New York as salty
pretzels and the carriage horses of Central Park. While Bill de Blasio
claimed to be inspired by Mayor La Guardia, the latter had an entirely
different view of the relationship between the people and the city
government.
“I prefer the happiness of our unorganized imperfection to the organized perfection of other countries,” La Guardia said after vetoing a jaywalking bill,
and added, referencing the growing fascism in Germany that was then
admired by many progressives, “Broadway is not Unter den Linden.”
The
happiness of unorganized imperfection is about as close to expressing
the contrast between the American and the European way of life as any
phrase can. It's also a foreign idea, not just to Bill de Blasio or
Bloomberg, but to the larger political culture of urban progressives who
are less interested in making the trains run on time, than in making
the men and women run on time.
Mayor
La Guardia was responsible for much of the city's network of roads,
bridges and tunnels that were built around the social changes in how
people lived. Modern progressives however don't understand
infrastructure, but think that they do understand people. From the
disastrous ObamaCare websites to California's light rail project, they
squander billions on unworkable infrastructure that is supposed to fix
social problems by changing how people live.
Modern progressives
think that it is easier to change people than to change infrastructure.
The classical city shaped infrastructure to accommodate how people
lived, while progressives use infrastructure as a tool of social change
to bully urban residents into changing how they live.
Bloomberg
did this in blunt fashion by eliminating elevators to force people to
get in shape by using the stairs and by blocking off streets to force
people to abandon cars and use public transportation. Instead the number
of cars in the city increased and so did the obesity rate.
Progressives
are adept at politically manipulating people with propaganda, but this
skill doesn't translate well at the policy level. Obama won over younger
voters, but can't get them to enroll in ObamaCare. Politics is an
abstract for most people. Policy is a reality.
Politics is the image they want to have. Policy is how much money they have in the bank.
Bill
de Blasio unrolled his Vision Zero plan for eliminating traffic
fatalities by the year 2024 surrounded by the grieving mothers of dead
children. It was a shameless performance that would have made even Piers
Morgan wince. No one in the media pointed out that Bill de Blasio, like
Obama, was using human shields to silence questions about a result that
he couldn't deliver.
Team De Blasio could have stopped far more
accidents if it had prioritized the snowstorm. Instead there were
dozens of accidents as cars slipped on sheets of ice. But the dirty
business of cleaning the streets is never as appealing to progressives
as glamorously rolling out a useless new policy.
Sweden's Vision Zero had mixed results and the majority of serious accidents
in that country are caused by wild animals. Due to the lack of moose in
Manhattan, Team De Blasio swapped out people for animals and insisted
that the majority of pedestrian fatalities were caused by pedestrians.
The claim doesn't accord with any
of the existing data about pedestrian fatalities, but it's easier to
hand out jaywalking tickets than it is to accept that the city's traffic
fatality rates are fairly low and that there is only so much you can do
about that when you pack a lot of cars, cyclists and people together.
Accepting
unorganized imperfection is not a progressive trait. If Bloomberg was
more circuitous about manipulating infrastructure to change human
behavior, Bill de Blasio is going right for the throat and bullying
ordinary people directly. People like Kang Wong, an 84-year-old man who
woke up one day in a city whose police officers were dispatched to
enforce an unenforceable law.
The assault on Kang Wong won't be
the last collision between the new totalitarian at the helm of the city
and the ordinary people who will have to live through four years of his
incompetence and abuses. The victories of the left locally in California
and New York and nationally in Washington D.C. are a master class in
totalitarian tyranny and progressive failure, but too many voters
disassociate politics from policy, judging candidates based on their
media likability until they feel the effects of their policies.
Obama's
approval ratings did not implode until the voters experienced
ObamaCare for themselves. Every conservative warning and protest had
fallen on deaf ears as Americans kept voting for and supporting a
celebrity politician without paying any attention to his policies until
the consequences of those policies caught up with them.
In
Toronto, Rob Ford's approval ratings have lifted after a snowstorm and
he is on track to win reelection despite admitting to drug and alcohol
abuse. The voters are making their decision based not on his media
profile, but on how well the snow got shoveled. It's something that Bill
de Blasio, who is better at posing for the cameras with a snow shovel
than actually managing a snowstorm, ought to keep in mind.
Progressives
are only popular until the people realize that the men and women
mirroring their anger and offering them everything for free can't clean
up the snow, but can beat them bloody and can't fix their healthcare,
but can destroy it. The left wins at politics, but fails at policies.
It's learned to stop looking like Carter, but it hasn't figured out how
to stop governing like him.
Americans want organized competence
from their leaders and unorganized happiness for themselves. Instead
progressives try to organize their happiness with their righteously
ideological incompetence.
When Americans realize that the
political choices they make are also policy choices between large sodas,
salty pretzels, open market health care and open streets on the one
hand or food fascism, DMV health care and bloody faces on the other;
they will choose the unorganized happiness of freedom over the
disorganized tyrannies of Bloomberg, De Blasio and Obama.
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