The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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men who are entirely unentangled with it? [La Guardia’s Fusion: “Yes!” Lindsay’s Fusion: “No!”] . . . Do the people wish a partial change of control at the top or a radical change of control from top to bottom? [In 1965, the people evidently desired only a change at the top—except for those who were deluded by the Fusion rhetoric into believing that they were voting for radical change of control from top to bottom.] In the McKee [read: Lindsay] faction they have men who have been a part of the existing machine, have done business with it, have acquiesced in it, have sustained it, still represent an important part of it, and, barring miracles, must continue to compromise with it. In Fusion [read—see below—the Conservative Party] they have a group of candidates who are the sworn enemies of the machine, owe nothing to it, have every interest in destroying it, and no interest in compromising with it.”
Lindsay’s Fusion, in a word, was a verbal operation. It was essential in order to hang on to the Republicans while pandering explicitly to the left. If the time for Fusion of the 1933 variety is truly here, one must discard sectarian prejudices. If New York is really going under, Fusion must be called to the rescue: and in behalf of Fusion, Republicans, like the conservative gentlemen on the old Fusion Conference Committee, must put aside their own values as irrelevant until the storm blows itself out. It doesn’t make any difference whether the man’s social views are those of Al Smith, or those of Norman Thomas; submerge your own ideas, and vote to save New York. Lindsay’s Fusion was procedural rather than substantive. Even so, the bugle of Fusion instantly fused together the Tribune and the New York Post, Life and The Nation, Richard Nixon and Richard Rovere, Ray Bliss and Ray Walsh, David Lawrence and David Dubinsky, all in the cause of extirpating Wagner from this earth. After the smoke had settled and the Democrats had named their own ticket, Murray Kempton calmly observed that Lindsay’s anti-Wagner ticket was one-third composed of anti-Wagner men, while Beame’s had evolved as three-thirds anti-Wagner. As for Wagnerism, if it was something other than Wagner, Lindsay was running on it, even while denouncing its eponym.
Wagner’s most opportunistic detractors within the liberal community could never quite find a way to state their case against him except in pallid Goo-gooisms. Lindsay’s need was to identify the city’s dissatisfactions as the direct result of the approach to government of Mr. Wagner. That was never easy to do. Because the trouble in New York was—is—not so much with maladministration as with a frozen ideology. If a public school’s standards are lowered because of a precipitate and thoughtless racial integration, what do you call that? Maladministration? If the traffic chokes up not because you don’t but because you daren’t control the flow of it into the city, what do you call that? If the middle class begins to flow out of the city because the schools are bad, housing scarce, and taxes high, what is the matter? If the crime rate rises while fresh judicial mores make its detection and conviction harder, what will Goo-gooism contribute to that? If rent control actually causes inequities and depresses the construction of new buildings—what is a Fusion, dedicated to preserving rent control, going to do about that? If labor unions exercise crushing power, what is a cool-cat administrator with vision, imagination, energy, devotion, compassion, and genius—who appeared prostrate before a couple of labor union leaders for their support and inveighs against Right-to-Work—going to do about that?
3. The Conservative Party 3. The Conservative Party
The Conservative Party of New York was founded in February 1962. The idea had been kicking around for several years. I remember discussing such a party with a few friends in 1955. We were moved to do so by the denial of the New York Democratic senatorial nomination to James Farley—because of pressure from the Liberal Party, which disdained him as too old-fashioned (read, too conservative). That was, of course, the Democrats’ business, but in American politics the position of the one party tends to influence the position of the other—on the whole a good idea in a political community which tends to discourage political polarization. But the line of the major parties should, of course, reflect substantial bodies of opinion within the consensus of each party. It seemed to me that the neglect of one body of opinion on the political spectrum, even while its counterpart at the other end, because it was effectively organized, was militantly represented, had resulted in distortions in the policies of both major parties. If the Liberal Party, which effectively mobilizes left-opinion in New York, did not exist, neither (I reasoned, and still do) would a Conservative Party need to exist.66
A few conservatives around the country, having become convinced that the Republican Party is for some reason metaphysically useless, have been trying, and will probably continue to do so, to establish Conservative Parties in every state of the Union, looking forward to a national party. They do not recognize that the essential precondition for such state parties is the pre-existence of an equivalent party on the left. It requires the special provocation of a successful left-splinter party to justify direct pressure from a fourth party on the GOP. The Liberals, for the most part, well satisfied with the policies of the Democratic Party, have not felt the necessity to found third parties outside New York, and in all probability will not do so in the foreseeable future. The possibility of a national third party, like Henry Wallace’s and backed by roughly the same people for roughly the same reasons, is something else again.
The Liberals’ influence on the Democratic Party in New York is not anywhere doubted. The influence, in fact, is greater than the vote regularly deployable by the Liberal Party would seem to merit—mostly for psychological reasons. That vote has fluctuated in the twenty years since the Liberal Party peeled off (in 1944) from the American Labor Party in patriotic protest against the ALP’s capture by the Communists. Its high point was in 1951, when it won (with the help of a minor party) the City Council Presidency with 659,000 votes. Two years later it got 465,000 votes for its candidate for Mayor, Mr. Rudolph Halley, who had become famous as the principal investigator for the Kefauver Committee (ironically, become famous by the use of tactics roundly condemned by Liberals when they were subsequently used by Senator McCarthy). Its low point was in 1964, when it delivered only 272,106 votes to Mr. Bobby Kennedy, running against Mr. Kenneth Keating. But its power, whatever the fluctuations of its performance, remained high. Its deliberations—which are a colloquy between Mr. David Dubinsky and Mr. Alex Rose—are copiously reported; and Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, when running for election, or re-election, as President, all appeared in person to accept the Party’s endorsement at great big to-dos. The Liberal Party paused to take credit for no less an achievement than the election of John Kennedy as President of the United States, a demonstration which required a certain flair for the use of statistics but which is not uninteresting; any more, for instance, than the Conservative Party’s claim—more plausible, as a matter of fact—to having cost the Republican Party the control of the New York State Assembly in 1965 is uninteresting. The Liberals’ reasoning was this simple: if the voters who voted for JFK on the Liberal line in 1960 had voted instead for Richard Nixon, Nixon would have carried New York; and if he had carried New York, he’d have got a majority of the electoral college. The flaw, of course, is that the voters who voted for Kennedy on the Liberal Party ticket would, most of them, have voted for him anyway; that is to say, irrespective of whether they had been coaxed to do so by the Liberal Party. The Conservatives’ claim is, although self-serving, at least one step more plausible. Seven Republicans running for the State Assembly in New York in 1965 were offered Conservative Party support and turned it down. Accordingly, the Conservatives nominated their own people, who amassed, individually, more votes than their Republican opponents lost by. Ergo, if the seven Republicans had accepted Conservative support, they’d have been elected, and the Republicans, with that seven-vote margin, could have organized the Assembly and thus controlled both branches of the State legislature, instead of merely a single branch. Almost-ergo, of course, because there is a weakness in the argument: it is impossible to compute how many votes the seven Republicans might have lost through the alienation of those who are allergic to the Conservative label . . .
But statistical rodomontade cannot detract from the fact of the Liberal Party’s enormous influence; or from the Conservative Party’s. Indeed, the Conservative Party is