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Frontpage Interview's guest today is Steven Malanga, author of the new book The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today.
FP: Welcome to Frontpage Interview Mr. Malanga, it's a pleasure to have you here.
Malanga: Thanks. Whenever my stuff has appeared on Frontpage I've always received a fabulous response from readers.
FP: What motivated you to write this book?
Malanga: I was struck by how different the discussion of politics at the national level is from what I observe at the state and local level. In Washington, the talk is all about judicial nominations and Senate filibusters. The 2004 presidential election, we are told, hinged on voters who voted their values. But whats happening in American cities and states is something often far different: the rise of a political party thats neither right nor left, strictly speaking, but rather a coalition of those who benefit from an ever-expanding government. Theyve been gathering political power for 50 years now, quietly at first, and they have shaped and influenced municipal and state policies in ways that impose steep costs on taxpayers, ways which are not easily unravelled. Blunted in Washington by the national political movement rightward, this New New Left, as I call it, has nonetheless successfully pursued an agenda of higher taxes, more spending and social and regulatory legislation at the local level. I wanted to write about that because I thought it was part of the discussion that was missing.
FP: Illuminate for us the ingredients of the leftward tilt in the nation's cities.
Malanga: The coalition I write about is chiefly composed of public employees gathered into powerful unions, social service organizations and activists essentially living off government money, and, increasingly, large portions of our health care system which are government supported. We see this coalition at work in the power of teachers' unions to blunt education reforms and lobby for ever greater spending on education, in the rise of health care activists like Dennis Rivera in New York, who runs a nominally private sector union, 1199, but which mostly represents workers whose salaries are paid by the public sector and who has become one of the nation's most powerful union leaders.
Increasingly, the road to electoral success in many city councils and state legislatures runs through this sector. In New York City, for instance, about two-thirds of everyone on the city council is either a former public employee (often having served as a public sector union rep), or a social service advocate or associated with the public health care sector. In Los Angeles you have the rise of Antonio Villlaraigosa, the first Latino speaker of the state assembly and now Los Angeles's mayor, who is a former organizer for the teachers' union. But even in middle American cities one finds increasingly that elected officials hail from this public sector economy, as I call it.
FP: You don't have a tremendously favorable opinion of the group ACORN. How come?
Malanga: ACORN, which grew out of the welfare rights movement of the 1970s, has spent the last 30 years as a social activist organization engaged in a pattern of activity that is typical of this sector: These folks complain there is a problem, advocate for government money to help solve it, then often run the programs that government creates to help rectify the problem. There's an inherent conflict of interest there, which is one reason why lots of these social service organizations are always looking for ways to tell you how things are getting worse, and never seeming to get better no matter how much money we throw at the problem.
In particular, we rarely use sensible measures of outcomes to determine whether so much of our spending in the social services arena is actually doing any good, so activists like ACORN just keeping getting funding. This goes all the way back to the initial stages of the war on poverty, when the early designers of urban-aid programs saw inner-city decay as more than just an economic matter. Poor neighborhoods were losing not only jobs but also their sense of community, advocates for the poor argued, and therefore, the government should help create viable urban communities by setting aside money for social services. But after all these years, we don't exactly know how government spending can create "viable urban communities," but no matter, what's important for these groups is to keep the money flowing.
FP: You are also quite critical of journalists Barbara Ehrenreich and David Shipler. Kindly tell us why.
Malanga: I write about Ehrenreich because it's important for people to understand that she represents an intellectual tradition that started in the war on poverty and that helped turn government welfare from a temporary program to help people get on their feet to a program of unlimited benefits that the poor had a right to, a notion that did so much damage in urban neighborhoods. What happened was that there was a brand of activist during the early stages of the war on poverty who were socialists who wanted to use the government's anti-poverty efforts to help undermine our current economic system and make it more socialist.
In a very influential article in the Nation in 1967, these folks argued that welfare workers who agreed with them should go on a vast recruiting campaign to fill welfare rolls so that the system would be overloaded and the federal government would have to raise taxes on the rich and middle class to pay for it--therefore redistributing income in the country. The plan partially worked, insofar as welfare rolls soared and lots of welfare agencies stopped worrying about eligibility standards or investigating fraud, but the movement provoked a backlash outside of cities, and the federal bailout they imagined never occurred. Instead, cities like New York nearly went into bankruptcy having to foot these bills themselves.
Anyway, Ehrenreich's work is very much in this tradition: she even co-authored a book with the original authors of the Nation article. Her latest book, Nickel and Dimed, is an attempt to show that welfare reform, which places time limits on welfare and encourages them to enter the workforce, would create vast new levels of poverty. But of course that didn't happen. The welfare reform hysterics have been all wrong--employment among single mothers has been rising, childhood poverty is declining. Yet Ehrenreich's book continues to be popular, especially on college campuses, where professors have made it mandatory reading, especially in these freshmen year reading programs, where thousands of freshmen are asked to read the same book. It's also made her a popular lecturer on college campuses.
