Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
March 6, 2005ESSAY
The Joy of FederalismBy FRANKLIN FOER
Nobody would ever confuse the Massachusetts liberal Barney Frank with the South Carolina conservative Strom Thurmond. But when the tart-tongued Frank appeared on Fox News Sunday last winter, it sounded as if an aide had accidentally slipped him some of Thurmond's talking points from the 1950's, when he was a states'-rights segregationist. ''Should the federal government say no state can make this decision for itself?'' Frank asked. He had ventured onto Fox to assert each state's right to marry gay couples.
Frank isn't the only supporter of gay marriage to sing the praises of federalism. Last December, Andrew Sullivan argued in The New Republic, ''The whole point of federalism is that different states can have different policies on matters of burning controversy -- and that this is O.K.'' That same month, Paul Glastris, the editor of The Washington Monthly, posed the question, ''Why shouldn't the Democrats become the party of federalism?''
In some respects, they already have. Liberal energies once devoted to expanding the national government are being redirected toward the states. New York's attorney general Eliot Spitzer, declaring himself a ''fervent federalist,'' is using state regulations to prosecute corporate abuses that George W. Bush's Department of Justice won't touch. While the federal minimum wage hasn't budged since the middle of the Clinton era, 13 (mostly blue) states and the District of Columbia have hiked their local wage floors in the intervening years. After Bush severely restricted federal stem cell research, California's voters passed an initiative pouring $3 billion into laboratories for that very purpose, and initiatives are under way in at least a dozen other states.
These developments may look like a desperate reaction on the part of some liberals to the conservatives' grip on Washington. But in fact the well-known liberal liking for programs at the national level has long coexisted alongside a quieter tradition of principled federalism -- skeptical of distant bureaucracies and celebratory of local policy experimentation.
To understand liberal federalism, however, it is first necessary to understand its nemesis, Herbert Croly. A shy, obscure writer on architecture, Croly rose to fame in 1909 with ''The Promise of American Life,'' a long-winded manifesto calling for a strong national government. The book fell into the hands of Theodore Roosevelt and, with the Bull Moose as its promoter, it attracted a crowd of high-powered admirers, including the benefactors who bankrolled Croly's new magazine, The New Republic.
Croly had a tendency to swing wildly and hard. His big target was Thomas Jefferson, a man of ''intellectual superficiality and insincerity.'' The sage of Monticello, Croly argued, had created a government suited for a bucolic era. But modernity, the birth of the corporation, the closing of the frontier and technological advances had reshaped America and rendered Jefferson's governing vision obsolete. What America needed was centralization and efficiency, not antiquated state governments. The inefficiency of state governments, he said, was ''one of the most fundamental of American political problems.''
Croly generally gets lumped together with the early-20th-century progressives, but his book often savaged these supposed comrades as outdated and stupidly old-fashioned. Croly accepted concentrations of power -- corporations, as well as a strong central government -- as immutable facts of modern life. Many of his fellow reformers, he charged, were clinging to an outmoded Jeffersonian affection for competition and equality. They wanted to dismantle the trusts and return to a marketplace dominated by small business. What's more, Croly claimed, these reformers continued to harbor an irrational attachment to state governments; instead of building a modern centralized nation, they focused on renovating the old state machinery. Progressives in the West, for instance, created the referendum, allowing citizens to vote specific laws up or down. Croly, an unabashed elitist, preferred handing power to experts.
In his polemical mode, Croly unfairly skewered the reformers' motives. The turn-of-the-century debates over the future of corporate capitalism resembled the current conflagration over gay marriage. There was no national consensus on the regulation of business then, just as there's no national consensus on same-sex unions now. Rather than wasting breath trying to persuade obstreperous Southern congressmen to back federal labor laws, the progressives plunged forward and passed reforms in the Northern and Midwestern state legislatures. Beginning with Robert La Follette's 1900 gubernatorial victory, Wisconsin raced farthest ahead in the nation, slashing railroad rates and passing laws on corruption and conservation.
Devout believers in the new social sciences, the progressives invested near mystical power in empirical data, and this faith guided their federalism. As Louis Brandeis wrote in a famous 1932 Supreme Court dissent, states could serve as ''laboratories of democracy,'' control groups to test the value of particular policies. Progressives believed that once the nation saw how successful these state-level reforms were, it would eagerly mimic them. Indeed, La Follete's administration became a trendy model. ''Outside the state, the 'Wisconsin idea' was rapidly becoming a program and inspiration,'' Eric Goldman wrote in his 1952 history of American reform movements, ''Rendezvous With Destiny.'' The Badger State had become a national guinea pig.
It's not surprising that Brandeis coined liberal federalism's signature slogan. A Kentucky-born corporate lawyer, whose wealth freed him to pursue progressive causes, Brandeis was the doctrine's sincerest believer -- and, for a time, Croly's intellectual adversary. And just as Croly had said, Brandeis continued to harbor a Jeffersonian aversion to agglomerations of power, or the ''curse of bigness'' as he called it, in both business and government. ''If the Lord had intended things to be big, he would have made man bigger -- in brains and character,'' Brandeis quipped in Congressional testimony in 1911. This abhorrence of bigness led him strenuously to oppose Croly's program, which proposed nationalizing inefficient trusts and tolerating efficient ones.
The Croly-Brandeis debate became the central theme of the 1912 election. While Croly was helping to conceive Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism program, Brandeis met with Woodrow Wilson at a low point in his campaign. As the late James Chace described the encounter in his narrative of the election, ''1912,'' Brandeis instantly supplied much-needed ideological direction to the faltering Democratic candidate. ''After his first meeting with Brandeis, Wilson spoke with new fervor.''
For conservatives, ''states' rights'' often seems just another way of asserting their libertarianism, their dislike of government in any form. Liberal federalism, on the other hand, doesn't view the state and federal governments as opposing forces. Brandeis may have celebrated the states but he also stressed the importance of federal antitrust policy, and he became the New Deal's most reliable advocate on the Supreme Court, even meeting privately with Franklin Roosevelt. New Dealers affectionately referred to Brandeis as ''Isaiah.''
That's not to say Brandeis meshed perfectly with the Roosevelt administration. He couldn't abide the president's seemingly boundless ambition to expand executive power. He joined a majority on the court in striking down a handful of New Deal programs, including the National Industrial Recovery Act. He even sent a stern note to Roosevelt's consigliere, Thomas G. Corcoran: ''I want you to go back and tell the president that we're not going to let this government centralize everything. It's come to an end. As for your young men,'' by which Brandeis meant the core of intellectuals assembled around the New Deal, ''you call them together and tell them to get out of Washington -- tell them to go home, back to the states. That is where they must do their work.''
Despite Brandeis's reprimand and the Supreme Court's decisions, Roosevelt's ''young men'' didn't soon leave Washington. World War II -- and then the cold war -- created new engines of government for them to operate. Emerging from the war convinced that America had just fought on behalf of equality and other liberal values, they wanted to transfer that crusading spirit to domestic causes. Eminences like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith celebrated the ''American creed'' and ''national greatness,'' phrases that echoed Croly's call for a ''new nationalism.'' And even if the war hadn't propelled liberals in this nationalistic direction, the segregationist invocations of states' rights would have. ''The time has arrived,'' Hubert Humphrey declared at his party's 1948 convention, ''for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of civil rights.'' Humphrey's party adopted a civil rights platform plank, and in response, Strom Thurmond led a white flight to a newfangled States' Rights Party.
Nationalistic postwar liberalism flourished, but a left-wing critique of it arose in the early 1960's. New Left student rebels shared Brandeis's aversion to bigness, though they arrived at their aversion through a very different intellectual tradition. Tom Hayden and other stalwarts of Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.), the defining organization of 60's radicalism, had absorbed the lessons of books like C. Wright Mills's ''White Collar'' and ''Power Elite,'' and Paul Goodman's ''Growing Up Absurd.'' (Hayden even wrote his master's dissertation on Mills.) This literature railed against bureaucracy, centralization and technocrats as agents of mass alienation and conformism. ''Overcentralization is an international disease of modern times,'' Goodman wrote in ''People or Personnel.'' Precisely the same language can be found in S.D.S.'s 1962 manifesto, the Port Huron statement, where the group waxed utopian about ''participatory democracy,'' a governing philosophy it described as the antithesis of managerial liberalism.
Over the next two decades, the raw ideas of Port Huron were tamed and refined by communitarian scholars like the Harvard professors Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam. These communitarians didn't particularly like the 60's counterculture ethos, but they assimilated many of the New Left's ideas about community, applauding civic organizations like churches and private charities as essential pillars of democracy. And they bemoaned changes in the political landscape that had blinded mainstream liberalism to the virtues of these institutions. The Washington Post's communitarian-minded columnist E. J. Dionne lamented that liberals ''came to believe that almost all doctrines emphasizing the value of local community were indistinguishable from the phony 'states' rights' arguments used by segregationists.'' A strong trace of Catholic social teachings could be discerned in these views, especially Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical on ''subsidiarity'' -- the idea that social ills are best solved by the organizations and people closest to them. Although the communitarians didn't spend much time integrating state governments into their vision, they spoke of them with great respect. Sandel concluded his book ''Democracy's Discontent'' with a call for progressives to discover the ''unrealized possibilities implicit in American federalism.''
By the 1970's, liberal federalist ideas suddenly had an opportunity to break into widespread circulation and shake off the segregationist stigma. Vietnam had stolen the swagger from nationalistic liberalism, a change that could be witnessed most poignantly in the writings of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. After spending decades advocating a strong central government, he wrote ''The Imperial Presidency'' in 1973, warning that the executive branch now possessed dangerous concentrations of power. But liberal federalism didn't fully get a hearing until the emergence of a new champion, Bill Clinton.
Prodded by a Republican Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, Clinton actually presided over the revitalized federalism that Sandel imagined, and even spent time in the White House huddling with Sandel and Putnam. Federalism suited his declared ambition to move beyond the era of ''big government.'' In 1995, he signed a law prohibiting the national government from imposing new burdens on the states without first providing funds to cover any costs. The welfare reform package he ushered into law a year later gave states enormous latitude in remaking social policy.
George W. Bush didn't give Clinton much credit for these achievements. Like many of his predecessors, he entered office promising to rescue the states from federal pummeling. Yet his administration has greatly expanded federal power, and some conservatives have been complaining. Writing in National Review two years ago, Romesh Ponnuru observed that ''more people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the cold war.'' State governments have their own version of this complaint. They say the Bush administration has imposed new demands -- federal education standards, homeland security tasks -- without also providing sufficient cash to get these jobs done. The Republican senator Lamar Alexander recently told The Times, ''The principle of federalism has gotten lost in the weeds by a Republican Congress that was elected to uphold it in 1994.''
This is hardly the first time that self-described federalists have abandoned the cause. Strom Thurmond ran on the States' Rights Party ticket in 1948, but throughout his long career as a senator, he never had qualms about heaving bushels of federal money into his state. In 1982, Ronald Reagan announced his own ill-fated new federalism proposal. But instead of dismantling Washington, his administration imposed a raft of new health and safety regulations on the states. Perhaps federalists have failed to reshape American government because federalism isn't really a governing philosophy. Its proponents describe a world that doesn't exist. In actuality, the states and federal government aren't cut-throat competitors but codependents, with state governments living off federal money and implementing federal programs. Rather, ''states' rights'' can be seen as a subgenre of political rhetoric, part of what the historian Michael Kazin calls the ''populist persuasion.'' And like so much of the language of populism, it proves hollow once its adherents obtain power.
One suspects that many if not most of today's liberal federalists haven't converted out of true belief, either. Some have adopted the rhetoric of states' rights because it provides psychic relief from the alienation they feel now that a majority of the nation's voters has returned George W. Bush to office. In its most frustrated form, this alienation has manifested itself in the ubiquitous joking about emigrating to Canada. Liberal federalism provides a more rational outlet. Instead of retreating to Vancouver, liberal federalists would retreat from national politics and focus on effecting change in their own blue states -- passing health care reforms, expanding gay rights. At the height of the liberals' postelection angst, The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, declared: ''We can secede emotionally, however, by turning our backs on the heartland. We can focus on our issues, our urban issues, and promote our shared urban values.'' It's like the path evangelicals beat after the Scopes trial, when the religious right took a 50-year break from mainstream political activity and quietly tended their own institutions.
Some Democratic political strategists are also guiding liberals in this direction. In election postmortems, they have urged the party to follow in the Truman-Reagan-Gingrich tradition and rail against the corrupt interests ruling Washington -- ''an aggressively reform, anti-Washington, anti-business-as-usual party,'' as James Carville described it at a Democratic hand-wringing session last November. Proponents of this strategy now reside in nearly every corner of the party -- from Howard Dean, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to the Democratic Leadership Council. Positioning the Democratic Party as the great modern-day defender of states' rights against imperial Washington jibes neatly with this strategy. Progressives once championed states as laboratories of democracy. Now many of them are hoping these laboratories will produce the Democratic electoral cure.
Franklin Foer, a senior editor at The New Republic and a contributing editor for New York magazine, is the author of ''How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization.''
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
March 6, 2005ESSAY
The Joy of FederalismBy FRANKLIN FOER
Nobody would ever confuse the Massachusetts liberal Barney Frank with the South Carolina conservative Strom Thurmond. But when the tart-tongued Frank appeared on Fox News Sunday last winter, it sounded as if an aide had accidentally slipped him some of Thurmond's talking points from the 1950's, when he was a states'-rights segregationist. ''Should the federal government say no state can make this decision for itself?'' Frank asked. He had ventured onto Fox to assert each state's right to marry gay couples.
Frank isn't the only supporter of gay marriage to sing the praises of federalism. Last December, Andrew Sullivan argued in The New Republic, ''The whole point of federalism is that different states can have different policies on matters of burning controversy -- and that this is O.K.'' That same month, Paul Glastris, the editor of The Washington Monthly, posed the question, ''Why shouldn't the Democrats become the party of federalism?''
In some respects, they already have. Liberal energies once devoted to expanding the national government are being redirected toward the states. New York's attorney general Eliot Spitzer, declaring himself a ''fervent federalist,'' is using state regulations to prosecute corporate abuses that George W. Bush's Department of Justice won't touch. While the federal minimum wage hasn't budged since the middle of the Clinton era, 13 (mostly blue) states and the District of Columbia have hiked their local wage floors in the intervening years. After Bush severely restricted federal stem cell research, California's voters passed an initiative pouring $3 billion into laboratories for that very purpose, and initiatives are under way in at least a dozen other states.
These developments may look like a desperate reaction on the part of some liberals to the conservatives' grip on Washington. But in fact the well-known liberal liking for programs at the national level has long coexisted alongside a quieter tradition of principled federalism -- skeptical of distant bureaucracies and celebratory of local policy experimentation.
To understand liberal federalism, however, it is first necessary to understand its nemesis, Herbert Croly. A shy, obscure writer on architecture, Croly rose to fame in 1909 with ''The Promise of American Life,'' a long-winded manifesto calling for a strong national government. The book fell into the hands of Theodore Roosevelt and, with the Bull Moose as its promoter, it attracted a crowd of high-powered admirers, including the benefactors who bankrolled Croly's new magazine, The New Republic.
Croly had a tendency to swing wildly and hard. His big target was Thomas Jefferson, a man of ''intellectual superficiality and insincerity.'' The sage of Monticello, Croly argued, had created a government suited for a bucolic era. But modernity, the birth of the corporation, the closing of the frontier and technological advances had reshaped America and rendered Jefferson's governing vision obsolete. What America needed was centralization and efficiency, not antiquated state governments. The inefficiency of state governments, he said, was ''one of the most fundamental of American political problems.''
Croly generally gets lumped together with the early-20th-century progressives, but his book often savaged these supposed comrades as outdated and stupidly old-fashioned. Croly accepted concentrations of power -- corporations, as well as a strong central government -- as immutable facts of modern life. Many of his fellow reformers, he charged, were clinging to an outmoded Jeffersonian affection for competition and equality. They wanted to dismantle the trusts and return to a marketplace dominated by small business. What's more, Croly claimed, these reformers continued to harbor an irrational attachment to state governments; instead of building a modern centralized nation, they focused on renovating the old state machinery. Progressives in the West, for instance, created the referendum, allowing citizens to vote specific laws up or down. Croly, an unabashed elitist, preferred handing power to experts.
In his polemical mode, Croly unfairly skewered the reformers' motives. The turn-of-the-century debates over the future of corporate capitalism resembled the current conflagration over gay marriage. There was no national consensus on the regulation of business then, just as there's no national consensus on same-sex unions now. Rather than wasting breath trying to persuade obstreperous Southern congressmen to back federal labor laws, the progressives plunged forward and passed reforms in the Northern and Midwestern state legislatures. Beginning with Robert La Follette's 1900 gubernatorial victory, Wisconsin raced farthest ahead in the nation, slashing railroad rates and passing laws on corruption and conservation.
Devout believers in the new social sciences, the progressives invested near mystical power in empirical data, and this faith guided their federalism. As Louis Brandeis wrote in a famous 1932 Supreme Court dissent, states could serve as ''laboratories of democracy,'' control groups to test the value of particular policies. Progressives believed that once the nation saw how successful these state-level reforms were, it would eagerly mimic them. Indeed, La Follete's administration became a trendy model. ''Outside the state, the 'Wisconsin idea' was rapidly becoming a program and inspiration,'' Eric Goldman wrote in his 1952 history of American reform movements, ''Rendezvous With Destiny.'' The Badger State had become a national guinea pig.
It's not surprising that Brandeis coined liberal federalism's signature slogan. A Kentucky-born corporate lawyer, whose wealth freed him to pursue progressive causes, Brandeis was the doctrine's sincerest believer -- and, for a time, Croly's intellectual adversary. And just as Croly had said, Brandeis continued to harbor a Jeffersonian aversion to agglomerations of power, or the ''curse of bigness'' as he called it, in both business and government. ''If the Lord had intended things to be big, he would have made man bigger -- in brains and character,'' Brandeis quipped in Congressional testimony in 1911. This abhorrence of bigness led him strenuously to oppose Croly's program, which proposed nationalizing inefficient trusts and tolerating efficient ones.
The Croly-Brandeis debate became the central theme of the 1912 election. While Croly was helping to conceive Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism program, Brandeis met with Woodrow Wilson at a low point in his campaign. As the late James Chace described the encounter in his narrative of the election, ''1912,'' Brandeis instantly supplied much-needed ideological direction to the faltering Democratic candidate. ''After his first meeting with Brandeis, Wilson spoke with new fervor.''
For conservatives, ''states' rights'' often seems just another way of asserting their libertarianism, their dislike of government in any form. Liberal federalism, on the other hand, doesn't view the state and federal governments as opposing forces. Brandeis may have celebrated the states but he also stressed the importance of federal antitrust policy, and he became the New Deal's most reliable advocate on the Supreme Court, even meeting privately with Franklin Roosevelt. New Dealers affectionately referred to Brandeis as ''Isaiah.''
That's not to say Brandeis meshed perfectly with the Roosevelt administration. He couldn't abide the president's seemingly boundless ambition to expand executive power. He joined a majority on the court in striking down a handful of New Deal programs, including the National Industrial Recovery Act. He even sent a stern note to Roosevelt's consigliere, Thomas G. Corcoran: ''I want you to go back and tell the president that we're not going to let this government centralize everything. It's come to an end. As for your young men,'' by which Brandeis meant the core of intellectuals assembled around the New Deal, ''you call them together and tell them to get out of Washington -- tell them to go home, back to the states. That is where they must do their work.''
Despite Brandeis's reprimand and the Supreme Court's decisions, Roosevelt's ''young men'' didn't soon leave Washington. World War II -- and then the cold war -- created new engines of government for them to operate. Emerging from the war convinced that America had just fought on behalf of equality and other liberal values, they wanted to transfer that crusading spirit to domestic causes. Eminences like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith celebrated the ''American creed'' and ''national greatness,'' phrases that echoed Croly's call for a ''new nationalism.'' And even if the war hadn't propelled liberals in this nationalistic direction, the segregationist invocations of states' rights would have. ''The time has arrived,'' Hubert Humphrey declared at his party's 1948 convention, ''for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of civil rights.'' Humphrey's party adopted a civil rights platform plank, and in response, Strom Thurmond led a white flight to a newfangled States' Rights Party.
Nationalistic postwar liberalism flourished, but a left-wing critique of it arose in the early 1960's. New Left student rebels shared Brandeis's aversion to bigness, though they arrived at their aversion through a very different intellectual tradition. Tom Hayden and other stalwarts of Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.), the defining organization of 60's radicalism, had absorbed the lessons of books like C. Wright Mills's ''White Collar'' and ''Power Elite,'' and Paul Goodman's ''Growing Up Absurd.'' (Hayden even wrote his master's dissertation on Mills.) This literature railed against bureaucracy, centralization and technocrats as agents of mass alienation and conformism. ''Overcentralization is an international disease of modern times,'' Goodman wrote in ''People or Personnel.'' Precisely the same language can be found in S.D.S.'s 1962 manifesto, the Port Huron statement, where the group waxed utopian about ''participatory democracy,'' a governing philosophy it described as the antithesis of managerial liberalism.
Over the next two decades, the raw ideas of Port Huron were tamed and refined by communitarian scholars like the Harvard professors Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam. These communitarians didn't particularly like the 60's counterculture ethos, but they assimilated many of the New Left's ideas about community, applauding civic organizations like churches and private charities as essential pillars of democracy. And they bemoaned changes in the political landscape that had blinded mainstream liberalism to the virtues of these institutions. The Washington Post's communitarian-minded columnist E. J. Dionne lamented that liberals ''came to believe that almost all doctrines emphasizing the value of local community were indistinguishable from the phony 'states' rights' arguments used by segregationists.'' A strong trace of Catholic social teachings could be discerned in these views, especially Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical on ''subsidiarity'' -- the idea that social ills are best solved by the organizations and people closest to them. Although the communitarians didn't spend much time integrating state governments into their vision, they spoke of them with great respect. Sandel concluded his book ''Democracy's Discontent'' with a call for progressives to discover the ''unrealized possibilities implicit in American federalism.''
By the 1970's, liberal federalist ideas suddenly had an opportunity to break into widespread circulation and shake off the segregationist stigma. Vietnam had stolen the swagger from nationalistic liberalism, a change that could be witnessed most poignantly in the writings of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. After spending decades advocating a strong central government, he wrote ''The Imperial Presidency'' in 1973, warning that the executive branch now possessed dangerous concentrations of power. But liberal federalism didn't fully get a hearing until the emergence of a new champion, Bill Clinton.
Prodded by a Republican Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, Clinton actually presided over the revitalized federalism that Sandel imagined, and even spent time in the White House huddling with Sandel and Putnam. Federalism suited his declared ambition to move beyond the era of ''big government.'' In 1995, he signed a law prohibiting the national government from imposing new burdens on the states without first providing funds to cover any costs. The welfare reform package he ushered into law a year later gave states enormous latitude in remaking social policy.
George W. Bush didn't give Clinton much credit for these achievements. Like many of his predecessors, he entered office promising to rescue the states from federal pummeling. Yet his administration has greatly expanded federal power, and some conservatives have been complaining. Writing in National Review two years ago, Romesh Ponnuru observed that ''more people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the cold war.'' State governments have their own version of this complaint. They say the Bush administration has imposed new demands -- federal education standards, homeland security tasks -- without also providing sufficient cash to get these jobs done. The Republican senator Lamar Alexander recently told The Times, ''The principle of federalism has gotten lost in the weeds by a Republican Congress that was elected to uphold it in 1994.''
This is hardly the first time that self-described federalists have abandoned the cause. Strom Thurmond ran on the States' Rights Party ticket in 1948, but throughout his long career as a senator, he never had qualms about heaving bushels of federal money into his state. In 1982, Ronald Reagan announced his own ill-fated new federalism proposal. But instead of dismantling Washington, his administration imposed a raft of new health and safety regulations on the states. Perhaps federalists have failed to reshape American government because federalism isn't really a governing philosophy. Its proponents describe a world that doesn't exist. In actuality, the states and federal government aren't cut-throat competitors but codependents, with state governments living off federal money and implementing federal programs. Rather, ''states' rights'' can be seen as a subgenre of political rhetoric, part of what the historian Michael Kazin calls the ''populist persuasion.'' And like so much of the language of populism, it proves hollow once its adherents obtain power.
One suspects that many if not most of today's liberal federalists haven't converted out of true belief, either. Some have adopted the rhetoric of states' rights because it provides psychic relief from the alienation they feel now that a majority of the nation's voters has returned George W. Bush to office. In its most frustrated form, this alienation has manifested itself in the ubiquitous joking about emigrating to Canada. Liberal federalism provides a more rational outlet. Instead of retreating to Vancouver, liberal federalists would retreat from national politics and focus on effecting change in their own blue states -- passing health care reforms, expanding gay rights. At the height of the liberals' postelection angst, The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, declared: ''We can secede emotionally, however, by turning our backs on the heartland. We can focus on our issues, our urban issues, and promote our shared urban values.'' It's like the path evangelicals beat after the Scopes trial, when the religious right took a 50-year break from mainstream political activity and quietly tended their own institutions.
Some Democratic political strategists are also guiding liberals in this direction. In election postmortems, they have urged the party to follow in the Truman-Reagan-Gingrich tradition and rail against the corrupt interests ruling Washington -- ''an aggressively reform, anti-Washington, anti-business-as-usual party,'' as James Carville described it at a Democratic hand-wringing session last November. Proponents of this strategy now reside in nearly every corner of the party -- from Howard Dean, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to the Democratic Leadership Council. Positioning the Democratic Party as the great modern-day defender of states' rights against imperial Washington jibes neatly with this strategy. Progressives once championed states as laboratories of democracy. Now many of them are hoping these laboratories will produce the Democratic electoral cure.
Franklin Foer, a senior editor at The New Republic and a contributing editor for New York magazine, is the author of ''How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization.''
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
"U.N." NomineeBy Bidisha BanerjeeUpdated Tuesday, March 8, 2005, at 5:00 PM PT
In the blogs today, liberals are scoffing at President Bush's nomination of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. There's also speculation about whether U.S. troops tried to kill an Italian journalist after she was released from captivity in Iraq. Other bloggers ponder terrorist threats against the Indian IT sector and actor Russell Crowe.
"U.N." nominee: Bloggers are asking why President Bush would appoint Bolton as U.N. ambassador considering that he once said that "there's no such thing as the United Nations" and "if the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."
Aristocratic liberal The Nattering Nabob complains: "Bolton has been appointed to be ambassador to an organization that he claims does not exist. … Bush appoints people to head agencies who hate what the agency stands for all the time. This is so much easier than gutting the agencies, because you actually have to persuade people and pass bills and do messy stuff like compromise in order to do that." Democratic superblog Daily Kos writes: "[Bush] gave yet another middle finger [to] the world community. And while conservatives can pat themselves on the back, content in their oh-so-clever 'message' to the world, our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue to die in increasing anonymity." ThinkProgress, a blog maintained by "nonpartisan" think tank Center for American Progress, catalogs Bolton's antidiplomatic statements and notes that Jesse Helms called Bolton "the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at the gates of Armageddon."
Conservative Pejman Yousefzadeh takes Bolton seriously: "Bolton's sin—if he has one—is that he has spoken out loud what many people believe in private about the U.N., North Korea, and other trouble spots in the world. … Perhaps this kind of thing hurts sensitive ears, but many of Bolton's comments should have been said by higher-ranking diplomats long ago." Libertarian blog Q&O claims that Bush does too respect the United Nations. "You don't select a hard-line UN reformer as Ambassador to that body because you think it's a worthless organization at worst, and a bothersome nuisance at best," it points out. "You select a guy like Mr. Bolton because you beleive that a reformed UN, one that is accountable, and that takes a realistic view of the legitimacy of non-democratic governments, might be a great force for good."
Slate's Fred Kaplan says that the Bush "administration will regret its latest appointment." Read what bloggers have to say about Bolton's hypnotic white moustache here.
Rome syndrome?: Last Friday, the Italian government negotiated the freedom of journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who had been held hostage in Iraq for a month. U.S. soldiers fired on the car carrying her to safety, wounding Sgrena and killing an Italian secret service agent; Sgrena has since claimed that the United States was trying to kill her. "Crazy liberal" Cerulean Ink writes, "I'm inclined to believe the Italian version of the events over Washington's cookie-cutter story … [but] it seems far-fetched that American troops would leave Sgrena alive if it had indeed been an ambush as she claims." Noting that the Italian government has paid at least $15 million in ransoms over the past year, conservative superstar Michelle Malkin calls Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi an "idiotarian." Self-proclaimed contrarian Scylla and Charybdis goes much further: "It seems more plausible that the entire affair was faked. The objective of the fake kidnapping was to create public pressure in Italy for the Italian government to withdraw troops." Democratic Underground calls out right-wing bloggers like Little Green Footballs for attempting to discredit Sgrena by falsely claiming that her car suffered minimal damage. LGF continues to question the Italian journalist's credibility, but blames the Associated Press for misidentifying her car. "Girl blogger" Riverbend writes from Iraq, "After everything that occurred in Iraq- Abu Ghraib, beatings, torture, people detained for months and months, the stealing, the rape… is this latest so very shocking? Or is it shocking because the victims weren't Iraqi?" In the same post, she complains that the Western media overlooked the aftermath of an explosion in Baghdad last week. Riverbend claims that when doctors in a Baghdad hospital refused to give wounded members of the Iraqi National Guard preferential treatment over civilians, a few guardsmen beat the doctors up.
Read more about Sgrena here.
Cultural destabilization: The Indian press reveals that Kashmiri insurgents planned to attack several Indian call centers and IT firms. A commentator on Slashdot wonders why consulting firms that reap rewards from offshoring don't point out that "[s]afety is much much lower in India…Someone may steal your data, source code and there is nothing you can do about it." A blogger based in Bangalore writes, "From an information security perspective, we are definitely ready to face any situation. However, from a physical security perspective, IT companies say that since matters like terrorist threat concerns the government, it should step up security measures."
In this month's GQ, Russell Crowe declares that he was targeted by al-Qaida in 2001 as part of a "cultural destabilization" plot. "Cultural destabilization? Couldn't they take Britney Spears instead? Or perhaps bomb the Baldwins, ala South Park?" mutters Secure Liberty.
Read more about terrorist threats against Russell Crowe here and more about threats against Indian IT here.Bidisha Banerjee is a Slate editorial assistant.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2114553/
"U.N." NomineeBy Bidisha BanerjeeUpdated Tuesday, March 8, 2005, at 5:00 PM PT
In the blogs today, liberals are scoffing at President Bush's nomination of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. There's also speculation about whether U.S. troops tried to kill an Italian journalist after she was released from captivity in Iraq. Other bloggers ponder terrorist threats against the Indian IT sector and actor Russell Crowe.
"U.N." nominee: Bloggers are asking why President Bush would appoint Bolton as U.N. ambassador considering that he once said that "there's no such thing as the United Nations" and "if the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."
Aristocratic liberal The Nattering Nabob complains: "Bolton has been appointed to be ambassador to an organization that he claims does not exist. … Bush appoints people to head agencies who hate what the agency stands for all the time. This is so much easier than gutting the agencies, because you actually have to persuade people and pass bills and do messy stuff like compromise in order to do that." Democratic superblog Daily Kos writes: "[Bush] gave yet another middle finger [to] the world community. And while conservatives can pat themselves on the back, content in their oh-so-clever 'message' to the world, our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue to die in increasing anonymity." ThinkProgress, a blog maintained by "nonpartisan" think tank Center for American Progress, catalogs Bolton's antidiplomatic statements and notes that Jesse Helms called Bolton "the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at the gates of Armageddon."
Conservative Pejman Yousefzadeh takes Bolton seriously: "Bolton's sin—if he has one—is that he has spoken out loud what many people believe in private about the U.N., North Korea, and other trouble spots in the world. … Perhaps this kind of thing hurts sensitive ears, but many of Bolton's comments should have been said by higher-ranking diplomats long ago." Libertarian blog Q&O claims that Bush does too respect the United Nations. "You don't select a hard-line UN reformer as Ambassador to that body because you think it's a worthless organization at worst, and a bothersome nuisance at best," it points out. "You select a guy like Mr. Bolton because you beleive that a reformed UN, one that is accountable, and that takes a realistic view of the legitimacy of non-democratic governments, might be a great force for good."
Slate's Fred Kaplan says that the Bush "administration will regret its latest appointment." Read what bloggers have to say about Bolton's hypnotic white moustache here.
Rome syndrome?: Last Friday, the Italian government negotiated the freedom of journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who had been held hostage in Iraq for a month. U.S. soldiers fired on the car carrying her to safety, wounding Sgrena and killing an Italian secret service agent; Sgrena has since claimed that the United States was trying to kill her. "Crazy liberal" Cerulean Ink writes, "I'm inclined to believe the Italian version of the events over Washington's cookie-cutter story … [but] it seems far-fetched that American troops would leave Sgrena alive if it had indeed been an ambush as she claims." Noting that the Italian government has paid at least $15 million in ransoms over the past year, conservative superstar Michelle Malkin calls Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi an "idiotarian." Self-proclaimed contrarian Scylla and Charybdis goes much further: "It seems more plausible that the entire affair was faked. The objective of the fake kidnapping was to create public pressure in Italy for the Italian government to withdraw troops." Democratic Underground calls out right-wing bloggers like Little Green Footballs for attempting to discredit Sgrena by falsely claiming that her car suffered minimal damage. LGF continues to question the Italian journalist's credibility, but blames the Associated Press for misidentifying her car. "Girl blogger" Riverbend writes from Iraq, "After everything that occurred in Iraq- Abu Ghraib, beatings, torture, people detained for months and months, the stealing, the rape… is this latest so very shocking? Or is it shocking because the victims weren't Iraqi?" In the same post, she complains that the Western media overlooked the aftermath of an explosion in Baghdad last week. Riverbend claims that when doctors in a Baghdad hospital refused to give wounded members of the Iraqi National Guard preferential treatment over civilians, a few guardsmen beat the doctors up.
Read more about Sgrena here.
Cultural destabilization: The Indian press reveals that Kashmiri insurgents planned to attack several Indian call centers and IT firms. A commentator on Slashdot wonders why consulting firms that reap rewards from offshoring don't point out that "[s]afety is much much lower in India…Someone may steal your data, source code and there is nothing you can do about it." A blogger based in Bangalore writes, "From an information security perspective, we are definitely ready to face any situation. However, from a physical security perspective, IT companies say that since matters like terrorist threat concerns the government, it should step up security measures."
In this month's GQ, Russell Crowe declares that he was targeted by al-Qaida in 2001 as part of a "cultural destabilization" plot. "Cultural destabilization? Couldn't they take Britney Spears instead? Or perhaps bomb the Baldwins, ala South Park?" mutters Secure Liberty.
Read more about terrorist threats against Russell Crowe here and more about threats against Indian IT here.Bidisha Banerjee is a Slate editorial assistant.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2114553/
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
February 13, 2005
How the Irish Paved Civilization By Joe Klein EMPIRE RISING By Thomas Kelly. 390 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.
NO writer owns New York -- not the way that William Kennedy owns Albany or Raymond Chandler once owned Los Angeles. The city is just too big. The best lay claim to a neighborhood, an ethnic group or a moment. Damon Runyon had Broadway in the 30's; Edith Wharton, high society in the Gilded Age; Henry Roth, the immigrant Lower East Side; Louis Auchincloss, the Upper East Side; more recently, Jonathan Lethem has captured a significant patch of Brooklyn. Now comes Thomas Kelly to stake his claim -- on a group, Irish immigrant construction workers, and on a transaction that is central to the political geography of the city: the kickback. ''Nothing,'' he writes, at the outset of his new novel, ''Empire Rising,'' ''gets built in Gotham without a kickback.''
Kelly is a former construction worker -- he worked his way through Fordham, that underappreciated Jesu-it launching pad in the Bronx -- and a former advance man for Mayor David Dinkins; his résumé positions him perfectly for his chosen turf. His claim is not quite literary. He is neither an elegant stylist nor a particularly close observer of the human condition. But there is a compelling muscularity to his work -- the plots barrel along, the characters are wildly colorful -- and there is a dead-on authenticity to the dialogue and the atmospherics. There is also a bracing, and rare, appreciation for the sheer satisfaction of honest work:
''Briody steadied his legs and back and torso and arms and clenched his jaw against the rattle of the pneumatic gun. His muscles were fluid one second with movement, static the next to drive the rivet home, a contracting and easing of his brawn that over the weeks had become as regular as breathing. The gang moved in perfect sync as four parts of one whole, advancing nonstop from beam to column to beam. The sun was out now, overhead and hot. The morning chill was gone. Sweat poured down their backs. Briody watched their rivet punk walk along a beam with a burlap bag full of bolts slung over his shoulder, his hat askance. He was 17 and glided along the six-inch-wide crossbeam with the assurance of the oblivious.''
The work in question is the grandest imaginable, the construction of the Empire State Building in 1930 -- a particularly resonant moment in the history of New York, the exclamation point that punctuated the Roaring Twenties. The stock market has recently crashed, but the depth of the economic abyss is not entirely apparent yet. The city is still blithely ignoring Prohibition, dancing the Charleston, drowning in bathtub gin. Gentleman Jimmy Walker is the mayor, nonchalantly adulterous, complaisant, casually corrupt. Franklin Roosevelt is governor, about to run for president, anxious to separate himself from the local political stench, and also from his predecessor -- Al Smith, a Roman Catholic and, arguably, Tammany Hall's finest flower, a great governor but a disaster as a presidential candidate in 1928. (Smith, for his part, detests Roosevelt.) Tammany itself is in decline, still suffering after the death of the brilliant ''silent'' boss Charles Murphy, and run now by an insurance man, John F. Curry, a shadowy nonpresence in ''Empire Rising.'' (Curry's absence is a distinct personal disappointment to me since my grandfather, also named Joe Klein, ran that boss's favored conduit for honest graft: the John F. Curry Insurance Agency.)
''Empire Rising'' is, then, a historical novel -- and there are perils that come with the territory, foremost of which is what an editor of mine once called the ''Oh, look, there's Walt Whitman'' problem. It takes a certain amount of grit -- Kelly would use a more graphic reference -- to mix and match historical and fictional characters. Even so talented an artist as E. L. Doctorow had only intermittent success with it in ''Ragtime.'' And Kelly has his hands full here, introducing not only Jimmy Walker, Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, but also Babe Ruth, Lewis Hine and Primo Carnera. Judge Crater is a character. In fact, the mystery of the judge's disappearance is ''solved'' by Kelly, which also takes grit.
Some of the historical showboating is a diversion -- the celebrities, with the exception of the elegant Mayor Walker, don't have much life to them -- but Kelly has chosen a particular time and place, and the elected officials of that moment are, each in his way, crucial to the intricate choreography of corruption in old New York.
At the center of ''Empire Rising,'' though, is Johnny Farrell, a fictional aide to Mayor Walker. Farrell's job is to orchestrate the kickbacks. Early on, Kelly explains how it worked:
''The developers needed two changes in the building code to make the Empire State Building feasible, never mind profitable. Steel gauge and elevator speed. Two simple adjustments in the way skyscrapers were built that the mayor had vetoed twice without comment. Farrell had played the developers beautifully. . . . [He] had secured the mayor's signature, after doubling its price, of course, to a nice round one million dollars. And that was just the beginning. There were to be dozens of subcontractors on the job who would have to pay for the privilege, not to mention ancillary work like sewer lines, roads and a sparkling new subway station. Plus, someone had to meet the gambling and policy needs of several thousand workers. Farrell controlled all of it.''
Farrell is a second-generation Irish immigrant, college-educated but street-smart. He dresses flashy -- diamond stickpin, fancy watch -- drops $20 tips and flaunts an upper-class Protestant wife and kids. He wants to be loyal to his old boys from the neighborhood, but there is a city to run and new alliances beckon.
There is a lot to work with here, and I wish Kelly had given us a bit more of Farrell's inner life, the conflicts that cause him to be just a shade too weak to be a really effective bagman, a shade too decent to be a truly frightening villain. (Frankie Keefe, the corrupt Teamster boss in Kelly's previous novel, ''The Rackets,'' was a magnificently awful bad guy.) Indeed, the emotional heart of ''Empire Rising'' lies elsewhere, in the romance between Farrell's Irish immigrant mistress, Grace Masterson, and a construc-tion worker, Mike Briody, who spends his spare time running guns for the Irish Republican Army.
The word most often used, not always favorably, to describe this sort of novel is sprawling, but Kelly is a big-hearted and admirably ambitious writer. He wants to show the city top to bottom, from Jimmy Walker's boudoir to the Irish pubs in the South Bronx where the construction workers drink their paychecks. ''The Rackets'' had a similar scope -- it was about a Teamsters Union election in the 1990's (the mayor, unnamed in that case, was a deftly arrogant Giuliani sort). In both books, Kelly takes lots of chances, drawing his characters broadly, jamming the plots with coincidence, violence and melodrama. Not all of it works, but Kelly's city is palpably alive and passionate, and very recognizably New York -- especially in the vertiginous rush of upward mobility, the fissures it causes within families, the loyalties strained, the traditions lost.
Kelly knows in his bones the lesson that Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer posited in their classic of urban sociology, ''Beyond the Melting Pot'': this is a tribal town, and ethnicity trumps economic class as a social determinant. The tribes have their rituals, and Kelly knows his own too well to gild the lily: his Irish construction workers drink hard, curse with genius and swoon over their mothers. They are pigheaded, honor bound and always game for a good punch-up. His heroines are a construction worker's fantasy -- tall, gorgeous, tough-talking and with no illusions at all about Irish men. Those who belong to other tribes, especially the Italians, are incomprehensibly barbaric. (In both ''Empire Rising'' and ''The Rackets,'' there are Italian mobsters who terrify their Irish counterparts -- Irish violence, according to Kelly, is volcanic, emotional, a consequence of pride and stubbornness; Italian violence is dispassionate, surgical, corporate.)
And at the center of Thomas Kelly's New York, more vital than plot or characters, is politics. Not the politics of elections, personalities, reform or progress -- no, this is the politics of the never-ending transaction. Public employees' unions may supplant Tammany, bundled campaign contributions may replace envelopes filled with cash, and new ethnic groups provide the crooks and the muscle labor. But the buildings still go up, the contracts are still let out (and not always to the lowest bidder) and zoning variances remain an adventure. There are lawyers, insurance brokers, pension fund managers and mobsters crawling all over each other for a payday, and good government sorts (''goo-goos'' is the term of art) trying to thwart them. Kelly is too smart for idealism, too romantic for reflexive cynicism. He is a realist, who understands that there's just too much here -- too much money, glamour, power -- for the city to ever completely reform itself. The structures are too big to run without a little grease. ''Empire Rising'' is an ode to urban grease; I'll never look at that grand old building the same way again.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Permissions Privacy Policy
February 13, 2005
How the Irish Paved Civilization By Joe Klein EMPIRE RISING By Thomas Kelly. 390 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.
NO writer owns New York -- not the way that William Kennedy owns Albany or Raymond Chandler once owned Los Angeles. The city is just too big. The best lay claim to a neighborhood, an ethnic group or a moment. Damon Runyon had Broadway in the 30's; Edith Wharton, high society in the Gilded Age; Henry Roth, the immigrant Lower East Side; Louis Auchincloss, the Upper East Side; more recently, Jonathan Lethem has captured a significant patch of Brooklyn. Now comes Thomas Kelly to stake his claim -- on a group, Irish immigrant construction workers, and on a transaction that is central to the political geography of the city: the kickback. ''Nothing,'' he writes, at the outset of his new novel, ''Empire Rising,'' ''gets built in Gotham without a kickback.''
Kelly is a former construction worker -- he worked his way through Fordham, that underappreciated Jesu-it launching pad in the Bronx -- and a former advance man for Mayor David Dinkins; his résumé positions him perfectly for his chosen turf. His claim is not quite literary. He is neither an elegant stylist nor a particularly close observer of the human condition. But there is a compelling muscularity to his work -- the plots barrel along, the characters are wildly colorful -- and there is a dead-on authenticity to the dialogue and the atmospherics. There is also a bracing, and rare, appreciation for the sheer satisfaction of honest work:
''Briody steadied his legs and back and torso and arms and clenched his jaw against the rattle of the pneumatic gun. His muscles were fluid one second with movement, static the next to drive the rivet home, a contracting and easing of his brawn that over the weeks had become as regular as breathing. The gang moved in perfect sync as four parts of one whole, advancing nonstop from beam to column to beam. The sun was out now, overhead and hot. The morning chill was gone. Sweat poured down their backs. Briody watched their rivet punk walk along a beam with a burlap bag full of bolts slung over his shoulder, his hat askance. He was 17 and glided along the six-inch-wide crossbeam with the assurance of the oblivious.''
The work in question is the grandest imaginable, the construction of the Empire State Building in 1930 -- a particularly resonant moment in the history of New York, the exclamation point that punctuated the Roaring Twenties. The stock market has recently crashed, but the depth of the economic abyss is not entirely apparent yet. The city is still blithely ignoring Prohibition, dancing the Charleston, drowning in bathtub gin. Gentleman Jimmy Walker is the mayor, nonchalantly adulterous, complaisant, casually corrupt. Franklin Roosevelt is governor, about to run for president, anxious to separate himself from the local political stench, and also from his predecessor -- Al Smith, a Roman Catholic and, arguably, Tammany Hall's finest flower, a great governor but a disaster as a presidential candidate in 1928. (Smith, for his part, detests Roosevelt.) Tammany itself is in decline, still suffering after the death of the brilliant ''silent'' boss Charles Murphy, and run now by an insurance man, John F. Curry, a shadowy nonpresence in ''Empire Rising.'' (Curry's absence is a distinct personal disappointment to me since my grandfather, also named Joe Klein, ran that boss's favored conduit for honest graft: the John F. Curry Insurance Agency.)
''Empire Rising'' is, then, a historical novel -- and there are perils that come with the territory, foremost of which is what an editor of mine once called the ''Oh, look, there's Walt Whitman'' problem. It takes a certain amount of grit -- Kelly would use a more graphic reference -- to mix and match historical and fictional characters. Even so talented an artist as E. L. Doctorow had only intermittent success with it in ''Ragtime.'' And Kelly has his hands full here, introducing not only Jimmy Walker, Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, but also Babe Ruth, Lewis Hine and Primo Carnera. Judge Crater is a character. In fact, the mystery of the judge's disappearance is ''solved'' by Kelly, which also takes grit.
Some of the historical showboating is a diversion -- the celebrities, with the exception of the elegant Mayor Walker, don't have much life to them -- but Kelly has chosen a particular time and place, and the elected officials of that moment are, each in his way, crucial to the intricate choreography of corruption in old New York.
At the center of ''Empire Rising,'' though, is Johnny Farrell, a fictional aide to Mayor Walker. Farrell's job is to orchestrate the kickbacks. Early on, Kelly explains how it worked:
''The developers needed two changes in the building code to make the Empire State Building feasible, never mind profitable. Steel gauge and elevator speed. Two simple adjustments in the way skyscrapers were built that the mayor had vetoed twice without comment. Farrell had played the developers beautifully. . . . [He] had secured the mayor's signature, after doubling its price, of course, to a nice round one million dollars. And that was just the beginning. There were to be dozens of subcontractors on the job who would have to pay for the privilege, not to mention ancillary work like sewer lines, roads and a sparkling new subway station. Plus, someone had to meet the gambling and policy needs of several thousand workers. Farrell controlled all of it.''
Farrell is a second-generation Irish immigrant, college-educated but street-smart. He dresses flashy -- diamond stickpin, fancy watch -- drops $20 tips and flaunts an upper-class Protestant wife and kids. He wants to be loyal to his old boys from the neighborhood, but there is a city to run and new alliances beckon.
There is a lot to work with here, and I wish Kelly had given us a bit more of Farrell's inner life, the conflicts that cause him to be just a shade too weak to be a really effective bagman, a shade too decent to be a truly frightening villain. (Frankie Keefe, the corrupt Teamster boss in Kelly's previous novel, ''The Rackets,'' was a magnificently awful bad guy.) Indeed, the emotional heart of ''Empire Rising'' lies elsewhere, in the romance between Farrell's Irish immigrant mistress, Grace Masterson, and a construc-tion worker, Mike Briody, who spends his spare time running guns for the Irish Republican Army.
The word most often used, not always favorably, to describe this sort of novel is sprawling, but Kelly is a big-hearted and admirably ambitious writer. He wants to show the city top to bottom, from Jimmy Walker's boudoir to the Irish pubs in the South Bronx where the construction workers drink their paychecks. ''The Rackets'' had a similar scope -- it was about a Teamsters Union election in the 1990's (the mayor, unnamed in that case, was a deftly arrogant Giuliani sort). In both books, Kelly takes lots of chances, drawing his characters broadly, jamming the plots with coincidence, violence and melodrama. Not all of it works, but Kelly's city is palpably alive and passionate, and very recognizably New York -- especially in the vertiginous rush of upward mobility, the fissures it causes within families, the loyalties strained, the traditions lost.
Kelly knows in his bones the lesson that Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer posited in their classic of urban sociology, ''Beyond the Melting Pot'': this is a tribal town, and ethnicity trumps economic class as a social determinant. The tribes have their rituals, and Kelly knows his own too well to gild the lily: his Irish construction workers drink hard, curse with genius and swoon over their mothers. They are pigheaded, honor bound and always game for a good punch-up. His heroines are a construction worker's fantasy -- tall, gorgeous, tough-talking and with no illusions at all about Irish men. Those who belong to other tribes, especially the Italians, are incomprehensibly barbaric. (In both ''Empire Rising'' and ''The Rackets,'' there are Italian mobsters who terrify their Irish counterparts -- Irish violence, according to Kelly, is volcanic, emotional, a consequence of pride and stubbornness; Italian violence is dispassionate, surgical, corporate.)
And at the center of Thomas Kelly's New York, more vital than plot or characters, is politics. Not the politics of elections, personalities, reform or progress -- no, this is the politics of the never-ending transaction. Public employees' unions may supplant Tammany, bundled campaign contributions may replace envelopes filled with cash, and new ethnic groups provide the crooks and the muscle labor. But the buildings still go up, the contracts are still let out (and not always to the lowest bidder) and zoning variances remain an adventure. There are lawyers, insurance brokers, pension fund managers and mobsters crawling all over each other for a payday, and good government sorts (''goo-goos'' is the term of art) trying to thwart them. Kelly is too smart for idealism, too romantic for reflexive cynicism. He is a realist, who understands that there's just too much here -- too much money, glamour, power -- for the city to ever completely reform itself. The structures are too big to run without a little grease. ''Empire Rising'' is an ode to urban grease; I'll never look at that grand old building the same way again.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Permissions Privacy Policy
