From a column by Lance Morrow in the Wall Street Journal titled “Three Tales of a City: Bloomberg, de Blasio and Trump”—Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. In 1981 while at Time he won a National Magazine Award for essays and criticism.
New York has a multiple personality. Messrs. Bloomberg, de Blasio and Trump represent three faces of the city, each of them distinct and vivid and typical. Each stands for a certain framework of ideas and ambitions and methods; each is differently tuned to the American themes of success and failure—which are, after all, New York’s themes, the raw binary possibilities that greet the newcomer. . . .
Mr. de Blasio—who supported Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, honeymooned in Cuba during the U.S. embargo, and calls himself a social democrat—entered city hall in 2014 and has been, almost everyone agrees, a fairly leftist—and fairly lousy—mayor. . . .
His predecessor, Boston native Mr. Bloomberg, was a success—thorough, thoughtful, imaginative, though with a troubling tendency to overcontrol. Messrs. Bloomberg and de Blasio share a coercive-activist streak—Mr. de Blasio as a left-wing leveler (opponent of charter schools and other avenues of merit and excellence) and Mr. Bloomberg as a nanny-state enforcer (who sought to outlaw large cups of soda). . . .
Mr. Trump favors forms of anarchy over government coercion. He may admire certain dictators abroad and advocate a border wall, but at bottom he is a natural subversive—which makes him a pretty strange president. He even routinely subverts himself, as if to validate the principle. He’d rather lie than accept the confinement of an unwelcome truth. He is reminiscent of the sort of New York operator whose assumption, going in, is that the law and the mob are coequal branches. That’s not always wrong.
Mr. Trump’s ego-driven, warlord presidency—for all its disorder, faults, bad manners and stupidities—comes out on the side of Huckleberry Finn’s kind of freedom: freedom from political correctness and its horrors, anyway, and from the essentially totalitarian mind that lurks behind it. Mr. Trump’s rebellion against such coercion is the secret of his appeal.
Speak Your Mind