Given that the diminutive Jewish billionaire has managed to piss off just about everyone during his decade-plus reign as the Big Apple's Il Duce, that's no small deal. Between his fascistic anti-gun policies, his war on sodas and other fattening foods, neutering the city's term limit law in a blatant power grab and using the NYPD as his personal Praetorian Guard, it's a wonder that Gracie Mansion hasn't been torched by an angry mob yet.
But while it's obvious that Bloomberg is a power-mad little dork with a Napoleon complex, you can't argue with results. Under both his and Rudy Giuliani's aegis, New York has rebounded from the horror years of the seventies and eighties to become America's most prosperous metropolis. Crime has hit amazing new lows, the cities' most stagnant slums are being gentrified back into polite society, and despite being the epicenter of world finance, it's weathered the second Great Depression pretty well. Even the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy last year couldn't stop New York.
And therein lies the problem.
New York City has become a victim of its own success. Giuliani and Bloomberg's efforts to make the city fit for human habitation have attracted white leftists who enjoy a safe, prosperous New York but can't comprehend what makes it possible. It's these cretins—pasty white hipsters, Gawker readers and people who watch Girls—who form the backbone of Bill de Blasio's constituency. And with New York's traditional white working and middle classes largely pushed out to the suburbs, there's nobody left to stop them.
Samuel Johnson once described a second marriage as "the triumph of hope over experience," and that sums up the ascendancy of Bill de Blasio. Despite not having a single accomplishment to his name during his tenure as Public Advocate, de Blasio not only surged from last place to beat four far more qualified candidates (yes, even Anthony Weiner is more qualified to be mayor) in the Democratic primary in September, he did so by a large enough margin to avoid a runoff election. Particularly shocking was the collapse of Christine Quinn, City Council Speaker, married lesbian and Bloomberg's heir apparent; she went from jockeying with Weiner for first place to finishing a distant third. De Blasio's Republican opponent, former MTA chairman and deputy mayor Joe Lhota, has been trailing in the polls by a double-digit margin the entire campaign, all but ensuring de Blasio's victory in today's election.
Bill de Blasio is so far to the left that he's being openly compared to Ken Livingstone, the ex-communist former mayor of London. His platform consists of wiping out New York's already endangered middle class with more taxes and regulations. His speeches have been fueled by open cultural Marxist rhetoric in part due to his wife, a perpetually angry black lesbian with—surprise, surprise—an axe to grind against the Evil White Patriarchy. He was a devoted supporter of the Sandinistas and spent his honeymoon in Cuba in violation of U.S. law. Repeated polls have shown that de Blasio's support comes from voters who think the city needs a break from the Giuliani-Bloomberg era... even when those same polls show that New Yorkers are pretty happy with Bloomberg's work as mayor.
But as Looney Tunes as de Blasio's platform is, he's ultimately the symptom, not the problem. What's happening in New York is the end result of a decades-long process on the part of America's elite class, the final displacement of the middle- and working-class whites who built this nation. Indeed, New York was where our leftist overlords first discovered that they could use blacks and immigrants to disenfranchise whites permanently and ensure themselves a never-ending string of electoral victories. To see this, we'll have to go back to the sixties, when it all began.
***
Ironically, it was a Republican, John Lindsay, who birthed the modern leftist coalition. Mayor of New York from 1966 to 1973, Lindsay was a trust fund baby from the Upper East Side who entered politics because he had nothing better to do with his time. "Daddy, I'm BORED! I wanna run for Congress!" He won the mayoralty in 1965 in part due to a wave of anti-incumbent frustration; twenty years of Democratic machine rule had resulted in economic stagnation and a massive budget deficit.
Unfortunately for Lindsay, he hitched his political wagon to a horse that was being sent to the glue factory; the progressive wing of the GOP. Under Eisenhower and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the Republicans had abandoned all pretense of being an opposition party and were trying to out-left the Democrats on most every issue. Just the year prior though, Rockefeller had seen his presidential ambitions crushed by conservative Barry Goldwater, an obscure Arizona senator with only a fraction of his money and name recognition. Goldwater lost the general election in a landslide, but the GOP saw the writing on the wall. The decreasing relevance of New York and New England on the national stage (in the 1970 census, New York would be eclipsed by California as the most populous state) signaled to Richard Nixon and others that the party's future depended on conservatives.
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| A vacuous, good-looking non-entity |
Lindsay's stupidity finally caught up with him in 1969. Running for reelection, he was soundly defeated in the Republican primary by conservative John Marchi, despite having greater name recognition and the support of the state GOP establishment. At the same time, the Democratic nomination was won by City Comptroller Mario Procaccino, who represented New York's traditional white working class: economically leftist but socially conservative. While Lindsay had secured the nomination of the Liberals, without a major party endorsement, his political career was over.
Lindsay saved himself with bread and circuses. He specifically bought the votes of blacks and Latinos by dramatically increasing the city's welfare rolls, creating countless patronage jobs and ratcheting up spending. During his mayoralty, the city budget more than doubled, from less than $5 billion in 1967 to over $10 billion in 1974. At the same time, Lindsay endeared himself to wealthy white/Jewish leftists by touting his progressive credentials. With Procaccino and Marchi splitting the middle-/working-class white vote, Lindsay was returned to power in November with a decisive plurality. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's the exact same game plan that President Obama used to win reelection last year.
Naturally, Lindsay's second term as mayor was as disastrous as his first. As the city's deficit spiraled out of control and crime skyrocketed, middle- and working-class New Yorkers continued to flee to the suburbs, exacerbating the city's economic woes. And despite plummeting approval ratings, Lindsay was so arrogant that he launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, only withdrawing after repeated poor showings in the early primaries. He declined to seek reelection in 1973 (reportedly breaking down in tears when his term ended), leaving his successor Abraham Beame to clean up his mess; it was Beame who was famously forced to beg President Ford for a federal bailout.
***
John Lindsay's legacy of anti-white discrimination and reckless spending endured long after he left office, with crime and white flight continuing to rise during the seventies and eighties. It wasn't until Rudy Giuliani's election in 1993 when things finally began to turn around. The Crown Heights riot in 1991—and Mayor David Dinkins' limp response to it—convinced New York leftists that maybe, just maybe, their melanin-rich coalition partners didn't like them very much. Under Giuliani's "broken windows" policing, violent crime took a nosedive, the long-despised "squeegee men" were put out to pasture, and New York finally began to climb out of the hole that Lindsay had stuffed it in. Bloomberg won election in 2001 in part by promising to continue Giuliani's policies.
But in the year 2013, Crown Heights and the blackout of 1977 are ancient history. Anyone who remembers what an uninhabitable hellhole New York City was prior to Giuliani is either dead, living elsewhere or is otherwise outnumbered by the clueless Midwestern hipsters attracted by the city's relative safety and prosperity. Gawker staffers screech about the "racism" of the NYPD's now-dead stop-and-frisk policy, oblivious to the fact that it's precisely those policies that kept New York from becoming a coastal Detroit. They whine about gentrification ruining "vibrant" minority neighborhoods (read: violent ghettos) despite the fact that without that gentrification, they'd still be stuck in their crappy little cul-de-sacs back in Wisconsin.
They're not just biting the hand that feeds them, they're tearing it off and shoving it into a meat grinder.
***
The average voter is a self-absorbed moron; he votes for the candidate who reminds him most of himself. We've seen this with both George Bush, a Connecticut blue blood who adopted a fake Texas cowboy persona (to the point where he hired a voice coach during the 2004 election so he could maintain his Southern drawl), and Barack Obama, a stuttering nerd who puts on airs of being a sophisticated intellectual. But what about Bill de Blasio? What does his ascendancy say about his supporters?
Answer: they're a bunch of androgynous, narcissistic freaks.
For starters, "Bill de Blasio" isn't even the man's real name; he was born Warren Wilhelm, Jr. in 1961. The name change came about because his daddy was mean to him: an irascible and violent alcoholic, he split from de Blasio's mother when his son was eight. In the typical petulance shown by men raised by single mothers, de Blasio chose to spit on his father's memory by adopting his mother's maiden name in 1983, barely four years after his father committed suicide when he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Stay classy, Bill.
But no amateur psychoanalysis of Bill de Blasio is complete without mentioning his domineering lesbian wife, Chirlane McCray (and yes, even after he adopted his mother's maiden name, she still wouldn't take his name). Prior to her marriage to the doughboy from Cambridge, McCray was best known for a 1979 Essence article in which she spoke about her experiences as a homosexual woman of color. De Blasio's account of how he wooed her reads like one of Heartiste's "Beta of the Month" horror stories as reinterpreted by Dostoevsky's Underground Man, as he steadfastly refused to take no for an answer:
"He flirted with her mercilessly, she said, calling nonstop and trying to steal an unwelcome kiss. “I actually told him, ‘Slow this down,’ ” Ms. McCray said. Her resistance became less diplomatic: “Back off.”
But a romance blossomed: Mr. de Blasio, five years her junior, won over her family with an overnight visit that earned him a new moniker: “Brother Bill.”
For Ms. McCray’s lesbian friends, her engagement to Mr. de Blasio, in 1993, was a stunning turn. Not all of them could stomach it. One of them refused to attend the wedding."
It's obvious that the only reason why de Blasio didn't get slapped with sexual harassment charges was because McCray took pity on the little weirdo. That and she probably realized that being an ugly black dyke meant that the only way she'd ever gain political power was by piggybacking off someone more telegenic. Hey, it worked for Hillary Clinton!
McCray has already been getting the Michelle Obama treatment from the New York media, who are inexplicably praising for her Chris Rock-in-drag looks, her unreadable slam poetry, and her courageous confrontation of the "patriarchal" Bloomberg... on Twitter. For his part, de Blasio hasn't been shy about flaunting her and their multiracial kids whenever the cameras are rolling, making all the multiculti white liberals melt in glee.
No one is apparently concerned that she has her husband's testicles in a vice grip.
Behind every weak man is a woman who gets her kicks from emasculating him. By her own admission, McCray asserts such a level of control over de Blasio that even Hillary Clinton would tell her to get a grip. She not only edits his speeches and has all but run his mayoral campaign, she actually threatened to divorce him in 2002 if he didn't endorse the candidates she approved of. Additionally, McCray exhibits all the signs of narcissistic personality disorder, fueled by her grandiose personality, resentment of men, and tall tales of racist oppression she supposedly suffered growing up:
"I had never had a deep sense of belonging anywhere,” recalled Chirlane McCray, whose husband, Bill de Blasio, is now the front-runner to become the next mayor of New York. “I always felt I was an outsider.”
Now, this onetime student of powerlessness, a woman whose early identity was profoundly shaped by feelings of alienation—because of her race, her gender and her evolving sexuality—is emerging as the ultimate insider: a mastermind behind the biggest political upset of the year and a sought-after voice as the city re-evaluates what it most wants from its first family."
This is the couple that leftists have chosen to deify: a codependent momma's boy and a rage-filled harridan with a never-ending list of grievances against white America. McCray is so dishonest she can't even give a straight answer on her sexual orientation. C'mon lady, it's not complicated: you can like penises, vaginas or both. It's not a freaking Sudoku puzzle!
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| Looks like a piano. |
John Lindsay smiled from hell.
***
Despite all this, there is a potential silver lining in Bill de Blasio's coronation: it might jump-start New York's moribund art and music scene.
While hipsters have become a popular target for derision on the Internet in recent years, the idea that the prosperity of the Giuliani-Bloomberg era has made New York uncool and lame has been a simmering trope in indie music for a lot longer. As the above-quoted lyrics show, James Murphy was mocking the hipster invasion way back in 2007. Recently, former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne penned a scathing editorial lamenting the growing sterility of the city's creative culture. Byrne's former bandmates, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, also rhapsodized the lost glory of the 70's music scene in their recent album Downtown Rockers.
As much as I like being able to walk to the 7-Eleven at night without worrying about getting mugged, Byrne and company have a good point. For my money, the late seventies and early to mid-eighties was the high point of American culture, and most of it came from New York. The Big Apple of John Lindsay and Ed Koch may have been an overgrown slum, but it also begat many of our greatest artists, musicians and writers: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Sonic Youth, Suicide, Lydia Lunch, Richard Kern, Jim Carroll and Talking Heads themselves. The neutered New York of today has given us Paul Auster, Matt & Kim, and Lena Dunham.
Gee, there's a real tough decision right there.
I obviously never witnessed the Lindsay-Koch-Dinkins era firsthand, but my mother's family came out of Brooklyn, and her descriptions of seventies New York when I was a kid were astounding. The problem with excessive comfort is that all great art comes out of struggle and conflict. The navel-gazing nature of Lena Dunham's work, the carping and petty obsessions of Gawker and its sister sites, and the generally self-indulgent nature of hipster culture are all products of excessive comfort. None of these overgrown babies have ever experienced true pain in their lives and it shows.
So while Bill de Blasio will no doubt be a complete disaster for New York, if his incompetence scares all the hipsters back to their cozy Minnesota suburbs, I say bring it on. As Orson Welles put it, thirty years of bloodshed in Italy gave us the Renaissance; five centuries of peace in Switzerland gave us the cuckoo clock. If you want to raise a family, go move to some boring backwater like Des Moines; New York City is not for amateurs.
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