As “the city that never sleeps” turned the calendar to 2022 with the inauguration of Eric Adams just after midnight, partygoers didn’t need Frank Sinatra’s reminder to “start spreading the news” heard on the New Year’s broadcast from Times Square. New Yorkers were well aware, as Brooklyn’s Chris Matthew Sciabarra put it, that “the best news about the next mayor is that it won’t be Bill de Blasio.”

Few would vouch that de Blasio’s administration had lived up to Eric Alterman’s first-year hopes that the post-Bloomberg mayor would “use the power of the city government to make New York a fairer and more equal place for all its inhabitants.”

Was the relentlessness of inequality since 2014, even well before the unexpected effects of COVID, merely due to de Blasio being the wrong choice to steer “the power of the city government,” or disgraced governor and sometime de Blasio foe Andrew Cuomo likewise mishandling state government, not the nature of government power itself?

Elections don’t offer control over policies that persist no matter who is in office.  Concentrated political power, rather than being a counterbalance to economic consolidation, is more likely to promote and ossify the latter far beyond market levels. Columbia University alumnus Thomas E. Woods warned Americans that “no matter whom you vote for [president], you always wind up getting John McCain.” New Yorkers always wind up getting Rudy Giuliani.

It’s not too late to revive the plan offered by Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin in 1969, whose mayoral campaign literature told New Yorkers that they “want neighborhoods to govern themselves.” Since “politicians have ridden this city right into the ground,” they asked for decision-making to be transferred away from them to local communities who could have “power over their schools, police, sanitation, housing, parks and life styles.”

Citywide impositions of uniform policies on issues from standardized testing to indoor smoking inevitably makes them politically contentious. Decentralization would unleash the ability of voluntary groups to coordinate cooperative activities, the potential for which has expanded far beyond what was possible eight years ago, let alone 53. And it’s not too late for New York City to “be a part of it.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, January 7, 2022
2. “A New Year One For Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, January 12, 2022
3. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Queens [New York] Ledger, January 12, 2022
4. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Forest Hills/Rego Park [New York] Times, January 12, 2022
5. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Leader/Observer [New York City], January 12, 2022
6. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, The Long Island City/Astoria [New York] Journal, January 12, 2022
7. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Queens [New York] Examiner, January 12, 2022
8. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Greenpoint [New York] Star, January 12, 2022
9. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Brooklyn [New York] Downtown Star, January 12, 2022
10. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, January 13, 2022

Six decades later, America’s headlines could remain in “America.”

Memorials to Stephen Sondheim didn’t have to search far to find parallels between the musical West Side Story and a United States disunited by class and ethnic strife in 2021.  Sondheim’s lyrics “Everywhere Grime in America, Terrible Time in America” became Jacobin‘s headline for an anniversary retrospective on the 1961 film version two weeks before his passing on November 26.

Meanwhile, current-year academic contentions that “white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty” may as well have borrowed the couplet “Life is all right in America/if you’re all-white in America.”

Less fashionable are sentiments celebrating the right to be “free to be anything you choose” nearly two decades before Milton Friedman popularized a shorter version of the phrase. In contrast to the rejoinder that this meant a mere freedom “to wait tables and shine shoes,” Friedman documented how economic restraints, rather than their absence, trapped workers in low-paying jobs and kept goods out of reach of consumers.

Sondheim’s paeans to expanded personal options were likewise echoed at the end of the 1960s in Karl Hess’s “libertarian insistence that men be free to spin cables of steel, as well as dreams of smoke.”  Hess noted the emerging libertarian movement’s break with “patriots who sing of freedom but also shout of banners and boundaries.” West Side Story‘s wayward youth, faced with prejudice and legal harassment, refuse to be barred from the “sweet land of liberty” of another song named “America.”

Esquire‘s critic Dwight Macdonald saw West Side Story as replacing a “lively and disrespectful” musical style with a “schmaltzy” one at odds with urban grit. Ironically, the same Macdonald championed the cultural ferment of city-states “riven by faction, stormy with passionate antagonisms” squelched by the “uniformity and agreement” needed for “that achievement of power over other countries that is the great aim of modern statecraft.” As Hess observed in writings like Neighborhood Power, the decentralization of politics to the smallest possible scale need not result in social devolution. Freedom of choice has enough room for all of us.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “All Should Be Free in America” by Joel Schlosberg, Anchorage, Alaska Press, December 3, 2021
2. “All should be free in America” by Joel Schlosberg, Kenosha, Wisconsin News, December 4, 2021
3. “All Should Be Free in America” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, December 7, 2021
4. “Six decades later, America’s headlines could remain in ‘America.'” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], The Glasgow [Montana] Courier, December 8, 2021

A year after the man dubbed the “Insane Clown President” by Matt Taibbi was voted out, Trump-era dread still haunts the USA.

As the end of October approached, numerous news outlets debunked online rumors that “clowns are allegedly planning their own purge the night before Halloween.” Yet while madcap maniacs’ mayhem was conspicuous in its absence, so was skeptical scrutiny of the similarly apocalyptic anxieties over the off-year elections of November 2.

When the forerunners of 2021’s clown warnings circulated in 2016, Mad magazine noted that common features with the concurrent presidential campaign included “men wearing makeup and disturbing grins” and being “like something out of a horror story.” If anything, such comparisons are too flattering to the political circus.

The campaign trail’s rivalries are more obnoxious than the one between Crazy magazine mascot Obnoxio the Clown and Mad‘s Alfred E. Neuman, who himself became a clown rather than merely clownish on the cover of Mad Clowns Around. Insane Clown Posse is not the threat to civil society that the FBI’s classification of the fanbase of the horrorcore hip hop duo as a gang itself became.

Election results confirming the Pew Research Center’s report that “support for reducing spending on police has fallen significantly” likewise reflect the premise of the Purge films (the second was subtitled Anarchy) that the absence of law and order would lead to chaos. Yet as Howard Zinn observed half a century ago, a society where “order based on law and on the force of law” preempts “harmonious relationships” and nonviolent settling of disputes “is the closest to what is called anarchy in the popular mind — confusion, chaos, international banditry.”

In an interview for their July 1976 issue, Karl Hess told Playboy magazine that “the Presidency could be overthrown tomorrow if the American people suddenly began laughing at it, or ignoring it” and that there was no need to “reach for the musket if all you need is a custard pie.” Looking back on that same bicentennial year’s presidential race for Vanity Fair, Wavy Gravy recalled that he was considered “too weird to arrest” when a bulge in his pocket turned out to be from gag teeth rather than a firearm, with the jester-protester choosing to follow its chattering rather than that of the candidates since “nobody should have that much power.”

Voting with one’s feet without passing through a polling site can be an effective path to change, even if those feet are wearing clown shoes.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Was it a Clown Car or a Cop Car I Saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, November 5, 2021
2. “Was it a clown car or a cop car I saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, Miles City, Montana Star, November 5, 2021
3. “Was it a Clown Car or a Cop Car I Saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, November 10, 2021
4. “Was it a Clown Car, or a Cop Car I Saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, Roundup Record-Tribune & Winnett Times [Montana], November 10, 2021