Why They Wish the Right Left

By James Taranto

Friday, January 24, 2014

Bill de Blasio, New York's new left-wing mayor, this week experienced a demonstration of the hazards of divisive politicking. On Tuesday the city was blanketed with a foot of global warming. A major snowstorm is always a political event, as the effectiveness of the Sanitation Department's response provides a test of municipal government that affects almost all city residents.

The New York Post reported Tuesday evening: "It really is a tale of two cities--this time with the tony Upper East Side getting the shaft!" The Dickens allusion was by way of de Blasio, for whom "tale of two cities" was a campaign slogan, reprised during his Jan. 1 inauguration, that vilified the rich while casting de Blasio as a champion of the common man.

The Upper East Side is a wealthy area, especially the stretch between Park Avenue and Central Park. But it's far from the only place in Manhattan with a high concentration of rich residents. Nonetheless, locals believed de Blasio was targeting their community:

    "He is trying to get us back. He is very divisive and political," said writer and Life-long Upper East Sider and mom Molly Jong Fast of Mayor de Blasio.

    "By not plowing the Upper East Side, he is saying, 'I'm not one of them.' But we have everyone in this area on the Upper East Side. We have rich people, middle class people, and housing projects. We have it all." . . .

    "I can't believe de Blasio could do this. He is putting everyone in danger," said Barbara Tamerin, who was using ski poles to get around 81st Street and Lexington Avenue.

    "What is he thinking? We're supposed to get up to a foot of snow and nobody on the Upper East Side is supposed to blink an eye? I can barely get around and I'm on snow shoes! All of the buses are stuck and can't go anywhere. He's crazy. We need Mayor Bloomberg back!"

At a press conference, de Blasio denied the charge: "All city agencies are acting [like] usual very, very effectively and in a coordinated fashion." The city's PlowNYC website showed that the Upper East Side hadn't been serviced, but Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty attributed that to a glitch, "claiming that one spreader had a busted GPS and was not reporting progress."

By Wednesday, however, the mayor had changed his tune, as the Post reported:

    "While the overall storm response across the city was well-executed, after inspecting the area and listening to concerns from residents earlier today, I determined more could have been done to serve the Upper East Side," de Blasio said in a statement. "I have instructed the commissioner of the Department of Sanitation to double-down on cleanup efforts on the Upper East Side, and as a result, 30 vehicles and nearly 40 sanitation workers have been deployed to the area to finish the cleanup."

That of course is not an admission that the foul-up was deliberate. But either way, it's worth savoring the irony that the first minor crisis of de Blasio's administration ended with his being compelled to reassure the affluent that they'll get their fair share of city services. And it's not hard to see why. If de Blasio is to succeed, both as a mayor and as a candidate for re-election in 2017, he can't afford to alienate the people who make up a large proportion of the city's tax base and a significant share of its Democratic political base.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the next day--which is to say yesterday--de Blasio launched an attack, or rather reinforced one, on a minority he can afford to alienate. Breitbart.com's Kerry Picket reports the mayor "emphatically backed New [York] Governor Andrew Cuomo's controversial remarks that 'extreme' conservatives . . . 'have no place in the state of New York.' "

"I stand by that 100%," said the mayor who usually speaks in terms of "the 1%" vs. "the 99%."

Cuomo made his comments last Friday in an interview with an Albany radio station. As the Post explained, the governor asserted "that members of the GOP with 'extreme' views are creating an identity crisis for their party and represent a bigger worry than Democrats such as himself." He asked, "Who are they?" and answered: "Right to life, pro-assault weapons, anti-gay--if that's who they are, they have no place in the state of New York because that's not who New Yorkers are."

Peggy Noonan conducted a useful script-flipping exercise in which she imagined a conservative governor, Frank "Boo" Burnham, of a conservative state, Mississippi, saying that people who agree with Cuomo on those topics "have no place in the state of Mississippi."

The actual governor of Mississippi, Phil Bryant, has never said anything of the sort, and it's difficult to imagine a conservative politician with the wherewithal to get elected statewide anywhere saying such a thing. To be sure, boneheaded and obnoxious statements from GOP pols are far from unheard of. But those who make them, as Noonan notes, generally come in for harsh criticism not only from the mainstream media but also from fellow Republicans.

Cuomo's defense was that he was merely "making the observation that an extreme right candidate cannot win statewide because this is a politically moderate state." It would be more accurate to call New York a politically liberal state, at least on the "social issues," but apart from that Cuomo's reframed observation is a commonplace, one often heard in conversations with New York Republicans.

But there's a world of difference between "cannot win statewide" and "have no place in the state." We recall hearing people say before the 2008 election that a black man couldn't be elected president of the United States. They were mistaken. Had they said about blacks in America what Cuomo said about conservatives in New York, they would have been immeasurably worse than mistaken.

Cuomo's statement was a gaffe, though one suspects it was a Kinsley gaffe, an inadvertent disclosure of his true feelings. De Blasio's endorsement of it, by contrast, was unquestionably purposeful. "I agree with Gov. Cuomo's remarks," he said. "I interpret his remarks to say that an extremist attitude that continues the reality of violence in our communities or an extremist attitude that denies the rights of women does not represent the views of New York state."

As a political matter, de Blasio is on entirely safe ground here, assuming he has no presidential aspirations. Social conservatives are vastly outnumbered in New York City, and, unlike the gentry liberals of the Upper East Side and other affluent neighborhoods, are unlikely to vote for the mayor anyway, or to vote in Democratic primaries at all. He has almost nothing to lose by attacking them, and in doing so he plays to the resentments of his political base, including those who are among "the 1%."

All that said, there's something a bit puzzling about the sheer viciousness of the governor's and the mayor's rhetoric. Liberals, after all, pride themselves on their toleration and open-mindedness, but often they sound like Michael Caine's character in "Austin Powers in Goldmember" who said: "There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch." Cuomo and de Blasio, unlike Caine, don't understand they're the butt of the joke.

One explanation for this phenomenon comes from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion." Todd Zywicki, coincidentally on the same day Cuomo made his remark, summed up the relevant finding in a Volokh Conspiracy post:

    Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a "typical conservative" and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: "The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as 'very liberal.' The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives." In other words, moderates and conservatives can understand the liberal worldview and liberals are unable to relate to the conservative worldview, especially when it comes to questions of care and fairness.

    In short, Haidt's research suggests that many liberals really do believe that conservatives are heartless bastards--or as a friend of mine once remarked, "Conservatives think that liberals are good people with bad ideas, whereas liberals think conservatives are bad people"--and very liberal people think that especially strongly. Haidt suggests that there is some truth to this.

Haidt has a theory that moral reasoning is driven by, as Zywicki writes, "five key vectors or values of psychological morality: (1) care/harm, (2) fairness, (3) loyalty, (4) authority, and (5) sanctity." Haidt posits that "conservative values are more overlapping than liberals--conservatives have a 'thicker' moral worldview that includes all five values, whereas liberals have a 'thinner' view that rests on only two variables," in Zywicki's summary.

Thus conservatives have a far greater capacity to understand the liberal worldview than vice versa--and, applying the theory to the case at hand, Cuomo and de Blasio are simply unable to overcome their own cognitive limits.

But there's a limitation to Haidt's experiments. Because his methodology is new, it has only been applied in the contemporary political context. Perhaps in a few decades it will be possible to determine the extent to which Haidt's findings reflect timeless truths about human nature as opposed to peculiarities of the present day. As time travel is a logical impossibility, Haidt cannot go back in time and gather data from earlier generations.

Here's an anecdote that counsels skepticism. When Andrew Cuomo's father, Mario, was Andrew's age, he was also governor of New York, elected in 1982 and re-elected twice. No one would say the elder Cuomo was anything but a liberal, and he was firmly "pro-choice." But unlike his son, he understood the other side well enough to declare himself "personally opposed" to abortion.