On November 2, 1965, John Lindsay became the first Republican elected Mayor of New York City since Fiorello La Guardia in 1941 and the last until Rudolph Giuliani in 1993. “The outcome gave moderates from coast to coast a tremendous boost in their struggle against the right wing of the Republican party,” the New York Times gushed the following day. “It catapulted Mr. Lindsay into a position of national leadership in the party. He is almost certain to be considered a Presidential or Vice-Presidential possibility in 1968 or 1972…”
But Gracie Mansion was as far as he would rise and Lindsay — who served as mayor until 1973 — is best remembered for leading New York City into bankruptcy in 1975. Instead, it was the man who finished third who would shape American conservatism for decades to come.
William F. Buckley, National Review editor, believed that the party system should offer voters a choice. While Lindsay and the Democrat, Abe Beame, vied to out-liberal each other, Buckley offered voters “a choice, not an echo,” as Barry Goldwater had the previous November. He ran on the Conservative Party ticket because, as he wrote in his classic account of the campaign, “The Unmaking of a Mayor,” “nobody else is who matters.”
“As far as New York politicians are concerned,” Buckley wrote, “a New Yorker is an Irishman, an Italian, or a Negro; he is a union member or a white collar worker; a welfare recipient or a city employee; a Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew; a taxi driver or a taxi owner; a merchant or a policeman.” The city’s politicians sought “to weigh the voting strength of all the categories and formulate a program that least dissatisfies the least crowded and least powerful categories: and the victory is supposed to go to the most successful bloc Benthamite in the race.”
By 1965, the city was “reaching the point where it faces the marginal disutility of bloc satisfaction,” or what might be called “identity politics.” In January, the New York Herald-Tribune began a series titled “New York City in Crisis” which chronicled the effects of suburbanization, the decline of manufacturing, rising crime, intractable poverty, and failures of urban renewal. “New York is the greatest city in the world,” it reported, “and everything is wrong with it.”
Identity politics was powerless to reverse this. “The race to satisfy the bloc finally ends in dissatisfying even the individual members of the same bloc,” Buckley wrote. The payoffs contradicted each other: the teamsters got the right to double-park, clogging the roads and diluting the value of the taxi driver’s medallions, whose number was limited as their payoff. And each individual belonged to several groups, each bought off as groups, while their individual members footed the bill in more taxes or fewer taxis.
Instead of identity politics, Buckley promised to “treat people as individuals.” Assuming that most individuals — whatever their “bloc” identity — wanted broadly the same things, he sketched an agenda for urban conservatism:
- (1) The security of life and limb; (2) an opportunity to find gainful employment without the artificial hindrances now imposed by monopoly labor unions and certain minimum wage laws; (3) the hope of finding decent living quarters without paying profits to land speculators or oligopolistic construction companies; (4) the opportunity to be educated without weekly litmus tests administered by an Interracial Commissioner to determine whether the composite color of every school is exactly the right shade of brown; and (5) the internal composure that comes from knowing that there are rational limits to politics, and that one tends to be better off where government is devoted to dismantling, rather than establishing, artificial privileges of the kind New York has been establishing for years…”
The Conservatives issued ten policy papers outlining how they would realize this agenda. Most remain relevant today and are the polar opposite — and a vast improvement on — anything proposed by the front runner in this year’s election.
“I was expecting our supporters to be National Review types,” Buckley aide Neal Freeman recalled, “car dealers, academic moles, literate dentists, dissenting students, whatever. As soon as we hired halls, though, we learned that [Buckley] was speaking for the people who made the city go—corner-store owners, cops, schoolteachers, first-home owners, firemen, coping parents.” Buckley recalled a meeting with the editorial board of the New York Times, going “up the elevator to the august quarters of my hosts—and having to pause every step or two to shake gratefully the outstretched hands of porters, clerks, secretaries, elevator men…several of them whispering to me their subversive resolve to vote for me the following Tuesday. The irony elated me, that the maintenance force of this august newspaper…had, so many of them, been more greatly persuaded by the positions of the Conservative Party than by the thunder-machine of their employers.”
Many of those New Yorkers acted on their “subversive resolve.” While Lindsay’s victory largely rested on his strength in higher-income Manhattan, Buckley scored well in working class neighborhoods of the outer boroughs, like Woodlawn and Flatlands, winning almost 47 percent of the vote in the latter. These Buckley Democrats — disillusioned with paying ever higher taxes and getting ever less in return — were the ancestors of the Reagan, and, yes, even Trump Democrats of today. Where Buckley appealed to a predominantly white working class, giving he race its racial tinge, conservatives court a multi-ethnic working class today, in the much discussed “realignment.” In 1965, as in 1980, they were attracted by sound policies of tax cuts and deregulation. “Populism” is a vehicle rather than a particular ideology, and can be a vessel for good policy, as well as bad.
Nevertheless, the New York mayoral election of 1965 was the conservative movement’s second defeat in a year. “Is it inconceivable that Republicanism plus electricity could equal conservatism?” Buckley asked in its wake. The following November, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California on a Goldwater/Buckley platform and conservatism plus electricity would come to equal Republicanism.
