THE UNGOVERNABLE CITY: John Lindsay and His Struggle To Save New York.

• Author: SLEEPER, JIM
• Position: Review

THE UNGOVERNABLE CITY: John Lindsay and His Struggle To Save New York by Vincent J. Cannato Basic Books, $35.00

Liberals are running big cities again. But they'll be more like Rudy Giuliani than John Lindsay.

"L.A. TURNS TO THE LEFT," HERALDED the Los Angeles Times after the June 5 victory of the city's next mayor, liberal Democrat James Hahn. The choice of the "Rainbow" tribune, congresswoman Maxine Waters, and local municipal unions, Hahn replaced departing centrist Republican Richard Riordan. The same day, voters in New Jersey's second largest metropolis, Jersey City, chose black liberal Glenn Cunningham to replace conservative Republican Mayor Bret Schundler, who's running for governor. In Philadelphia, another stalwart black liberal, John Street, has replaced once-touted centrist Ed Rendell. Detroit and Cleveland are bidding farewell to retiring fiscally conservative black Democratic mayors Dennis Archer and Michael White. And in New York, four liberal Democrats and two tar-from-right-wing Republicans--media mogul Michael Bloomberg and former deputy mayor Herman Badillo--are battling to succeed Rudy Giuliani, the country's best-known scourge of Rainbow politics.

It seems only yesterday that the departing centrists, along with Chicago's Richard M. Daley and Washington, D.C.'s Anthony Williams, threw out mayors weaned on Great Society spending and racial grievance politics. The centrists tried to reshape municipal work forces, social-welfare bureaucracies, and the color-coding of civic life. Much of this was constructive, but in the short run, it hurt many of those with the thinnest wallets and political skins. Are the Los Angeles and Jersey City elections part of a liberal counterrevolution?

Not quite. In Los Angeles, Hahn vowed a crackdown on gangs and had strong backing from police unions; even some of his heavily black municipal-union support is more protectionist than liberal. And he beat his equally liberal Democratic opponent, Antonio Villaraigosa, by nearly eight points, thanks in part to ugly, suggestive ads tying Villaraigosa to the drug trade--this despite Villaraigosa's touting Giuliani's quality-of-life initiatives in New York. In Gotham, meanwhile, Mark Green, the leading liberal wing to succeed Giuliani (he was Mayor David Dinkins' highly visible Consumer Affairs Commissioner), has abandoned his opposition to welfare reform and workfare and taken on the teachers' union over hiring policies. In a move reminiscent of Hahn, Green sought and got the endorsement of Giuliani's former police commissioner, William Bratton.

Clearly, the terms of civic discourse and urban policy have changed. So have big-city populations, with hundreds of thousands of non-white immigrants whose understandings of race are more fluid and ecumenical than those of most American blacks and whites. The newcomers are carving out economic niches amid bigotry and isolation to win capital, connections, and economic skills. Their small-business networks, sustained at first by ethnic ties, soon transcend ethnocentrism. So do ethnically inflected but universalist struggles to organize new, exploited workers, as New York's heavily Jewish garment- workers' unions did decades ago and Los Angeles janitors and restaurant workers are doing now.

The question is whether new mayors like Hahn and Cunningham will fall back into the grip of government bureaucracies, public-employee unions, and racial-grievance-mongers who barely a decade ago paralyzed Rainbow mayors such as Coleman Young, Marion Barry, and David Dinkins. Will the new mayors and their supporters attribute past defeats like Dinkins' (and successes like Giuliani's) to ups and downs in crime, racism, and right-wing economics? Or will they admit that liberals let their preoccupation with such demons sap their fiscal and racial restraint?

They would do well to study the fate of New York Mayor John Lindsay, the ur-mayor of Rainbow politics, who from 1966 to 1973 elevated racial claims to levels that energized but soon palsied the political imaginations of his many emulators. It would be going too far to say that without him, there'd have been no Young, Barry, or Dinkins; but Lindsay legitimized fiscal fantasies and racial taboos that made dependency and resentment the...