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CHAPTER TWO
A WALKER IN CITY JOURNAL
David Brooks
Download Chapter Two
Let’s pull a back issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal
off the shelf—say, the one from Autumn 2000. The first thing you notice
is how attractive it is. City Journal is the most beautiful magazine
in the world that regularly contains the phrase “housing vouchers.”
It features thick, luxurious paper, the kind you would get if you were shopping
for paper on Madison Avenue. The typeface is classical and bold, like the Empire
State Building. Full pages are frequently devoted to photographs, something
nearly unheard-of in a policy magazine, and lots of thought has clearly gone
into each page’s layout, design, and presentation.
There is a puritanical notion in some of the idea community that such glossy
presentation is somehow superfi cial—that what matters are the facts, arguments,
and conclusions. But this is a magazine about cities, and what are cities these
days but factories for producing stimulation?
Living in a city is a pain. There are lines for movies and restaurants. There’s
traffi c everywhere. But the payoff of city life is that it presents you with
such a series of stimulating experiences that it arouses new thoughts and ideas.
City living is a sensual experience. And so: City Journal is a sensual
magazine. It is the sort of magazine put together by the sort of people who
love cities.
Some policy experts believe that cities will no longer be the main engines
of economic growth in this country. That view is surely right. Far more jobs
get created in the suburbs than in the cities these days. Ninety percent of
the office space built in the 1990s went up in the suburbs, not in the cities.
There are now five times as many companies headquartered in Santa Clara County,
outside of San Francisco, for example, than in the city of San Francisco itself.
But cities still have a vital, if more modest, role. They will still be the
epicenters for the creative and the adventurous. They will still be the foundries
of ideas, design, culture, and the arts. As people get richer, they want to
buy goods that not only serve some sort of utilitarian function; they want to
buy goods that say things about who they are and who they want to become. It
is city dwellers who will quite often come up with the designs and sensibilities
that excite and inspire the imagination, and so in this way, too, the magazine’s
appearance is a message about what cities should be.
The look of the magazine is also a persuasive device. There may be some people
who base their political opinions on the cold, rationalistic weighing of the
competing arguments, but I have never met such a person. Most people find themselves
drawn to liberalism or conservatism or any other belief system out of a more
instinctive sense that this worldview, these values, these people are attractive,
admirable, and right. Happiness has convinced more people than statistics.
Walter Bagehot understood this truth when he wrote in 1876: “Talk of the
ways of spreading a wholesome Conservatism throughout this country: give painful
lectures, distribute weary tracts (and perhaps it is just as well—you may
be able to give an argumentative answer to a few objections, you may diffuse
a distinct notion of the dignified dullness of politics); but as far as communicating
and establishing your creed are concerned—try a little pleasure. The way
to keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with
the present state of things is, to enjoy that state of things. Over the ‘Cavalier’
mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an exultation in a
daily event, zest in the ‘regular thing,’ joy at an old feast.”
Bagehot, the intellectual founder of The Economist, would have loved
City Journal, not only for its Anglophilia and its commitment to economic
freedom and development, but for the exultation, zest, and joy evident in its
design and feel.
Optimistic Urbanists
Enough of mere appearance. Let’s read the words. For those looking for
arguments, there are plenty of them. The first feature in the Autumn 2000 issue,
which we have pulled randomly off the shelf (and it could be any issue right
through to the present, since the magazine is remarkably consistent in quality),
is the letter from the editor, called “In Prospect.” In this issue,
editor Myron Magnet is in quintessential form. He cites the great institutions
that earlier generations of New Yorkers built for their city, including the
Frick Museum and the 42nd Street library. Then he notes: “How uplifting
it would be to show that we can still do it—that we can match the achievements
of the generous benefactors on whose legacy we have lived for so long.”
If you had to pick one phrase to summarize the cast of mind that informs City
Journal, it would be, “We can still do it.” The whole magazine
bases itself on the idea that while some may have concluded in the 1970s and
1980s that cities are ungovernable, they were wrong. There is absolutely no
need, the writers assert, simply to learn to live with certain problems as inevitable
by-products of urban life. On the contrary, it’s possible to reduce crime
dramatically. It’s possible to reduce child poverty dramatically. It’s
possible to reduce joblessness dramatically. It’s possible to reduce illegitimacy
dramatically. Fatalism is never justified.
When the magazine started more than a decade ago, this optimism was more faith
than reality. Furthermore, it would have been natural for conservatives, a tiny
minority in New York policymaking circles, to feel sour, alienated, and contemptuous.
But the people who contribute to this magazine somehow managed to preserve their
love affair with the cities even while urban leaders scorned everything they
stood for. And in the past few years, we have seen a renaissance of cities,
in part because of the influence of the ideas promulgated in this magazine (and
in the many books compiled from its articles and in the adaptations of those
articles that often appear in major newspapers and on websites). Now optimism,
along with the intellectual style it enhances, seems utterly realistic.
As Magnet wrote in 2000, “Pulsating with opportunity, cities constantly
renew themselves by attracting the talented and enterprising from everywhere
else, however distant or foreign. Above all, cities are realms of freedom.”
Contemplate the sensibility that informs that passage. It’s the sensibility
of a young person just arrived in the city and dazzled by all that might happen
there. I think of Gene Kelly in the “Gotta Dance” number in Singin’
in the Rain. And while Magnet is no Gene Kelly (though I have never seen
him dance), he still possesses that wide-eyed sense of possibility.
He also, it should be said, possesses the hopefulness of the immigrant. Many
of the best pieces in City Journal have been about immigrants—I’m
thinking of a 1995 piece that Heather Mac Donald wrote, “Why Koreans Succeed,”
and Steven Malanga’s 2002 essay “Minority Business Triumphs in New
York,” among others—precisely because the striving immigrant spirit
is so in tune with the magazine’s.
Beautiful Buildings
Continuing our stroll through the Autumn 2000 issue, we come across a long
series of visions of what a new Lincoln Center might look like. Believing that
it’s time to tear down and replace the current Lincoln Center, the editors
asked several important neoclassic architects to propose alternative plans.
The magazine has emerged as an important champion of neoclassic architecture,
which at first seems unpredictable for a journal whose primary mission has been
to investigate issues like education, housing, and welfare reform. But architecture
is not out of place. Whether it is in building structures or building social
programs, the writers in this magazine operate in a revivalist mode. There was
a body of inherited wisdom, they argue in sphere after sphere, which, in the
period after World War II, was forsaken—with disastrous effects.
For centuries, architects found that they could adapt the classical idiom to
fit their own times. And then suddenly, poof! That insight was forgotten. Penn
Station was torn down and glass boxes started going up, with empty plazas and
windblown streetscapes. Or else, it was plop after plop of public housing monstrosities.
In just the same way, rulers and civic leaders for centuries understood certain
truths about family structure, poverty, character, and the debilitating affects
of dependency. And poof! Those truths were discredited.
Barely an issue goes by in which there isn’t an argument pointing out
that despite all our condescension, the Victorians, or Edwardians, or even the
New Dealers understood things that we must now relearn. In architecture, the
revivalist cause is still beleaguered, as the magazine’s noble (but probably
doomed) effort to get New Yorkers to rethink what should go up on the World
Trade Center site makes clear. As the comprehensive Autumn 2001 issue, commissioned
as a response to September 11, shows, the neoclassicists want to restore the
traditional New York streetand-store pattern to the site. The current plans
call for plopping another suburban/Disney-style mall onto the now-vacant ground.
Policy Realism
But in some other areas, the revival is proceeding apace. As we promenade further
into the issue, we find an essay by Lisa Graham Keegan, then the revolutionary
head of the public schools in the state of Arizona. This is another trademark
City Journal feature: a concrete “How To” essay by an actual
public policy practitioner.
Lisa Graham Keegan is one of the most important education reformers in the
country today, and this essay illustrates why. She describes her efforts to
pioneer charter schools in Arizona. She also clashes with Republican orthodoxy.
It is important to spend the same amount of money on each student in a state,
she argues, and the way to do that is to strap the dollars to the child, wherever
he or she goes. This is egalitarianism in practice. Keegan is also honest. Many
charter schools fail, she acknowledges. She had to close a dozen in Arizona.
Moreover, while there are some signs that the charter schools outperform public
schools, the advantage —so far anyway—is not by a large margin.
Keegan is an ardent advocate of reform, but the essay bears none of the marks
of the ideologue. She is realistic and has her eyes open. In this way, City
Journal has benefited from the social policy tone established by Irving
Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer in The Public Interest: champion
reform, but be realistic, flexible, and pragmatic. City Journal has been
an aggressive advocate of choice in education. Sol Stern has investigated the
issue from all angles (his book, Breaking Free, grew out of his excellent
reporting for the magazine). But even vouchers, the most radical reform idea,
will not transform schools for kids who come from broken homes where there is
nobody at the kitchen table to reinforce the school’s good work.
The fact is, social policy is complicated. The most promising approaches and
individuals sometimes go nowhere. In 1999, Fred Siegel and Kay S. Hymowitz wrote
an influential piece entitled “Why Did Ed Rendell Fizzle Out?” trying
to figure out why the once promising reform administration of the former Philadelphia
mayor stagnated in its final years. On the other hand, sometimes unpromising
figures end up surprising you. Heather Mac Donald wrote a 1999 piece, “Jerry
Brown’s No-Nonsense New Age for Oakland,” on the impressive things
the former Governor Moonbeam was accomplishing in his city.
If you have conservative leanings in New York City, you have one of two choices.
You can retreat to your little ghetto and remind yourself how stupid everyone
around you is. Or you can engage with the world, looking for wisdom even among
people who might disagree with you most of the time. City Journal has
always taken the latter approach. That is a triumph of temperament as well as
of intellect.
Reporting the World
Moving along in our stroll through our randomly chosen issue, we come across
an essay by Heather Mac Donald on the New York Police Academy. The magazine
has built itself around a half dozen or so key writers: Mac Donald, Kay Hymowitz,
Sol Stern, Steven Malanga, Brian Anderson (Magnet’s deputy), Theodore Dalrymple,
and others.
I confess that Mac Donald is my favorite. That’s not to slight the others
because Mac Donald is just about my favorite journalist working in America today.
She goes where it has not occurred to others to go. She is fearless. She is
persuasive, observant, and she topples your notions of the way the world is.
If you ever needed proof that the American media are blinkered, complacent,
and biased, just consider the fact that Heather Mac Donald is not, on a weekly
basis, lionized and celebrated as one of the pioneering reporters and muckrakers
in America today.
The particular piece of reportage in this back issue takes us inside the police
academy. There are many reports on how soldiers are trained, but how many times
have you read a piece on how cops, who touch our lives directly, are trained?
When on those rare occasions I am pulled over to the side of the highway for
going a teensy bit over the speed limit, it has occurred to me that state troopers
all have that same cool and imposing manner. But how do they get it? Why do
cops behave the way they do? It transpires that this manner is taught, not simply
absorbed. “It’s not about us,” one of the police academy instructors
tells his cadets. “You are not the message. You put someone in handcuffs
because they’ve broken the law, not because you’re the police.”
In the year leading up to September 11, 2001, the New York police were under
assault for being brutal racists. Mac Donald was doing a series of pieces on
the realities of police work, demonstrating that in fact the NYPD was doing
an excellent job. The number of civilian complaints about police brutality had
declined rapidly. After 9/11, the cops became heroes for everybody, but the
truth was there all along. Mac Donald’s essays on policing have been collected
in a book, Are Cops Racist? In recent articles, she has been doing for
homeland security what she did for policing: using old-fashioned reporting to
get at the truth.
A Unique Team
Mac Donald’s writing is compelling, but she is not the only outsize personality
in the magazine’s pages. The magazine is full of people who really could
be characters in somebody’s novel. Editor Myron Magnet walks around twenty-first-century
New York wearing mutton chops; I’ve always suspected that he changed his
name from Seymour Friedberg or something because Myron Magnet just seems more
Dickensian. Kay Hymowitz writes on that trickiest of subjects, social manners,
with a piercing style. Theodore Dalrymple writes high—one critic calls
him a “writer of genius”—but he lives low, working as a prison
doctor in England. Victor Davis Hanson is a farmer in Fresno who writes about
... well ... everything (and is one of Dick Cheney’s favorite authors).
Sol Stern is a recovering radical—in fact, he was once an editor of Ramparts,
a house organ of the sixties student Left. Stefan Kanfer is a former editor
at Time with best-selling biographies of Groucho Marx and Lucille Ball
to his credit. There is something distinct about each of these individuals,
and though I don’t know many of them, I can imagine a late-night party
with the cast of City Journal—somebody pulling you aside to give
you a 25-minute disquisition on the genius of Al Hirschfeld, somebody else interrupting
with a scathing account of the ruination of another school system, somebody
else telling an uplifting story of a former crack dealer who now runs a sports
league, somebody else describing the revolution in conservative media.
If you want normal people, go to suburbia. If you want idiosyncratic people
who talk too much and argue too loudly, move to the city.
We’re now deep into that Autumn 2000 issue of the magazine, into the back-of-the-book
section called “Urbanities.” It should be clear by now that City
Journal is all about enjoying the city, and here is where the editors let
their taste buds out for a romp. This particular issue has an analysis of the
New York Times Book Review and a short biography of Horatio Alger. (Did
you know that Alger was first a parson who had to quit the ministry after he
was caught molesting boys?) Other issues may include essays on sexologists or
tabloids, Cole Porter or tailcoats, Sex and the City or the great San
Francisco fire of 1906.
The City’s Future?
As you put down the issue, a troubling question occurs: Does this magazine,
and the revivalist mode it represents, have a future? Many of the ideas expressed
in these pages are or have been given the label “conservative.” Indeed,
this magazine is one of the epicenters of compassionate conservatism that George
W. Bush said he would champion during the 2000 campaign.
But how much do conservatives really care about the cities and the problems
addressed in these pages? The Republican Party is growing more and more exurban
and rural. Will governing Republicans take the time to champion these policies?
On the other hand, will the Democratic elites pick up the reform mantle? Certainly,
the Democrats are interested in urban issues, but the party is also tied down
by its links to certain interest groups, such as the teachers’ unions.
Far from embracing the reform mantle, the party has become an ardent defender
of the status quo.
A few years ago, you could point to a whole group of reform-minded administrations—Giuliani,
Riordan, Rendell (it seemed), Daley, Norquist, Engler, Keegan, and, in some
ways, Clinton and Bush. But
my sense is that both parties have in the past year or so settled back into
their own orthodoxies. The anti-reform forces have demonstrated how powerful
and entrenched they are.
The folks at City Journal, as I have mentioned, are congenital optimists.
I suspect that it will take a new burst of political energy to build momentum
for their cause.
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