So we’re again to the strongman. Not simply in Washington, however right here in New York Metropolis, the place Andrew Cuomo is in search of to restart his profession by making the novel transfer from Albany to Gracie Mansion. With the Democratic major going down in June, he’s dominating the race.
How is that this potential? Wasn’t it simply yesterday that Mr. Cuomo fled workplace in a cloud of scandal?
New Yorkers, although, have an extended historical past of turning to powerful, even ruthless leaders after they worry their metropolis is lurching uncontrolled.
“We all know that immediately our New York Metropolis is in bother,” Mr. Cuomo stated in a nimble announcement speech, evoking each the fantastic achievements of its liberal previous and name-checking all the issues of its unsettling current: the mentally sick homeless, the damaging vibe of the subway, the empty storefronts, the random violence. “Town simply feels threatening, uncontrolled and in disaster.”
New York isn’t, by any affordable definition, in disaster. It’s the wealthiest metropolis on the planet, one visited by over 65 million vacationers in 2024. Most varieties of felonies have fallen over the previous 12 months, and homicides are right down to a small fraction of the height homicide totals town reached within the Nineties.
But it can’t be stated that America was in disaster, both, after we returned to workplace probably the most radical strongman in our nation’s historical past. Certainly, the resurrection of Mr. Cuomo is roiling not simply New York Metropolis but in addition a nationwide Democratic Get together convulsed simply now over how fierce its resistance to President Trump must be. Can Mr. Cuomo be the “Democratic Trump” some declare the occasion wants, no less than as a lot superstar as politician, prepared and capable of bulldoze over each the opposition and the various scandals of his previous?
Very similar to america in 2024, if there’s not one massive factor flawed in New York proper now, there are many smaller issues flawed, and if collectively they don’t represent a disaster, they’ve left many within the metropolis depressed and demoralized.
Storefronts throughout city are vacant and infrequently stay so for years. The subway isn’t almost as dysfunctional because it was within the Seventies and ’80s, however it’s undeniably filthy and infrequently menacing. Crime stays very low there — however random, usually terrifying assaults have nearly doubled since 2014. Each time there’s information of somebody getting pushed in entrance of a prepare, it’s laborious to not think about what you’d do to maintain that from occurring to you.
Even our civil discourse — by no means excessive — has degenerated. No matter one thinks of the protests over the conflict in Gaza, the insults and assaults directed at Jewish and Muslim individuals and establishments are unpardonable.
It feels as if any widespread floor, any common thought of our metropolis, is dissolving.
To repair this, many New Yorkers miss “the large canine,” as Mr. Cuomo was referred to as as governor — or no less than the daddy determine he performed in his day by day tv appearances through the early days of the pandemic lockdowns. Protecting and competent and wryly humorous, bringing on his daughters and his brother to jest with him for the cameras. That Mr. Cuomo appeared like our defend in opposition to the vicissitudes of Mr. Trump’s let-them-eat-bleach method to the deadliest pandemic in a century.
New Yorkers in droves fell for Mr. Cuomo’s actuality present presentation (with out seeming to note that this was the identical medium that labored for Mr. Trump). We laughingly referred to as ourselves Cuomosexuals and showered him with reward and awards.
He bought a $5 million e book contract. He bought a particular Emmy Award. (“The primary ever Emmy for controlling the narrative,” scoffed John Kaehny, the manager director of the general public watchdog affiliation Reinvent Albany.)
The crash, when it got here, was swift and brutal. Some 13 costs of sexual harassment, most of them by younger ladies pursuing their careers in authorities or media. Accusations that his administration exacerbated the Covid disaster by requiring nursing properties to simply accept contaminated sufferers, then lined up hundreds of deaths. An ethics panel ordered him to return his e book advance. (The authorized battle is ongoing.) The Emmy was retracted. On Aug. 11, 2021 — with impeachment investigations underway within the New York State Meeting — “the love gov,” as he referred to as himself, introduced his imminent resignation.
“New York was maybe the primary nice metropolis in historical past to be dominated by males of the individuals, not as an remoted phenomenon of the Gracchi or the commune however as a persisting, established sample,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1961.
Sadly, a lot of the males — extremely, there has by no means been a feminine mayor of New York — have been horrible selections. They’ve included nincompoops and nonentities, the clueless and the corrupt, the hopelessly idealistic and the mobbed-up and even a secessionist. (Fernando Wooden needed town and Lengthy Island to comply with the Confederacy out of the Union and kind a brand new nation referred to as Tri-Insula.) Then there was James J. Walker, our Jazz Age mayor, who took months of trip yearly, hardly ever bought to his desk earlier than midday, had a nightclub inbuilt Central Park during which to cavort together with his cronies and his mistress and had a hangover room put in within the basement of Metropolis Corridor.
But New York had by no means had what it does in Eric Adams: a mayor who till lately was overtly held as a political hostage by a vengeance-seeking presidential administration. When Choose Dale Ho of the U.S. District Courtroom for the Southern District of New York mercifully put an finish to this case by dismissing the federal government’s corruption costs in opposition to the mayor, Mr. Adams — a buffoonish determine in the perfect of instances — celebrated by asserting that he would run for re-election as an impartial and holding up a e book full of conspiracy theories by Mr. Trump’s weird new head of the F.B.I., Kash Patel.
In New York politics, the enjoyable stops when the unhealthy instances return. Then we wish that strongman.
Somebody like DeWitt Clinton, who drove the grid system by way of Manhattan — and, finally, the Erie Canal by way of New York State. Or Fiorello La Guardia, who pulled New York by way of the Melancholy. Ed Koch was considered because the mayor who tamed the ungovernable metropolis of the Seventies, and Rudy Giuliani ran because the restorer of civil order within the Nineties earlier than changing into the hero of Sept. 11.
But for all his swagger, Mr. Cuomo as governor was largely the alternative of the strongman we appear to need. In his Albany, the buck didn’t cease at his desk; it didn’t cease wherever. It was his administration that gave us “the costliest mile of subway monitor on Earth,” pandering to each contractors and unions, in line with an exposé by Brian M. Rosenthal in The Instances. His Buffalo Billion initiative, meant to rework that metropolis’s industrial base, dissolved in chapter and indictments — and earnings for Elon Musk.
If Mr. Cuomo’s duty within the Covid nursing residence scandal has by no means been established, his prime aide admitted that she delayed the discharge of knowledge relating to hundreds of Covid deaths, and 9 main well being officers resigned in his administration’s confused response to the pandemic. The “massive, laborious, essential issues” he boasted, in his announcement video, of carrying out — the renovation of La Guardia Worldwide Airport, the development of the Moynihan Prepare Corridor and the alternative of the Kosciuszko Bridge — had been largely the results of planning and funding began earlier than he took workplace. One massive factor that Mr. Cuomo carried by way of totally on his personal watch was a alternative of the Tappan Zee Bridge, with a brand new $4 billion span that he named for his father — an achievement all his personal that was quickly tormented by snapping bolts and faulty cables.
Mr. Cuomo has usually taken a strongman’s proprietary perspective towards authorities, as when he created the Moreland Fee to research public corruption — then abruptly shut it down, notably after it nosed too shut to a few of his political allies.
On the identical time, he has been maddeningly elusive about taking duty for something. At varied instances as governor, he insisted that he was not in cost of the M.T.A. — earlier than ordering the company to settle for a European mannequin for repairs of the Williamsburg subway tunnel — and that he had no duty for the rail tunnels below the Hudson, important to town’s financial well being.
“Why don’t you pay for it?” he berated members of the press. “It’s not my tunnel.”
This stage of handy, political schizophrenia can appear nearly, nicely, Trumpian. Is that this what we actually need? A Democratic Trump?
Cities change, and they should change if they’re to prosper and reside. It’s not at all times simple to evaluate simply how these modifications will work out. Too usually, in our latest previous, no less than, the underpinnings of our strongmen have been racist, alienating insurance policies resembling cease and frisk and a narrowing of our metropolis’s future that envisions filling it with solely as many wealthy individuals or sponsored companies as potential.
A really sturdy man — or girl — ought to be capable of converse fact whereas in energy. To not solely admit errors but in addition to be taught from them. To ask all kinds of advisers and recommendation on this nice polyglot metropolis of ours. To have the ability to say “no” however to know the way to deliver us collectively in our sorrows and our aspirations and to attract out from us the widespread sense of humanity that led so many people or our ancestors to go away behind the drained quarrels and oppressions of different locations and are available to New York.
From all now we have seen and heard in his lengthy profession, it’s troublesome to imagine that we’ll discover that energy in Andrew Cuomo.
