Steven Malanga, The New New Left

Some of the biggest battles in our cities in recent years have been fought over living wage laws, public funding for projects like stadiums and convention centers, and the privatization of city services. At the core of these fights is a fierce debate over the best way to use public money to promote economic and community development. On one side, labor unions and grassroots community groups like ACORN often argue that cities should use public funds to create better-paying jobs for city workers and other low-paid employees. They are often in favor of ramping up city programs and attaching “living wage” requirements to subsidized development projects. On the other side is the business community, which traditionally argues that if cities want to flourish, they must lower taxes, grant unconditional development subsidies, and make city services more efficient by contracting them out to private companies.

Steven Malanga, a journalist and senior policy fellow at the libertarian Manhattan Institute, has been following these fights closely. In the past five years, in dozens of op-eds for the Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and other publications, he has railed against minimum wage hikes, public employee unions, living wage laws, and increased spending on public services. In his first book, The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today, he promises to shed light on the new politics that are shaping our cities. But he delivers neither an original discussion of the role of special interest groups in city politics nor a factual analysis of the impact of the policies he condemns. Instead, The New New Left is essentially a collection of rants that re-tread familiar right-wing diatribes against left-wing special interest groups who ruin local economies with their tax-hiking, anti-business demands.

In spite of his book’s title, Malanga claims at the start that the politics at work in our cities is not a matter of Left versus Right. It is rather about the battle raging between those who benefit from an expanding government - whom he cleverly dubs “tax-eaters” - and those who pay for it. Malanga envisions a sizeable conspiracy of unions, social service providers, and sneaky community organizations running amok in cities. These agencies, he believes, have joined forces to hike taxes and spend cities dry through funding for social services and the arts. They also block employers like Wal-Mart from entering cities and maintain bloated, overpaid municipal workforces. Malanga paints this “New New Left” coalition as being narrowly self-interested and crass - much more so than even the cranky Old Left, which at least intended, however misguidedly, to improve society. The failed War on Poverty was “romantic but wrong-headed” and led by idealistic and paternalistic folk whom history proved indisputably wrong, he writes. The new coalitions, by contrast, cynically seek to bolster their own membership, rather than actually help the poor.

Malanga has a particular beef with public employee unions, which he describes as the 800-pound gorilla in any state or local policy debate. He believes unions were bad enough when they used their collective power to win high wages and full benefit packages for their members. But now they are even more damaging, as they flex their political muscle to oppose privatization of public services and lobby for higher taxes and bigger government.

The other lobby Malanga concerns himself with is the network of government-funded social service agencies who, much to his dismay, are now organizing their clients, thus “parlaying their huge empire built on government funding into political power.” He offers as a case study his hometown of New York City where, he argues, public employee unions and non-profits run City Hall and have made Democrats subservient to their agendas. With municipal jobs as patronage opportunities and government-funded social service organizations as the new neighborhood power centers, he equates this coalition with New York’s viciously corrupt Tammany Hall operation of a century ago. The current “radicalized city council” has been busy rolling back Giuliani-era reforms, he says, passing anti-business, living wage laws and protections against predatory lending. 

As he cooks up conspiracy theories though, Malanga sets up a curious, if common, double standard: he correctly recognizes union members, welfare recipients, and non-profit organizations as interest groups while completely omitting mention of an organized business community that lobbies for its own interests. He also portrays tax-payers and tax-eaters as entirely separate groups with inherently different priorities and no overlapping interests. But in drawing the opposition so neatly, he ignores the fact that public-sector workers pay taxes, and that private-sector workers and corporations “eat” taxes when they use city services or receive economic development subsidies. Similarly, by assuming that public-sector workers are single-mindedly interested in protecting their job security or benefits, he fails to see that they are just as likely as the business establishment to own homes and have children, and are just as likely to be concerned about issues such as rising property taxes and school funding.

Though Malanga’s primary concern is with the growing power of labor and community coalitions in local politics, his table of contents reads like a top ten list of topics that make Republicans angry: there is a chapter each for living wage laws and Wal-Mart; a chapter devoted to journalists Barbara Ehrenreich and David Shipler, who chronicle the lives of the working poor; a chapter on labor studies programs and academia’s liberal bias; and the obligatory chapter on creative class guru Richard Florida, who will no doubt bristle at being labeled a lefty. Malanga does almost nothing in either his opening or closing chapters to tie together this broad array of subjects, and at times he seems confused about the purpose of his own book. For example, his chapter on Wal-Mart retells the quaint tale of Sam Walton’s modest beginnings, defends the company’s much-maligned healthcare plan, and clucks his tongue over the many lawsuits against the company. But he doesn’t delve into the current debate about the impact of Wal-Mart’s entrance into urban areas, and he skips over one of the most crucial questions communities should ask themselves about Wal-Mart, which is whether the company will hurt existing local businesses.

At fewer than 160 pages, the book is awfully slim to take on such a wide variety of issues in any detail. For the most part, Malanga does not provide many hard facts to justify his assertions that the New Left’s policies are doing harm and that a free-market approach would be altogether better. Even where he attempts to go into subjects in further depth, he has little objective evidence to back up his claims. He trots out numbers, but living wage advocates and unions have numbers too. Malanga spends one chapter attempting to discredit the research reports of left-leaning think tanks and labor studies centers such as the Economic Policy Institute and
the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research. He characterizes these centers as unobjective tools of unions, existing primarily to provide “bogus” studies to support the unions’ legislative agendas. This view easily allows him to refute reports claiming that living wage laws help workers or that Wal-Mart costs taxpayers money. But the further threat to his credibility is the fact that Malanga himself and the Manhattan Institute are just as likely to produce biased reports as the groups he skewers. If labor-funded think tanks are unqualified to supply objective studies and reports on privatization and the living wage, certainly the Manhattan Institute and other right-wing think tanks are equally unqualified. One gets the sense that, though Malanga may feel the need to present numbers to show that living wage movements and unions are bad for local economies, his ideological blinders would lead him to consider living wage laws and social service programs bad ideas regardless of the numbers.

The lines Malanga draws in the sand are not new ones. The business community has always been interested in maximizing profits, and unions and community organizations have always been interested in meeting the needs of their members. Both will always promote their agendas aggressively in city hall, using whatever leverage is available to influence elected leadership. Whether this is healthy for cities and whether alternative forms of public debate might be possible are worthwhile questions. But Malanga, contrary to his stated intention to expose the new reality of urban politics, is more interested in pursuing old grudges against perceived enemies of the free market.

IVAN R. DEE, PUBLISHER, $22.50, CLOTH, 157 PAGES