[ Leftists need a new (old) pitch to lead America’s cities.]
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BRING BACK THE SEWER SOCIALISTS!  
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Jordan Fraade
July 29, 2021
Slate
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_ Leftists need a new (old) pitch to lead America’s cities. _

She, and they, had the right idea. , Photo illustration by Slate.
Photos by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images, Wikipedia (Wikipedia
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Auctions/Wikipedia, wisconsin.edu
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“There’s no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the
garbage,”
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goes a famous quip usually attributed to New York City Mayor Fiorello
La Guardia. The meaning is clear: Running a city government requires
elected officials to be pragmatic, deliver services, and check their
ideology at the door. It’s a witty but misleading quote. Providing
public services might technically be a nonpartisan matter, but it’s
hardly a nonideological one. How to distribute power between the
public and private sectors, which services to cut first when budgets
are tight, whether decisions should be made by civil servants or
elected officials—these are values-based questions, not empirical
ones.

New Yorkers have had more immediate reasons lately to think about
garbage pickup: 1) It’s summer and therefore Hot Trash Season
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and 2) the city’s former sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia,
came within one percentage point
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during ranked choice voting of winning the Democratic primary for
mayor. Garcia was a lifelong civil servant whose pitch to voters
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was almost entirely about her own competence and managerial skill; she
promised to “get shit done,”
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a wry nod to her past in sanitation and sewage. Her policy positions
were mostly moderate, but her message contained a kernel that the
city’s progressive left can adapt and make its own after a
disappointing showing in the mayoral race. The most electorally
successful leftists in U.S. history ran and governed on this very
kernel—the belief that delivering basic services, building public
works, and running a functional local government are inseparable from
what it means to govern from the left in a major city.

That Garcia came so close to victory, despite no political experience
and almost no name recognition before the race, means her message hit
a nerve. There’s a lesson there for candidates across the country.
Maya Wiley, the left-most major candidate in the race, mostly
campaigned on nonprofit-esque platitudes after serving as Mayor Bill
de Blasio’s counsel. Garcia offered New Yorkers a clear value
proposition instead: improving the public services they rely on for
daily life. The eventual primary winner and now presumptive next mayor
Eric Adams was always going to be a formidable candidate, given his
rock-solid support
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the city’s largest voting blocs and his close ties to labor, real
estate, and the traditional Democratic machine. But Adams has
vulnerabilities: He is openly tolerant
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of corruption
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and said the party hacks at New York’s patronage-riddled Board of
Elections did a “great job”
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(_Narrator: They did not._) If Adams won’t promote good governance,
the city’s progressive left should do it instead. Voters who lack
strong ideological beliefs but simply want the city’s many public
services to work well might be willing to take a chance on something
new in order to avoid dysfunction and stagnation.

When I say “the progressive left,” it’s shorthand for the forces
ranging from loyal liberal Democrats to leftists who reject capitalism
and are hostile to the Democratic Party. Most major U.S. cities have
some version of this formation, which in New York is anchored
respectively by the Working Families Party and the Democratic
Socialists of America (who only endorse self-identified socialists,
and thus didn’t endorse for mayor). These groups hardly form a
single, unified movement, but if they’re a big tent, Garcia was
still outside it. She was against reducing the New York Police
Department’s budget
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supported raising the cap on charter schools, and rejected calls to
raise taxes
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on the wealthy. Garcia’s focus on her own managerial skill almost
recalled Michael Bloomberg, the consummate neoliberal politician. But
there’s a key difference: While Bloomberg preferred business to
government and expressed his desire to make New York a “luxury
product
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Garcia is a creature of the public sector. She was reportedly beloved
by her staff
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— a rare feat, since rank-and-file bureaucrats are often
surprisingly progressive and often resent agency managers and electeds
who maintain a complacent culture of mediocrity. (I say this from
personal experience as an ex-bureaucrat.) Some of her more progressive
proposals, including free childcare
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middle-income families and an extensive climate platform
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Deal for public housing, would have required a significant expansion
of New York City’s fiscal authority and governmental capacity.

Not only can good governance and public services jibe with leftist
ideology, the two have gone together before. For 38 of the 50 years
between 1910 and 1960, and under three separate mayors, Milwaukee was
run by a democratic-socialist political faction nicknamed the “Sewer
Socialists.” The first mayor, a woodworker named Emil Seidel, was
swept into office on the Socialist Party line as a response to the
deep corruption of the incumbent Democrats, and immediately got to
work
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raising the minimum wage, strengthening the power of the civil service
against patronage appointees, and laying the groundwork for what would
become a nationally famous network of parks centered on the city’s
lakefront. His successors opened the first municipal public housing
project
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in America, built libraries, pioneered adult vocational education, and
required the city’s private streetcar company to pave streets and
run frequent service in exchange for its city-granted monopoly. As
racist urban renewal schemes took hold in the 1950s, socialist mayor
Frank Zeidler refused to participate in slum clearance unless
integrated public housing was built for displaced residents.
 

Just imagine. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by
Nerthuz/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

As their nickname indicates, the Sewer Socialists’ achievements were
most famous in the realm of public health. Daniel Hoan, the second of
their three mayors, ran public vaccination campaigns and built
water-treatment plants around the city
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longstanding practice of mixing raw sewage with drinking water. They
instead recycled sewage sludge into fertilizer using a city-operated
plant that continues operating today
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take tours). The “sewer” moniker actually began as a way for more
theoretically minded leftists to mock the Milwaukeeans’ obsession
with clean government and direct services, but they refashioned the
term as a badge of pride. Seidel memorably dismissed their critics
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as “Eastern smarties” and wrote, “We wanted a chance for every
human being to be strong and live a life of happiness. And, we wanted
everything that was necessary to give them that: playgrounds, parks,
lakes, beaches, clean creeks and rivers, swimming and wading pools,
social centers, reading rooms, clean fun, music, dance, song and joy
for all.”

If bureaucratic excellence and “honest, frugal government”
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small ball compared to global socialist revolution, it’s partly
because U.S. cities face serious limits to their legal and political
power. As Richard Schragger writes in his book _City Power_
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are creations of their state governments with few rights of their own.
They rarely have permission to raise and spend revenue as they see
fit, must balance their budget every year, and are hobbled by the
U.S.’ lack of serious regional government structures. Partly because
of these difficulties, the original Sewer Socialists were almost
fanatical about their commitment to fiscal discipline. In 2021 most
Americans would associate this attitude with austerity-loving
conservatives, but there’s another way to look at it: Every dollar
in the municipal budget that’s saved by rooting out inefficiency and
graft is another dollar to be spent on better public services.

What would running on Sewer Socialism look like in 2021? Start with
(obviously) sanitation. New York’s residential garbage collection is
under the purview of the city’s Sanitation Department (formerly run
by Garcia), but commercial collection is handled by unaccountable,
dangerous private companies
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that overwork and underpay their drivers. We know a unionized public
agency can do the job better than the unregulated private sector, so
let them take it over. There’s also New Yorkers’ infamous habit of
leaving trash bags on the sidewalk, since the city doesn’t have
alleys. The obvious solution—replace some parking spaces on every
block with rat-proof garbage containers—is currently being
implemented, but the pilot program to do this makes applicants go
through neighborhood groups or business improvement districts
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The Sewer Socialist rejoinder: You shouldn’t need an intermediary to
get usable trash cans.

Speaking of parking spaces: The streets are a mess. Increased car
ownership during COVID has led to more congested roads
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reckless and unaccountable drivers
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and the highest number of road deaths since 2014
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Sewer Socialists could run on a platform of managing the streets with
separated bus and bike bus lanes in every corner of the city, for rich
and poor alike. They could replace curb parking with loading zones to
prevent double-parked delivery trucks, and implement a parking-permit
system to raise revenue and stop rampant car-registration fraud.
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The result would be safer streets for the city’s nondriving majority
and proof that our public realm does not have to be chaotic and
dystopian.

Eventually, any Sewer Socialist movement in New York will have to
contend with the political and financial might of the police. Last
summer, Bill de Blasio’s impotent response to the NYPD’s brutal
treatment of anti-racist protestors
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the agency is effectively outside civilian control. Even if the
“Defund” slogan is a nonstarter with the incoming mayor, there’s
a more utilitarian argument: The police are doing too many jobs they
simply aren’t good at. A new city pilot program to replace police
with social workers
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for mental-health-related 911 calls has shown promising early results.
Several elected officials have proposed getting the NYPD out of
routine traffic stops, which would be a win for both street safety and
racial justice.
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(There’s strong public support for doing this
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especially since police are famous for breaking the city’s traffic
laws
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with impunity.) Public attitudes on defunding or reforming the police
are complex, and usually hinge on how the question is framed
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But the worldview that Sewer Socialists champion, rooted in
competence, anti-corruption, and democratic public life, provides a
useful framing to understand why power and money need to be taken from
the NYPD.

Because New York is a large, wealthy city with a vibrant progressive
movement, there are more resources to make Sewer Socialism work here.
(Likewise, when Milwaukee was run by socialists it was the 12th
largest U.S. city and frequently annexed its suburbs
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harder, but the tradition still inspires. In Somerville,
Massachusetts, DSA-backed candidates are running for City Council this
September as “sidewalk socialists,”
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to invest in municipal plows to clear the sidewalks and provide union
jobs during snowy Boston winters. On the same day that Eric Adams won
in New York City, Buffalo, N.Y., picked socialist India Walton
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in its Democratic mayoral primary. In addition to running a dogged
field operation, Walton heavily criticized incumbent Mayor Byron
Brown’s investments in overpolicing and big-ticket
economic-development schemes instead of basic public services. In
Jackson, Mississippi, 38-year-old Mayor Chokwe Lumumba began his first
term in 2017 promising to both deliver high-quality services and
pursue racial justice. Jackson is a poor, majority-Black city in a
state run by white conservatives, and Lumumba has had trouble
summoning the tax base he needs
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to fulfill his promises, but he won re-election in a landslide this
spring.

All these struggles fit within a long history of Americans stripping
cities for parts, hoarding the wealth in the suburbs, and then
claiming urbanites can’t govern themselves. That process has
accelerated since the 1970s, as U.S. cities have embraced “private
sector-driven solutions
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normally think of as being in the realm of the state or public
resources,” in the words of historian Kim Phillips-Fein. New York
has been at the forefront of this trend starting with the city’s
1975 fiscal crisis “emergency” financial controls
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effect. And while progressive candidates’ recent primary victories
are partly a backlash to this neoliberal turn, it’s noteworthy that
these candidates also defeated allies of the city’s Democratic
machine. Eric Adams will be a machine mayor, one with strong
working-class support and deep roots in the city’s governing
institutions. Offering a better vision will mean electing progressives
with their own community roots who care about urban policy, but will
also mean stacking the city bureaucracy with committed leftists and
progressives who are inspired by the promise of public life and
unafraid to speak up and act when their values and expertise are
aligned.

The progressive left will have a hard time getting every item on its
urban-governance wish list, because the rules of our political system
conspire to make cities weak and underrepresented. American
public-benefit programs at all levels of government
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are also designed so they’re aggravating for citizens to access and
hard for civil servants to implement well. Changing all of this is a
necessary long-term project for the left. In the meantime, take it
from Cea Weaver, the lefty housing organizer behind the coalition to
pass New York State’s historic tenants-rights package in 2019, who
tweeted in May, “I need the left to get someone like Kathryn
Garcia.” [[link removed]]
Delivering safe streets, joyful parks, affordable housing, and a
livable planet will take the organizers in the streets and the nerds
with the spreadsheets, working together.

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