NEW YORK — If Democrats have little more to celebrate than sleazy, slightly demagogic Eric Adams’ landslide victory in a Democratic bastion like New York City, it clearly was a horrible night.
I voted for Adams out of some hope that he will surprise us all, because he is quick-witted, opportunistic, and may genuinely want to make the city a better place for its working class and poor citizens. But that’s just my hopeful side speaking, while knowing how difficult it is to sustain even a moderate left program in this country. Though it may be possible in New York, in most of the country the right can always play the race card in all its multiple manifestations (as Youngkin did in Virginia); some of them too devious for the public to pick up and then defeat efforts at reform.
We may have a slew of television shows centering on black life and stars, and the NY Times compensates for past neglect by self-consciously focusing its art pages on black writers, painters, and actors. However, that doesn’t help when Congress tries to defeat bills that struggle against the many faces of voter suppression. Race and racism are always there, and sometimes seem too cemented into the fabric of our life to expunge. And it hasn’t been helped by many black intellectuals’ and writers’ embrace of a racial essentialism where they see everything though a racial lens, and cancel out anybody who offers a more nuanced take on black life and behavior.
But that’s another subject, and doesn’t explain why New Jersey’s Gov. Phil Murphy, who was often described as the most progressive governor in the country, faced such a close race. Murphy raised the minimum wage, made earned sick leave mandatory, boosted funding for pre-K schools, and made community college free to those who can’t afford it, but still lost ground in the New Jersey suburbs.
I find myself often just feeling despair about the political climate. I ask that at 82 why should I care so deeply about Manchin’s machinations to undermine legislation that will give us a bit of welfare state that almost all Western European countries have had for decades. I can no longer march or make speeches as I did from the ’60s to the ’80s, but I still write and obsess about the state of American society and politics. I sometimes wish that the political world would be an easier place, but I know how much pain and failure are part of the process. Maybe in the words of the Beatles’ song. I just should “Let it Be.”
