January 7, 2004
In This Issue
RACHEL GORDON'S JAN . 4 San Francisco Chronicle story about the legacy of Mayor Willie Brown was about what you would expect: a reasonably adequate overview that touched on the mayor's strengths and weaknesses but never got into what I consider the real, lasting, and terrible impact of Brown's eight-year term.Willie Brown made liberals mistrust government.
A lot of modern political cynics like to say corruption doesn't really matter, that an effective mayor or president with (to use Gordon's phrase) the "force of will" is preferable to a namby-pamby do-gooder type who follows all the rules. And if all you really care about is physical monuments (and Brown clearly thinks that's a good way to measure achievements), then a mayor who could rebuild City Hall in glory and splendor, promote a dandy new stadium for the Giants, encourage high-rise housing and office buildings, and break ground on all sorts of civic improvements was a great success.
But the big ideological battle in the United States today is really between people who want to turn control of public policy over to the private sector and those who want to keep it in public hands. This has monumental implications for the future, on almost every front. Global trade, economic inequality, workplace safety, public health policy, energy policy, land preservation, criminal justice, even national security decisions ... if you look at the trends closely, you notice that more and more of the real decisions are being made by private companies and private nonprofits.
(A fascinating example: I saw an article in the New York Times the other day on charitable giving, which noted that the 10 biggest foundation donors had significantly increased their funding compared to other, smaller donors and to public-sector spending. The Times missed the point: Bill Gates now decides what social priorities are important in the world. Funny, I didn't vote for him.)
And one of the reasons this is happening is the right wing has co-opted a lot of liberals who are starting to buy the argument that the private sector is more efficient – and that government is riddled with waste and fraud and can't be trusted with your dollars. And when you have people like Willie Brown, who likes to call himself a liberal, acting as if it doesn't matter at all whether he's honest or open or cares about public process, it makes things much, much worse.
Good riddance, Mr. Mayor.