Opinion

DELONAS ON SUNDAY; GETTING NYC TO GET IT

The Manhattan Institute, New York’s preeminent right-leaning local think tank, took credit for a host of political achievements as it marked its 25th anniversary at a dinner Wednesday.

The group deserves the credit – but less because its ideas were so brilliant and original, and more because it managed to overcome the enormous difficulty of selling those ideas in the first place.

In New York.

Consider some of MI’s most pivotal intellectual campaigns – starting, say, with Charles Murray’s critique of welfare.

Tom Wolfe explained it pretty well Wednesday: Murray showed how welfare destroyed families, by making it more attractive to remain jobless and to have no man in the home.

Now what could be more obvious than the notion that many folks will choose not to work if it pays as well as working? Or, as Wolfe also noted, if the people who do work will start looking like suckers, rather than the community’s more upstanding members? Welfare, Murray argued in 1984, had to be reformed.

George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s “Broken Windows” approach to crime-fighting betrayed similar common sense.

Wolfe noted how it inspired Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton to get rid of the “squeegie men”- and so signal that the town belonged to its law-abiding citizens, not shakedown artists.

On the day of the crackdown, Wolfe recounted, cops issued increasingly stern warnings and finally arrested hold-outs.

One day later: Problem solved.

Notions like these seem compelling, but New York’s political culture nonetheless resisted them tooth-and-nail. Again, the public debt of gratitude owed to MI for reshaping the political culture accrues mostly from the fact that that culture, particularly in Gotham, was so hard to change.

Remember, this is the city where every kooky, left-wing shibboleth is not just embraced, but adopted, embellished and fiercely enforced.

* Striped bass have rights.

* Compassion means letting mentally ill folks live on sidewalks, even in freezing weather.

* Blacks in Crown Heights in 1991 had to be allowed to “vent” – by rioting against Jews.

* Housing is a right. And rent regulation helps the poor afford apartments – even though tenants are often well-to-do and the result is a housing shortage.

* Medicaid is a vital safety net, though it now covers one in three New Yorkers.

Are liberals here really so misguided?

Well, yes – though, of course, there’s more to it.

Demographics surely play a role: Poor folks like handouts, even if they’re self-defeating, while rich folks buy off guilt over their own wealth by backing pricey social programs; America’s ever-rising prosperity enables more and more Americans to do just that.

Union muscle also skews city politics.

And then there’s the belief in liberalism that can only be compared to against-all-physical-evidence religious faith.

Whatever: The Manhattan Institute somehow managed to get its ideas turned into policy. Credit its rigorous, smart and well-written pieces; its publication, City Journal; forums; lunches, and other vehicles.

Thus, Bill Clinton signed a Murray-inspired rollback of welfare, and Giuliani deflated crime.

Such successes should not be oversold. New York, especially – with its liberal politicians, still-sinewy unions and ethnic politics – has far to go before it can be considered politically sane.

But that’s all the more reason to hope the institute keeps up its good work – long into the future.

E-mail: abrodsky@nypost.com