Talk about your tale of two cities. As New York begins its lurch to the left, the thing that I keep thinking of is that a quarter of the votes in town went to the Republican at the top of the ticket, but the GOP has only 5 percent of City Council seats. It’s a glaring fact with a Democrat moving into Gracie Mansion.
No doubt, some will say it’s just deserts. Others that it’s time for charter reform. The person I would consult is a left-wing law professor named Lani Guinier, whom President Clinton nominated for assistant attorney general for civil rights only to drop her for being too radical.
Guinier is an advocate of proportional representation — the idea that seats in a legislature be parceled out according to the percentage of votes won by the various parties. She reckoned a version of it should be tried in some southern states that had large numbers of African Americans but were not electing them to public office.
Proportional representation is used today in, say, Israel, and there are a number of distinguished New Yorkers who think it would be a good idea here. It was tried in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s and had what I once called the “main effect” of electing two communists to the City Council.
When proportional representation was ended here in 1947, The New York Sun called it an “un-American monstrosity.”
The Times complained that the system had seated “communists and other radicals who could not, by normal majority and district voting methods, have hoped to become members.”
Such worries have been brushed aside by Hendrik Hertzberg, a writer for The New Yorker and a member of what might be called the journalistic shadow Supreme Court. He called the “Red threat” a “red herring.” He once e-mailed me to remind that proportional representation in the city had been hated by Tammany Hall.
“My impression,” Mr. Hertzberg wrote me, is that the results of proportional representation “also included representation for other political minorities (e.g., Republicans), a high caliber of candidates and councilmen, fervent public interest in council elections and activities, and high voter turnout in council elections.”
Hertzberg’s riposte, I wrote later, “caused me to sit up a bit straighter in my chair and stroke my chin, smiling at the thought of proportional representation as a way to elevate more Republicans to a City Council that is dominated by the left.”
Lani Guinier once cited support for proportional representation from a raft of business and good-government groups. She said in a note to me that the city’s former parks commissioner, Henry Stern, once called the decade or so in which proportional representation was tried in New York the City Council’s “golden age.”
As recently as 2006, Stern wrote a piece saying that the return of proportional representation would be “an enormous lift for democracy in city government.”
He said it would take a lot of work and education to get such a reform. But he thought it was time to give proportional representation another chance, “now that the Communist menace is behind us.”
The latest election results suggest that the left-wing menace appears to be still in front of us. We have a mayor who sided with the Nicaraguan Marxists, canoodled with Robert Mugabe and honeymooned in Castro’s Cuba. Between the Working Families Party and the Democrats, we have the most left-wing government in the city’s history.
All the more reason to start thinking about how to represent in the City Council the New Yorkers who tend to vote Republican. Mayor Bloomberg’s idea was what he called “non-partisan” elections. His proposed charter reform in 2003 was based on the notion that political parties were the source of the problem. He wouldn’t have outlawed them. But he would have done away with party primary elections and guaranteed party ballot lines.
The voters were no dummies. They rejected the idea.
They understood that political parties are the way people of ordinary means aggregate their resources in an election. Bloomberg eventually ditched the GOP and bought an exception to term limits, while warning of the labor-electoral complex. In any event, the Left now runs the table. How much worse could proportional representation be than that?