The Sensible Seventy: A Manifesto
New York's New Big Tent: The 70% in the Great Middle
The presidential election has shredded the Overton window, and opened a liminal space where new political orders can be forged. This is a grand opportunity for those on the ground in New York City to create a new coalition of competence—a politics that delivers on time, under budget, and for the common good.
But doing this will require, among other things, throwing off the oppressive weight of cultural censoriousness that has gripped New York City’s political arena—the intense chilling of expression through social and cultural pressure, rather than legal censorship. This means consolidating and defending classically American principles that have been in a waning era: good ideas can come from anywhere, reasonable people can disagree, and the intellectual, conversational commons must be defended from those who’d close them. More people than ever crave the return of these civic commons, just New Yorkers crave the fuller return of the literal, physical commons from dominance by anti-social behavior.
I’m not the first person to notice this. Within the last few days Matt Yglesias published “A Common Sense Democrat Manifesto,” Noah Smith “The blue cities must be fixed,” and Jerusalem Demsas “The Democrats Are Committing Partycide.” There are more reflections than these, but the political culture of the nation could use as many “middle manifestos” as it can get. This is mine, entitled “The Sensible Seventy,” an ode and exhortation to the 70% of New Yorkers in the broad middle of city politics. This moment is yours if you will claim it.
A Grand Opening, and a Sketch of Cultural Censoriousness
Throughout American history, we have dealt with cultural censoriousness and illiberal tendencies. It comes and goes in different strengths and with different focuses. No one group has a monopoly on it.
If you go back to the Bush era, you’d see the country superstars The Chicks (née Dixie Chicks) being thrown off the radio and out of public prominence for opposing the Iraq War; they were canceled before “cancellations” were a thing. And the most popular daytime talk show host of the time, Phil Donahue, had his show literally canceled (by MSNBC!) for the same kind of criticism in 2003.
This prevailing conservative illiberality came to an end with the Obama administration, which upended American political discourse and favored realignment in its own time. But, eventually, a new illiberality anchored on the left emerged—and that is the trend that has now potentially ended. We have a new moment of realignment, and the Sensible Seventy should seize that moment in New York.
Who are the Sensible Seventy?
If I had to put partisan labels on them, I’d include the emerging Abundance Democrats, the remainder of the Bloomberg Republicans (many of whom are now “Bloomberg Democrats”), and a larger, unfurling urban majority that has lost tolerance for governmental and civil dysfunction. If I had to pick an example publication that speaks in their voice, I’d pick Vital City, which has a relentless focus on “what works” and “good ideas come from all kinds of perspectives.”
The Sensible Seventy contains both people who have been working diligently to reform New York City politics, and that part of the electorate that, while not regularly active, will send strong signals through the ballot box if pushed. It is New Yorkers who say “anarchy is not a form of welfare.” It is also the great swell of New Yorkers who aren’t active in politics at all, who desire a functional urban environment.
Finally, beyond any partisan label, it is New Yorkers who will no longer walk on eggshells when discussing the pressing problems affecting our city. These are not reactionaries who have been waiting to gnash their teeth—they are your friends, your family, and your coworkers, and they want to earnestly work through urban issues in good faith. They go to your church, they’re in your political party, and they took pictures with you at your graduation. If you haven’t heard any opposing ideas from these people, you are either in a bubble, or those closest to you haven’t trusted you to react well in the honest search for policy truth.
What has held the Sensible Seventy back until now?
Frankly: withering cultural censoriousness from part of the political and social left,1 more often deployed on a small scale by friends against friends than on a large scale by enemies against enemies. Two common tools of silencing and intimidating others are: (1) purity tests, and (2) guilt by association. The practical impact of these are a decrease in the size of one’s political tent (only the purest may remain, and the bar escalates over time), and maligning reasonable people as caricatured, funhouse mirror enemies.
But one might say, “Shouldn’t people just have the courage of their convictions? Shouldn’t they stand up for what they believe in, regardless of what people say about them?” I do, in fact, agree with this. People should have more political courage. But consider what that means when applied to reality. Most people in NYC do not vote, and most of them are not engaged with city politics—although that trend is the opposite in my own universe. That means when they’re at work, or taking care of their children, or pursuing their own ambitions generally, participating in local politics (and politics generally) is not a priority. They often don’t put up a fight in the face of political censoriousness because it’s not their domain of expertise, and they’re busy with other things. I’m sure many readers have done this, and their internal thought was something like, “You have to pick your battles.”
And I also agree that sometimes, tactically, “You have to pick your battles.” But the problem is, over time, people do not pick any battles in the political arena, and the war is won by the unreasonable, the unwell, the loud, and the illiberal. The territory is completely ceded, and this creates a chilling effect over creative thought in general, well beyond the strictly political arena. People lose the “muscle memory” of voicing dissent, the marketplace of ideas closes up shop, and the quality of what thought remains is poor, unsharpened by trial. This poverty is magnified in the quality of city law and policy.
John Stuart Mill, in his 1859 work On Liberty, lays out the oppressive nature of cultural (rather than legal) censorship:
But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
He also lays out the nature of the small groups of people who would like to impose their views on others:
They have occupied themselves rather in inquiring what things society ought to like or dislike, than in questioning whether its likings or dislikings should be a law to individuals. They preferred endeavouring to alter the feelings of mankind on the particular points on which they were themselves heretical, rather than make common cause in defence of freedom, with heretics generally.
And he correctly highlights a devastating consequence of this censorship generally, the degradation in good thought (emphasis added):
But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
If your politics grow in an echo chamber, you will be an inadequate advocate. A Ruth with no Antonin.
What should the Sensible Seventy do?
The Sensible Seventy, and anyone who feels recognized by what I’ve written so far, have an opportunity to retake the public commons of discourse right now. The illiberality of the previous era has been quelled by the presidential election. This is an Adams Imperative moment—more often than one would think, “self-government” means yourself, yes you.
Here’s what you can do:
📝 Write your own “Middle Manifesto” and send it to me. It can be a Substack post, a Twitter thread, an Instagram story—anything you want. The more people come out as part of the Sensible Seventy, the more others will realize they are in the majority. Lend others your courage by going before them.
🔗 Share this post. I don’t often ask people to share my work directly, but I’m doing it now. I want people to know that I believe in the big political tent, in civil discourse, in the good faith search for sometimes difficult truth, and the betterment of my city and country.
✉️ Submit your email if you want to organize for The Sensible Seventy. Want to come to talks with a big tent ethos? Want to meet others who think the same? There will be opportunities.
☕️ Contact me to get a coffee and talk about any of the above. You can email me (daniel@maximumnewyork.com), or DM me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
If you have read this far and had any thoughts like “Daniel is a partisan now,” I have two things to say in response.
First: of course I have my own ideas about government and law. Here’s a broadside on gentrification. Here’s one on crime rates. But my goal here is to reveal that most New Yorkers want the same kind of broad, intellectual, civic commons, and that they want the same kinds of problems to be investigated and fixed. They do not want to walk on eggshells. They want to solve hard problems—and to begin doing that, they want to discuss them.
If this post is partisan about anything, it is for these principles: seeking the truth, honest disagreement, and giving the benefit of the doubt to fellow New Yorkers.
The four rules of etiquette in my classes, which I now think we can more firmly establish in the broader city political culture with expeditiousness and work, are:
Politics is a good word, and a potentially beautiful thing. We are here to learn how to do government as friends or allies, even while dealing with weighty issues.
No bullshitting, aka be concrete. We’re all here to learn together, but we’re doing it in a rigorous fashion. You must always strive to deeply understand the reality of governance that underpins your political thought.
Extend grace to everyone. We’re here to learn together. Government and politics are complicated fields, and no one knows everything. We will be better, together.
Find the good time. Taking things seriously does not mean being mad about them. The wider world can pressure people to get mad to prove that they take political ideas seriously. I do not equate anger with either sophistication or dedication, so I relieve you of that burden. Make jokes, be serious, push back, learn a lot. But give yourself a break.
This isn’t a “they can’t kill us all!” type of call to action. It’s a “the emperor has no clothes” klaxon. Competence, reasonable disagreement, and B-minus politics are roaring back. If you feel afraid, that’s OK—but have the courage to face it.
New York’s new big tent—if we can pitch it
Urban functionality. Civil discourse. Effective governance. A renaissance for New York City.
That’s what we’re aiming for.
You might want to make this into a “red versus blue” issue, or a “blue versus other blue” issue. That kind of analysis is useful, especially within the realm of political tactics, but that’s not what I’m doing here. I’m proclaiming the existence of The Sensible Seventy, and defending the rhetorical, cultural, and political environment needed for it to flourish going forward.
Not red. Not blue. Rather: red, white, and blue.
Excelsior.
This is not exclusive to any one party, as I mentioned. But this is the reality of New York in the modern era.