The Progressive Civil War
Editorial of The New York Sun | February 16, 2019
Which side are you on? That’s the question in what the New York Post calls the “progressive civil war” that has erupted in New York. It’s over Amazon’s decision to pull out of its deal to move a headquarters to America’s largest and most dynamic city. It could end up as a watershed moment in the political realignment in the city and state of New York, and none too soon.
So are you rooting for the high-spirited socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Even before taking office, she was the first politician to denounce the $3 billion in incentives the city offered the big retailer to move to Queens. Or do you fetch up with the progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio? A big backer of the deal, His Honor says that he “came up watching the mistakes of the progressives of the past.”
We ourselves were considering backing Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Blamed, though, if the leading progressive newspaper in the country, the Wall Street Journal, didn’t scoop us. It stuck to its principles and rushed out an editorial saying that, while it rarely agreed with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist was right to call billions in taxpayer subsidies for Amazon “extremely concerning.”
“These handouts to one of the richest companies in the history of the world, with an essentially zero cost of capital, is crony capitalism at its worst,” said the Wall Street Journal, which once issued a famous editorial called “Down With Big Business.” This may have animated the main organ of crony capitalism, the New York Times, to swing behind the Amazon deal.
Not, of course, without its infernal capacity for hand-wringing. It reports the latest news under a headline that says “New York Returns 25,000 Jobs to Amazon” and reckons that “anti-corporate activists got what they wanted at a great cost,” though as far as we can tell, the anti-corporate activists didn’t put up ten cents. Our guess is that the Times was worried about the Washington Post.
That’s because the Washington Post turns out to be owned by — wait for it — the same Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon. You would think, therefore, that the Post would be transpiring that Amazon’s decision to pull out of New York was a prime stroke. Instead, Mr. Bezos’ editors ran out a piece saying that Amazon “isn’t an unstoppable beast after all” but was “beaten in New York City by its own hubris and miscalculations.”
How weird is that? Well, it turns out that the piece the Washington Post published about Amazon’s “hubris and miscalculations” was actually written by Shira Ovide, who is a columnist for Bloomberg, the wire service that employs 2,000 or more journalists and is owned by the eponymous Michael Bloomberg, who wasn’t able to get Amazon to headquarter at New York when he was mayor.
Then again, too, he may have lacked for Mayor de Blasio’s capitalistic spirit. Mr. de Blasio says that the progressives “alienated working people.” Such working people, he adds, “are very smart and very discerning. They want jobs, they want revenues, they want the kinds of things that government can do for them. They understand they have to be paid for.”
All this has left New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, who was going to take credit for the whole plan, fuming in Albany. Will the progressive civil war get so bad that the Republicans could win high office in the Empire State? Ask Donald Trump, Jr., we say. It does, though, remind us of the last time the progressives went to war. That was Vietnam, where it was said they had to destroy the village in order to save it.