Ted Cruz pulled the New York liberal card on Donald Trump before the last debate, in what was likely an attempt to draw evangelicals away from Trump. As Trump so deftly noted, this is rich coming from Cruz. The Texas Senator is married to a Goldman Sachs executive, solicited donations from wealthy gays, and attended two Ivy League institutions before clerking on the Supreme Court.
In firing back, the Cruz campaign released video of Trump discussing his support for partial birth abortion and gun control.
Two perspectives have been offered on the matter. Writing in National Review, Kevin Williamson noted that while New York may be liberal, there’s a lot about it that conservatives should love:
It has been said that you cannot understand America without understanding New York City, and the first thing to understand about New York is that it isn’t very much like the rest of America. That is true, unquestionably. But New York’s traditional virtues — its brashness, its hustle and enterprise, its anything-is-possible attitude — are the traditional American virtues, just as the city’s vices — its materialism, its self-importance, its fascination with the transitory and the impermanent — are the American vices, too. Conservatives, of all people, should be more attuned to the virtues of the nation’s commercial center; let the nation’s art-school dropouts sneer at that great collision of money and culture. The city has been the incubator of our best minds — Buckley, Friedman, Podhoretz, Kristol — and is home to great conservative institutions from The New Criterion and the Manhattan Institute to this magazine. Ayn Rand, who didn’t understand people but had a great and admirable capacity to be arrested by the beauty of human achievements, loved New York as only an immigrant can.
To the extent that “New York values” is another way of saying “urban values” — and it is, to a great extent — conservatives would do well to develop a keener appreciation of them. (Never mind, for the moment, the notion that Donald Trump’s values are identical to the values of New York, in which he is a figure of fun rather than a figure of respect.) From a matter of pure self-interest, Republicans would be in much better shape if their presidential candidates did not start in an electoral hole, with California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois wrapped up in a bow for the Democrats. It isn’t California ranchers and Illinois farmers who have handed those states to the Left, but city-dwelling people who believe with some reason — Ted Cruz has just given them another — that Republicans hate them. Urbanites are not entirely pleased with the Democratic monopolies that govern most of them. Our cities are disproportionately black, but they are not disproportionately Martian.
Our cities have many immigrants, but not immigrants from the Land of People Who Don’t Care About Their Kids and Really Like Paying High Taxes. Ask a black Democrat in the Bronx working to support a family whether he’d prefer to make more money or less, to keep more of his money or less, to have more economic security or less, for his children to have more educational opportunities or fewer, and he will give the same answers as any plaid-panted Brooks Brothers specimen haunting the Merion Cricket Club — or any white oilman running a fracking rig in the Eagle Ford shale. His values are New York values, too.
Williamson’s point is worth heeding. Although many red state conservatives love Trump, many purple state, nominally conservative family men who are concerned about taxes and corruption and less motivated by social issues might be attracted to Trump, viewing Cruz as a moralizing tinpot dictator. Writing at Red State, Josh Hammer has a different perspective:
Notwithstanding Trump’s shrewd obfuscation of the underlying critique by nostalgically reverting to Rudy Giuliani 2008 campaign-style braggadocio, everyone listening knew exactly what Ted Cruz meant when he lambasted Donald Trump for exuding “New York values.” This line of attack quite clearly has neither anything at all to do with individual New Yorkers—many of whom are proud conservatives, and even some of whom I know to be close confidantes of Cruz himself—nor anything at all to do with the truly heroic actions of N.Y.P.D. and F.D.N.Y. first responders on September 11, 2001.
Instead, it is about a Mike Bloomberg-implemented Big Gulp soda-banning nanny state culture that reeks of Wilsonian “progressive” elitist provenance.
It is about a duly elected Leftist New York governor openly telling pro-life, pro-Second Amendment conservatives that they “have no place” in New York.
It is about a totalitarian Leftist New York City mayor whose alliance with anti-cop provocateur Al Sharpton causes N.Y.P.D. officers to turn their backs, and whose newly promulgated transgender law institutes fines for up to $250,000 for employers who refuse to use non-sensical (but preferred!) pronouns like “ze” and “hir.”
It is about a self-absorbed culture that openly denigrates benighted “flyover country,” says Lincoln should have just let the woebegone South secede, and belittles those neanderthals who “cling to their guns and religion.”
Whom do you think is right? What do you think are “New York Values?”
AAN Staff
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