How This Liberal Democrat Learned to Hate Liberal Democrats
AIDS, poverty and discrimination are not problems to solve; they are talking points helpful in winning elections
By
David Gottfried
In the Summer of 1985, the nation discovered AIDS in the form of Rock Hudson. (By that time, the number of infections had been growing for years, but for Americans some things don’t exist until they happen in Hollywood.) In August of 1985, after I took the New York and New Jersey bar exams, I was excited, disturbed and anxious for political action.
I was irate at the lassitude of liberals with respect to AIDS. (The Republicans had to be written off; AIDS was giving their bible-belting Southern evangelicals Schadenfreude.) In the autumn of 1985, Carol Bellamy was running against Ed Koch in the Democratic Mayoral Primary in New York City. In the course of challenging Koch from the left, she proposed doing something about AIDS by painting the roof of a gay clinic on West 13th Street.
Jesus Christ! We were facing mass death and liberal lady bountiful proposed giving death a fresh coat of paint. Something was clear to me: At the end of 1982, we had about 1000 AIDS cases in the nation. Toward the end of 1984, we had about 10,000 AIDS cases in the United States. According to a study in Los Angeles, 40 percent of gay men in L.A. had low T4 – T8 cell ratios, a laboratory finding consistent with AIDS. (Footnote 1) It was clear to me, and perhaps to about 2 percent of my fellow Americans: Soon we would have millions of AIDS cases.
I wrote an article, published in the “New York Native” in the autumn of 1985, which called for massive, aggressive political action to increase funding for medical research to fight AIDS. Unfortunately, by 1985, a large proportion of the populace had succumbed to the poisonous conservative message that liberals just want to spend money and spending money is usually a waste. These imbeciles didn’t seem to remember that we spent a ton of money on armaments in World War Two (The Federal Deficit then, as a share of the national economy, was enormously bigger than what it is today) and that spending and the weaponry it bought helped defeat Hitler and Tojo, the cruelest tyrants that had ever trod upon the earth.
My article came to the attention of the two leading gangs in New York’s Democratic Party: The Koch gang, which was devoted to exalting the Mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, and the Cuomo gang (Mario Cuomo was New York’s governor). I do not know if either Ed Koch or Mario Cuomo ever read the article, but leading disciples of Koch and Cuomo in the gay community were aware of the article and wanted to know what to do about me.
I thought that people affiliated with Koch and those affiliated with Cuomo would realize, instantly, that we had to increase funding on research. As my article said, the number of cases was increasing like a parabola on a Cartesian plane and basic mathematics meant millions of cases in the not too distant future.
However, most people in the world of supposedly liberal Democratic clubs were deaf, dumb and blind to the enormity and most of all the urgency of the problem. They were plodding people, with ponderous ways, and they were always plopping their puffy bodies onto sofas to have Danish and coffee and, as we say in Yiddish, kvetch (complain).
More importantly, Koch and Cuomo were bitter rivals because they largely sought the same supporters, liberal democrats. All democratic politicians in New York were divided into the opposing Cuomo and Koch camps, and this division was the defining theme of their claustrophobic pseudo-progressive world. If you were pro-Koch, your primary responsibility, of course, was not improving New York; it was making crazy Eddie look good and making Mario look mean. If you were in the Cuomo camp, your job was to exalt Cuomo and demonize Koch.
Issues such as AIDS, housing, employment, and welfare were not things to solve; they were debating points used to canonize Koch and crucify Cuomo, or visa-versa. The debates and the issues were, at root, a facade for what is, essentially, a contest for power, money, patronage, and prestige.
Actually, this is endemic to politics: In the 1960’s, Nelson Rockefeller was New York’s governor and Mayor Lindsay was New York City’s mayor, and they could have helped one another tackle the people’s problems, but they were both liberal Republicans, and sought the slavish support of the same people, and therefore cut each other’s eyeballs out. Ed Koch and Bella Abzug were both liberal Dems from New York City and they routinely savaged one another to be anointed King Of New York’s liberal Jews. Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, prior to 1966 when Bobby turned against the Vietnam War, shared the same views and they dutifully aimed for the other’s demise. Today, Donald Trump and Florida’s De Santis are competing to be the champion of America’s white, neo-fascist reactionaries, and lord knows they hate each other.
The "reform" clubs of Manhattan, I thought, were the Democratic clubs to go to to agitate for more attention to fight AIDS. These organizations got their first whiff of life from veterans of Adlai Stevenson's campaigns, grew in strength in the civil rights and anti-war struggles of the sixties, and had the most momentum, and a political agenda which reached an apogee of immediacy and clarity, at the end of the 1960's, when half a million men were fighting in Vietnam.
The reform clubs, in 1985, were a fragile, bastardized mutation of the reform clubs of the late 60's and early 70's. For the most part, they did not seem to know why they were in existence, could not define their political agenda with coherence, and lacked conviction.
My local Democratic club, the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club, seemed to be an institution of nostalgia which existed to make aging Jewish liberals feel young and brave again.
The reform clubs did not lose all sense of purpose. Patronage was a very tangible, concrete objective, and the reform clubs -- which, in their glory days, scorned patronage-- made an unabashed, unapologetic about-face, scrambling for patronage, sucking-up to leading "liberals" in New York and making a mockery of everything reform politics once purported to uphold. Many of the leaders of the Chelsea Reform Democratic club would show up at a government office pertaining to the regulation of Tobacco and Firearms for a couple of hours, on Friday mornings, and would get 275 dollars for each Friday morning of thumb-twiddling. Allan Roskoff and Dan Roskoff parleyed their work at the Village Independent Democratic Club into Cuomo sinecures paying in excess of 100 grand a year (Which wasn’t a bad salary in 1985 for someone who wasn’t a college grad.).
This crass and very unreformist approach to reform politics was evident in the gay world and the straight world and the then embryonic and grotesque metrosexual world which is so self-consciously and nauseatingly fashionable that it’s apt to render one asexual.
The urgency of AIDS did little to shake these groups from their torpor and acquiescence; instead of attempting to launch major political action to combat the crisis, the weary and feeble "reformers' worked as if it was business as usual, trying to outdo one another in demonstrations of loyalty to their respective groups, begging for crumbs from the table, and ignoring the mass death sweeping New York.
I tried to persuade gay allies of Cuomo and Koch to get their bosses to fight for more money for research. They were Tom Duane and Dan Roskoff of the Cuomo contingent and Jim Levin who was known as Mayor Koch’s liaison to the gay community.
Through Dan Roskoff of the Cuomo camp, the Village Independent Democrats (the Cuomo camp) passed resolutions endorsing my proposals, made and distributed about a hundred copies of my New York Native article, “Towards a New Political Offensive on AIDS,” and summoned five legislators to a meeting to press these legislators to work to implement my proposals, which now, supposedly, were VID's proposals. However, by the time the meeting was held, the mayoral race was over and the extent to which my political proposals and criticisms could be used to embarrass Mayor Koch was limited. Accordingly, VID's interest was waning. Their diminished interest was quite apparent when the meeting with the five legislators was held. Catherine Abate, a leader of VID who had recently been appointed to a very high post by Cuomo, was almost completely "out of it,” other members of VID did not understand my proposals, and another member of VID, perhaps concerned that support for my proposals would increase my strength in VID (and, consequently, stop her "star" from rising) attacked my proposals (apparently oblivious to VID's formal endorsement of my proposals.) Given VID's disunity and confusion, the legislators walked away from the meeting knowing that they could disregard my proposals in their entirety.
The other politician, who was a prime target of my campaign regarding AIDS, was James Levin. In 1985, Levin. was recognized as Koch's “man in the gay community.” Although my "Native" article was critical of Koch, and although I had no small measure of antipathy toward Koch, I was not hesitant about working with his gang, and they did not hesitate to work with me. I, naively, wanted to work with them to persuade the Koch administration to modify its positions or, more realistically, increase dissension within Koch's ranks. Their objective in working with me was probably much more cynical: Pacify this discontented leftist with promises of positions and prestige and stop him from giving ammunition to the anti-Koch camp.
Although my work with Levin and his confederates were not the least bit rewarding, I tried to make them happy -- out of either stupidity or passivity. I was enticed by the promises of money and prestige from the then overwhelmingly potent Koch machine. However, all of my efforts to curry favor with this camp were in vain because of my association with VID and other arch-rivals of Koch.
Similarly, all of my attempts to develop a rapport with the Cuomo camp, and its vast apparatus of money, patronage and no-show jobs, were quashed by association with James Levin, the man who delivered the gay community to Koch.
This compulsion to choose sides -- and to refrain from playing ball with both sides at the same time -- is common in politics. However, these people not only wanted you to refrain from working with the other side; they were livid if you had a mere fleeting conversation with someone from the other side. On several occasions, I was accused, by both sides, of committing the heinous transgression of talking to someone on the other side -- i.e., Kochites would attack me for talking to Cuomo people and Cuomo people would disparage me for talking to Koch people -- and I was interrogated about conversations, asked to provide word by word and sigh by sigh accounts of conversations, and asked what documents and materials I may have transmitted to the other side. Furthermore, James L and Dan R were at odds not only because of the Koch-Cuomo war; they also were embroiled in their own personal war. Dan Roskoff, Allen Roskoff’s brother, was a bitter foe of James Levin. Indeed, Levin once said to me that the two people in the world he most wanted to see suffer were Allen Roskoff and Tom Duane. Somehow, the likes of major gay haters of the time, such as Jesse Helms, never crossed his mind.
Tom Duane was a leader in the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club. (He later was elected to public office) This organization, in terms of its political viewpoint, was a carbon-copy of the Village Independent Democrats, repudiating Koch and adhering to the most liberal positions espoused by any segments of the Democratic Party. The primary difference between CRDC and VID was attitudinal and psychological. Although the VID had some vague aspiration toward the hip and the bohemian, which it failed miserably in achieving, the CRDC had no such pretensions. The median age of members of the CRDC was far too advanced to permit anything of the sort, the social revolutions of the sixties were completely incomprehensible to CRDC, and, as far as many members of the club were concerned, there were no insights to glean from any political developments since the Spanish Civil War.
The people in CRDC had the cynicism of salty lox and were as matronly as roast chicken keeping kugel (A hearty potato cake) warm. First, CRDC had a contingent of loud and hysterical Jewish women who all seemed to be auditioning for the role of Sophie Portnoy in a film version of “Portnoy's Complaint.” One woman in CRDC, Esther Smith, always won the part.
Esther (who was a lot like Aunt Esther from the sit com “Sanford and Son”) vociferously denounced any deviation from the leftist catechism as preached by Bella Abzug. (Jim Levin called Esther Smith “Bella Abzug’s right hand ball.”) In her view, she had conclusively resolved and determined the proper position on any political action and, like a rigid commissar, would not permit dissent. She told me, "David, they're already spending plenty of money on AIDS." Most people, even conservative people, recognize that spending on AIDS, in 1985, was woefully deficient. Nevertheless, Esther Smith, who purported to be, and was acclaimed by her slavish followers in Chelsea as being an uncompromising, fierce progressive and true-blue liberal, dared to assert that monies allocated to AIDS, in 1985, were sufficient.
I had plenty of data to refute Esther's complacency.
For example, Wayne Barrett of the Office of the Comptroller of NYC, leaked to me a letter which revealed the rot of the City in black and white:
It was a letter from Victor Botnick to Mayor Koch which asserted, in 1984, that the City would tackle two issues, regarding AIDS, in 1984:
A) Aid to a clinic on West Thirteenth Street (stuff along the lines of what Carol Bellamy was talking about; painting the roof of the clinic)
and
B) ten additional beds in Bellevue.
The Koch administration was merrily oblivious to the at least tens of thousands of New Yorkers who already harbored the virus, the AIDS patients who had lost their jobs, did not have health insurance and were faced with eviction, and the drum beat of murderous, anti-gay venom and violence coursing through the city streets.
The CRDC was never interested in examining any of the materials I obtained. Although Chelsea is heavily gay, and the CRDC had a fair number of gay people, the older members of the club never saw AIDS as a political issue.
Of course, AIDS was not the only issue that progressives pretended to care about. Progressives were supposed to care about income inequality. Although The CRDC had an elderly constituency, many of whom had very vivid memories of the depression, the CRDC never seemed to understand the importance of economic issues and, more specifically, the problems of working class and lower middle-class people.
Since the mantle of leadership in the Democratic Party passed from Truman (who referred to the rich as "bloodsuckers" and "gluttons of privilege") to Stevenson (far too genteel for blunt, tough words), the Democratic Party has, in the course of discussing economic issues, talked, almost exclusively, about the poorest of the poor. Although the poorest of the poor have the most urgent needs, they are not the only ones who are being short-changed. Furthermore, the poorest of the poor -- say the ten percent or so at the very bottom of the ladder -- is not enough to work with; you don't win elections with ten percent of the vote. The Democratic Party, to win, must concentrate on the bottom 60 percent of the population -- people who are employed, but are treated like dogshit; people who are not homeless, but are living in sardine cans; people who are not destitute, but are not permitted to deduct interest payments on education loans while upper middle-class people can deduct interest expenditures on second and third homes. Although one would be too optimistic too hope that VID, and its assortment of fashionable and phony rich liberals, could understand the meat and potatoes of economics, one had higher hopes for Chelsea with its memories of the past. However, although they remembered the glory of the old conflicts, they could not apply old principles (many of which were still valid) to new situations, e.g., they could not understand why the tax code, and alleged reforms in the tax code, harmed the poor and the lower-middle class and exalted the rich. (Of course, much of this changed with Bernie Sanders who vaporized the cobwebs of ossified, elitist Park Avenue liberalism like an atomic laser)
About the only thing that Chelsea and VID were clear about was quotas. They supported them. Perhaps this is because quotas are not intellectually taxing. Although the tax code and economic policy can be complex, it’s very easy to comprehend what the proposition "Fifty percent of all hired must be black" means.
The rigidity and stupidity of CRDC, VID and other liberal clubs in supporting quotas, and in their support of candidates simply because they were black or did not possess penises, is best exemplified by a dreary convention, that I attended, of the Manhattan branch of the New Democratic Coalition. There was one issue on the agenda: Who should we nominate as judges.
The convention was not interested in the intelligence, experience, views, prior associations, and the legal opinions of the candidates. There was only one issue, only one issue which captured the imagination, dreams and aspirations of the sickening liberals seated at the convention: Whether the New Democratic Coalition should nominate two blacks and a woman or two women and a black. Delegates from black neighborhoods wanted two blacks and a woman; delegates from white neighborhoods wanted two women and a black.
Since I am white, Jewish, and am in possession of a penis, as well as no fewer than two testicles, the pseudo-liberals who control the left-end of the Democratic Party do not have much to offer me. Note I use the term "pseudo" liberals as opposed to ultra or radical liberals. I would welcome a much more radical approach to economics, but our so-called liberals do not understand economics.
Sometime in 1986, I decided to work in private enterprise and started working at a law firm.
But I don’t mean to deplore all activism. I simply can’t stand the nonsense propagated by loathsome liars who have made a career of caring about a problem and, perhaps, don’t want to solve that problem because that would make their careers dispensable.
There are real activists, and I met a genuine and potent activist group in ACT UP. Inspired by Larry Kramer, the perfect and glorious antithesis of the petty bourgeois philistines whom Marx railed against, ACT UP understood the necessity for angry, explosive revolt. Act Up sent me to Houston to make trouble at the 1992 Republican convention. At the Republican convention in Houston, in 1992, I dyed the fountains of Houston red to symbolize the blood of AIDS patients. On the night George Bush was nominated for a second term, I screamed, at an ACT UP Rally, “Burn, Baby, Burn,” and this prompted some guys to burn an American flag. The cops charged toward us. I never was a runner, but that night I ran so fast I felt I had I broken records.
The status of gay people has improved dramatically since the 1980’s. As I have made clear, progressive politics didn’t liberate gay people. (Although some legal victories were somewhat helpful) I can cite two phenomena which were very liberating, but I have already been chastised for writing posts that are way too long. A future post will discuss these two phenomena.
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Footnote 1: The T 4 cells are the primary target of HIV. Hence the T4 population is decimated in AIDS. The T 8 cell is tasked with enveloping and destroying diseased and contaminated T 4 cells. Its population increases in AIDS. Before scientists found the virus which causes AIDS, some doctors hypothesized that AIDS was an auto immune disease in which T 8 cells went on a bizarre rampage against T 4 cells. In fact, longitudinal studies showed that those patients with the most elevated and shockingly high T 8 counts were most likely to live.