The candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America who recently swept Democratic primaries around the country have stoked fears about a looming wave of socialism. Of course, such apocalyptic musings mirror the left’s fears that Trump and other MAGA-affiliated politicians are ushering a new era of fascism. Yet the conventional narrative about the deadlock between socialists and fascists, and even between the left and right, serves to obscure the less talked-about—albeit more real—conflict between local agency and over-centralization.
Despite the vastly different framing of their platforms (and personas), writer Leila Mechoui argues that politicians like President Trump and Mayor Mamdani have more in common than we realize. Underneath their theatrics, the inevitable result of their actual policy positions is “a steady expansion of centralized power, which will attempt to manage ever more aspects of social life, and even the inner life of the citizenry.” Indeed, the hysterics and division stoked by the conventional culture war narratives function to benefit technocratic elites: as the common folk are distracted by bickering among their chosen champions, elites continue amassing more and more power into their hands.
Yet the problem of over-centralization has not been lost on all who have an influence on public discourse. In his recent encyclical letter Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV warns of the dangers of the excessive power of elites “over the conditions of everyday life.” He points to the principle of subsidiarity, which “requires that such processes not be imposed from above … but instead be directed toward the common good with transparency, accountability and meaningful forms of participation,” as an alternative model.
The encyclical’s frequent references to Rerum Novarum by his namesake Leo XIII has prompted many to revisit the seminal 1891 encyclical upon which the Catholic Church’s modern social doctrine is built. Though he didn’t explicitly use the term, Pope Leo XIII drew heavily on the principle of subsidiarity, which calls for decisions to be made on the most basic level possible, and for larger bodies to avoid swooping in to do what smaller bodies can do for themselves. Popes from Leo XIII to Leo XIV have warned of the dangers that come when larger bodies of power absorb local and individual agency. When the locus of power is too distant, too centralized and expansive, it is more prone to corruption. When power gets too big, too God-like, to the point that it begins absorbing the power of smaller entities and individuals, it becomes harder to keep in check.
While few consider it one of the main tenets of his papacy, it was Pope Francis who warned of a new threat to the principle of subsidiarity in our age: the “technocratic paradigm.” In Laudato Si, Francis insists that our age is dominated by structures run by alleged “experts” who create systems that promise us greater freedom and efficiency, while simultaneously severing our agency and roots within a given locale or community.
Francis went on to insist that technocratic “expertise” tends too often to measure “human development” more on the basis of “metric-driven” data than on the actual needs of particular people and communities. “By itself the market cannot guarantee integral human development.” Advancements in technology, Francis continues, are frequently made “without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings.” While sometimes this is driven by blatant greed and the desire to maximize profits, even those with good intentions end up doing a disservice to people, as their impersonal abstract logic is incapable of recognizing and responding to real needs.
This overemphasis on top-down reform leaves little space for bottom-up changes, and an overemphasis on expertise leaves little room for the wisdom born from proximity to people and problems. That such structures of power seem to operate—as Pier Paolo Pasolini put it—“without a face” serves to further rob the people of avenues to make their voices heard and to have a direct impact on their own community, thus weakening personal agency.
Papal warnings about over-centralization shed light on the trajectory of the politics of Newark, New Jersey—something which I’ve researched and reported on extensively, in part because of my paternal grandfather’s involvement in it and also because I’ve spent 8 years working (2 of which I spent living) in the city. This essay aims to map out Newark’s shift from a city which balanced “external” interventions with numerous avenues of localized direct action, to one dominated by distant forces and where local agency continues to erode.
Community Development Corporations: The Both/And Option
For decades Newark, like most other cities in New Jersey, was dominated by “machine politics.” While they were written off for their corruption (nepotistic offering of “favors,” ties to mob money, embezzling tax-payers’ dollars), the reality is that political machines often got the job done—they delivered results that concretely benefitted community members better than more impersonal, albeit less corrupt, bureaucratic systems. There’s something to be said about the extent to which these “messier” personalistic, communitarian political machines were informed by the decidedly non-Anglo (Italian and Irish, and later black and Latino) cultural, moral, and metaphysical sensibilities of New Jersey’s political leaders and residents. It’s also worth looking at how political machines were formed in response to “the system’s” failure to deliver for immigrants and ethnics, who the WASP establishment looked down upon as second-class citizens.
The corruption of political machines was often fueled by the corruption within labor unions, which after the Great Migration of blacks from the American south had developed a reputation for racism. Run primarily by the city’s Italians and Irish, racism in the unions was distinct from the “ideological” racism of white supremacist Anglos: it was more a by-product of their tribalistic impulse to “defend their own” amid political and economic precarity. Blacks were often pushed out of the unions not so much because of a deep-seated belief that blacks were categorically inferior people, but because job openings were limited, and if you were going to give a job to someone, then you’d rather give it to one of your own people.
The situation became even more challenging when production was outsourced to other countries, leading to the loss of factory jobs. Eventually, this devolved into blatant discrimination that, compounded with white flight and redlining, made the situation for blacks in Newark unsustainable. This is why many argue that the riot (or “rebellion”) of 1967 was inevitable, if not also justifiable and worth celebrating.
Despite the corruption of political machines and the unions, they were in the least veritable avenues for direct action. Even in the wake of the riots, white flight, and the erosion of the white-dominated political machines, new avenues for direct action opened up. Take the Committee for a Unified Newark led by Amiri Baraka, whose black nationalist philosophy aimed to celebrate black culture and foster both black self-reliance and mutual support within the black community. This took the shape of art showings, education in black history, and social initiatives like communal housing, schools and childcare facilities, and food distribution.
In the end, Baraka’s isolationist refusal to collaborate with whites and to rely on state support, and his generally antagonistic ethos, made his movement unsustainable. Yet for a period of time, it functioned to effectively recover and mobilize the agency of the city’s black residents, and it went on to inspire his son to develop a more measured and pragmatic form of pro-black left populism.
But perhaps the greatest example of the balancing act between state support and local agency were the city’s community development corporations (CDCs). In the 1970s, several CDCs cropped up in Newark in response to the need for employment, commercial growth, and, above all, affordable housing.
In her 2016 book The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960-1990, historian Julia Rabig highlights how the founders of CDCs were wary of both the radicals who were suspicious of all external support and the government reform programs which supplanted all local initiatives and overlooked the input (and real needs) of the city’s residents—as well as the growing neoconservative push for total self-reliance and withdrawal of government funding for social programs.
The founders of the CDCs “mixed two goals: they sought self-determination of communities marginalized by poverty and lack of political power while they also pursued the related strategy of meeting immediate needs by doing for neglected or exploited communities what the state and the market would not. This parallelism,” Rabig continues, “reflected a deep-seated self-help ethos, but in the context of civil rights and antipoverty reforms, it was also a challenge to the state to guarantee full citizenship and economic rights.”
They understood the need to start from the bottom up because the residents knew their neighbors’ needs best and thus should be the ones spearheading social programs, rather than external “experts” who falsely claimed to know what was best for them. “They underscore[d] the entrepreneurial vein that ran through many organizing strategies, as activists sought to meet black communities’ immediate needs,” and were “preoccupied with cultural authenticity . . . rooted in a belief in neighborhood self-determination.” Furthermore, CDCs “helped to institutionalize the expectation that ordinary residents were entitled to collectively alter urban redevelopment.”
Yet Newark’s CDCs “did not uniformly condemn the federal government. Indeed, their experiences fighting against discrimination and for antipoverty measures had proven that federal power could be crucial in overcoming or circumventing intractable municipal opposition.” They were hardly naive about the fact that in order to enact sustainable reforms, there was a need for adequate funding—thus their openness to cooperating with external entities and the federal government in their efforts: “These organizations recognized the limitations of the local even if they could not transcend them, and they did not purport to carry out their aims in a vacuum of oppositional purity.” Thus, they also looked to “secure the capital to sustain their protest—and their independence—over the long run.”
During the early rise of neoliberal economic policy, which opened the door to decision making by technocratic “experts,” the CDCs called instead for “a collective, critical engagement with expertise.” Indeed, they “sought new methods for engaging ordinary residents in issues of planning and municipal politics that were typically reserved for experts and to institutionalize a space for counterexpertise.” Yet as neoliberalism became entrenched as the normative paradigm under the Reagan administration, it became difficult for the CDCs to sustain their balancing act.
Under neoliberal logic, “officials sought to solve their revenue problems by remaking central-city Newark for corporate and white-collar interests rather than for the people who already lived there.” And while some Newarkers “continued to build and manage housing . . . few sustained businesses on a scale that permitted self-sufficiency and significant local employment. Many abandoned self-determination and instead contracted with government agencies to provide social services.” Under this shift, it became more difficult for everyday residents to exercise their agency to have a say over what goes on in their own communities.
Furthermore, the nuanced balancing act between local agency and external support became less tenable on an ideological level thanks to the right’s co-opting of localism to push for reductions of federal aid on the one hand, and the left’s co-opting of progressive reform to push for more centralized power under the guise of counteracting the right’s cutting of federal aid on the other. Neither faction valued the both/and of local self-determination and external support—but even if they did, they wouldn’t have been able to pull it off: only someone with local “expertise” would know how to pull this off.
The possibility of a balancing act was further dissolved by the Clintonian neoliberal consensus, where the Democratic party jumped on board with the right’s endorsement of metric-driven, market-minded logic fueled by technocratic experts who could produce better, more efficient outcomes. Under this model, even “progressive” reforms manage to be dominated by corporate interests—despite using language about empowering the underprivileged—and fueled by the presumption that progress is driven more by “success” than by local agency.
Within this neoliberal structure, decision-making is always top-down, and never from the bottom-up. The underlying assumption is that the bottom lacks the expertise to get the job done, and thus to afford them too much agency would be inefficient and would not end up benefitting them in the end. But can the “top”—with their reliance on metrics and blind obedience to the “objectivity” of the market—really claim to know what’s best for people at the bottom?
Booker’s Technocratic Sledgehammer
The last vestiges of local control within Newark were met with a major blow upon the election of Cory Booker as mayor. Despite his community-centered rhetoric and (mostly fabricated) stories demonstrating how he was “down” with the locals, Booker ushered in a new level of expert-outsider control, at the cost of silencing and disempowering residents. This effort was fueled in part by his alliance with Silicon Valley moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Republicans like Governor Chris Christie, who all agreed that experts could be tapped to “clean up” urban blight and empower Newark’s residents—that is, to make them more “efficient” contributors to society.
Nowhere was this more prominent than in the battle over the city’s public schools. For decades, the schools were in disarray. The majority of students were far behind the benchmarks for their grade. Teachers were deprived of resources to help students learn and to overcome behavioral issues that stemmed from the psychological trauma born of growing up surrounded by poverty and violence. The district was haunted by the city’s legacy of machine politicking: employees were hired based on their relationships with people in power rather than by their qualifications, and reform was further stunted by the stubbornness of the teachers’ unions. Taking the advice of Mark Zuckerberg, Booker turned to experts on education reform who insisted that charter schools were the only way to work around the unions and bring in qualified professionals and to implement effective educational models. Booker managed to get Governor Christie’s support in his effort to solicit funds from Silicon Valley executives to usher in a wave of charter schools.
Of course, the public school teachers, administrations, and union representatives understood that reform was needed—and that students would suffer should they continue in their old corrupt and ineffective ways. While many Newark educators agreed that there was a dire need for reforms, they insisted that reforms needed to engage the expertise of educators who had been on the ground—in the classroom as teachers and as students in the past.
According to Dale Rusakoff, whose book The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools covers Booker’s school reforms, the unions agreed that the district “urgently needed a systemic overhaul. But as teachers, they knew that transforming education would require far more than strict accountability, performance incentives, and heightened emphasis on data. They were intimately familiar,” she continues, “with the challenges Newark children brought to the classroom, and they knew of no model for addressing them other than child by child, teacher by teacher, school by school, from the bottom up.”
The concern was that big plans from the top, without engaging the community members and taking their concerns seriously, would bring more harm than good. In the words of Newark-based Baptist minister Rev. William Howard, “no abiding change in human communities can be imposed.” Indeed, Newarkers were extremely wary of “outsiders” coming in to “fix” their city—especially white outsiders. The wounds fueling what Councilman Ronald Rice Jr. called Newark’s “extreme xenophobia” ran deep, stretching back to the early days of “urban renewal.”
When he announced he’d be tapping Zuckerberg’s support and bringing in educational experts to implement reforms, Mayor Booker promised to engage Newark’s teachers and parents “every step of the way.” Yet as decisions kept being made without their input, they started to feel that this was an empty promise. They felt “insulted” and “disrespected” that neither he, Christie, nor Zuckerberg ever appeared at school board meetings. They were made to feel voiceless and powerless, as “those who did have power . . . were [never] there.”
Booker frequently consoled the city’s residents, telling them that he valued the community’s input, and he often took to Twitter to post pictures of himself being “present” in the community—saving a cat from a burning house, talking to waitresses at IHOP, shoveling a neighbor’s snow. Yet these performances of communal solidarity—like his promises to value the community’s input in school reform—were hollow, winning him the label “the virtual one,” from Amiri Baraka. It soon became clear that Booker’s skipping out on community meetings to fly to California for meetings with Silicon Valley execs indicated he was more concerned about advancing his career than responding to the city’s real needs—which he couldn’t have even articulated had he tried, given his lack of presence there.
Indeed, some residents began longing for the days of Mayor Sharpe James, who despite his corruption charges, seemed to actually care about the city, and in the least, to know what was going on in it. Under Booker, residents felt like life in the city was becoming something of a reality show—a platform to further propel Booker’s career. The release of the reality series Brick City and the documentary Waiting for Superman only served to cement their fears that Booker was more interested in the narrative of Newark that fit his reality show than the reality on the ground.
Of course, the reality is that Newark was in desperate need of external funds and expertise in order to reform the schools. Given the damage done by Newark’s past machine politics and the stubbornness of the unions, the system could not be changed purely from the bottom up. But as much as subsidiarity would call for the need to bring in external support, as the residents tried time and time again to insist, said support had to respect and take into account the wisdom of those who have been on the ground. No amount of expertise or money can replace the wisdom born of experience, of proximity to a people and their needs, to their weaknesses and strengths, to their hopes and desires.
Surely, the efficiency of technocratic experts should be welcomed—within limits—for the good it can do. Yet we ought not forget that like all man-made machines, even the most efficient structures are prone to corruption and will break at some point. Indeed, technocratic power banks on a measured deceptiveness: the promise of efficiency and data-driven results often serves as a mask for the inevitable corruption it engenders.
This was made clear in Newark, where some of the reforms indeed did good for the schools. But the cost of the heavy-handed manner in which they were implemented was intolerable for residents, who were made to feel like their needs and voices didn’t matter. In 2013, seventy-seven pastors signed an open letter to Governor Christie “calling for a moratorium on One Newark, citing ‘venomous’ public anger and ‘an overwhelming sense of frustration, community disenfranchisement and alienation.’” Indeed, they felt so powerless, so robbed of any avenue to do anything about the top-down reforms Booker was implementing, that they resorted to screaming at school board meetings.
This desire to regain local control fueled Ras Baraka’s mayoral campaign in 2014. His platform promised to “‘take back Newark’ from the control of outsiders,” and he made his slogan “When I become mayor, we become mayor.” Newarkers, he insisted, had to reform their own schools, finding “good-willed and fair-minded people to help us, not hedge fund groups and special interests.” Baraka turned the Booker-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson “into a stand-in for all outsiders—a universal ‘they.’. . .‘They want to close our schools. Their idea of fixing Newark is getting rid of you! . . . We have to look the devil in his face and say, ‘Not only are you wrong. We don’t want you here!’”
Even Shavar Jeffries, who ran against Baraka in 2014 and was more supportive of school reforms, “conceded that ‘education reform comes across as colonial to people who’ve been here for decades. It’s very missionary, imposed, done to people rather than in cooperation with people.’”
It’s worth noting the extent to which Baraka’s father informed his “common-sense” progressive populism with a localist-communitarian bent. His understanding of the importance of empowering everyday citizens and cultivating their roots in the city is indebted to his father’s black nationalism—whose strengths he borrowed and short-sightedness he learned from.
His victory speech after getting elected boldly proclaimed that “we are the mayor”: “Today we told them that the people of Newark are not for sale! That people outweigh money in a democracy! That Broad Street should be more important than Wall Street!”
His commitment to protecting local control has spared his progressivism from getting co-opted by technocratic liberalism (like Booker) or overly centralized forms of democratic socialism (like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Mamdani)—both of which have a track record of eroding local power. His attempt to prudently combine local control with external support harkens to the wisdom of the old CDCs.
Even after his time as mayor, Booker has continued preaching the gospel of technocratic solutions to Newark’s problems. During the COVID pandemic, Senator Booker zoomed into my class full of mainly black American, African-American, and Latino high schoolers. He insisted that the solution to inner-city poverty was more STEM education so black kids could get into elite colleges and obtain high-paying jobs. I wondered how that would help to rebuild black families, neighborhoods, businesses, churches, and community organizations for those who were not lucky enough to “make it” and thus had to stay behind. I guess they can always just wait for the charity of their neighbors who were lucky enough to make it somewhere else.
Reading Rerum Novarum in Newark, From the Ground Up
Though most of my students were apathetic when it came to politics, a handful of them were inspired by the summer of George Floyd to get politically active. Indeed, their neighborhoods were plagued with plenty of issues that needed to be addressed—and race played a very real role in many of them. Yet the nature of political discourse had been rendered so sensational—and so abstract—by social media that their vision of social justice mainly amounted to symbolic activism: posting black squares on Instagram, attempting to propagate stricter speech codes, and trying to cancel teachers and classmates for their microaggressions.
Needless to say, this is radically different from what fighting racism in Newark meant fifty years ago, when people addressed racism as it manifested not in “symbolic language,” but in extremely concrete ways and turned to organizations led by people in their own neighborhoods rather than influencers who may or may not even be real people. Furthermore, I was astounded by the amount of power internet personalities had over the narratives the students were being told. They had the power to convince them that their teacher who made an off-color joke was a white supremacist.
Given their local and national context, it’s not surprising that few of them thought to start from the bottom up, to look for avenues where they can directly respond to specific issues and make changes that would concretely—and not just symbolically—make their lives better. Compounding the problem, the students’ connection to the history of grassroots activism in Newark was practically non-existent, as few participated in church, neighborhood, or community organizations, or even spoke much to their older relatives.
After reading Rerum Novarum with them in class, I was amazed by how it radically shifted the nature of our class discussions. The insistence on starting from the most basic (experiential) level possible made our discussions about social justice much more fruitful. I was shocked when a conventionally “woke” student who constantly cited TikTokers in class shared with me that Rerum Novarum made her realize that she needs to spend more time working on the problems in her home (with her family members) before going out to “change the world” because that’s where she could have the “greatest impact” right now. Other students started looking up their local councilmen and councilwomen and wrote letters to them regarding particular issues in their neighborhood and made an effort to talk to their neighbors about them as well.
While the behemoth of technocratic power continues to mow down local agency, the papacy of Leo XIV reminds us to hold out hope and to look for ways to keep subsidiarity alive.
Image Credit: Albert Bierstadt, “The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak” (1863)
