Party Poopers

On August 26, 1664, four English warships dropped anchor off the southern coast of Brooklyn, armed with the firepower to level the colony Peter Stuyvesant had labored seventeen years to build up. Despite being massively outgunned, the Dutch director general was defiant, tearing up the letters sent by the British inviting him to surrender peacefully. Stuyvesant was ready to go down in flames and take all of New Amsterdam with him. 

Fortunately, even back then people in this neck of the woods weren’t shy about speaking up. Ninety-three prominent citizens, including Stuyvesant’s own son, presented their leader with a petition, requesting that he capitulate. Deserted by the public, Stuyvesant had little choice but to listen and shortly thereafter ceded control of the colony to the English without so much as a single shot fired. 

As the heirs to that great city in the making, which the following month, on Oct. 20, would be renamed New York, we should all be grateful to Stuyvesant for coming to his senses. Far too often politicians conflate their own interests with those of their constituents. 

Take the Democratic minority in the state Senate. For more than 15 months, hostilities have seethed between Jeff Klein’s Independent Democratic Conference and Andrea Stewart-Cousins’ herd of regulars—and they have only grown more heated with the recent defection of Sen. Tony Avella to the IDC. 

Earlier this month former state attorney general Oliver Koppell fired off a statement that encapsulates the minority’s mentality, accusing the IDC of “apparently declar[ing] war on Democrats across the state” by threatening Stewart-Cousins and Co. with primary challenges, even though Koppell is actively contemplating launching just such a challenge against Klein with the minority leadership’s blessing. 

Koppell’s rhetoric asserts, in essence, that the 24 members of the minority conference (not counting Malcolm Smith and John Sampson, who are in the wilderness) are the only real Democrats in the Senate. Sen. Martin Dilan has made this argument explicitly by seeking to banish the IDC’s five members from the party. This logic is an insult to the millions of Democrats across New York whose beliefs span the spectrum from liberal to conservative and fill in every niche in between. The party does not belong to its leadership, but to its members, and yet time and again those in office act if the inverse were so. 

The Democrats in the Senate minority are no truer Democrats than those in the IDC. Just because the members of the IDC have determined that it is in the best interest of their constituents (and themselves) to share power with the Republicans, does not make them any less principled or worthy of carrying their party’s standard. Let us not forget that only five years ago the lofty-minded Senate Democrats—most of whom are still in office—voted to embrace as their leader Pedro Espada, a felon currently behind bars, so that they could regain their precious majority with Sampson, who could soon follow Espada to the slammer, as their conference chairman. What audacity the regular Democrats have to declare their moral superiority with a recent track record such as theirs! 

If the foremost aim of the Democrats in the minority is really to pass their progressive agenda—as so often they have insisted is the case—they should welcome the IDC back into the fold, accept Klein as their leader and achieve their objective. To do so would require swallowing their pride and giving up power, but as the people of New Amsterdam told Stuyvesant, “It’s not about you, it’s about us.”