It was pushing midnight earlier this week when my phone rang. Luckily I was up late, watching the actual GOAT: Steph Curry. It was Michael Nutter on the caller ID. Along with former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, he and I have a blast hosting a regular podcast — How To Really Run a City — and he was calling about some scheduling issue.
But, not just that. I hadn’t detected this level of anguish in the Mayor’s voice since he was managing crises in City Hall. “Did you see that story, about the antisemitic bottle service sign in that Center City club?” He was referring to the one about the two Temple students who’d allegedly ordered a customizable letter board reading “Fuck The Jews” to accompany the serving of their bottle at Barstool Sports — which the waitstaff dutifully obliged. (Note to legacy media: You do nothing to slow the spread of hate by not printing it verbatim.)
Listen to the audio edition here:
“What the fuck is going on?” the Mayor said. “This shit can explode real fast. There’s some sickness spreading.”
I could hear the pain in his voice. I don’t think Nutter was reacting to just one isolated news story. Instead, it seems like incivility has become the order of our day. In addition to the Jew hate in the Center City bar, we’ve had a cop shot during a brawl outside Overbrook High; an assassination attempt on our Governor and his family; Temple students assaulted by a group of minors at Broad and Cecil B. Moore; a Main Line school board forum shut down for fear of “disruptive behavior;” and a former Delco fire chief alleged to have committed a racist attack.
Forget about disagreeing better. Seems like, lately, the default mode is to simply not see each other as fellow human beings who love and are loved. That’s the sickness Nutter seems to be intuiting.
“We need to bring that back, a sense of community pride, a sense of ownership, a sense of caring about each other. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.” — former Mayor Michael Nutter in 2007
One thing I’ve learned from spending so much time with him and Reed is that once a mayor, always a mayor. You spend eight years seeing every pothole, every uncivil interaction, every flurry of gunshots as an affront to you because it happens on your turf. That doesn’t end with your term in office. Behind every conversation I’ve ever had with former mayors is a shared predicate: This is still my city. Reed likes to say mayors are “damaged people” and I think I get what he means: They don’t just serve for eight years and move on to another J.O.B. They carry on a lifelong love affair with their cities. They can’t quit us.
That’s what I inferred from Nutter, late at night this week. Murder and poverty are down; we have a Mayor who may be the best public cheerleader since Ed Rendell. And yet … our civil society may be in grave jeopardy. Anger is the new order of the day, from the halls of power in D.C., trickling down to our city streets.
For days, I found myself mulling over our brief conversation. Perhaps the toughest job of a big city Mayor is to read and, ultimately, shape a city’s moral center. Unlike getting a policy right or a bill pushed through a city council, there’s no training ground for cajoling a citizenry into doing right. If Nutter was this concerned, Mayor Parker must be staring at the ceiling at night, right? After all, her communitarian mantra is perfect for these times: One City.
One City in action
But now the challenge is to turn a slogan into an impetus for change. Maybe it’s time, Mayor Parker, for a One City public rally?
Imagine a diverse lineup of speakers and musicians all challenging Philadelphians to recognize themselves in one another. A local version of JFK’s Ask Not, a reminder that there’s nothing rational about a city: Let’s take all these different folks, from vastly different backgrounds, and have them live basically on top of one another … What could go wrong? Diversity drives cities, but it also requires elected leaders to not only preach commonality, but reward it.
These last days, we haven’t heard much from the Mayor in this vein. In the aftermath of the Jew hate at Barstool Sports, it was Temple University President John Fry playing the role of moral-instructor-in-chief in the New York Times: “Antisemitism is abhorrent … and has no place at Temple,” he said, suspending the students. While the wisdom and legality of punishing students for off-campus offensive speech is a reasonable debate to have, Fry demonstrated a quality I wrote about a couple of weeks ago in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Governor Shapiro and his family: the power of moral clarity.
After the Overbrook High shooting, Parker spoke, but it was Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel who best extemporaneously channeled our emotions. “Today reminds us of our why,” he said. Watch his comments on the scene after his officers took down the 30-year-old suspect who had — incredulously — brought a gun to a fight between kids. Watch this and you tell me you’re not moved to thank the first cop you see for their service:
There is, in our history, ample evidence of how the mayoral voice can not only rally us to common cause but also lower the temperature on our streets. Nutter’s fiery reaction and imposition of a curfew when “flash mobs” of marauding teens terrorized city streets in 2011 was a substantive public safety response and a tough-minded example of moral suasion:
Even before then, Nutter endorsed the concept of a city’s oneness, often by castigating those who broke the social contract.
“When we were younger,” he said in 2007, “we didn’t need a law, we didn’t need a bill, we didn’t need a resolution, we didn’t need a government to tell us: Come outside and sweep your steps, wash down your sidewalk, and make your neighborhoods clean. We didn’t need anybody to tell us that because we cared. About where we lived, and who we were and what we were about. We need to bring that back, a sense of community pride, a sense of ownership, a sense of caring about each other. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.”
Perhaps the greatest example in recent history of a mayor putting reputational risk on the line in furtherance of the common good was when, amidst a brewing racial conflagration in Grays Ferry, Ed Rendell brought Minister Louis Farrakhan to Philly for a church service that successfully calmed troubled waters. It was 1997, and the impetus was an attack on a Black woman by seven White men and the murder of a White teen by two Black men during a robbery; the neighborhood was about to erupt in all-out violence. Jewish and Catholic groups denounced Rendell for sharing a platform with Farrakhan, but he said, “The real risk would be not to be willing to talk about our differences.”
Rendell took a pounding in the press and from religious groups, but his speech was a tour de force. He, a Jew, used his budding bromance with his African American Council President, John Street, as a metaphor for how dialogue and common purpose can save a city. Check it out:
Okay, now comes the trigger warning for you progressives: We’re about to praise a Republican mayor on this front. And not just any Republican mayor. Yes, Rudy Giuliani has become a Dr. Evil-like joke this last decade. But he was once a popular and successful mayor of New York City who, after winning reelection in 1997, declared war on blaring car alarms, littler and incivility. (“Be Polite Or Else” read a New York Times headline.)
“Does everybody remember Plato?” Giuliani asked in a post-election address to his Cabinet and staff. ”Plato developed the notion of the ideal. You never reached it. But in striving to get there, you kept making improvements in society. The ideal republic, the ideal state of honesty, the ideal state of integrity, the ideal state of cleanliness or safety … Let me talk about the one that may be in many ways the most metaphysical, esoteric, philosophical, whatever — that may be the most important of all: treating each other in a civil and decent way.” He went on to outline substantive policies: a training program for city workers in treating citizens nicely and with respect — his police force had a reputation for brutality — and a mandatory civics curriculum in public schools.
Now that you’re aghast at the mention of Giuliani, let’s look to a less off-putting Republican icon. I didn’t often agree with his policies, but Ronald Reagan always remained civil, with the crack of a smile even when under ferocious political attack. He prophetically concluded his presidency with a stirring call to double-down on America’s status as a nation of immigrants — a call to arms that is well worth listening to today. Just this week, his Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute’s Center on Civility and Democracy released a study that should give us a glimmer of hope: Seventy-two percent of Americans “desire to be a part of the solution in restoring civility to our country.”
But they’re waiting to be asked. And that is what a mayor can do. Cherelle Parker can follow the lead of transformative mayors like the late Harold Washington in Chicago, who sought to not only influence his times, but shape them as well. One City is the exact right phrase. Now, can Mayor Parker turn it into a challenge that calms, inspires and unites us, all at once?
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