It came as no surprise to learn that Kamala Harris will skip this year’s Al Smith dinner, where presidential candidates have historically come together to exchange friendly barbs for the benefit of Catholic Charities. Harris has got far better things to do on October 17 (campaigning) and much better places to be than New York City. It’s not known whether Donald Trump will show for the dinner, though he will be at Madison Square Garden on October 27 for a fond-memories style tribute to the infamous American Nazi party rally of 1939.

Things aren’t good here in the Big Apple. Our indicted mayor refuses to step down amid federal investigations of bribery and corruption within his inner circle, a wave of resignations, and a few arrests. Eric Adams faces five counts of bribery, wire fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign donations. There is no official charge for the chaos and leadership vacuum he has created, but 69% of registered city voters want him to resign or be removed from office by Governor Kathy Hochul, a ribbon-cutter politician with neither vision nor moral backbone.

There is not much to say about Adams since any New York voter who spent 15 minutes reading up on the guy in 2021 would know that he is corrupt to the core and should not be in office, just like Trump. Few are surprised that this happened, but many are worried about how bad things can get.

Our city is historically plagued with low voter turnout in both city and state elections. It’s not the same nonvoting residents at fault at any given time. For half a century, both New York City’s population and its registered voters have grown, but voter turnout levels have been decreasing, especially in races for mayor and governor. At the time of the 2022 general election, the city had 4,723,497 eligible registered voters, but only 1,809,732—or 38.3%—showed up to vote.

The voices of optimism might argue that the city will always survive, just like it did during the Great Depression, the seventies “Drop Dead” budget crisis, the aftermath of 9/11, the Great Recession, and COVID. How could one ex-Brooklyn cop on the take bring down the whole shebang? The thing to remember is: it’s not this one guy who’s broken the system; it’s us who put him there by default by disavowing civic duty. They call New York one of the bluest cities in the country, but how do we know that when just 38% of those eligible bother to vote?

I can never get to the point of calling New York a failed city, since it’s been a mess for centuries. But I can see how New York’s failings mirror the moral rot going on at the national level. This is a city of incredible tolerance, insofar as market forces run the city and they love tolerance to death. New York welcomes every progressive special interest as long as you’re paying your way: it won’t pass judgment on you, but it also won’t do anything for you. With cutthroat competition the norm, there is nothing binding all these disjointed special interests. The City Council is only good at lobbying for certain communities in Brooklyn, East Harlem, and the Upper West Side and producing mayoral candidates with zero executive leadership capacity.

As the city greased by money and corruption, New York gave the world Donald Trump. In case you need a reminder, go see The Apprentice, the Gotham version of My Fair Lady, where Roy Cohn is the Henry Higgins to Trump’s Eliza Doolittle. It seems just like yesterday (it was actually 2019) that I mentioned here the documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn?, about the mob-land lawyer, society gadfly, and Trump mentor and legal fixer who saw the rampant corruption of 1950s Manhattan as his own Candyland.

It’s hard to be shocked by anything Trump does these days, but over the past two weeks I’ve been shocked at the open fascism he spews at his rallies. In many ways, the words of this wannabe dictator are worse than the rhetoric of the 1930s because Trump’s audience has no decency standard. Dog whistles aren’t needed; you can just say it straight.

The false bonhomie of the Al Smith dinner is absurd in the America of 2024. Its host, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, has repeatedly praised Trump and even offered the invocation at his inauguration. In September 2023, Dolan whined to the New York Post that President Biden was not taking his calls to offer advice on the migrant crisis while praising Eric Adams for “asking our help to advocate with the federal government, which has done hardly anything, [and] with the state government, which hasn’t done much.”

The dinner is named for four-term New York Governor Al Smith, a Democrat and the first Roman Catholic to be nominated for president by either party. At the time of Smith’s 1928 run, Catholics were broadly despised and reviled as dirty immigrants loyal to the pope in Rome—the very people a 1928 Trump would call “scum” and “garbage.”

In his essay “My Lost City,” F. Scott Fitzgerald describes returning to an impoverished Manhattan after the catastrophic 1929 crash wiped away all memory of a decade of free-flowing booze and stock speculation. He called his “awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe . . . the rash gift of Alfred W. Smith.”

As another crisis of apathy engulfs our city, we might want to learn from the city that Donald Trump recently slimed and the Harris-Walz campaign has embraced. More and more it looks like Detroit, unlike New York, has a real future. §