Libertarian Rhapsody

It's so hard to teach New Yorkers," says columnist John Tierney of The New York Times, lowering his binoculars and shaking his head. "I try twice a week, and it never works." It's morning in Manhattan's Riverside Park, and Tierney and I are standing near 89th Street, spying on dog walkers on the promenade below us and counting how many leash their pets upon leaving the enclosed dog run, as city law requires. We're in the data-collection stage of a mock scientific experiment conducted for Tierney's twice-weekly column "The Big City." Here is the protocol:

Step 1: Tierney and I spend 15 minutes tabulating the ratio of unleashed to leashed dogs (3:1).

Step 2: Tierney hands out $20 bills to law-abiding dog walkers and, as they gape, provides flyers that read:

Big City
Civility Award

You are hereby awarded the sum of
Twenty Dollars ($ 20.00)
for engaging in civil behavior in a public place.

Thank you for keeping your dog leashed.

Tierney's objective is to test the libertarian hypothesis that civic virtue can be promoted through financial incentives. To limit sample bias, the dog walkers aren't informed that their "awards" will be billed to a New York Times expense account.

Since the 1994 launch of "The Big City" in the New York Times Magazine (it now runs Tuesdays and Fridays in the Metro Section), Tierney has, among other things, dressed up in a ski mask with a fake bag of loot and tried to hail cabs outside banks (he went five for five); advocated stealth egg-throwing to punish urban boors for noisy car alarms ("Have you enforced a norm today?"); and escaped from a stopped subway car and jogged along the tracks back to the station, arguably risking his life.

Tierney's best friend and fellow conservative gadfly, Forbes FYI editor Christopher Buckley, calls Tierney "a bit of a merry prankster" but concedes that even his pranks have a political point. When out-of-town liberals like Rosie O'Donnell and Hillary Clinton were attacking Mayor Rudy Giuliani for clearing the homeless off the streets, Tierney dressed up as a bum and slouched on the sidewalk outside O'Donnell's Westchester County mansion. A cop promptly forced him to move on. In feature articles for the Times Magazine, Tierney has also savaged rent control and enraged environmentalists with a 1996 cover story titled "Recycling Is Garbage" (see "Garbage In, Garbage Out" on page 30), which prompted a record number of letters and a book-length refutation by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Indignant responses to Tierney's articles often vastly exceed his original word count.

A major character in Tierney's prose is ... Tierney. In one strangely personal column, he imagined turning "Recycling Is Garbage" into a film script:

I once despaired of selling my life to the movies. My reporting had never saved a life, rescued a city or put me in mortal danger. An article against recycling had angered some environmental groups and provoked a lot of angry letters, and a carton of smelly garbage, but that didn't seem to be enough for a movie.

What is this man doing at the Times? In seven years of writing "The Big City," Tierney has built a reputation as a provocateur whose journalistic sallies tend to target New York City's liberal elite. Underneath the urbane, whimsical-prankster sensibility, however, is a fairly straightforward ideological mission. Despite its title, Tierney's column is not entirely a reporter's notebook of random musings about Gotham. It's closer to a series of briefs for laissez-faire. In his breezy attacks on rent control, his advocacy of school-voucher programs and workfare, and his conceit that norms can be bought, he sides again and again with the free market and personal initiative. As a libertarian, Tierney also celebrates what he calls New York's "tradition of being a sin city" and has gone after the mayor regularly for moralistic behavior, like clamping down on strip clubs and imposing smoking ordinances. This adds to the column's plumage and the sense that Tierney is a fun guy.

Tierney is also something of a science-and-technology wonk. His ideal of dynamic technological progress, an endlessly developed and redeveloped New York cityscape, recalls a futuristic scene from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series: the vast planet of Trantor, whose surface is covered by a single, sprawling metropolis. "The whole point of Manhattan is congestion," wrote Tierney in a column debunking what he refers to as New Yorkers' "Green Acres Syndrome."

Early in his career, Tierney covered science and energy for New Jersey's Bergen Record; in the 1980s, he freelanced for a wide range of magazines, including Discover and National Geographic Traveler. In "The Big City," this strain has shown itself both in his pseudo-anthropological commentaries on New York's dating and fashion scenes and in his repeated attacks on environmentalists. Tierney is frequently compared to the contrarian ABCNews correspondent John Stossel, a friend of his who's gone after the organic-food industry and Erin Brockovich. Both reporters have a legion of environmentalist enemies; Tierney's particular nemesis is NRDC senior scientist Allen Hershkowitz, who calls Tierney's famous article on garbage an "intellectually dishonest piece of advocacy."

Tierney's ability to blend ideological crusade and puckish provocation is an important factor in his rise at the Times. The paper nominated him for a Pulitzer last year, and there are murmurs of a promotion to the op-ed page. Along with featured nonliberals William Safire, Maureen Dowd (whom Tierney used to date), and Times Magazine contributor Andrew Sullivan, he's part of the conservative counterbalance to a paper whose moderate leaders view it, perhaps too charitably, as liberal.

But Tierney also has his detractors at the nation's paper of record. Noting that "Recycling Is Garbage" is viewed as "archetypal" at the Times Magazine--the Platonic form of contrarian, controversialist journalism--one former Times editor points out that Tierney's contrarianism fails when it becomes such a formula that its ostensible unpredictability is itself predictable. "If you ran a piece that said murder is good," says this editor, "you would also get a lot of letters."

The entire Tierney formula was on display in his recent Times Magazine piece on Hasbro's new handheld video game Pox. Tierney followed market researchers onto Chicago playgrounds looking for what marketers call "alpha pups"--the coolest kids in the school. These kids then got free games and a $30 payment, plus additional free games to give out to their friends. Pox includes a short-distance transmitter, allowing players to compete at a distance of up to 30 feet--say, by holding the devices under their desks in class. This promotional strategy of disseminating the games among third-grade opinion leaders is known as "viral marketing."

Tierney was delighted by it all. In his account of the campaign, Hasbro was the ally of nine-year-old boys having a fun time at the expense of grim school administrators trying to keep video games out of school. Where a conventional journalist might raise an eyebrow at the manipulativeness of the whole enterprise, Tierney's antic sympathies were with Hasbro and the kids. He found an expert to debunk the idea that video games cause violent behavior and he got in a nice dig at the concern that it's mainly boys who play these games. ("Both sexes were still ignoring grown-ups' advice to play together, and maybe they knew best... . While academics plotted to get boys and girls playing together on computers, the kids seemed to recognize all along that it was a lame idea.") Tierney wondered whether he'd want his own kid playing Pox at school but shrugged: "Well, it was probably no worse than shooting spitballs." So there it is: grown-ups as scolds, the market as liberator, all packaged as a cool story with the ideology deftly added in light touches.

It's hard to criticize the Times for pursuing ideological breadth, and Tierney is clearly a talented and inventive writer. In disarming columns ranging from epistolary parodies to a series of mock standardized-test questions, he seldom seems at a loss for unconventional ways of promoting his ideas. Reading Tierney, you often get a hearty dose of libertarianism without really noticing it. When it finally comes, the occasional screed catches you almost by surprise.

Modest Proposals

Tierney is a benign-looking man of midheight whose blue eyes and prominent cheekbones make him look a bit like a younger version of William F. Buckley. Over lunch at a pricey Manhattan eatery called City Hall, a place where the urinals are packed with ice cubes, Tierney is helpful, self-effacing, and funny. "He's a pleasant fellow, everybody will tell you that," observes the John Jay College historian Mike Wallace. "This doesn't preclude vigorous differences of opinion."

Wallace would know. The co-author of the massive New York City history Gotham, he was appalled by a particularly egregious Tierney column on the Triangle Shirtwaist fire (a piece prompted by a Ric Burns documentary on New York that featured Wallace as a commentator). Tierney conceded that the tragic fire was triggered by "unsafe conditions at one factory" but deplored the way the event has come to be considered the catalyst for historic occupational-safety regulations. While pooh-poohing subsequent OSHA-style reforms, Tierney called the turn-of-the-century garment industry a "dynamic economy" in which immigrant workers "could walk across the street to a competing company or a whole new industry."

Tierney's Triangle Shirtwaist column reads as a formulaic retrofitting of free-market thinking onto a particular historical event--and shows how Tierney the slick contrarian can lapse into Tierney the pamphleteer. For example, Tierney cited a 1908 study by the U.S. Immigration Commission that found the average salary for an immigrant garment worker to be 8 percent above average. This, Tierney argued, contradicted the fairy-tale "capitalists versus workers" story told by Burns in his documentary. But as Wallace pointed out in a rebuttal to Tierney's column (they later debated on public television), garment work was seasonal, sometimes lasting only half the year. So most immigrant garment workers ended up far below the poverty line. Contrary to Tierney's libertarian idyll, a century ago the Triangle workers couldn't easily move to "a whole new industry": As women, their main alternatives were domestic service, other grinding factory work, and prostitution. When women's opportunities and conditions finally did improve, it wasn't the work of the free market but of social movements and legislation.

Generally, though, Tierney's columns are more subtle. Sure, he's advocated the privatization of Central Park ("turnstiles at the gates will take some getting used to") and the secession of Manhattan--extreme versions, respectively, of free-marketeering and localism. But these were Swiftian modest-proposal pieces, written half in jest as a way of throwing out off-the-wall ideas to push people's buttons.

Independence [for Manhattan] would present a few logistical problems, of course, but we shouldn't be deterred. It's not worth staying in a bad marriage just to avoid the paperwork of divorce. We've been abused for so long that we have a hard time imagining life on our own, but all we need is a little confidence. All we need is a small first step--say, a trial separation from Staten Island, with joint custody over the ferry. And then, if we can make it without Staten Island... .

Up from Liberalism (to Mars)

Tierney's politics were once approximately those of the liberal Times editorial page. He was born into a large Irish Catholic family, the son of academics. The Tierneys moved a lot, from outside Chicago to Indiana to Minneapolis to South America and finally to Pittsburgh, with a year spent in Spain along the way. (Apparently there's a family gene for journalistic mischief: Tierney's brother Patrick recently authored the wildly controversial Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon.) Tierney was a liberal in his youth but says frustrating experiences trying to get a summer job in one of Pittsburgh's steel mills helped sour him on unions.

Tierney idealizes danger and exploration in his writings, often rather blithely. This interest has an ideological side: For libertarians who prize human industry and initiative, exploration can be a hallowed undertaking. In a 1999 cover story for the libertarian magazine Reason in which he advocated exploring Mars, Tierney wrote:

Mars gives libertarians a rare chance to be for something, to present a grand vision of freedom instead of merely trying to fend off the latest excesses of big government. Building the future is a splendid alternative to the drudgery of deregulating and privatizing the present.

Tierney casts his urban forays as mini-adventures, as expeditions. When he went around New York ticketing people for antisocial behaviors like littering--the confrontational flipside of his dog-walking experiment--it was almost as if Tierney was thrill seeking. "Wearing a black-and-white-striped referee's shirt and a badge identifying me as a Civil Referee," he wrote, "I took to the streets looking for incivility and hoping not to be killed." Presumably, a few close calls were welcome.

Contrarian Cornucopian

Tierney's enthusiasm for Martian exploration is of a piece with his sometimes gushy futurist techno-optimism, an outlook that dates at least to 1985. Tierney was preparing to go to Kenya to report on the population crisis for Science. He was getting sick of Malthusian doom scenarios of shortages and famine, so he called the late libertarian economist Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate Resource (a 1981 book on the potential of humanity). On population issues, Simon was an undying optimist who believed that Malthusians were guilty of Chicken Little-ism. When pressed, human ingenuity would find ways to feed as many mouths as necessary.

Tierney funneled Simon's futurism into his prose. In a much reprinted 1990 Times Magazine piece titled "Betting the Planet," Tierney described the wager between the "Cornucopian" Simon and The Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich ("the Malthusian") over whether a quantity of five metals--chrome, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten--would become more or less valuable over the course of a decade. (Ehrlich lost.) The article took a David-and-Goliath angle, depicting Simon as a daring underdog and Ehrlich as the established purveyor of conventional wisdom.

This particular way of shaping a story--centering it on the exploits of a "libertarian hero" figure--recurs in Tierney's writing. But how many times can David slay Goliath before becoming Goliath himself? Despite conservative intellectuals' pose of being lonely outsiders in a hostile liberal culture, the realities of power have shifted. The liberal New York Review of Books is still required reading in the Hamptons, but the Manhattan Institute has the inside track at City Hall. Over the course of his two mayoral terms, Rudy Giuliani has significantly shifted the political burden of proof onto those who advocate a stronger safety net and bigger city government. Yet the right still seems to get away with playing cultural underdog.

Some of Tierney's attempts to inject economic thinking into his journalism fall flat. In his piece on recycling, he wrote: "And what about the extra space occupied by that recycling receptacle in the kitchen? It must take up at least a square foot, which in New York costs at least $4 a week to rent. If the city had to pay for this space, the cost per ton of recyclables would be about $2,000."

Passages like this make me nervous as I sit in Tierney's Upper West Side apartment before we leave for Riverside Park. Holding the empty bottle of my finished Orange Mango Nantucket Nectar, I wonder: Should I just throw it out, out of respect for my host's libertarian dissent? Or should I wait to get outside and find the right disposal option?

When I finally ask what to do, Tierney shows me to a closet where, to my great surprise, a recycling bin is taking up its pricey square foot of space. I toss in my bottle, thinking dazedly: John Tierney recycles. John Tierney recycles. But, he explains, it's only because city law requires it. Tierney practices intellectual provocation, not civil disobedience.

Libertarian Rhapsody

When Tierney and I return to his apartment after the Riverside Park experiment, the building is a dark monolith of scaffolding. Tierney's landlord is adding extra stories. All new buildings in New York must be built with sprinkler systems; older buildings undergoing major renovations must have them put in. So Tierney, who opposed the sprinkler law to begin with, had to put up with installation. "As far as I know, the neo-boiler-room decor of our apartment makes me unique among the veterans of the sprinkler debate," he wrote in a column recounting his sprinkler ordeal. "I wasn't able to find any pro-sprinkler politicians or journalists who have personally experienced the joy of sprinkler installation."

Later, Tierney takes me on a sprinkler tour. It's midmorning, and the household is awake; Tierney's wife Dana and his two-year-old son Luke are sitting in the kitchen with his mother-in-law. When Tierney comes in, Luke demands that he take off his jacket, and so Tierney's left wearing corduroys, a shirt and tie, and his "Civil Referee" jersey.

While this is happening, I take in a few apartment motifs. In the bookcase, there's a plush hardcover copy of The Explorers, by Paolo Novaresio. On Tierney's desk sits a small wooden box with a picture on its lid of a galleon amid icebergs--a scene of the South Pole explorer Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance locked in an ice floe. It recalls Tierney's gloss on why we should colonize Mars: "It is in going to new places and forming new societies that you come up with great ideas."

Maybe it's just the ghost of Julian Simon talking, but I decide that this is Tierney's most winning trait. Tierney sees his own writing as a Shackletonian process of exploration; his best columns read as gleeful journeys of intellectual or comic discovery. They're fueled by a rhapsodic libertarian ideology, a faith in progress and human abilities that could be called naive--or far worse. But even this has its good side. As the former Reason editor Virginia Postrel observes, at least Tierney's not a cranky libertarian of the sort who's constantly griping about taxes and big government. It simply doesn't fit his temperament.

But buying into Tierney's professed nonpartisanship is a lot harder to do. So is sharing in the Times's rather contrived liberal enthusiasm for its conservative contrarian. Tierney comes off looking the best when you compare him to other self-styled underdog and "independent" journalists who are nastier and more conventionally conservative, like Fox News's Bill O'Reilly of The O'Reilly Factor. O'Reilly's columns run in the hysterically right-wing Washington Times; Tierney's in the hallowed New York Times. O'Reilly is an overbearing windbag; Tierney is soft-spoken and funny. Next to O'Reilly, Tierney comes off as flexible and independent-minded.

Then again, maybe Tierney's just much better at pulling off the aisle-crossing act. He professes to be guided only by evidence. "I've seen people who have turned out to be wrong, older experts who pursued something with the best of intentions. My hope is that that won't happen to me. That if I start seeing stuff where the real world contradicts my theory, then I'll be able to change."

So far, Tierney hasn't changed. When I ask him if he's an equal-opportunity debunker, he says, "I'd like to be." Then he brings things back to his pet issue: "I could write something about the good side of recycling. And there are some benefits." He pauses. "But everybody else writes that."

The Neocon Times

Last year the Times asked Tierney's pal Christopher Buckley to write the citation nominating Tierney for a Pulitzer Prize. When Buckley requested guidance, he received a note suggesting that he might point out that Tierney's column belied the paper's reputation as a purely liberal organ. "They were offering him as their credential for evenhandedness," suggests Buckley.

For the record, the Times insists that Tierney is not their token conservative. Tierney came up through the Times working originally as a reporter; it's not as if he were recruited on an affirmative-action policy. John Landman, Tierney's Metro editor, objects when I inquire whether Tierney might be there to provide balance: "Now, if you're asking me, am I proud that John Tierney's part of the Metro Section, you bet your ass I am. But not 'cause of his ideology. 'Cause of his skill."

Tierney's closest equivalent is not William Safire, who was indeed brought onto the op-ed page for ideological balance, but Maureen Dowd, another Irish Catholic writer with a fondness for mockery. "The snotty style is in these days," observes New York University communications professor Todd Gitlin of the pair. Another journalist-media critic, former New York Daily News columnist Jim Sleeper (author of Liberal Racism), describes Tierney and Dowd as "safety valves"--outlets for dissent from the Times's liberal values. Sleeper stakes out political terrain somewhere between the Times editorial page and Tierney, whose writings he admires. For more steadfast liberals, however, the conservative columnists at the Times are less safety valves than emblems of the paper's shift away from its historic liberalism.

All of which suggests how far both the Times and Tierney have come over the course of the Giuliani era. When Tierney started his column, the paper had just supported David Dinkins for mayor instead of Giuliani. "By having John write a column, it was at least a partial redress," says Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and former editor of the conservative Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Whatever the case, in 1993 and 1994 a confluence of factors catapulted conservative gadflies into power and influence in New York: Giuliani, the Manhattan Institute (whose ideas he relied on), Tierney at the Times. The spirit of the moment, appropriately enough, may be best captured in words spoken by Giuliani and quoted by Tierney in his 1995 Times Magazine profile of the mayor. "I absolutely love, and maybe I overdo this a little," Giuliani told Tierney, "to suggest something new and then watch the reaction to it. Sometimes I'm not even sure we should do it, but I love to watch the reaction from the so-called intellectuals."

In this quote, Tierney almost seems to be channeling his own journalistic doctrine through the mouth of the mayor. Tierney's supporters insist that his column will take on new relevance in the post-Giuliani era, when the city could swing partway back toward its liberal roots. Yet as the conservative impact lingers at the Times and New York's other power centers, the ascendance of Tierney's ideology may undermine his formula. His brand of contrarianism could seem less and less fresh--having become part of the conventional wisdom.