Voters should know what brought the city back from crisis. But they don’t.

Charlie Cooke writes,

In the case of New York City, I am baffled. Why? Well, because, in my experience, most of the important questions that arise in that place are pre-political. My reading of history shows that, if New York is to function properly, it needs a pragmatic, no-frills mayor who is obsessed with fighting crime, with ensuring that the city’s already high taxes do not become so absurd that the taxpayers leave, and with preventing the machinery of government from being derailed by special interests. When New York has one of those mayors — as it did in Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg — it works. When New York does not have one of those mayors — as was the case in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as has been the case (to a far lesser extent) since 2014 — it works less well. Politics is a complicated endeavor, and, in consequence, it does not exhibit too many genuine “iron rules.” But this is one of them: Serious person as mayor = success. Frivolous person as mayor = failure.

I understand what Charlie is driving at, but I must disagree with his premise. I don’t think New York voters — especially a critical mass of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s voters — actually do understand what made Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg successful. They don’t understand why the city turned to those men in the first place. They don’t understand — because they didn’t live it. That’s not an excuse. It’s an indictment of their ignorance. But it’s by far the most plausible explanation of Tuesday night’s results in the Democratic mayoral primary in America’s largest and most important city.

The New York Post reported that “New Yorkers under 40 years old accounted for a whopping 40% all early voting ballots cast” in this election.

The typical age for New Yorkers who cast ballots during the nine-day early voting period from June 14-22 was 43, the BOE data show.

First-time voters also jumped significantly, with 22,000 ballots cast from New Yorkers who are newly registered this year.

What’s more, most pre-election polling had younger voters backing Mamdani over Andrew Cuomo by something like a 2–1 margin.

A 40-year-old voter today would have been eight years old when Rudy Giuliani defeated David Dinkins in 1993. Such a voter would have personally experienced almost nothing of the exploding street crime and civic unrest of the ’70s and ’80s that made New York City a believable candidate for dystopian films such as Escape from New York (1981), Taxi Driver (1976), and The Panic in Needle Park (1971).

Voters under 40 grew up with the on-screen New York City of You’ve Got Mail, Sex and the City, and Elf.

What do 25-year-old New Yorkers remember? Relative peace and prosperity. Relatively low crime. Relatively safe streets.

The Mamdani-voting youngsters of the five boroughs don’t remember a bankrupt New York City under Mayor Abraham Beame, or the crisis in 1975 surrounding the events that led to the New York Daily News’ famous headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

Again, none of this should be seen as an excuse for the own-goal political choice that New Yorkers have now made. The residents of one of the world’s great cities should know a little bit about the history of the prolonged crisis that brought their city to penury, insolvency, and intense turmoil in the middle of the past century. They should also know a little bit about what brought it back from the very brink. But they don’t.

Of course, as Churchill told the House of Commons in 1948, “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”