What he does know is the rhetoric and praxis of left-wing socialism.
I have been living in New York City since the summer of 1977. I missed that year’s blackout, but I was here for the arrest of Son of Sam. I also saw Edward Koch’s first victory in a mayoral election. The one-time liberal Democrat-moving-right seemed like a breath of common sense, with a dash of sass. The city’s finances stabilized with outside control and a big federal loan. Ear buds muted boom boxes, poop-scoop laws turned dog latrines back into sidewalks again. Things looked like they were looking up.
It was not so. Koch talked a good game, but he never got a handle on crime. People who get their history from movies look back to Taxi Driver to capture the bad old days, but I look to two movies set in the subways, The Taking of the Pelham 123 and The Warriors.
In the first, a gang of masked criminals seizes a subway car and holds it and its passengers for ransom. There is claustrophobic drama below ground, set beneath a picture of general dysfunction above. At one point, a police car racing to deliver ransom money on deadline crashes into someone blithely shooting a bicycle across a police line. The flaw of the movie comes at the end when the criminal mastermind, worsted at last, tells us he is a former white mercenary who once fought in Rhodesia, and turned to hijacking subways for thrills and profit.
But little if any New York subway crime was committed by former white mercenaries who once fought in Rhodesia. The Warriors, for all its luridness, was more accurate as to causes. A gang of teens from Coney Island, wrongly accused of murdering an uber gangster in the Bronx, must fight their way home through a gauntlet of fellow hoodlums. The costumes the various gangs wore were preposterous — one that lived near Yankee Stadium wore pinstripes — but the sociology was accurate: New York subway crime was perpetrated by New York youths.
Subways, as it turned out, first saw the turnaround. There, under the leadership of top cop William Bratton, and the inspiration of academics George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, the techniques of broken windows policing were first practiced. (Cheerleader for the new protocol was City Journal, the publication of the Manhattan Institute, edited by NR veteran Richard Vigilante.) The theory was simple: clean up the little crimes, and you will clean up the big ones. Arresting fare beaters and panhandlers gave a sense of control. Ordinary commuters felt confident, crooks felt on the defensive. The petty crooks often turned out to be wanted for more serious crimes too.
The critics of good order criticized the test case: broken windows policing could not work in the wide-open world above ground. Rudy Giuliani, first elected in 1993, made Bratton his first police chief, and indeed it worked. After two terms of him came three terms of Michael Bloomberg. For almost 20 years, crime dropped steadily.
Both mayors were a bit crazy. Giuliani today has taken it to 11; back then he was maybe at 6 or 7. Michael Bloomberg had the arrogance of the self-made rich. When he came to one editorial dinner at WFB’s, he would listen to contradictions or queries for maybe 30 seconds, then say, “But let’s be serious.” Charming. New Yorkers had not elected him or Giuliani to be Mr. Congeniality, however, they wanted a safe, clean-enough city that worked, and they got it.
Bill de Blasio, the lazy arrogant leftist who succeeded Bloomberg, was just cunning enough to know he had to keep some lid on crime, so he brought Bratton back as police chief (Giuliani had canned him years before in an ego-feud). Bratton did his best, but lacked numbers and rock-solid backing. Would the city revert? Eric Adams, the former cop who followed two terms of de Blasio, has succeeded in lowering gang violence in Brooklyn. His and the city’s Achilles’ heel is our old friend, the subways. They have become the resorts of the homeless and the mad (generally the same people). My trainer, himself a former cop from the Bahamas, commutes between clients in three boroughs a day and is very familiar with life underground. One of his many anecdotes had him coming up an exit from one of his regular stops only to find it being used as the toilet of the couple who slept there. He backed down, warning a family of tourists to join him at the exit at the other end of the platform. “Imagine that,” he said of what they had missed. “Welcome to New York!”
The second act of the musical Hamilton opens with a foppish Thomas Jefferson singing, “What did I miss?” Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, likely next mayor, missed much of this history, as he was being raised in Uganda at the time. What he does know is the rhetoric and praxis of left-wing socialism. Socialism today is both a cultural and an economic project. He will junk the city’s registry of gang members. He will raise a billion dollars of taxes to fund a force of social workers to deal with criminals. (It won’t prevent any crimes, but it will give jobs to under-employed activists — socialism as cheese parings.) He will open city-owned grocery stores. They have failed in every other city that has tried them, but have they really been tried? Ambition and ideology plus ignorance and indifference is not a good equation.
Who else? Andrew Cuomo, who helped run his father Mario’s losing mayoral bid in long-ago 1977, can get things done — witness the Second Avenue Subway and the new Tappan Zee Bridge, accomplished under his governorship. He also, in the words of the late Bob McManus, killed grannies and pinched fannies. John Podhoretz says that Mayor Adams is stupid. I must be more stupid than John, because I thought Adams’s response to October 7 was a word fitly spoken, all the more powerful for its lack of polish. Adams has a party-dog streak, however, and a dodgy streak: President Trump allegedly offered to make him ambassador to Saudi Arabia to get him out of the race. He should have offered Turkey; Adams knows everyone there already. Curtis Sliwa is the doughty Republican. We have not learned apparently to vote for people with experience in running things. WFB was a media figure when he ran for mayor in 1965, but he expected, indeed intended, not to win. Yet Sliwa says he is for real.
I will consult the polls the day before the election and vote for the non-twelve-year-old who is closest to the front-runner. After that, enjoy the ride.