By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I have some family remembers who remain steadfast members of the Democratic Party, though if you met them the last word you would use to describe them would be “left-wing.” They are what you might call “Kennedy Democrats,” Irish Catholics and union members who still see the Democratic Party as the party of the “little guy,” the party that helped our family members get on their feet when they arrived in New York from Ireland in the early years of the 20th century.
Even so, my relatives agree that liberal Democratic Mayor David Dinkins was a disaster, and that Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani rescued New York City from very dark days in the mid-1990s. Because of that, I was curious what they would say when Bill de Blasio became mayor in January of 2014. De Blasio is a man of the left on both economic and social issues. That he traveled to Nicaragua in 1988 to bring economic aid to the Sandinista regime, and honeymooned in Castro’s Cuba in 1991, speaks volumes about the man.
When I asked my Democrat family members whether they thought there was any likelihood that de Blasio would undo the reforms instituted by Giuliani that resulted in the remarkable resurgence in New York City, they were confident he would not; that Giuliani’s stress on law and order was common sense, and that no Democrat would reverse Giuliani’s stress on law and order for fear of going back to the mess of the Dinkins’ years.
What did that mess look like? I can remember it well. It looked as if the city would never recover; that what happened to Detroit was about to happen to the Big Apple. It was the era of the “squeegee men,” aggressive panhandlers with grimy buckets of water who would set upon cars entering Manhattan. They would splash rags across your windshield and shove their hands at you demanding payment. Most people would hand them a dollar or two to avoid any physical confrontation. Such confrontations were not infrequent. New Yorkers were told by the Dinkins administration that there was “nothing that could be done,” that they had “a right to solicit business.”
It was a time when homeless people were all over the city, sprawling on church and library steps, in the passageways at Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station. If you stopped in the men’s room at Grand Central, there were always a few homeless men with their shirts off, sponge bathing in the sinks. Cars parked on the city’s streets routinely displayed “No Radio” signs, in an attempt to prevent young men from bashing in the car’s windows to steal the car’s radio. It happened so often that auto parts stores displayed the signs prominently.
I knew several colleagues at the high school where I taught at the time who would carry five or ten dollars in loose bills in one pocket to give to the muggers they feared they might encounter when they went to Broadway shows or night courses at Columbia University. Their hope was that the muggers would be satisfied and not go after the larger amount of money they carried in the other pocket.
They were not being alarmist or paranoid. The newspapers regularly carried stories about the bands of young men who roamed the city looking for soft targets to shake down. The press called it “wilding.”
Graffiti filled the city, on the sides of stately and architecturally impressive hospitals, bridges, and libraries, as well as on every subway car in sight. It was so commonplace that some of the city’s “edgy” artists tried to convince us it was a form of artistic expression that we should welcome; “urban chic” was the term they used.
It wasn’t just the appearance of the city’s subways that had degenerated. Young men would routinely leap over the turnstiles, as if only losers paid to use the trains. Panhandlers roamed up and down the cars during rush hour with extended paper cups looking for “some help.” If they didn’t get it, they were not reluctant to express their displeasure.
A woman colleague of mine at the time, an outspoken liberal and devotee of The New York Times and National Public Radio, relayed to me her experience on the subway while on her way to meet her husband at a Manhattan restaurant.
A young black man turned toward her as he was leaving the train and spat a mouthful of orange soda across the front of her white topcoat. “If I had a gun, I would have shot him,” she told me with an angry scowl. “Not really,” she quickly added, to preserve her liberal bona fides. But I wasn’t sure. It was that New York City that my Democratic relatives were confident no mayor would permit to return.
They were wrong. The newspapers in New York City are filled these days with stories about the return of the homeless in the city’s public spaces, of panhandlers and graffiti on the rise, of vagrants urinating and defecating on the city’s streets and bathing in the city’s outdoor fountains, of numerous shootings taking place in residential areas of the city. There were 22 such shootings in the first weekend of August alone.
You don’t have to take my word for how bad things have become. Consider the following from Myron Magnet in The City Journal on July 27:
“Take a walk around the Grand Hyatt and neighboring Grand Central Terminal these days. It’s often like stepping out of H.G. Wells’ time machine straight back into the 1970s or 1980s. Vanderbilt Avenue, in particular, is becoming once again the urinal of the universe, with one block wall-to-wall ‘bum stands,’ as my son, with childhood inventiveness, used to call them: the stolen supermarket shopping cart, the garbage bag full of scavenged cans and bottles for redemption, the prone figure wrapped mummy-like in a filthy blanket.
“The heart sinks. It took so much effort by so many people to clear up the human wreckage that so many years of liberal ‘compassion’ had created in a dying New York.”
Magnet sees it all thrown away now, by a mayor beset by “personal demons” that have left him “stuck in the politics of the 1950s and 1960s….It is so hard to build; so easy to destroy.”
De Blasio has to know what people are saying about what is happening on his watch. Why then does he permit it? He is a man of the counterculture left. It ties his hands. To go back to the Giuliani crackdown on crime and antisocial behavior would require that he renounce the mixture of behaviorism and Marxist economic determinism that shapes the core beliefs of everyone on the hard left. It would be like asking a devout Catholic to deny the Resurrection.
In de Blasio’s world the individual is not to blame for crime and antisocial behavior. It is society’s fault. Racism, poverty, and discrimination are responsible for the homelessness and street crime. The criminal is a victim. It is an ethnocentric presumption to impose middle-class values about behavior and respect for public property on disadvantaged youth.
De Blasio has heard such talk in every social science course and social gathering he has attended since he was a teenager. The bottom line: He doesn’t think of himself as a man who was elected to perpetuate the legacy of Rudolph Giuliani, but to undo it. Q.E.D.
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