When I was a young pup, NYC was a dangerous shit-hole. The 70’s were pretty rotten all over thanks to the Left, but NYC was the epicenter of crap in America. The ghettos were ferociously violent. Drugs were rampant. Crime in general was a huge problem, even amongst the cops. In the early 70’s some radicals were still blowing stuff up. Ed Koch was mayor and his main attribute was explaining away the dysfunction of city government. He lasted into the 80′ basically on the claim he prevented the city from going bankrupt. He gave way to David Dinkins, who was a complete boob and failure. By the end of his time in office, New York City had suffered at least thirty years of corrupt and insipid left-wing mayors.

Giuliani came in after Dinkins and started to clean up the city. He cleaned up the petty crime and rounded up the gangsters. He cleaned up and professionalized the police force using modern techniques like noticing that most crimes are committed by young black males. The boom in financials certainly made it easier as it gave him a viable tax base. Unlike his lefty predecessors, he did not look at Wall Street as a crime or merely a source of money, he embraced the new financial class by embracing gentrification of the city’s neighborhoods. Bloomberg, nutty as he is, carried on the polices for another decade. Today, a middle class person can live in places like Harlem and Queens. Within my lifetime those areas were killing zones. That’s amazing turnaround for a population that had embraced lunacy to such a degree.

Now, here we are with a foaming at the mouth lunatic as mayor. Bill de Blasio is from the New Left. He was born too late to be a part of that world in its bombing years, but he was nonetheless educated by them after they moved into the universities. He defended Daniel Ortega in the 80’s and he still thinks Castro got it right. Despite the multi-decade experiment in progressive madness that nearly destroyed New York City, de Blasio is convinced this time it will be different.

“We recognize a city government’s first duties: to keep our neighborhoods safe; to keep our streets clean; to ensure that those who live here – and those who visit – can get where they need to go in all five boroughs. But we know that our mission reaches deeper. We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love. And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York. And that same progressive impulse has written our city’s history. It’s in our DNA.”

He’s right about the DNA part. True believers like de Blasio are born to join a cult. In another age, he may have been a Jesuit or a member of a heretical sect of Christians. In the 1930’s, he would have either joined the Nazis, fascists or Marxists, depending upon his location. That’s why democracy always fails. These nuts are always with us and they will never quit. They keep working the system until they can impose their brand of lunacy on the rest of us. The fact that everything he advocates has been tried and failed horribly will not deter him or his supporters. They are always armed with the phrase, “this time it will be different.”

John Adams and his coevals dismissed democracy out of hand as the surest path to national suicide. They were smart men who were not part of a religious cult. They were mostly skeptics, at least by the standards of their day. They knew the lower classes would always vote themselves a raise from their neighbor’s wallet. They knew the excessively religious would try to vote in their kind. Our last two presidents are examples of both. In the case of New York, the rabble has decided to sign on with the lunatics to attack the rich, who will leave if the attack is successful. And so it goes…