In the 1970’s and into the 1980’s, New York City was a terrible place, mostly due to the Left throwing open the prisons. They also encouraged blacks to run wild, which they were more than happy to do without much encouragement. As a result, the ghettos were ferociously violent. Drugs were rampant. Crime in general was a huge problem, even among the cops. In the early 70’s some radicals were still blowing stuff up.
Ed Koch was mayor and he spent most of his time was explaining away the dysfunction of city government, claiming it was just the new normal. 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 failure. By the end of his time in office, New York City had suffered at least thirty years of corrupt and incompetent 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. He did not say it like that, obviously, but what he was doing was clear to everyone, even if they publicly said otherwise. Crime control is about race realism.
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 the enemy. 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 white person can live in places like Harlem and Queens, without getting mugged every day.
Now ehre we are, after all of that, with another left-wing wacko as mayor, promising to reverse all the polices that cleaned up the city. Bill de Blasio was born too late to be a part of radical stuff 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 mass movements like cults and extreme religious movement. That’s why democracy always fails. These typesare 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.”
The Founding generation dismissed democracy out of hand as the surest path to national suicide. They were smart men who had a realistic understanding of human nature. 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. They knew democracy was a terrible way to run a society, so they tried to build a system to prevent it. yet, here we are.
