This week in North Philly Notes, Tim Weaver, author of Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City, writes about New York City’s political development.
The 2024 presidential election delivered a profound shock to the American political system. One of the election’s most striking features was the surge of support for Donald Trump among voters in putatively liberal places, most stark in New York City where a red wave swept across the city’s working-class neighborhoods, not only in reliably Republican Staten Island, but also in parts of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and in Queens, where Trump was born and raised. Why did “reliably blue” New York, a putative liberal bastion, undergo such a decisively rightward shift?
To answer this question, one must look not only at the recent past—where rising vote shares for the GOP in presidential elections have been detectable since 2012—but more deeply into the city’s political history. My recent book, Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City, analyses the past 50 years to argue that the city’s political and economic development belies glib assumptions about its supposedly liberal character.
In the aftermath of the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis New York’s development was driven by a neoliberal order reflected in periodic imposition of austerity measures under the egis of an unelected Emergency Financial Control Board, which reduced the size and scope of city government. Furthermore, mayoral administrations, from those of Ed Koch to Michael Bloomberg—Democratic and Republican alike—embraced the ever-expanding use of tax incentives to boost commercial and residential real estate development in a bid to transform New York into what Mayor Bloomberg called a “luxury city.” It was government largess in the form of tax breaks that underwrote Trump’s meteoric rise in the 1980s. The net effect of the neoliberal economic policies has been widening income inequality, stagnating median wages, stubbornly high levels of poverty, and gentrification. Thus, far from hewing to the dictates of New Deal liberalism, after 1975 neoliberal economic policy was the order of the day.
But if neoliberalism characterized the city’s approach to economic policy, it was not the only game in town. Alongside neoliberalism, New York’s approach to law-and-order highlights an additional driver of the city’s political development: conservatism. The 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a sustained rise in violent crime, often associated with the drug trade, which gripped neighborhoods like Harlem and the Lower East Side. Until the 1960s, the preferred approaches to crime and drug addiction were primarily liberal. These problems were largely viewed as emanating from underlying structural socioeconomic failings. From this perspective, the solution was to address root causes and offer treatment to addicts. In the face of rising crime and social dislocation, however, conservative diagnoses and remedies were stridently advanced by right-wing elites and working-class New Yorkers who were desperate for change.
Whereas conservative claims about the “culture of poverty” frequently took a racist and misogynistic form—as the “welfare queen trope” reveals—concern about disorder and crime cut across racial divides, as did preferences for tough-on-crime measures. Hence, mayors like Ed Koch and the city’s first black mayor, David Dinkins, prioritized investments in policing and corrections over funding for social programs. Still, it would take the combined administrations of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg to transform New York into a mass incarceration city. Whereas Giuliani promoted “broken windows” policing, which targeted those committing “quality of life” crimes, Bloomberg accelerated the use of stop-and-frisk. Indeed, even as serious crime fell markedly, the number of people stopped and frisked annually exploded from 160,851 in 2002 to 685,724 in 2011. Over the course of Bloomberg’s mayoralty, there were almost five million stops, the vast majority of which were found to be unconstitutional, not least because they overwhelmingly ensnared black and Latino New Yorkers. Hence, alongside the neoliberal, elite-led transformation of economic policy, in the realm of policing conservative ideas came to dominate, bubbling up from the streets and flowing down from the think-tanks.
But if neoliberal and conservative ideas and policy designs came to define key elements of New York City’s political development since the 1975, the left was not vanquished entirely. The city’s centuries-old tradition of protest and rebellion was apparent throughout this period, as illustrated by the movements against gentrification in Tompkins Square Park in the late 1980s and the Occupy Wall Street revolt that exploded onto the scene and was echoed worldwide beginning in 2011. Furthermore, leftists and liberals enjoyed a modicum of electoral and programmatic success with the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio, which reversed the city’s decades-long tough-on-crime policing strategy, increased public-sector wages, froze socially regulated rent, and rolled out universal pre-kindergarten with alacrity. Furthermore, beyond the de Blasio administration a plethora of progressive forces based both in the resurgent labor movement and organized at the community level pressed for transformational economic and social policies. Therefore, alongside the neoliberal and conservative political orders sits an egalitarian order fighting for the material interests of the city’s working class.
With the social disruption of the pandemic, and an associated (albeit transient) spike in crime, the city’s conservative and neoliberal orders found themselves once again with the initiative. The familiar bromides of austerity and punitive policing were back on the agenda. Voters turned once again to somebody who promised to “get tough” on crime: former NYCP cop Eric Adams, who was elected in 2022. Although they spring from vastly different social and economic backgrounds, the parallels between Adams and Trump are clear, even beyond their causal relationship with the truth and the law. Perhaps most strikingly, their willingness to scapegoat “illegal immigrants,” who they deem responsible for crime and disorder, has paid political dividends, helping them to garner the support of the city’s racially and ethnically diverse working-class.
A historical understanding of New York City’s political development since the 1960s helps us to see how its trajectory has been shaped by the interplay among its three political orders: conservatism, neoliberalism, and egalitarianism. Such a perspective gives lie to the view that New York is a liberal city to the core. Rather, it is a blend of the political traditions that will continue to vie for power in the years to come. The balance of those forces will determine whose interests get protected and who will suffer the consequences.
Filed under: african american studies, american studies, civil rights, economics/business, History, law & criminology, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, Urban Studies | Tagged: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Bill de Blasio, conservative, crime, David Dinkins, Democracy, democrat, Donald Trump, economics, Ed Koch, egalitarianism, elections, Eric Adams, gent, gentrification, history, law-and-order, liberalism, mayors, Michael Bloomberg, neoliberalism, new york city, news, Occupy Wall Street, pandemic, philosophy, politics, poverty, racism, republican, right-wing, Rudy Giuliani, stop and frisk, welfare | Leave a comment »
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