Mark Schmitt reconsiders New York’s John V. Lindsay:
In the familiar sad story of the decline of liberalism and the rise of the right in the 1970s, New York City deserves a particularly long chapter. The aphorism, “A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged,” originated in New York, where robberies rose 900 percent from 1964 to 1974. The first generation of neoconservatives, defined more by their cautious domestic policies than by global hawkishness, was bred in the experience of New York in the late 1960s. For others, the mere phrase “Ocean Hill-Brownsville,” referring to two Brooklyn school districts that became the site of a showdown between teachers and community activists, is sufficient shorthand to evoke the many-layered misunderstanding between white (especially Jewish) liberals and African-Americans that threatened the hopeful alliance of the civil rights movement. And it was in the outer boroughs of New York where the white working class broke most visibly from the New Deal liberal coalition.
In the journey from the glamorous and safe New York of Mad Men to that of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning (the title of a superb book and miniseries about the city in 1977) the central figure inevitably is John V. Lindsay, elected mayor in 1965 after embracing columnist Murray Kempton‘s description as a campaign slogan: “He is fresh and everyone else is tired.” Lindsay left office eight years later widely considered a failure, responsible at least in part for the phenomena named above, and with the city a few years away from near-bankruptcy.