Daily Archives: April 15, 2021

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Why the lefts turn from higher education has coincided with a newfound conservative appreciation for it.

The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in BostonCristina Viviana GroegerHarvard University Press, $35 (cloth)

Lets Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal EducationJonathan MarksPrinceton University Press, $27.95 (cloth)

The politics of higher education are changing.

For decades the basic arrangement has had ascendant conservatives arrayed against it and liberals engaged in a defensive rearguard action. The rightwing onslaught was spearheaded by the likes of William F. Buckley, whose God and Man at Yale (1951) decried the secularization of an elite institution overrun by Keynesians and collectivists. The onslaught endured through the end of the twentieth century in the work of people like Allan Bloom, whose 1987 best-seller The Closing of the American Minda broadside in the so-called canon warsdeplored the rise of relativism on campus and the sidelining of great ideas by works by scholars from historically marginalized groups, supposedly promoted in the academy due to political trendiness rather than merit.

The conservative fantasy of the campus as a mythical space of open discourse and reasoned argument is defined most of all by who doesnt get to take part.

Both books were, in the manner of their times, part of an anti-intellectual and anti-academic red scare that weaponized reactionary notions of who belongs in the academy and who doesnt. Meanwhile, it was Ronald Reagans education secretary, William Bennett, who hypothesized that tuition rose because of increasing federal student aidcasting universities as villains that feed off both taxpayers and their own students. The debate over higher education throughout this period mirrored attitudes toward intellectualism in generalsince, it was assumed, the academy was where the intellectuals were to be found. Buckley, for his part, gleefully declared that he would rather be ruled by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty.

Given this ideological arrangement, it is no surprise that liberalsincluding those who help to formulate higher ed policyhave long embraced claims that a college degree pays off in the form of higher earnings and better career opportunities. After all, this view allows them to defend their commitments in terms that might appeal to conservatives: higher education is good for the economy, this messaging goes, not for namby-pamby reasons like scholarship for its own sake or for broader societal transformation. One product of such thinking is The Race between Education and Technology by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who couch the argument for higher education in the language of human capitalportraying it as an engine of both individual economic improvement and macroeconomic growth.

But it is also not surprising that a younger generation of left intellectuals has turned against higher education, given that it has turned against them. Following years of austerity budgets and the systematic deprofessionalization of academic labor, millennials and their generational successors have found it harder and harder to get faculty positions. As for students, a college degree of some sort has become a near-universal standard for younger cohorts entering an increasingly credentialized labor market. For them, the university has meant neither an enriching intellectual experience that sets them on a path of humanistic, lifelong inquiry nor a path to middle-class economic stability, but rather escalating tuition for degrees of questionable value that sets them on a path of crushing, lifelong debt. Once popular on the right, the Bennett hypothesis is likely to find more and more of its adherents on the left.

Alongside this left turn away from higher education has been a newfound conservative appreciation for it, couched in a critique of college campuses as sites of elite liberalism and social justice warriors run amok. According to this narrative, the values of free and open discourse, passionate debate, and the marketplace of ideas have been shut down by liberal scolds and race-conscious administrators beholden to woke ideology, and it is up to conservatives to resurrect them.

Two new books, Cristina Viviana Groegers The Education Trap and Jonathan Markss Lets Be Reasonable, illustrate this changing polarity. The former is primarily a work of history about the restructuring of education at the secondary and post-secondary levels in Boston during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Lets Be Reasonable is more personal and polemicalthe factually untethered musings of a conservative professor at a liberal arts college on the demise of reasonability in an academy beholden to a small but culturally hegemonic left. Taken together, the two volumes exemplify the shifting ideological valence of higher education in 2021.

Groegers book covers the beginning of the high school movement, the era during the early twentieth century when secondary schooling spread across the United States. It draws on a remarkable breadth of sources, from ethnographies and interviews to public directories, the full-sample decennial censuses made public relatively recently, and other statistical sources. The thesis is stated upfront. Education became a central means of social mobility, Groeger argues, at the same moment that it became a new infrastructure for legitimizing social inequality. While providing economic opportunities to some workers, the expansion of schooling actually undercut the power of others.

Far from reducing socioeconomic inequality, more widespread formal education actually solidified it under the rising tide of corporate capitalism.

The high school movement was the social process by which attendance at and graduation from secondary school became universal (or nearly universal) among native-born Americans. The transformation is conventionally dated from 1910 or so (though Groeger shows it started earlier in Boston), when the graduation rate in the relevant age cohort was less than 10 percent. By 1950 the graduation rate had grown to over 50 percent, and attendance was nearing universality outside the segregated South. Graduation rates continued to increase in subsequent decades in the process of desegregation and the enfranchisement of southern Black communities. Nearly every school district came to offer some form of secondary schooling over that time period, though it took time for what we now conceive as a public high school education to become standardized. One striking feature of this transformation is that it was decentralized. No federal program sought to bring about universal secondary education; rather the impetus came from local status competition for what counted as a complete education expected of local children and young adults, operating in combination with unemployment crises and sectoral transformations that removed children from the labor force.

The Education Trap is usefully understood in reference to The Race between Education and Technology, which treats the high school movement as an episode of forward-thinking public improvement from the ground up, a civic-minded provision of secondary education as a public good in response to the demands of technological change. Groegers narrative complicates this picture by introducing class conflict. It studies who exactly availed themselves of new opportunities, foregrounding the way class patterns of formal and informal education help to explain contemporaneous socialization into occupational and status hierarchies. The result is a more complete and convincing picture of the high school movement than Goldin and Katzs, one that punctures the central conceit of liberal educational philosophy in the late twentieth century. Far from reducing socioeconomic inequality, more widespread formal education actually solidified it under the rising tide of corporate capitalism.

Each chapter of the book focuses on a particular class, tracing its relationship to the shifting structures of education and work. Organized craft workers, for instance, avoided formal vocational education outside the workplace, perceiving it as an employer-backed threat to their control over apprenticeshipsand thereby over entry into the ranks. Craft unions didnt want their ability to withhold skilled labor undermined by strikebreakers trained through mechanisms outside their control. Moreover, vocational education that would actually prepare workers for such jobs was and always has been prohibitively expensive. Goldin and Katz treat the lagging high school enrollment patterns of men and boys in industrialized regions as a puzzle amid the larger trend of rising high school enrollment and graduation rates in the early twentieth century. Groeger solves the puzzle by pointing out that formal education was not the accepted route into industrial occupations.

Feminized domestic labor likewise resisted the introduction of formalized training for jobs where none had previously existed, exasperating progressive do-gooders who thought that such schemes as Schools of Housekeeping would empower the poor and downtrodden to enter the professional classes and avoid prostitution. In fact, this training was viewed as inconvenient, irrelevant, and unnecessaryif not a further exploitation at the hands of employers (say, when unpaid work was required for certification). The reformers read this hostility as either a congenital disinclination to education or complacency. The 1895 annual report of the Womens Educational and Industrial Union declared, The competent general housework girl is practically a thing of the past. . . . The demand for household servants is greater than the supply, thus giving little incentive to maids to become really skilled in their work. What the organization interpreted as an excess of demand over supply was in fact the reluctance of domestic workers to respond to the WEIUs own placement services even as they were besieged by would-be employers of domestic labor enthusiastic to have an outside organization exist for the purpose of certifying applicants as biddable. These reactions exemplify the limits of formalized education to change work conditions in occupations with a clear gendered division of labor and norms around who can attain the job and how.

The idealized liberal college education espoused as a timeless principle today was a recent and historically contingent construction, one that served to undermine rather than promote social mobility.

Groegers analysis is most interesting in relation to three other classes that were just coming into being during this period and were characterized in relation to formal education: white-collar clerical and retail workers, liberal professions (such as teaching and school administration, as well as the law), and new corporate managers and executives.

The corporate transformation of the economy during this era created an abundance of occupations in the first group: telephone operators, secretaries, clerks, bookkeepers, and the like. Their ranks were filled by women and the first native-born generations in immigrant families. These workers welcomed the new educational opportunities, perceiving them as entryways into the American mainstream and a means of economic improvement. When juxtaposed with the wariness of more established communities and workers, this pattern illustrates a crucial lesson: education was embraced by those for whom it was useful and avoided by those who (rightly) perceived it as a threat. There is thus no simple education is good conclusion to be drawn here.

By the beginning of the twentieth century Boston had a raft of proprietary options for secondary education like the Burdett College of Business and Shorthand and the School of Successful Salesmanship. These schools conducted business based on their reputation for securing employment for their graduatesor at least claiming to do so. The parallels between these institutions and the for-profit colleges of today are striking, providing another corrective to those of us who have embraced the high school movement as testament to the superiority of public goods over private, discriminatory, and often fraudulent institutions. Groeger even mentions the imprisonment of the School of Successful Salesmanships proprietor for fraudan example that wont be lost on readers who recall that predatory lending at for-profit universities in our own day has suffered little consequence. Eventually, the demand for the kind of education offered in proprietary institutions, combined with the institutions questionable practices, led the city to open and expand existing public high schools.

Locals further demanded that the growing school system hire graduates of Bostons teaching colleges rather than out-of-towners. This move was part of a push to create a public university (with attendant degree-granting and certification powers) open to immigrants and their families, an effort that was repeatedly blocked by existing private colleges and their powerful allies in the legislature. Instead, private colleges established schools of education to professionalize education itself, creating a gendered division of labor within that expanding sector. The teachers employed in the new secondary schools were mostly women but their principals, superintendents, and the social scientists studying themtrained at Harvards Graduate School of Educationwere all men.

There are limits to formalized education's abilityto change work conditions in occupations with a clear gendered division of labor and norms around who can attain the job and how.

Finally, prior to this period, the route to a senior position in a Boston merchant or banking house would have been through a de facto apprenticeship as a clerk. The new corporate economy filled these jobs with second-generation immigrants and women, at the same time denying them a path to promotion into management. Instead, management training happened at Harvard College, which repurposed the bachelor of arts degree toward what we now conceive as a general liberal arts education in order to create an impermeable class and gender boundary between the graduates of public high schools and the college graduates who became their bosses. Under its president Charles Eliot, Harvard created an elective system in order that a student develops and increases his own powers, and gains command of those powers.

Its graduates moved seamlessly into industry, equipped with a liberal education that differentiated them from the new masses of white-collar workersall with the help of the schools cultivated alumni network. College education thus became a useful marker of who belonged in corporate management, shielding the ruling class from threats to its hegemony posed by new employment opportunities further down the occupational hierarchy. As Groeger summarizes, The reconstruction of economic opportunity on the basis of education created a new institutional and ideological infrastructure for upholding socioeconomic inequality. The upshot of this important analysis is that the idealized liberal college education espoused as a timeless principle today was a recent and historically contingent construction, one that served to undermine rather than promote social mobility.

None of this makes it into Lets Be Reasonable, which tries to take the history and politics out of higher education at the same time that it issues an explicitly conservative call to action for a conservative audience to take up arms in its defense. Erasing the actual social conditions in which college education operates, Marks instead sees timeless principles of reason under threat from social justice warriors dead set on undermining once-great institutions. John Locke is the guiding spirit, set up in opposition to what universities have supposedly become. Universities, as if bored with what they call critical thinking, he writes in the first chapter, have unfurled a multitude of other banners sporting other terms: diversity, empathy, world citizenship, civic engagement, and so on.

Erasing the actual social conditions in which college education operates, Marks instead sees timeless principles of reason under threat from social justice warriors dead set on undermining once-great institutions.

The book consists of an episodic and polemical recounting of controversies on campus over the past decade, from politically correct placemats at Harvard dining halls to the policing of micro-aggressions. It joins a long tradition of conservative outrage, from Buckley and Bloom to James Buchanan and Nicos Devletoglous Academia in Anarchy (1970) and the latest Substack screed about cancel cultures newest victim. Marks positions himself against what he calls the conservative movements anti-intellectual attack on higher educationespecially that of the so-called paleocons. Take Michael Anton, author of The Flight 93 Election manifesto, which claimed that universities are wholly corrupt and operate in service to a leftist globalist junta, to whom the conservative intellectual establishment is uncomfortably close and thereby compromised. Marks defines himself against this brand of conservatism, apparently to claim the middle ground, but he also indulges the notion that leftist professors are indoctrinating the children of nice conservative families with poisonous ideas.

Despite the polemicism, it is evident that Marks cares greatly for his students and for the work of teaching and scholarship. One gets the feeling that he is justifying his lifes work within the ivory tower to himself and to an audience that he considers his peers (professional, think tank, movement conservative types). But a central flaw of the book is its deeply distorted representation of college studentsa consequence, perhaps, of extrapolating too much from his own career spent teaching humanities in small liberal arts colleges (though I doubt his portrayal is even true of students there). Like much popular coverage of the higher education landscape, Lets Be Reasonable focuses on the wealthiest institutions, those that tend to house the most privileged students. His portrait of college students makes them out to be nave, young adults, with opinions easily manipulated by professorsan infantilization starkly out of touch with the realities of higher education today.

To begin with, the vast majority of students do not attend elite schools or small liberal arts colleges. At the 32,000student state flagship where I teach, undergraduates come to class knowing more about the world than I did when I was in college, but on the other hand, they evidently dont know one another terribly well despite taking advanced coursework in the same major, likely because many have families and jobs and most live off campus.

Universities today have increasingly oppressivepower hierarchies.Those sitting at the top have learned how to use egalitarian language while they do everything in their power to perpetuate the very power imbalance that they decry.

Beyond these demographic misrepresentations, you also wont learn from Markss book, which acts as though college campuses are conservative-free spaces, that there already is a very well organized conservative presence on them today: the far-right, white supremacist, and misogynistic incel cultures Talia Lavin writes at length about in Culture Warlords (2020), the part of the conservative movement that actually has representation among the young. For all their careful cultivation, the Young Republican types Marks and so many other conservative writers on higher education conceptualize as principled cultural conservativessamizdat George Willsdont exist. The ones who are portrayed that way dispense with the costume in the privacy of anonymous online chat forums for purer expressions of alt right beliefs. One could imagine a more broadly appealing working-class cultural conservatism that would hold up expensive, exploitative universities as elite liberal villains; that seems to be where Marks wants to go. The problem is that the constituency for such a political tendency probably wouldnt identify itself as a student movement. And in any case, that is absolutely not what Marks is offering. His target is not the reality of academia but a conservative caricature of it.

As a result, Marks glosses over the question of where power really lies in neoliberalized higher ed institutions. The people in charge arent the hectoring campus radicals but administrators selected and elevated through close relations with outside funders, alumni philanthropists, federal research agencies, private sector partners, gargantuan university health systems, and state legislators. Yet still Marks sees only a leftist assault. The left is so embedded not only at left-branded places like Oberlin and Berkeley, he writes, but also at Grandees R Us Harvard, that one no longer needs student activists and radical professors with imposing beards to march around and demand things.

Demanding things, needless to say, is not the same as getting them. Just consider the demands made of Harvards current president, Lawrence Bacow, that have gone unheeded. Universities today are exactly the same as any other institution in contemporary U.S. lifewhich is to say, places where power hierarchies are increasingly oppressive and where those sitting at the top have learned how to use egalitarian language while they do everything in their power to perpetuate the very power imbalance that they decry. Meanwhile, university administrators and senior officials at the Department of Education have proven quite willing to indulge conservative demands to marginalize Palestinian solidarity movements on campus at the behest of Zionist activists and the institutions backing them.

A further signal of where power truly lies in neoliberal academia can be found in Markss admission that his colleagues have rarely treated him unprofessionally due to his outspoken conservative identity as a scholar. By contrast, as an outspoken leftist economist, I am treated unprofessionally by my colleagues all the timedespite 70 percent of the profession identifying as a Democrat (at least as far as these things can be measured). The department where I teach has also been targeted by conservative philanthropic interests, who have in some cases gained the sympathetic ear of university administrators.

Markss vision of left power on campus has never been an accurate assessment of U.S. higher education.

Since liberals vastly outnumber conservatives in academia, Marks writes, conservatives must be bearing the brunt of whatever political discrimination may be occurring there. In economics, at least, this latter claim is flatly false, and it probably isnt true in other disciplines either. Conservatives may not be numerous in some places on campus, but that doesnt mean theyre discriminated against. They enjoy power enough not to be treated unprofessionally precisely because of the mechanisms that exist to protect and promote them, punish their supposed tormentors, and defund anyplace that might make it possible for their antagonists to earn a living. Meanwhile, Markss vision of left power on campus has never been an accurate assessment of U.S. higher educationnot when Buchanan laid it out in similarly colorful language in 1970 following high-visibility campus upheavals and the vast expansion of publicly funded state university systems to educate the Baby Boomers, and certainly not now.

Perhaps most tellingly, the book is also in some cases straightforwardly self-contradictory. Markss gratuitous attack on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement conflicts with the books overarching plea for free speech and liberal discourse. In this move we see how the elitist notion of a liberal education, whether in the era Groeger writes about or today, is weaponized by the right to beat down claims to social equality. The conservative fantasy of the campus as a mythical space of open discourse and reasoned argument is defined most of all by who doesnt get to take part.

For decades the received wisdom in higher education policy circles has been rooted in the theory of human capital. In that light, five or ten years ago Markss argument might have appeared as a relatively innocuous backward-looking paean to a golden age of liberal education outside a market logic. But now it seems like Marks is pointing the way forward. He marshals a number of thinkers, organizations, and statements that he considers himself in solidarity with, from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and its Chicago Principles (essentially a protest against campus political correctness based on a letter issued by the dean of students at the University of Chicago in 2016 as a warning to incoming freshman but evidently aimed more at garnering applause from concerned alumni) to Heterodox Academy (Jonathan Haidts project to protect professors from student blowback for expressing views supposedly unfashionable with campus PC culture). All of this infrastructure, like Markss book itself, is the product of the Charles Koch Institutes funding and partnership. He acknowledges right up front that he received generous financial support from the Koch Foundation and its offshoot, the Institute for Humane Studiesknown for harboring anonymous members of the online far right.

As the meritocratic model of what higher education is for comes under more and more pressure in light of its evident failures, these offerings tell us what the conservative response will be: raise the drawbridge, keep out the rabble.

In this respect, Markss book is quite similar to another recent conservative book about higher education (backed by the same funders), despite coming to what appears to be a starkly different conclusion. Bryan Caplans The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money (2018) pours scorn on the idea that near-universal higher education does society any good. Caplans effort is primarily concerned with returning to a world in which higher education is far from universaland so, in its way, is Markss. As the meritocratic model of what higher education is for comes under more and more pressure in light of its evident failures, these offerings tell us what the conservative response will be: raise the drawbridge, keep out the rabble.

Originally posted here:

The New Politics of Higher Education - Boston Review

A steep increase in the number of migrants from Central America appearing at the United States-Mexico border is making headlines and poses a big challenge for the new administration of President Joe Biden in Washington. The continuing illegal immigration across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe has become a regular occurrence. Because it is now nearly business as usual and the media is laser-focused on Covid-19, press coverage is minimal.

Both Europe and the U.S. attract migrants. Some of them are refugees, forced by war or political persecution to leave their homes. Others want a chance to make a living doing useful work. Unfortunately, many others come prepared to abuse generous welfare systems or engage in illegal activity, emboldened by the host countries mild penalties for doing so.

I am very much in favor of offering shelter to real refugees. However, it is a natural prerequisite that they respect the norms and laws of the host country (as it must be a better system in refugees view anyway) and they try to contribute by work.

It is also true that the U.S. and Europe need immigration, as long as it occurs in an orderly manner and allows in people who respect the rules.

Europe has had difficulty dealing with the influx. Social legislation and a misinterpretation of humanitarianism have prevented the continent from coming to terms with the problem and discouraging illegal, unjustified immigration. Strict labor laws and excessively high minimum wages dissuade businesses from employing less-skilled people, hindering integration. High social costs and difficult bureaucratic procedures are other hurdles. Moreover, migrants know that there are many ways to prevent repatriation.

The promises of social benefits create exorbitant expectations. This is why, as the great economist Milton Friedman explained, open borders and the welfare state are incompatible.

Typically, migrants should have this attitude:

I am forced to find another home because my own country oppresses me or makes it difficult to work for a living. My host country has a much better system, gives me freedom and allows me to make a living. This however requires acceptance of and respect for the host countrys system and culture.

The host country should be entitled to insist on this acceptance and respect. Therefore, it should also be allowed to ask potential immigrants the following questions: Who are you? Where are you from? Why do you want to come to this country? What do you expect and what can the country expect from you?

Unfortunately, some in Europe consider these questions unethical out of an exaggerated sense of political correctness. They worry that such questions though fully legitimate might be discriminatory. Not being able to ask them, however, makes the orderly control of access difficult. These questions are much less intrusive than the information European countries request from their own citizens worth mentioning is the spurious retention of telecommunications data.

Another problem is documentation. Immigrants frequently strain credibility by claiming that they have lost their identity documents. While human trafficking practices can require migrants to give up their papers, it often becomes clear that the failure to present identification is an attempt to game the system.

The European approach encourages illegitimate immigration and has helped make human trafficking a more widespread phenomenon. When in 2015 hundreds of thousands of refugees from Afghanistan and Syria were knocking at Europes door, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, Wir schaffen das (We will manage). The statement was understood to mean that Germanys doors were open and marked the rise of something called Willkommenskultur, or welcome culture.

The dam broke with Chancellor Merkels declaration. A few weeks later, Germany could no longer handle the inundation of people anymore and started to limit entry at its borders with Austria. The result was that several countries, especially Hungary, were stuck with thousands of people who wanted to go to Germany. Finally, Turkey saved Europe by generously accommodating more than 3 million refugees.

But the Pandoras box has been opened, and the flood of migrants continues. In typical fashion, several European countries (among them Germany and France), foisted the problem onto the European Union, pushing for a quota system to distribute immigrants across the bloc.

That proposal is no solution, but the countries that disagree with the policy have been defamed, unjustly accused of not supporting European solidarity. Yet European principles, rightly understood, mean that members ought to have the right to decide for themselves on such a crucial issue.

Whether it is considered politically correct or not, stricter rules on immigration, adherence to law and respect for European traditions are required if immigrants are to integrate properly. Further, quicker repatriation should be applied and enforced for immigrants breaking the law. Such changes could form the basis for a better-controlled immigration system.

The matter remains unresolved. Unless European countries and Brussels apply a more appropriate and more justified approach, the problem will continue to haunt the continent. It could challenge EU cohesion and again become a political lightning rod in Germany, which will hold elections this fall.

In the U.S., the swell of immigration from the south is a permanent feature. The administration of former President Donald Trump took a strict approach. One of his campaign promises, the erection of a wall on the Mexican border, could not wholly be met during his term.

Mr. Trumps tough policy was harshly criticized by Democrats like current President Joe Biden, whose White House has been vocal in doing away with some of the previous administrations harsher measures to contain illegal immigration. The move raised hopes among potential immigrants and the flow of people to the U.S.s southern border increased dramatically. The situation now appears out of control.

President Bidens dilemma is similar to the one Germany created for Europe with its Willkommenskultur. Washington will have to strengthen border security, an uphill battle now that potential immigrants believe they will have an easier chance of settling in the U.S. The ironic conclusion may be that the Biden administration will find itself forced to fulfill President Trumps promise building a wall of concrete, fencing and heavy surveillance along the border, and implementing more stringent immigration procedures.

Read the original here:

Immigration policies in the US and Europe are poorly thought through - Geopolitical Intelligence Services AG

KRASNIK, Poland When local councilors adopted a resolution two years ago declaring their small town in southeastern Poland free of L.G.B.T., the mayor didnt see much harm in what appeared to be a symbolic and legally pointless gesture.

Today, hes scrambling to contain the damage.

What initially seemed a cost-free sop to conservatives in the rural and religiously devout Polish borderlands next to Ukraine, the May 2019 decision has become a costly embarrassment for the town of Krasnik. It has jeopardized millions of dollars in foreign funding and, Mayor Wojciech Wilk said, turned our town into a synonym for homophobia, which he insisted was not accurate.

A French town last year severed a partnership with Krasnik in protest. And Norway, from which the mayor had hoped to get nearly $10 million starting this year to finance development projects, said in September that it would not give grants to any Polish town that declares itself free of L.G.B.T.

We have become Europes laughingstock, and its the citizens not the local politicians whove suffered most, lamented Mr. Wilk, who is now lobbying councilors to repeal the resolution that put the towns 32,000 residents in the middle of a raucous debate over traditional and modern values. The situation also illustrates the real-life consequences of political posturing in the trenches of Europes culture wars.

When Krasnik declared itself free of L.G.B.T., it was joining dozens of other towns in the region that had adopted similar measures with strong support from Polands governing right-wing Law and Justice party and the Roman Catholic Church.

The declarations, part of the partys efforts to rally its base before a presidential election in 2020, did not bar gay people from entering or threaten expulsion for those already present. Instead they vowed to keep out L.G.B.T. ideology, a term used by conservatives to describe ideas and lifestyles they view as threatening to Polish tradition and Christian values.

Cezary Nieradko, a 22-year-old student who describes himself as Krasniks only open gay, dismissed the term L.G.B.T. ideology as a smoke screen for homophobia. He recalled how, after the town adopted its resolution, his local pharmacist refused to fill his prescription for a heart drug.

Mr. Nieradko recently moved to the nearby city of Lublin, where the regional council has also adopted a free of L.G.B.T. resolution but whose residents, he said, are generally more open-minded.

Jan Albiniak, the Krasnik councilor who drafted the resolution, said that he had nothing personally against gay people, whom he described as friends and colleagues, and that he wanted to contain ideas that disturb the normal, regular way our society was functioning.

He said he had drafted the resolution after watching an online video of abortion rights activists screaming at Christian men in Argentina. Although that had nothing to do with L.G.B.T. issues or Poland, Mr. Albiniak said the video showed that we are dealing with some sort of evil here and can see manifestations of demonic behavior around the world that must be stopped.

In response to a rash of anti-L.G.B.T. resolutions across Polands heartland, the European Union, of which Poland is a member, as well as Norway and Iceland, have said they will cut funding to any Polish town that violates Europes commitment to tolerance and equality.

The European Parliament also passed a resolution last month declaring all 27 countries in the bloc an L.G.B.T. Freedom Zone, although like the Polish resolutions declaring the opposite, the declaration has no legal force.

All the posturing, however, has begun to have concrete consequences.

Krasniks mayor said he worried that unless his towns free of L.G.B.T. status is rescinded, he has little chance of securing foreign funds to finance electric buses and youth programs, which he said are particularly important because young people keep leaving.

My position is clear: I want this resolution repealed, he said, because its harmful for the town and its inhabitants.

That will be an uphill struggle.

Faced with the loss of foreign grants, several other Polish towns that declared themselves free of L.G.B.T. or adopted a family charter trumpeting traditional values have in recent months changed their mind. But the 21-member council in Krasnik, having voted last year against repeal, recently rejected an appeal by the mayor for another vote.

Only one member has openly voiced a readiness to change sides. I made a mistake, said Pawel Kurek, who abstained on the original vote but now says the resolution was foolish and should be rescinded.

On a national level, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of Law and Justice, told the newspaper Gazeta Polska last week that Poland must resist L.G.B.T ideas that are weakening the West and against all common sense.

Underlying the stalemate in Krasnik are the political and demographic realities in a region where many young people have left to find work abroad or in Warsaw, the capital, and where the Catholic Church remains a powerful force.

While many older people like their town being free of L.G.B.T., young people who have remained are appalled. Amanda Wojcicka, a 24-year-old convenience store worker, said the idea was embarrassing.

But Jan Chamara, a 73-year-old former construction worker, said he would rather live on a diet of just potatoes than give into economic pressure from outside to repeal the resolution. I dont want their money, said Mr. Chamara, who said he had never seen gay people in Krasnik but still felt precautions were necessary. We will survive.

Krasnik has acquired such notoriety that a French minister responsible for European affairs said he wanted to visit the town recently to show his opposition to discrimination during an official visit to Poland. The official, Clment Beaune, who is gay, called off the visit to Krasnik after what he described as pressure from Polish officials not to go, a claim that Polands foreign ministry said was untrue.

When Krasnik and other towns adopted free of L.G.B.T. resolutions in early 2019, few people paid attention to what was widely seen as a political stunt by a governing party that delights in offending its foes political correctness.

But that changed early last year when Bartosz Staszewski, an L.G.B.T. activist from Warsaw began visiting towns that had vowed to banish L.G.B.T. ideology. Mr. Staszewski, a documentary filmmaker, took with him an official-looking yellow sign on which was written in four languages: L.G.B.T.-FREE ZONE. He put the fake sign next to each towns real sign, taking photographs that he posted on social media.

The action, which he called performance art, provoked outrage across Europe as it put a spotlight on what Mr. Staszewski described in an interview in Warsaw as a push by conservatives to turn basic human rights into an ideology.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has accused Mr. Staszewski of generating a fake scandal over no-go zones that dont exist. Several towns, supported by a right-wing outfit partly funded by the government, have filed defamation suits against the activist over his representation of bans on ideology as barring L.G.B.T. people.

But even those who support the measures often seem confused about what it is that they want excluded.

Asked on television whether the region surrounding Krasnik would become Polands first L.G.B.T.-free zone, Elzbieta Kruk, a prominent Law and Justice politician, said, I think Poland is going to be the first area free of L.G.B.T. She later reversed herself and said the target was L.G.B.T. ideology.

For Mr. Wilk, Krasniks mayor, the semantic squabbling is a sign that it is time to drop attempts to make the town free of anyone or anything.

But Mr. Albiniak, the initiator of the resolution, vowed to resist what he denounced as blackmail by foreigners threatening to withhold funds.

If I vote to repeal, he said, I vote against myself.

Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting.

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After Going Free of L.G.B.T., a Polish Town Pays a Price - The New York Times

Im profoundly disappointed in the Cleveland Indians plan to change a proud name in place for 105 years. The Woke Cancel Culture never ends. Lets look at facts.

Some American Indians consider the name an honor. such as the Spokane people of Washington State, who have worked with the minor league Spokane Indians on culturally respectful team uniform designs and other symbols, plus exhibits at the stadium and cultural outreach.

Why not listen to Native Americans instead of a small group of white Americans?

Changing a name makes no ones life better. Least of all, Native Americans.

The Indians made this decision in the wake of the George Floyd death. One should have nothing to do with the other.

Alternatives:

Community outreach benefiting Native American causes, education, and families.

Honoring Native Americans with pre-game rituals.

Symbolic honors, such as using images that record Native American heritage.

The teams heritage also matters. The Cleveland Indians are part of my familys tradition, not some other team.

Changing the name is short-sighted and historically ignorant and based on political correctness, elitism, and white guilt.

Lad Dilgard,

Galena

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Changing Indians name will achieve nothing but negatives - for fans and Native Americans - cleveland.com

In Marty Rochesters column, Oy Vey: The excesses of identity politics (March 24), he criticizes President Biden for picking a diverse cabinet with the insinuation that because it is diverse, it is not the best cabinet he could have picked.

In that he provides no factual basis for these not being the most capable candidates, the only conclusion I can draw as to why he thinks they are not the best candidates, is because of their diversity.

What does that say about him?

Kenneth Cohen,Creve Coeur

I would like to compliment the Jewish Light on publishing articles by Professor Marty Rochester. These well-written highly rational discussions provide a good balance to the fact-free emotional diatribes we frequently see in other articles or letters you choose to publish.

I was particularly taken by his recent article (March 24) decrying the selection of cabinet and thousands of other appointments (to say nothing of a vice president) based on ethnic or other criteria rather than provable qualifications. Rochesters analogy to getting on an airplane, the crew of which had been selected based on political correctness rather than competency, was particularly telling. It is a dangerous and difficult world with domestic and international problems which need to be addressed by the best qualified people to achieve solutions beneficial to our nation. Instead, we see those who simply check the diversity-biased identity boxes required by Democrat pressure groups.

Im reminded of an interview conducted with Jesse Jackson in the early years of the President George W. Bush administration, wherein he criticized the president for not appointing a sufficient number of black Americans. When it was pointed out to Jackson that President Bush had in fact appointed a number of such people to high positions Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and many others Jackson replied that they should not be factored in, as they had been selected based on merit. The Biden administration need not worry that they will be accused of doing the same.

Steve Finkel,Creve Coeur

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Letters to the editor: Divergent reactions to commentary | Letters To Editor - St. Louis Jewish Light

No one can dispute that America is currently undergoing a racial reckoning. Ever since the killing of George Floyd in the spring of 2020, a nation-wide soul-searching over racism has seized hold of the collective imagination, with everyone from massive corporations to national media outlets leading the charge against America's enduringeven risingwhite supremacism.

But what if everyone is wrong? What if the media and the national conversation isn't exposing racism so much as creating it, or at least, creating the impression that it is far more prevalent than we thought?

This is what I found in my recent report for the Manhattan Institute, The Social Construction of Racism in the United States. The report is an analysis of a wide variety of data sources, including several new surveys that I conducted. And what I found is that media exposure, partisanship and a person's anxiety or depression levels explain much of what passes for racism todayas well as essentially all of its reported rise.

We know this in a more general sense on an intuitive level. The idea that party identification shapes perception, for example, is pretty uncontroversial. And social scientists have long known that exposure to unusual events that make news shapes our perceptions; Gallup surveys consistently show that concern with racism tends to spike after major events like the Ferguson protests, George Floyd's killing or Trump's election.

But this effect has been in hyperdrive in recent years. And there's evidence to suggest that the constant beating of the racism drum has led many to see racism where they didn't previously.

Mentions of racism in national news outlets have soared since 2015. And this media activity has coincided with a drop in the number of Americans who describe Black-white relations as good. From 2002 to 2013, 70 percent of Americans believed that race relations were good, a number that dropped to half after 2014.

How do I know that negative media attention to race, rather than a worsening reality, is driving perception? Here's where my research comes in. To get at this question, I asked respondents the following question: Did they believe young Black men were more in danger of dying in a car crash, or of being shot by police?

There is a correct answer to that question: Cars are around ten times more lethal to young Black men than police bullets. But it was something people on one side of the political spectrum were much more likely to know than the other side. I asked respondents a second question to test this: Do they believe white Republicans are racist? And what I found was that people who answered yes to the second question, who believe white Republicans are racist, were much less likely to accurately assess whether cars or cops were more lethal to Black men.

My surveys found that 70 percent of white Americans and 95 percent of Black Americans who agree with the statement "white Republicans are racist" believe that young Black men are more likely to be shot by the police than to be killed in a traffic accident. Fully 53 percent of Biden voters got the answer wrongcompared to just 15 percent of Trump voters.

This is not about intelligence or being informed. Indeed, educational attainment made no difference to the result.

Much of the false perception we have of rising racism is due to traditional news media. But a lot of it comes from social media, too, which is accelerating the problem.

In the same survey, 53 percent of Black Americans who use social media said they had experienced "people acting suspicious" around themcompared to 31 percent of Black Americans who do not use social media. Across several questions, controlling for age, income, education and other factors, social media exposure significantly increased a Black person's sense that they had been a victim of racial discrimination.

And rather than a corrective, higher educationwhere students are exposed to far left ideas on race like critical race theorymay lead to even greater sensitivity to racism. Research tends to find that minorities with degrees are more likely to report discrimination than their non-college educated counterparts. My surveys also showed that college-educated Black Americans are significantly more likely than those without a degree to be offended by so-called microaggressions, like people saying, "I don't notice race."

But this isn't just a question of getting a question wrong on a survey. The effect this false perception of rising racism is having on societyespecially on Black Americansis devastating. And just reading a few paragraphs written by someone with an extreme view on racism in America can have an impact, I found.

I asked some Black survey respondents to read a passage from the critical race theory-inspired writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, a passage from Coates' writing about how "the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body." To others I gave nothing to read, or a mild paragraph.

What I found was staggering: Reading even a single paragraph from Coates had a significant impact on Black respondents' ability to believe in their own agency.

Just 68 percent of Black respondents who read Coates' paragraph agreed with the statement, "When I make plans, I am almost certain that I can make them work"compared to 83 percent of those who did not, a statistically-significant effect.

In other words, even brief exposure to critical race theory narratives disempowers Black people. This reinforces previous research that found that heightened perceptions of racism caused harm to Black Americans.

Moreover, the effect is being amplified by politics and higher education. Black Biden voters were twice as likely as Black Trump voters to say that they personally experienced more racism under Trump than under Obama. And liberal Black Americans with a college degree were almost 30 points more likely to be offended by white people saying things like "I don't notice people's race" or "America is a colorblind society" than were Black Americans without degrees who identify as conservative.

There was, however, consistency on one front: Throughout my surveys, African-Americans see themselves as independent and resilient, while white liberals are more inclined to see them as weak and needing protection.

When asked whether political correctness was demeaning to Black people or necessary to protect them, 51 percent of Black liberals chose "demeaning" and 49 percent "necessary." But white liberals chose "necessary" by a 62-38 margin.

You can see this in another one of the survey questions. I asked respondents "If you had to choose, which is your ideal society?" One option was, "Minorities have grown so confident that racially offensive remarks no longer affect them." The other option read, "The price for being racist is so high that no one makes racially offensive remarks anymore." Again, the difference between Black and white respondents was significant, and instructive: 47 percent of Black liberals chose the resilient option in which they were immune to racially offensive remarks, compared to just 29 percent of white liberals.

In casting Black Americans as uniquely in need of protection, white liberals are actually having that impact, shaping a reality that harms people of color.

And this perception is in direct contradiction with reality. Attitudes to inter-racial marriage and interaction have become steadily more liberal across the nation, while the number of Black people shot by the police has declined by 60-80 percent since the 1960s.

When the media exaggerates the level of racism in America, redefining non-racist words and actions as racist, this distortion of reality is not just false; it's actively disempowering minorities.

Racism, like crime, is unlikely to ever fall to zero. But progressive media's mining for racism has reached a point of diminishing returns, with perceptions doing more harm than good.

Eric Kaufmann is a professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and is affiliated with the Manhattan Institute and the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

The views in this article are the writer's own.

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The Media Is Creating a False Perception of Rising Racism. My New Study Proves It | Opinion - Newsweek

Photographer: Angela Weiss/AFP

Photographer: Angela Weiss/AFP

HOWARD WOLFSON: Your new book, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation, is out. I've been interviewing the mayoral aspirants this year and thought it would be exciting to talk to you about the mayors you look at in your book. You begin with a discussion of Ed Koch. Tell me about him.

THOMAS DYJA: Ed Koch was an underdog. He was not a favorite of the political establishment. He ran from outside. Hugh Carey, the governor, was pulling for Mario Cuomo and he went through a bruising primary and then a runoff against Cuomo. Over his three terms, he did a remarkable thing. He really did bring a lot of life back to the city in the face of enormous challenges.

But as with everyone, there were dark sides to it. He racially charged the city in ways that were destructive and that, to his credit, he recognized later in his life and tried to publicly apologize for.

But in other ways, on his housing initiative, for example, he brought about a paradigm shift in how we look at housing in this city. Koch laid the groundwork for renewal, not just in the kind of rah-rah, New York is back way, but by opening the city to new housing and new ideas.

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The first successful wave is the whole urban pioneer thing that brings back the boomers and begins the gentrification of the city. Then there was a second wave that brought in immigrants and helped them settle in neighborhoods. This created an order that allowed crime to come down.

Another thing he did was create an administration that had an enormous impact on the city over the long term. You see many of the same names and faces that he brought in to City Hall turning up later under Mike Bloomberg and in all the kind of superstructure that surrounds the city. This is started by Koch saying, I want good people in here who can do the right thing, and I will field the political flak.

HW: One of the things I found powerful in your section about Koch was that you made his and the citys response to AIDS central to the narrative, where I think in a lot of other discussions about his tenure, its sort of off to the side.

TD: It was devastating. We still have no idea of how much of an impact, how many people we lost. The complication of his own professed identity adds another layer. How did someone who most of the gay community consider one of them deal with the AIDS crisis? To me, it wasnt just that one through line that through line had an impact on everything. And that was just like so many other through lines in the book. You couldnt just talk about housing as a discrete topic, or cultural things as a discrete topic real estate has an impact on the art business. It goes on and on.

HW: As New Yorkers, we like to think that were in control of our own destiny. Certainly there have been times over the last 40 years where reality disabused us of that fantasy or that belief. Was the fiscal crisis solved by Koch and New Yorkers, or did larger economic trends enable the city to recover?

TD: New York is an odd place in that it has its own micro-economy. Its the city economy that is open to the influence of whats happening in the rest of the world, but its banks make it a leader, dictating a lot of whats going on in the global economy.

One of the most important factors to keep in mind is that no one ever really thought the city couldnt eventually pay its bills back. There was a philosophical decision that was made by kicking the city out of the credit market. But the city was going to be able to refinance and get going. It was able to take advantage of changes in the economy that werent necessarily a product of the people of New York, but were derived from powers based in New York: lower interest rates, the ability to refinance.

If the people of New York brought it through the fiscal crisis, it was by surviving that era. So Koch is defeated by Dinkins in the [1989] primary in large measure because of the racial divisions that had developed and really sort of exploded.

Everybodys also tired of Koch. There is a kind of Koch fatigue, where even he admits hes running on fumes. The city was so ready to move on at that point.

HW: One of the things that is surprising to me is how incendiary and routinely divisive Kochs language was, especially around race, but also in response to any sort of routine criticism. It makes me wonder, was New York a rougher place during that period?

TD: When I moved here in 1980, it was definitely surprising how visceral it was. And the press loved the fact that Koch would spout off and insult people in a way that was kind of amusing at first. By the second term, it stopped being amusing; the press was not so tickled by it, but in general the city was more and more exhausted by it.

I do think the city was a matter of survival then. You had friends who got mugged and peoples cars being broken into; if that was the worst of it, you were lucky. It was a hard place to be. I remember the convenience of big-box stores when they first came in and thinking, Wow, look at all those towels. And buying hardware. Before, there werent big hardware stores; there were small ones and you were lucky if they had what you wanted, and they were expensive. There were things that were difficult about life in New York and almost intentionally so. That changed over time and became better, but we ended up not necessarily liking the results. Kochs New York was a much testier place. We look back with amusement and nostalgia, but the reality is that it was exhausting.

HW: In the last couple of years of the Bloomberg administration, there was a mini boom of 70s nostalgia that developed. Obviously there were some exciting things happening in the arts and culture, but it was a difficult time to live in New York in a lot of ways.

TD: Nostalgia is about loss, not just in a kind of historic sense or an objective sense about place, but its so often about ourselves. One of the things I really insisted on myself in looking at this was, I can have all the warm and fuzzy emotions I want to have about my memories, but I really needed to look at it as objectively as possible.

HW: Koch is beaten by David Dinkins, the only one-term mayor of the mayors that you cover. Theres been a reappraisal of Dinkins, especially after his passing [Nov. 23, 2020]. Where do you come down on the Dinkins mayoralty?

TD: Certainly the years deserve some re-evaluation because hes handed a combination of peak AIDS, peak crack, peak crime all the problems that are cresting in the second half of the Koch years crash on top of him. Added to that is a press corps that, when you look at what Koch does and what the press corps does and says during those years, youre shocked. The treatment of Dinkins is stunning. When you have writers comparing him to Babar its jaw-dropping. Koch goes to the Inner Circle Show in a big Afro wig. These are things that are just not acceptable now. And he faced that.

I think most of all, he faced that he never dreamed of becoming Mayor Dinkins. Out of the Harlem circle of power, he was the least expected to become mayor out of [Charles] Rangel and [Percy] Sutton and [Basil] Paterson. It fell to him in a certain way. He didnt have that kind of fire in the belly that Koch had to do this and that Rudy Giuliani would have, and that Bloomberg would have.

There was also a bit of a fissure in his administration between being effective and trying to serve the people who elected him. But when we look ahead to what happens the renewal of Times Square begins under him. Safe Streets, Safe City is passed, which lays the groundwork for one of the major sources of money that Giuliani is able to use to staff up the police department. A lot of the groundwork is there. But he was just never able to convince anyone that he really meant it.

One of the things that was surprising to me when he ran for re-election against Giuliani there is this myth that nice liberals held their nose and voted for Rudy over Dinkins because they wanted a change. But looking at the vote breakdown, the numbers were pretty much the same. It was the turnout that killed Dinkins. In a lot of black communities, turnout was way down. In Staten Island, which had a secession vote on the ballot allowed by Governor Cuomo, theres a huge boost in turnout. So you have depressed turnout in black neighborhoods and increased turnout in Staten Island, and you get Rudy Giuliani.

HW: One of the characters you introduced during the Koch-Dinkins years is Donald Trump. It struck me that in a lot of ways Trump learned his politics and his mode of discourse in New York City in the 70s, in the 80s, and never forgot it. Does that make sense to you?

TD: Absolutely. When the person who teaches you how to function in the city is Roy Cohn, youre starting at a pretty frightening place. It all leads up to a person burning their way through the structure of democracy for their own needs and their own gains.

The other interesting thing about Trump to me was watching how he started. He was helped along by Brooklyn machine guys like Carey and Abe Beame. The fact that he got that first deal to redo the Commodore Hotel and turn it into the Grand Hyatt this was actually a positive thing. It was a bit of a boondoggle, but it did flip the switch on that area and really started momentum for the move across 42nd Street. So I guess even a broken clock can be right twice a day.

HW: You say Rudy was essentially attempting to build a city for the deserving who did what they were told. Thats a pretty tough judgment. Whats your overall take on the Rudy years?

TD: There was very much a place where I needed to put my personal feelings aside and try to look at Rudy in a clear-eyed way. Its important to keep in mind that when Rudy first shows up, hes kind of a guy in a white hat. Hes the one guy whos willing to go after Wall Street. Hes the one guy who brings down the pizza connection, mob stuff.

Hes kind of a fusion Republican and brought this kind of nonpartisan approach to things. And he did deliver on some of that. He delivered a leadership that we didnt have under Dinkins. The biggest failing I would say of Dinkins was that sense of letting the city feel like it was out of control, even when it wasnt. Giuliani made people feel that there was someone in control, and then he crosses the line when he decides to control New York. New Yorks not a place that wants to be controlled, but it wants somebody in control of the thing.

I want to give Rudy credit for running the city at the beginning and in a way that was fresh and open to both sides. But that quickly shifts gears into something that is much more about maintaining order over people. This is the first time we start talking about identity politics and political correctness and multiculturalism these catchwords were using now were all aflame in the 90s. A lot of his political, policy things are tied in with the cultural things that are going on, and much of this is about maintaining control for the old white ethnic powers that are feeling very much under siege.

HW: One of the strands that you draw in the book throughout all of the mayoralties is this question of order versus disorder. Theres always a seesaw, and at some points people are looking more for one than the other. And then theres a reversal. Rudy clearly is on the order side of things. You posit that by the end of the second term, people had had quite enough of it.

TD: Cities are like this they need this switch back and forth between order and disorder. They need that energy that happens when, Hey, heres a big thing thats up in the air, lets put some order on it. Or, Lets blow this thing up. Wall Street becomes a massive gusher of wealth because it had been very circumscribed, very much a 9-to-5 thing. And then the Reagan era blows it up. All these different people introduce the unexpected into the markets again, and that creates a vast amount of wealth. What was orderly suddenly becomes disorderly. But what you can never do is try to create a city that is 100% orderly, because it doesnt exist. Its a computer model. Its SimCity; its not a real place. Giuliani didnt get that. I point out that a lot of the things that he talked about with his big civility push, things that everybody was up in arms about, like lower speed limits, were policies Bill de Blasio later put forward. They werent necessarily horrible things. But when you put them in a context of, Were going to give you five or six things that all happen to most impact people of color, its destructive. Same when you tell people that they have to do these things to be better citizens, to be civil, which is a fraught word. You can have too much order.

HW: So he is leaving at the end of his term and New Yorkers have had their fill of him, and then 9/11 occurs, and everything changes at least for a time. Can you talk about the post-9/11 Rudy?

TD: Remember that the months before 9/11 were just crazy. Rudy was saying terrible things about people whod been killed by the police. Then theres the whole divorce. It became petty and venal and really unattractive, and we were ready to move on, and then 9/11 happens and somehow he transforms and steps into this role of being the city father. He was an amazing figure for this period. He goes to every wake and funeral; hes present in such an important way. If only hed been able to approach the previous eight years with that level of empathy, with that sense of unity, it would have been a remarkable period, because he had it in him somehow.

HW: David Axelrod, the Obama strategist, has a theory around politics. When it comes to chief executives, people look to correct the deficiencies of the predecessor. Often you get opposites: Koch replaces Beame; Dinkins replaces Koch; Giuliani replaces Dinkins. Looking back on it, New York City politics would have been very different absent 9/11. I think in a lot of ways, Freddy Ferrer was better positioned to win the Democratic primary than Mark Green, absent 9/11. The attack upended the political situation both in the primary and the general. So you have the election of Mike Bloomberg, which might not have happened absent 9/11. Talk about the Bloomberg years, recognizing that Im clearly not objective.

TD: Youre right that the expectation for Bloomberg was that he was going to lose. Every prediction was that he was not going to win. So he won in a surprising way, which is also something Koch had. A lot of the people around him were connected to Koch, too. The sense of the city facing an urgent challenge was something those people understood. I think the most important thing he did getting out of the gate was bringing in the best people and re-creating a sense of service, reconnecting the business community that Giuliani did not really have much of a relationship with, to involve them again in the future of the city.

He did that by drawing on his own connections. It was a different paradigm of the city that he was bringing in where he was the center point of every network. For all the pluses and minuses of that, it was made to look apolitical, but in fact it was a new kind of political, and it proved to be effective in some places. But in places where I think there might not have been as much personal investment or a sense that maybe this was something that was intractable, sometimes the ball got dropped. Sometimes he gave things to people who were given maybe more rope than they should have been, who should have been reined in much earlier than they eventually were.

HW: You talk about the city regaining its innocence after 9/11. I think that is a very underappreciated factor in the politics and the culture of the city after 9/11. There was this sense of unity and fraternity that was important in setting the tone for that decade.

TD: The wonderful writer Rebecca Solnit calls it a disaster utopia. We just clung to each other and did all that we could together. The nature of the pandemic is that you cant do that. And that has been incredibly difficult hanging out your window or banging a pot just isnt the same as getting together with two other families, and going to the firehouse and contributing things.

I think that people were ready to get past the divisiveness of Rudy, but then when you threw in 9/11, we really were pushed together. Now, as time goes by, we hear more from communities of color who feel that they were treated unfairly over time. It became apparent that the security we were so focused on, or many of us were focused on, was built on unfairness to others. When you look at some of the things that the NYPD was doing over those years, what was the cost of that sense of unity?

HW: You briefly touch on Bill de Blasio, because the book really ends at the conclusion of the Bloomberg years. De Blasio in many ways is the reaction of Bloomberg and his opposite. Youre pretty tough on de Blasio. When you look at the current field knowing what you know about New York City politics and mayoral elections, how do you imagine that the next couple of months might play out?

TD: De Blasio is the only one of these mayors who didnt come in at a moment of emergency. The other four all walked in the door with people saying the citys going up in flames. Sometimes literally. What crippled de Blasio was the inability to create an idea of one city, no matter how much he talked about Dickens. We need a mayor who is going to be able to ask New Yorkers individually to step up in their lives and look at how we work with each other, how we live with each other, how we contribute to the city in ways that arent just about tax revenue and flipping the switch in the ballot box. Which one of those mayoral candidates is that one hasnt yet been made evident to me, but were watching and hoping.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:Howard Wolfson at hwolfson1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:David Shipley at davidshipley@bloomberg.net

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