As the aftershocks of the 2024 presidential election in the United States reverberate across the globe, a chastened Democratic Party is grappling with how best to counter Donald Trump’s profound assault on the basic precepts of the American constitutional order: the right to habeas corpus, birthright citizenship, and the separation of powers.
Yet, beneath the roiling crisis surrounding fundamental elements of liberal democracy, city mayors and their rivals are grappling with the more prosaic challenge of how to respond to the quotidian needs of a population laboring under an endemic cost-of-living crisis and concerns about public safety.
In this context, observers might be surprised to see “reliably blue” New York City, a putative liberal bastion, lurching to the right. The city’s strong conservative political currents are evident at both the national and local levels.
If neoliberalism characterized the city’s approach to economic policy, conservatism was the key driver behind New York’s approach to law-and-order.
In the 2024 presidential election, for instance, despite the city preferring Democrat Kamala Harris over Republican Donald Trump, the change in vote share reveals the red wave that 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.
Moreover, in the city’s 2021 mayoral election, New Yorkers elected former cop, Eric Adams to replace left-leaning Bill de Blasio. This year, it looks like it might turn to disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo, a political chameleon who recently claimed that “The city just feels threatening, out of control and in crisis.”
New York’s Multiple Political Orders
As I show in my recent book, Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City, the recent rightward political shift has deep historical and local roots.
I analyze the past 50 years to argue that the city’s political and economic development reflects not simply a dominant liberalism, against which support for Adams and Trump seems aberrant but due to the interaction of three political orders: neoliberalism, conservatism, and egalitarianism.
Although the relative influence of each order has waxed and waned over time, all three have been present throughout New York City’s recent history.
In so doing, I devote each of the three substantive chapters to key areas where each political order has profoundly shaped city politics. Neoliberalism, for example, is the central force in the city’s economic realm.
Meanwhile, battles over the meanings of “urban crisis,” drugs, and “law-and-order” were largely resolved on conservative terms.
But despite neoliberal economic reforms and the construction of a conservative carceral state, New York’s egalitarian order fought to protect the public good, resist state oppression, and advance progressive alternatives.
Economic Crisis and the Emergence of Neoliberalism
The key economic story begins with the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis, after which New York’s development was driven by a neoliberal order reflected in periodic imposition of austerity measures under the unelected Emergency Financial Control Board, which reduced the size and scope of city government.
The neoliberal settlement that undergirded the city’s economy resulted in several signature trends: 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.
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.”
Indeed, it was government largesse, in the form of tax breaks, that underwrote Trump’s meteoric rise in the 1980s. Enthralled, Newsweek breathlessly reported: “Donald John Trump—real estate developer, casino operator, corporate raider, and perhaps future politician—is a symbol of an era. He is the man with the Midas fist.”
Disorder, Crime, and Conservatism
But if neoliberalism characterized the city’s approach to economic policy, conservatism was the key driver behind New York’s approach to law-and-order. 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 claims about the “deterioration of the Negro family” and the “welfare queen trope” reveal—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 conservative ideas prevailed in the realm of policing, bubbling up from the streets and flowing down from the think tanks, such as the Manhattan Institute.
Egalitarian New York
Though neoliberalism and conservatism have driven critical elements of New York City’s political development since the 1970s, 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 abortive resistance to gentrification, which came to a head in Tompkins Square Park in the late 1980s, and the Occupy Wall Street revolt that exploded onto the scene and echoed worldwide.
Furthermore, leftists and liberals enjoyed a modicum of electoral and programmatic success with the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio. Under de Blasio, the city abandoned its decades-long tough-on-crime policing strategy, raised 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 again embraced when voters elected Eric Adams, NYPD cop on the promise that he would “get tough” on crime.
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. In late 2024, Adams suggested that undocumented immigrants should not be subject to constitutional protections, saying “Americans have certain rights. The Constitution is for Americans.”
In April 2025, the Adams administration issued an executive order reversing “sanctuary city” protections, which would once again allow the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to access the Riker’s Island jail, which ICE had been forbidden to do since 2014. That decision has been challenged in the courts.
A historical understanding of New York City’s political development reveals its trajectory as determined 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 political traditions. The balance of those forces will determine whose interests get protected and whose will be cast aside.
