By contrast, the recent shooting of 16-year-old Kimani Gray in East Flatbush led to days of scattered street violence, an Occupy influx, extended posturing on MSNBC and widespread press coverage.

The difference this time? An election, and post-Bloomberg anxiety.

For more than two decades, Gotham’s mayoral politics have been framed by racial conflicts as expressed over policing methods.

In 1989, with an election approaching, the racially motivated killing of Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst triggered a surge in support for challenger David Dinkins. The candidate, who had been trailing, went on to defeat three-term incumbent Ed Koch in the mayoral primary.

Mr. Hawkins’s murder has cast a long shadow over New York politics ever since.

When Rudy Giuliani, running as the law and order candidate and enjoying strong police backing, defeated David Dinkins in 1993, the outgoing mayor’s supporters threatened the city with ongoing disorder. This seemed no idle threat at the time, given the deadly Crown Heights riots of 1991.

In a city suffering from 2,000 murders a year, Mr. Giuliani refused to cave in to Al Sharpton’s “riot ideology,” the threat that if Al and his pal Charlie Rangel weren’t propitiated, the city might see a repeat of the violence that erupted during 1995’s 125th Street massacre, when protests over the eviction of a beloved black record shop boiled over into a murderous rampage. Though not charged with a crime, Mr. Sharpton was implicated for whipping up the hate.

Mr. Giuliani cut off Messrs. Sharpton and Rangel, but then he had to pay the price politically when the reverend and the congressman exploited tragedies such as the 1999 Amadou Diallo case, in which the aggressive and usually effective NYPD Street Crimes Unit mowed down an unarmed African immigrant in a hail of gunfire.

But for all the tumult, when Ruth Messinger ran against Mr. Giuliani in 1997 and tried to make race and policing an issue, the tactic fell flat in a city enjoying an unprecedented reduction in crime. Mr. Giuliani and his first police commissioner Bill Bratton had, with great success, replaced the passive policing of the Koch and Dinkins years with the activist and innovative “broken windows” approach.

Mr. Bloomberg split the difference. His police commissioner, Ray Kelly, continued broken windows policing and intensified the use of stop and frisk to further drive down the crime rate. He also defused the threat of riots by making nice with Al Sharpton. Mr. Bloomberg used cutouts such as the Carnegie Corporation to pay off Mr. Sharpton and other ministers, thus buying the relative peace of this past decade. But none of the mayoral candidates other than Republican long-shot John Catsimatidis have even a fraction of Mr. Bloomberg’s money. The upshot is that the city is entering a period of uncertainty when it comes to racial politics.

With the exception of the most radical of the mayoral candidates, Comptroller John Liu, whose one-time policy director honeymooned in North Korea, candidates have tried to take moderate positions on the Kimani Gray incident.

The Kimani Gray case, however, may turn out to be a damp squib. The facts suggest that, unlike Mr. Hawkins, Gray makes an unmarketable martyr. The story that has emerged, largely uncontested, suggests that Gray, a young wannabe gangster with ambitions to become a Blood, was approached by two police officers—neither of whom was white—who thought he was holding a gun. Police say he was, and he pulled it despite police orders to “freeze” and then was shot seven times, both in his front and his back, suggesting he was facing the police when they began shooting and was turned around by the force of the shots.

Jumaane Williams, the councilman representing the heavily Caribbean area of single-family homes and apartment buildings where the shooting took place, was already prominent as a critic of the city’s “stop, question and frisk” policing policies, and he has emerged as the chief community spokesman in the case. Mr. Williams has both revved up the rhetoric and tamped down the sometimes violent protests that followed the killing.

Sounding at times like the Al Sharpton of the Giuliani years, Mr. Williams has warned that because Police Commissioner Kelly—with whom he has frequently clashed—ignores the “root causes of the problems in East Flatbush, I fear this will be a long and bloody summer ahead.”

All of the major candidates have called for modification to stop and frisk, but like Mr. Williams, they’re short on specifics. Their problem is that stop and frisk is unpopular with half the city’s population, but is also enormously effective. In the wake last December of the horrific Newtown killings in nearby Connecticut, there was an enormous hue and cry for better gun control, and the call often came from the very pols most opposed to stop and frisk.

Yet stop and frisk—far and away the most effective means of getting guns off the streets—has served to reduce not only crime but the state prison population well. The problem is that it’s also an affront to the dignity of ordinary people going about their business in high-crime areas.

The difficult task of reconciling the legitimate demand for respect and the need for the police to protect the population at large will, at least for a time, be in the hands of the left-wing activist United States District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin. She will no doubt rule on behalf of her allies in the ACLU, who have been fighting the most successful criminal justice reforms in the history of the country for the past 22 years.

But her verdict will certainly be appealed, and that leads back to the role of Mr. Williams. He’s been a bitter critic of Mr. Kelly, but he’s neither acknowledged the disproportionate benefit to minority communities from the city’s approach to policing nor laid out a means by which public safety can be better reconciled with the right of ordinary citizens not to be harassed by the police.

In a recent speech, former Commissioner Bill Bratton compared the use of stop and frisk to chemotherapy. He noted that too high a dose can kill a patient, but the proper amount can save lives. The courts, wrapped up as they necessarily are in abstraction, are unlikely to be able to strike that balance. It will be the task of Mr. Bloomberg’s successors to work out the new framework.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the leading mayoral candidate at the moment, says she would like to retain Ray Kelly as police commissioner but also impose a monitor to oversee stop and frisk. Rival Bill de Blasio wants to replace Mr. Kelly, possibly with Bill Bratton.

The Kimani Gray case may fade, but the intertwined issues of crime and race will remain high on the electoral agenda. If the politicians fail to thread the needle, the danger ahead is that New York could regress to a Chicago-like situation, where the well-to-do areas are reasonably well-policed while the minority areas are left to fend for themselves regarding crime. The liberal champions of equality will have once again produced greater inequality.

editorial@observer.com

Back in the fall of 2003, when Dr. Dean was still riding high in the Presidential primary, I'd listened in on a conversation among undergraduate Deaniacs outside my office at Cooper Union in the East Village. "This just doesn't feel like America any more," one of them said to a friend, who replied, "Fuck Bush," and pointed to a button on his jacket bearing the same slogan.

It's an old professor's habit, but I had to engage them. "What does that mean?" I asked the fellow with the button. "Bush is bullshit," he replied, "the most evil man in the world." When I said that wasn't an argument and pressed him, he acknowledged that "Saddam isn't a good guy," but "who are we"-he pointed both to me and his like-minded friend-to "judge Saddam Hussein?"

"Why not?" I asked. He replied with an answer right out of the postmodern playbook. Americans can't judge another culture, he insisted, because there is no common morality. But if that's the case, I asked, why then was George Bush "undoubtedly the most evil man in the world?" He seemed puzzled by the idea that his version of an emotional truth might seem incoherent to others.

Like the fascist writers of the 1930's from whom their postmodern teachers had drawn their ideas, these Deaniacs were both engaged in politics and deeply cynical about democracy, which they saw as a game manipulated by nefarious forces led by Fox News. As they see it, there is little to argue; the only question is "which side are you on?" Doubtful that informed debate could settle much, they hoped to impose their will on a backward country that wickedly refused to see the appeal of a "Fuck Bush" platform.

I was taken aback by my conversation with the Deaniacs; their sheer coarseness stunned me. Even at the height of the "Ronald Reagan is going to blow up the world" mania of the 1980's, I had never seen a "Fuck Reagan" button. But the coarseness was consistent with the dominant mood in academia outside of the sciences.

Recently, the professoriat has been embarrassed by a series of dustups exposing the irrationalist underside of academic life. After Hamilton College invited a former Brinks holdup terrorist to take a faculty position, it compounded its problems by asking "Indian" poseur Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado to speak, only to back off when he was found to have delivered a rant about how the people killed in the World Trade Center were "little Eichmanns." Columbia's alumni, if not its administration, has been discomfited by the ravings of Joseph Massad, a professor so extreme in his support of Palestinian terrorism as to have labeled Yasir Arafat a collaborator with Israel. Harvard president Larry Summers has been forced to don the sackcloth and ashes after he commented reasonably that the differences between men and women might-and his stress, the transcript shows, was on might- be one part of the reason why there are fewer females in the sciences.

The common response to these embarrassments has been either to defend them as free-speech exercises or as petty conflicts confined to the parallel universe of our campus Brigadoons. Both reactions are somewhat disingenuous, but the latter response is particularly problematic for the future of the Democratic Party.

The Democrats and the academy have been deeply intertwined ever since Franklin Roosevelt drew on Columbia faculty to staff his brain trust. In 1961, John F. Kennedy turned to Harvard for similar talent. But the relationship, although it continued to be tight, turned negative in the 1960's, when campus extremism undermined the popular appeal of the "party of the people," and the relationship has stayed negative ever since.

As academia turned to political activism, think tanks took over its role as the main source of policy ideas for new, generally Republican, administrations. In this last election, academia contributed little in the way of usable ideas, though it was a major source of Democratic Party funding.

"While Republicans were commandeering the nation's political apparatus," noted historian Richard Wolin, the theorists of a postmodern left, cuckolded by history, were conquering academia. Their victory has come at a high cost. Once a forward-looking hothouse for discussion and debate, academia, taken as a whole, has been increasingly dominated by freeze-dried 1960's radicals and their intellectual progeny, who have turned much of the humanities and social sciences into a backwater.

In 1989, when Eastern Europeans were reclaiming the ideals of human rights and political freedom, students and faculty on the Stanford campus were marching with 1988 Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson shouting "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture's got to go." Up the road, Berkeley-a city, dominated by the university, which conducts its own foreign policy-announced it was adopting Jena in Communist East Germany as a sister city, this just a few months before the Berlin Wall fell.

But then again, academia has been getting it wrong over and over again. Criminologists, as a group, were convinced that crime couldn't be cut; sociologists were sure that welfare reform couldn't work because it didn't go to the root causes of poverty; and Sovietologists were certain that the USSR of the 1980's had matured into a successful, even pluralistic society. As for radical Islam, the consensus view of the Middle Eastern Studies Association was that the danger to America came from a "terror industry" which conjured imagined threats in order to justify American aggression.

But even as academia's batting average has declined, its claim to superior knowledge has expanded. The old ideal of disinterested scholarship, or at least the importance of attempting to be objective, has been displaced. In 2003, the University of California's Academic Assembly did away with the distinction between "interested" and "disinterested" scholarship by a 45-3 vote. As Berkeley law professor Robert Post explained, "The old statement of principles was so outlandishly disconnected to what university teaching is now that it made no sense to think about it that way."

The reality, as Professor Post recognized, is that many professors now literally profess. Far from teaching the mechanics of knowledge, they are in fact preachers of sorts, spreading a gospel akin to that of Howard Dean. And if they are part of grievance-studies departments, like Ward Churchill or Joseph Massad, there never was any expectation of objectivity: They were knowingly hired as activists and are now puzzled as to why this has become a problem for some of their students and the larger public. After all, what they preach is built into the very orientation students are given when they arrive on campus. New students at many schools are quite literally given a new faith in which the world is divided into victims and victimizers, with little room for common ideals of citizenship or rationality, and no basis for debates that approximate the give-and-take of politics.

This appeal to tribalism was nearly summed in a popular T-shirt of the mid-1990's. It read in large print: "If you're not black, you wouldn't understand."

The effect of victims-studies departments, in which intellectual standards are ignored-the personalization of the political by way of feminism, and the epistemological nihilism of postmodernism-has cut much of academia off from its lifeblood of free and open debate. Like the Deaniacs, who wrote off the success of the Iraqi elections, they never need to refine their arguments in light of new evidence, since criticism can be written off as "Republican," or "racist," or "sexist," or "Islamophobic," or just plain "bullshit."

It has gotten so bad that philosophers at a prestigious university have asked to be detached from the humanities department because the English and history departments are so mired in subjectivity that faculty members in the same department can barely speak with each other, let alone across disciplines.

Postmodernism is the Indian rope trick of academia; it's an intellectual illusion that collapses before even slightly skeptical scrutiny. The postmodern game consists of an insistence that objective judgments are impossible, since all knowledge is riddled with prejudice, power considerations, ethnocentric assumptions and so on. The trick is that these prejudices infect only those who differ from the (almost always left-wing) positions of the professors. Its triumph on campus after campus-where the tenure system ensures that only like-minded scholars are accepted and deters those with different ideas from even considering the academy as a career choice-means that the postmodern academy speaks largely to itself and its offspring. In the absence of truth, there's little reason to try and persuade people. Instead, performance replaces plausibility and persuasion as the coin of academic success, giving rise to percussive performers like Ward Churchill and Joseph Massad.

In the absence of intellectual competition-other than the disputes between left and lefter-academia will continue to get it wrong over and over again. This might be of limited concern were it not for the fact that the sheltered students who emerge from this one-party state are left bereft of any means of negotiating with political reality once they engage in politics as adults.

Students left uninformed by a high-school education largely bereft of U.S. history arrive at college, where, instead of being given the background knowledge of American institutions they need to make judgments as citizens, they are fed attitudes and theories that can be made to fit with isolated fact taken out of context. This academic alchemy specializes in trying to turn Third World thugs like Yasir Arafat and Saddam Hussein into vanguards of virtue.

Credulous undergraduates fall prey to priestly performers who claim to be initiating them into the subterranean mysteries of postmodern theory. It's an appealing brew, a short cut to supposedly subversive and hence superior insights into the world without ever knowing much about it. A postmodernist recently told me that the Third World is backward because it had failed to follow the path set out by Franz Fanon, in which the opposed "others" of the world would claim the future by inflicting violence on their First World oppressors and native allies.

Had this man never heard of Pol Pot or Yasir Arafat or Robert Mugabe? Those who buy into this worldview-many of whom are future Democratic Party activists-are left both insufferably pretentious and substantively silly.

This doesn't speak to whether the acadeaniacs and Deaniacs were right or wrong about Iraq, but it does explain why they're unable to give coherent reasons for their views. Instead, when pushed, they fall back on their angry emotions or crackpot conspiracy theories. The idea that George Bush invaded Iraq to help the Saudis, who are ferociously opposed to a Shia-dominated state on their northern border, will be persuasive only to people of the Deaniac faith.

"No Blood for Oil" was a facile slogan in 1991, but simply bizarre in 2003. My son saw a "U.S. out of the United States" sign in Union Square on the night of Sept. 11, 2001. What makes all this worse is that when the acadeaniacs graduate, they tend to sort themselves into places where only the like-minded are likely to have settled, furthering their isolation them from the life of the country.

If the Democratic Party comes to be dominated by angry ill-informed activists who believe that George Bush is more evil than Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, it will have a bleak future. It's time for Democrats, if only out of their own self-interest, to start paying attention to the tragic decline of our college and universities. If they don't, the party's future will be in the hands of the acadeaniacs.

The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, by Gilles Kepel. Harvard University Press, 336 pages, $23.95.

America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, by Anatol Lieven. Oxford University Press, 274 pages, $30.

What We Owe Iraq: War and Ethics of Nation Building, by Noah Feldman. Princeton University Press, 154 pages, $19.95.

Now that the shouting and sloganeering of the election season is behind us, there may be an opening for a serious discussion of the complex arguments about terror and the war in Iraq laid out in George Friedman's America's Secret War. Mr. Friedman, who runs Stratfor, a private intelligence-gathering organization, has a record of clear-eyed thinking. He has the unusual ability to view events through the eyes of not only American but also foreign political leaders. There's no posturing or rhetoric with Mr. Friedman: He approaches problems like a policymaker forced to select from an unappetizing menu of options. The United States, as he sees it, is in the treacherous business of enlisting Saudi Arabian and Pakistani allies-who are also our enemies-into at least a supporting role in the war against Islamism. Viewing the landscape of terror in geopolitical terms, he takes the reader through the intricate politics of the Islamic world, in which Shiite Iran-a charter member of "the Axis of Evil"-quietly supported U.S. wars against the Sunni regimes in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

He reverses the conventional judgment about the Bush administration: President Bush, he writes, "has been portrayed as strategically simplistic and politically adroit and opportunistic. In fact, the exact opposite seems to be the case." Mr. Friedman lays out a sophisticated case for linking the war on terror to the war in Iraq-a case that an inarticulate and often incompetent Bush administration could not seem to make.

Al Qaeda, he notes, assumed it had executed a masterstroke on 9/11. They knew the U.S. would try to strike back. But Al Qaeda's leadership assumed it was invulnerable in its Afghan strongholds. They expected it would take at least six months for the Americans to launch a response. The delay-like the failure to respond to earlier terror attacks-would be taken as additional proof of American impotence.

In the pre-9/11 world, both the Pakistani and Saudi intelligence services played a major role in the rise of Al Qaeda. Even after 9/11, the pragmatic Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan was reluctant to do more than act as a mediator between the U.S. and the Taliban. But within a mere month of 9/11, with the help of the Russians, we had rented the Taliban's Afghan military opposition, bypassed General Musharraf by airlifting our Special Forces into the mountains, and begun the war on the Taliban. Still, it took the simultaneous threat of nuclear war with India to bring General; Musharraf around to cooperating against Al Qaeda-a risky business in a country where 65 percent of the population thinks that Osama Bin Laden is a hero.

Saudi Arabia, which had treated American soldiers sent to protect the regime from Saddam Hussein as no better than hired help, assumed it had America by the short hairs. The U.S., notes Mr. Friedman, didn't scare the Saudi royals nearly as much as did Mr. bin Laden. But the U.S. was in no mood for Saudi equivocation. In the month after 9/11, the C.I.A. received two credible-but thankfully erroneous-reports of a terrorist nuclear device in New York. Those reports sent the administration into a cold sweat. It became clear that it was impossible to fight a largely defensive war against determined terrorists with deadly weapons. They could, as Mr. bin Laden bragged in the pre-election videotape aired on Oct. 29, keep the U.S. on tenterhooks and cost the government billions by constantly jerking the American chain with feints and hints of future attacks.

The U.S. needed a way to force the Saudi regime not only to take action against Mr. bin Laden's Saudi backers but to force the royal family to make a strategic decision: Which side are you on? Faced with American pressure, the Saudis floated a phony Arab-Israeli peace plan, blamed Saudi-American tension on those nefarious neoconservatives, and launched an expensive stateside P.R. campaign. But still-perhaps because of Al Qaeda attacks within the kingdom-the Saudis refused to cooperate. Here was one of the key reasons to go into Iraq. As a military matter, Iraq is "the single most strategically located country in the Middle East." It borders not only Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, but also Syria, a junior partner in "the Axis of Evil," as well as Iran and Turkey. "The U.S.," writes Mr. Friedman, "was not driven by bloodlust or some cowboy mentality," but by a desire to make it clear that in the only calculus in the Arab world that counted, it was to be feared more than Al Qaeda.

Still, the Saudis-like the Pakistanis with regard to Afghanistan-assumed that the Americans couldn't go into Iraq without their cooperation. Wrong again. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, the Saudis-worried, among other things, about an American seizure of their oil fields-were forced to crack down on Al Qaeda's funding sources. Americans weren't taking "maybe later" for an answer. The U.S., notes Mr. Friedman, "moved from being hated and held in contempt to being hated and feared-a substantial improvement in terms of getting nations to act in accordance with U.S. wishes." And like the Pakistanis, the Saudis have crossed the line in cooperating with us against Al Qaeda; they can't go back. "The U.S.," Mr. Friedman argues, "has reshaped the Islamic world to such an extent that Islamic nation-states are now using their intelligence services to attack and undermine Al Qaeda." They were forced despite themselves to cooperate against terrorism.

Going into Iraq, Mr. Friedman argues, wasn't a good idea; it was just the best available option. While he supports the broad strategic concept behind the war in Iraq, he's scathing when it comes to its execution. He singles out Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for particular criticism. Mr. Rumsfeld, who kept on talking dismissively about the Iraqi opposition as "dead-enders," was very slow to see that Saddam Hussein had been planning for a guerrilla war from the start. Meanwhile, the administration-having placed all its rhetorical eggs in the W.M.D. basket-was left verbally defenseless when they weren't found. Still, Mr. Friedman concludes that trends in Iraq favor the U.S., even if, "because of the political failures of the Bush administration, [most Americans] seem unaware of it."

Mr. Friedman's conclusion would come as a shock to the conspiratorial Gilles Kepel, who has written The War for Muslim Minds, and Anatol Lieven, whose book America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism reduces U.S. foreign policy to pop psychology.

Mr. Kepel, an influential Parisian academic and erudite flack for French foreign policy, has written a book in which all our problems, from 9/11 to the Palestinian intifada, have been produced by one man: Ariel Sharon. In Mr. Kepel's world, the late Yasir Arafat never walked out of the Oslo peace talks and began the second intifada. In Mr. Kepel's world, the 9/11 attacks, whose planning began in 1996, were merely another response to Ariel Sharon becoming the Israeli prime minister in 2000. It would take a far longer book than Mr. Kepel has written to unravel all his errors of fact and chronology. But one point deserves mention: The U.S. first began to arm the mujahadeen in Afghanistan during the Carter administration. It was a policy designed in 1979 by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a man almost as hostile to Israel as the French foreign ministry is. But in Mr. Kepel's world, the policy was begun by Ariel Sharon's allies, the American neoconservatives-never mind that the neocons who didn't gain influence until 1981, when Reagan had assumed the Presidency. Did the editors at Harvard University Press actually read this manuscript?

Anatol Lieven's American Nationalism is cut from similar cloth. During the Cold War, there was a whole genre of revisionist histories that explained the conflict with scant reference to Stalin or the Soviet empire. Rather, they traced the problems to the psychology of American life that produced a false fear of communism. Substitute "Islamism" for "communism" and you have much of Mr. Lieven's book. There's no need to analyze the aims and tactics of the "alleged threat" from the jihadis, since for Mr. Lieven, American foreign policy stems from a "psychological hatred and fear of the outside world." Mr. Lieven, an Englishman who's associated with the Carnegie Endowment, goes on to explain the deep ties between the U.S. and Israel by arguing that the Americans see the Jews as the cowboys and the Palestinians as the Indians.

Reading Messrs. Kepel and Lieven underscores the wisdom of Middle East scholar Barry Rubin's comment that when it comes to Judeophobia, "rather than easing the Middle East's madness, Europe has caught the disease itself."

Noah Feldman's What We Owe Iraq is a tightly argued but highly academic argument about why, in the name of both ethical norms and our own self-interest, we ought to support democracy in Iraq. But despite the fact that Mr. Feldman, an N.Y.U. law professor, was an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the book's abstract treatment of the issues leaves the reader without a feel for Iraqi politics. Mr. Feldman never deals, as Mr. Friedman might have, with the central paradox of holding elections in Iraq. In order to make sure they are as fair as possible, we have to be neutral among the three major contending groups, Shiites, Kurds and Sunni. But the Shiites have generally been our allies and the Sunnis our enemies-a dilemma worthy of Mr. Feldman's attention.

Since 9/11, there's been a continuous flow of books on American foreign policy, terrorism, Iraq, and the Arab and Islamic worlds. Most are forgettable; few have the power and insight of George Friedman's taut and smartly argued America's Secret War. With the election behind us, Mr. Friedman's argument provides the basis for a substantive debate on the relationship between the war in Iraq and the threat of Islamist terror. Let the rational arguments begin!

Fred Siegel is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington and a professor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York.

New York politics is mostly about striking caring poses. Liberals like former Mayors John Lindsay and Mr. Dinkins spoke endlessly of what the city owed the poor, but they delivered rising rates of crime and welfare. Mr. Giuliani spoke in the middle-class language of what the poor owe to the rest of society, and he delivered more peaceful neighborhoods and a rising standard of living from Mott Haven to East New York. For all of Fernando Ferrer's assertions that Mr. Giuliani abandoned "the other New York," the city's poorest neighborhoods experienced the sharpest drop in crime and biggest rise in income.

None of this was predestined. No other city has made comparable gains. Past booms in the 1960's and 1980's failed to revive the city's distressed neighborhoods. And very little of this would have happened had David Dinkins been reelected in 1993.

When Mr. Giuliani took office on Jan. 1, 1994, conventional wisdom had it that fear was the price people had to pay to be in New York. Not everyone agreed: In the closing years of the Dinkins administration, tourists stayed away in droves, while businesses and residents were racing for the exits in what seemed like an evacuation. Had Mr. Dinkins been reelected, the flight from fear would have become a flood.

In the early 1990's, when the city already had lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, union leader Dennis Rivera captured the spirit of the Dinkins years. He proposed tax increases on the grounds that "if the quality of life deteriorates any further, they [those who can] will leave anyway.

"What's going to happen to New York," he explained, "is a repeat of Detroit; those who can escape will." And there were plenty of reasons to escape. It seems like a memory from a distant time now, but recall that during the Dinkins years, a crowd in Washington Heights cheered when a heavy bucket hurled off a roof fatally struck a young housing cop working to clear double-parked cars so that fire engines could get through. Then there was the week of violence in Jamaica, Queens, when marauding "kids" smashed windows and looted displays in a shopping area once hailed as a haven for the black middle class.

You didn't have to see the Whitney Biennial, featuring a photo of five black males with the words "What You Lookn At" written across it in bold letters, or the first Batman movie, which depicted a Gotham held in thrall by an artist criminal, to worry that New York might be terminally ill. You just had to listen to city leaders like former union leader Victor Gotbaum, who denounced those who were "enamored of middle-class, two-parent families with children who don't have sex" because "middle-class values" were "contrary to the environment and lives of [New York's] students." New York's future was being written off.

The change under Mr. Giuliani-almost a rejoinder to Mr. Gotbaum's disdain for middle-class values-was best encapsulated by a large billboard along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It read in giant letters: "Citi: The Bank for the Upwardly Normal." Under Mr. Giuliani, the ideal that Mr. Gotbaum rejected-the ideal of upward mobility-once again became the defining credo of a city whose policies and politics had been based, before Mr. Giuliani entered office, on the assumption that the pathological was routine. A city once organized around the presumption that the poor were caught in a permanent depression, so that the best we could do was to make poverty comfortable, returned to the ideal of giving people a chance to make better lives for themselves. As Mr. Giuliani himself said, for many years "we blocked the genius of America for the poorest people in New York."

Breaking the Rules

"New York's mayors," explained Times columnist Joyce Purnick, "have always played by unwritten rules that demanded they get along with the leading players in government." Mr. Giuliani governed against the grain. He achieved greatness by repeatedly breaking those rules. Ed Koch had tried and failed to reform welfare and to merge the city's transit and housing police into the NYPD. Mr. Giuliani, impervious to the criticism from powerful interests, succeeded in both cases. "The usual yelling and screaming about this program, that program," he explained, wasn't going to stop him. He understood that in New York, the hospitals and schools and social services were often run more for the benefit of employees than the people they were supposedly serving. In case after case, he asserted the general interest of the city as a whole over the special interests accustomed to having their way.

His successes produced not only accolades, but also anger and envy from those whose power had been diminished. The result has been numerous efforts to denigrate his accomplishments. These usually take one of three forms.

The first assertion is that crime has fallen everywhere, so Mr. Giuliani had little to do with the decrease in crime in New York. This argument was made by Mr. Ferrer, WNYC radio host Leonard Lopate, New York 1 anchor Dominic Carter and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, among others. None of these critics supplied specifics-with good reason. Crime didn't fall everywhere, as anyone from Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit or a host of other big cities could have explained. In fact, much of the national decline in crime (anywhere from one-seventh to one-fourth) was a reflection of New York's achievements. And just as important, in some of the cities where crime had dropped, such as Los Angeles and Boston, it has, unlike in New York, been rising again the last few years.

A corollary of the above argument has it that Mr. Giuliani was just lucky. In the words of Mr. Ferrer, it was the national economy that saved New York, and "Alan Greenspan has been … one of the greatest crime fighters." Not true: Crime dropped by 30 percent in Mr. Giuliani's first two years-in other words, before the 1990's boom really took off. But even more important, the economic booms of the 1960's and 1980's were accompanied by rising rates of both crime and welfare. It was different this time.

Finally, the usually astute political consultant Hank Sheinkopf and a host of others have argued that nothing was accomplished in Mr. Giuliani's second term. A popular argument has it that the only thing Mr. Giuliani did since 1997 was to harass vendors and cabbies, censor art exhibits and defend rogue cops. This caricature ignores a long list of accomplishments that received only a fraction of the publicity of the Brooklyn Museum's Sensation exhibit, but has had a far greater impact on the life of the city. These include the Herman Badillo–led reform of City University, which reintroduced academic standards to an institution long on the slide; reform of the once violence-ridden Rikers Island jail under Michael Jacobson and Bernard Kerik; the success of the Nick Scopetta–led Administration for Children's Services; and Jason Turner's transformation of the welfare department from an agency that handed out checks to a place where people are pushed to find work. But the biggest accomplishment of the second four years, made possible by the continued drop in crime and welfare, has been the revival of numerous neighborhoods from Harlem to Bushwick. This is an accomplishment unmatched by any Mayor since Fiorello LaGuardia.

The shadow of Rudy Giuliani's accomplishments in reviving neighborhoods and reducing fear, welfare and the city tax burden will fall over every decision made by incoming Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mr. Giuliani has raised the bar for what we expect of New York Mayors. Before Mr. Giuliani, the conventional wisdom insisted that New York was ungovernable. New York's problems were said to be an expression of national problems, social trends, right-wing Republicans or a variety of other bogeymen. We know better now, and we also know more about how government works, thanks to the light that Comstat has shed on New York policing. It will be harder for crime to creep up on us again, because New Yorkers can go online to get weekly crime statistics for their neighborhood precinct.

Above all, Mayor Giuliani should be remembered as the man who saved New York from self-destruction. He leaves office as "America's Mayor," a hero of 9/11 who is greeted with chants of "Rudy! Rudy!" wherever he goes.

But it was his response to the first crisis he faced eight years ago-when the city was careening toward disaster-that recreated the New York allure which other Americans responded to when terror struck in September.

In his final appearance as Mayor on Saturday Night Live on Dec. 15, Mr. Giuliani sang the Shirelles rock standard "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" The answer is yes-so long as New Yorkers remember how he restored the promise of American life for the city's poorest neighborhoods.

college athlete who's still wearing his faded championship jacket long after

his brief triumph. The New York Review of

Books is a magazine version of that guy. A cutting-edge publication in the

1960's, when the street fighters at Elaine's signed on to the revolution, today

many of its articles have the musty feel of a C. Wright Mills polemic. Once

interesting even if infuriating, the NYRB

rarely figures in the debates of the last two decades.

Yes, it still publishes articles of considerable

sophistication on history, literature and philosophy, such as Tony Judt's

recent essay on the French collapse in World War II. And once in a while it has

something interesting to say on contemporary issues, as with Christopher

Jencks' two-part article on homelessness in 1994. But that's the exception. On

a variety of subjects from the American economy to race to the Cold War and the

Middle East conflict, the magazine generally runs new versions of the same

arguments it's been hawking for nearly 40 years. 

When it comes to New York City, the NYRB is almost always at sea. In the early 1990's, founding editor

Jason Epstein blamed the disaster of the David Dinkins era on capitalism and

Robert Moses (the latter has been one of the NYRB 's longtime villains). Annoyed when Rudolph Giuliani deposed

Mr. Dinkins and began recording historic drops in crime, the NYRB flailed away at Mr. Giuliani in a

series of articles until it concluded, in 1997, that the city's

"broken-windows" theory of policing was simply "rudimentary" and that it

shortchanged the city's poorest neighborhoods. In 1996, essayist Michael

Massing was sure that Mr. Giuliani's policing success would be short-lived. He

predicted a vast new crime surge because the Mayor wasn't spending enough on

social services. Mr. Massing approvingly quoted a middle-aged black man who

predicted that "crime is going to go up" because "they're hounding people off

welfare. These people are not going to starve. They'll steal." Another piece attributed the crime drop to the "little

brother phenomenon," whereby younger brothers see the damage that drugs

have done to their older siblings and stay clean. Yet another noted the general

decline in drug use nationally. Both of these points are true to a degree. But

what marks the NYRB is its general

inability to adapt to new evidence, combined with an unwillingness to deal

honestly with its political adversaries.

In explaining the Cold War, for instance, the NYRB -which once fervently supported the

argument that the U.S. forced the conflict on Stalin-now asserts, in a recent

article by Thomas Powers, that Ronald Reagan had nothing to do with the

collapse of the USSR. Mr. Powers asserted that it was "not the Americans, not

the Russians, but the bomb" that won the Cold War. There can be no doubt that

many factors brought the Soviets down: Chernobyl, the demoralization of the

Soviet military in Afghanistan, increasing contact with the West, President

Carter's human-rights initiatives and the war in Lebanon, when Israel

demonstrated the superiority of Western technology by quickly knocking out

about 90 Syrian MiG's without losing any of its planes. That said, surely it

was Mr. Reagan's pressure on Mikhail Gorbachev that pushed the Soviet leader

into his failed attempt to reform Communism. But the NYRB cannot bring itself to concede the point, just as it cannot

give Rudy Giuliani credit for cutting crime without embracing root-cause

doctrines.

The same refusal to question outdated dogma applies to the NYRB 's take on the Middle East. No matter

what the circumstances, the NYRB 's

editors are sure of one thing: The Israelis must be blamed. It is beyond the

magazine's limited imaginative capabilities to understand that the Palestinians

are both bully and victim. When the story that Edward Said peddled about his

family's history in Jerusalem proved substantially fraudulent, the NYRB sprung to his defense in November

1999 with one of its most bizarre articles yet. The apologia, written by the

veteran Israeli dove Amos Elon, minimized Mr. Said's penchant for exaggeration

and distortion. Rather, Mr. Elon argued that criticism of Mr. Said, an

apologist for the Ayatollah Khomeini and an opponent of the Persian Gulf war,

was in effect an attack on the peace process. But surely even the cloistered NYRB must have known that Mr.

Said-recently pictured turning his words into actions by throwing rocks into

Israel from Lebanon (yet another topic about which he lied)-has been one of the

leading opponents of the Oslo peace negotiations with Israel. After Israeli Prime

Minister Ehud Barak made wide-ranging concessions to Yasir Arafat and received

not a counteroffer but war, the NYRB 's

editors learned nothing. In their most recent offering on the topic, they

insist nothing good can happen until all Israelis fervently and frequently

apologize to the Palestinians for their very existence. 

Few issues demonstrate the NYRB 's intellectual rigidity better than the devastating impact of

family breakdown in the African-American community. Most observers across the

political spectrum now recognize the terrible impact of illegitimacy and absent

fathers on poor black children. But not the editors of The New York Review of Books. While Daniel Patrick Moynihan's

famous 1965 study on black family breakdown now is considered prophecy, NYRB writers on race, like Andrew

Hacker, either ignore the issue, minimize it or continue to throw darts at the

report, as Garry Wills recently did.

In fact, the former Senator has long been a bête noire at the NYRB , even as others (with the notable exception of The New York Times Magazine )

acknowledged him to be one of the nation's greatest scholar-statesmen. Whether

the issue was the black family or America's role in the world, the NYRB has long disdained the former

Senator. Tellingly, the one time the NYRB

embraced a Moynihan position-his vehement opposition to the 1996 welfare-reform

bill-the Senator was wildly off the mark. In an overwrought NYRB article entitled "Congress Builds a Coffin," Mr. Moynihan

predicted that welfare reform would be a catastrophe.

Traditionally under the tight control of its editors, the NYRB was founded by New Yorkers Robert

Silvers and Jason and Barbara Epstein in 1963. Mr. Silvers, a man of British

affectations, said that he wanted it "to be read in the common rooms of American

universities." During the turmoil of the 1960's, however, the NYRB found a wider role as the primary

voice of both radical chic and the rapidly rising population of new faculty

members. Sometimes original and interesting even when it was over the top, the NYRB' s success came from connecting

literary academia to the larger issues of the day, such as the debates over

black nationalism and the war in Vietnam.

Too clever to be

straightforwardly Marxist, too detached from mainstream America to have a clue

about how life was really lived beyond the Hudson River, the NYRB made a splash after the 1967 riots

in Detroit and Newark by running a do-it-yourself diagram of a Molotov cocktail

on its cover. The diagram illustrated an article by a Time magazine writer turned radical named Andrew Kopkind, who

thrilled the publication's highbrow readers with an approving reference to

Chairman Mao's dictum that "morality, like politics, flows from the barrel of a

gun." The NYRB' s coverage of Vietnam

didn't merely excoriate American policy; its lead articles by Noam Chomsky

posited America as the center of evil in the world. At the heart of that evil

was an American people so stupid that they were unable to grasp the convoluted

conspiracy theories that the NYRB was

peddling. The magazine's contempt for the middle class "grunt(ing) its way

upward," in the unlovely words of Mr. Epstein, was as boundless as its

unlimited credulity in romanticizing racial thuggery. New York, Mr. Epstein

argued in the midst of the Ocean-Hill school-decentralization Kulturkampf , was "faced with a classic

revolutionary situation." He intoned: "The alternatives left to the white

majority are capitulation or genocide."

The intellectual origins of this Tory radicalism lie in both

a home-grown, Mencken-like disdain for the "booboisie" and the transformation

of American intellectual life by German neo-Marxist emigrés in the 1950's. The

Frankfurt School emigrés perceived signs of fascism in every nook and corner of

American life. They detested American mass culture, which they argued submerged

class consciousness beneath a sea of mass consumption; they saw America's

fascination with science through the eyes of the Nazi philosopher Martin

Heidegger; and they assumed that technology would soon become an instrument of

totalitarian domination. They were sure that strong, father-centered American

families were a source of what they called "the authoritarian personality," yet

another path to fascism.

The most influential of

the emigrés, Hannah Arendt, famed as the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, had an enormous influence on the NYRB . Anticipating today's campus

literary theorists, she was an expert on everything. Arendt's high-toned sense

that she alone commanded the truth, and her track record for factual errors as

well as errors of judgment, helped set the magazine's tone. A lifelong

apologist for Heidegger, her professor and onetime lover, she argued in Eichmann in Jerusalem that the Jews of

Europe had been done in not so much by the Nazis as by their own leaders. She

was also convinced that a flowering of the arts was underway under Stalin in

the early 1950's, while automation, she was certain, would eliminate most work.

In the NYRB she pronounced the

creation of a reliable and devoted civil service as "probably the most

important achievement of the Roosevelt administration," and she compared

Richard Nixon to Hitler and Stalin. Nixon, she insisted, "was engaged … in an

attempt to abolish the constitution and the institutions of liberty." (She

later backtracked from that position.) She asserted that it was only Cold War

military expenditures that kept the U.S. from collapsing back into a

1930's-style depression.

The ongoing failure of the American economy and the dangers

of an imminent depression have been two of the NYRB 's ongoing themes. One of the NYRB 's star writers on the economy was the medievalist turned

prophet of doom Geoffrey Barraclough. The cover of a January 1975 issue had the

headline "THE WORLD CRASH" splashed across the cover. Mr. Barraclough was

certain that the coming depression was likely to be "even more severe and more

world-shaking than the depression of 1929-40."

The U.S., he argued, could not continue its high standard of living

"unless we wish, like Hitler, to bring the whole world down with us in

catastrophe."

In subsequent years, the NYRB

was sure of the superiority of the corporatist German and Japanese models of

capitalism. During the 1980's, it regularly published articles by Felix Rohatyn

calling on the national government to do for America what Mario Cuomo was doing

for New York. Fortunately, this advice was ignored-after all, Mr. Cuomo's

version of crony capitalism left upstate devastated. In the late 1980's, the NYRB was enthusiastic about historian

Paul Kennedy, whose 1988 book The Rise

and Fall of the Great Powers saw the USSR as staid but stable, but the U.S.

in irremediable decline. In a June 1990 article, the NYRB' s editors still were peddling the idea of American decline,

even after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The NYRB 's track

record on crime and the cities is similarly askew. In the 1970's, it had Garry

Wills arguing for the abolition of prisons, while law professor Graham Hughes

insisted that nothing short of social revolution could make a dent in the crime

rate. "The failure to prevent most crime does not make the state at fault," Mr.

Hughes argued, "for most crime is probably not preventable." Not to be

outdone,  Andrew Hacker's 1988 article

"Black Crime, White Racism" asserted that although crime had tripled since

1960, whites should be grateful, since black oppression justified even more

crime. White concerns about crime, he insisted, were merely a form of subtle

racism. Mr. Hacker, one of a number of

NYRB writers whose slogan seems to be "White Racism Now and Forever,"

insists that "even those who see themselves as fair-minded still show subtle

signs of bias … something we can and should call racism-and without quotation

marks-reveals itself in the attitudes and conduct of virtually all white

Americans." During a recent discussion at the Century Club, Mr. Hacker said the

absence of a sufficient number of dark-skinned female television anchors was a

far more important source of African-American problems than the proliferation

of female-headed families. 

More recently, the

NYRB 's editors have been unnerved by New York's phenomenal drop in crime.

It doesn't fit their world view. Last year, I met George Fredrickson, a

Stanford University professor and another member of the NYRB 's "White Racism Now and Forever" stable, at a Michigan State

University conference. He told me that "Al Sharpton was doing important things

for New York" and that Sharpton was "far better for New York than- ugh!- Giuliani." He then admitted that he

hadn't been to New York recently to see matters firsthand. Asked about some of

Rev. Sharpton's failings, he said that while he didn't always agree with the

reverend, "at least he is not a racist like Giuliani." When I asked for the

specifics of Mr. Giuliani's racism, he replied, "If you don't know, I can't

help you."

It's often hard to take the NYRB seriously. It has become the magazine of would-be

sophisticates gulled into irrelevance by their own sense of superiority. But

rather than learn from their failures, the NYRB 's

editors have stuck with their roots. Keenly aware of their core market, they

have consistently downplayed the problems of political correctness on campus.

In return, NYRB remains the preferred

"paper" of many aspiring associate professors. In a sense, the NYRB and much of literary academia have

followed a parallel course from heightened influence during their 1960's moment

of glory to well-deserved marginality today.

Terry Golway will return to this space next week.

By refusing to recognize Mr. Sharpton's leadership, Mr. Giuliani brought to a halt the reign of riot ideology, in which politics were driven by fear, crime and threats of disruption. Mr. Giuliani returned civility to the streets and revived the city's faltering credit rating. Considerable though this achievement was, it was marred by the Mayor's failure to support an alternative black leadership. At the end of the Giuliani years, Al Sharpton-beloved by the media, enhanced by his attacks on the Mayor-stands as the city's premier African-American politician.

By excising Mr. Sharpton, Mr. Traub, whose genteel sensibilities have been offended by Rudy's rhetorical excesses, would have the reader believe that the Mayor alone has brought a confrontational tone to New York politics. But, for better or worse, conflict and confrontation have been the meat and potatoes of New York politics for the past two centuries. It was New York Review of Books co-founder Jason Epstein who famously insisted, during the 1968 Ocean Hill–Brownsville school decentralization fight, that "the alternatives left to the white majority are capitulation or genocide." More recently, former union leader Victor Gotbaum described Mayor Koch as a "pimple on the rear end of civilization." Down the road, Reverend Al and his minions will no doubt discover hitherto hidden racist tendencies in Mr. Giuliani's eventual successor.

Mr. Traub has some shrewd insights into Mr. Giuliani's personality, and he correctly notes that part of what has made Mr. Giuliani so powerful is that he is the first effective Mayor to govern after the Board of Estimate was abolished in 1989. But Mr. Traub's article is marred by misstatements and misunderstandings that have important implications for the post-Giuliani years.

He says that "very few welfare recipients have joined" the private economy. How does he know this? There are no numbers. One of the administration's failings is that it has, until recently, refused to keep track of what happens to former welfare recipients. He worries that the police have become "too ready to pull the trigger" under Mr. Giuliani. What? Police killings have dropped from a high of 41 under Mr. Dinkins to a record low of 11 last year. He insists that Mr. Giuliani's achievements were "rather narrow," but never mentions the promising reform of the City University. He's outraged by Mr. Giuliani's "cruelty" in driving Ray Cortines from the school chancellorship. But he neglects to mention that Mr. Cortines was unable, despite repeated requests, to let City Hall know how many people actually "worked" at the school board's Brooklyn headquarters.

For Mr. Traub, the Sturm und Drang of the Giuliani years were unnecessary because the liberal establishment- The New York Times in particular-has been "largely converted" to the Mayor's point of view on most issues. This is odd, since the very journal he's writing in has fought welfare reform tooth and nail, while The Times has carried its criticism of Mr. Giuliani's anti-crime and welfare policies to a near-fever pitch.

In fact, The Times has gone so far as to regard low-level heroin dealers as simply part of the "diversity" of Brooklyn, while it accuses the police of trying to impose the "mores of Mayberry" on street life. Mr. Traub insists that Mr. Giuliani has "won the battle of ideas," but the Mayor's would-be successors are falling over themselves in arguing for new massive housing subsidies-just the kind of program Mr. Giuliani opposed. For its part, The Times recently ran a front-page piece that approvingly reported a liberal advocacy group's claims that the city's rapid growth in entry-level jobs poses a terrible problem that must be solved with a new round of day care, housing, and training subsidies. If these debt-defying proposals constitute a victory, what does defeat look like?

If Mr. Traub has it right, we're about to sail off into a rosy sunset; the city will be prosperous, tranquil and well-governed, even as it rids itself of the "bully" in Gracie Mansion. Don't bet on it.

(Terry Golway will return to this space next week.)

But there is an ugly irony in Mr. Gore's statement about the G.O.P.'s inability to see racism even when it is staring them in the face. The Republicans, said Mr. Gore, "looked at that State Capitol in South Carolina … But they didn't see a symbol of prejudice and injustice … They turned their heads and pretended they didn't see." That's precisely what Mr. Gore and Mr. Bradley did. They stared at the face of racism right in front of them, the face of the Rev. Al Sharpton, and pretended they didn't see.

You would never know this from the candidates or the extensive press coverage of the Apollo debate, but the famous theater is located diagonally across the street from the site of the racial arson instigated by Mr. Sharpton at Freddy's Fashion Mart five years ago. It took eight lives. The murderous rampage was set in motion when the United House of Prayer, one of the largest black landlords on 125th Street, raised the rent on the Fashion Mart owned by a Jew, Freddy Harari, who then raised the rent on his subtenant, Sikhulu Shange, who ran a record store. Recognizing that the quickest way to gain support in a landlord-tenant dispute is to turn it into a racial issue, Mr. Shange went to Mr. Sharpton's National Action Network, which in turn knew that the quickest way to build a crowd in Harlem is to rouse racial hatreds. Mr. Sharpton and the daily picketers did their job brilliantly. He opened his public campaign against Freddy's on WWRL radio, warning: "We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street."

After two months of rhetorical violence, protester Roland Smith ran into the store with guns blazing and burned it down. When it was over, Smith had killed himself and seven others. Armed with a .38-caliber revolver, he shot three whites and a Pakistani in cold blood-he had mistaken the light-skinned Pakistani for a Jew, and then set the fire that killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese and one black, a security guard whom the protesters had taunted as a "cracker lover."

I've gone into the horrid details because Mr. Gore and Mr. Bradley might well claim that they knew nothing of the massacre since, Stalinist-style, the story of Freddy's has been largely effaced from the public record. Many of the recent profiles of Mr. Sharpton mention Freddy's either not at all or only in passing.

The memory hole into which Freddy's disappeared fits the pattern of Mr. Sharpton's political career. After each major outrage, Mr. Sharpton draws in the press and some selected rubes, and assures them that this time he's really reformed. The first New Sharpton, complete with fawning profiles in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker , came after the Tawana Brawley hoax.

Then, when a young rabbinical student was murdered by a racist mob in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Mr. Sharpton did his best to stoke the anger. At the funeral for Gavin Cato, the young boy whose death in a traffic accident set off the rampage, Mr. Sharpton eulogized in full Farrakhan mode about Jewish "diamond merchants" and "no compromise."

A New Sharpton emerged when he ran in the Democratic Party Senate primary in 1992. He remained piously above the fray as the real candidates went at each other tooth and claw, emerging with his reputation refurbished.

But in 1993, it was back to business. Mr. Sharpton introduced the Nation of Islam's maximum leader, Louis Farrakhan, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, saying: "We will stand together. Not in some private midnight meeting … but in the daylight.… Don't ask who don't like it; we love it! Don't ask who's mad, we're glad!" By 1994, the Farrakhan connection was brushed aside and yet another Al Sharpton, Sharpton III, ran a primary campaign against Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Sharpton III told people he was evolving, and promised to make amends. A year later there was the massacre at Freddy's followed by the fourth New Sharpton. Sharpton IV, a candidate for Mayor in 1997 was, for the most part, on his best behavior. But Evan Mandery, a staff member of Ruth Messinger's campaign, reveals in his recent book The Campaign that after Mr. Sharpton lost the Democratic primary to Ms. Messinger, he tried to shake down her campaign in return for an endorsement.

Last summer, after Khallid Abdul Muhammad threatened to kill Bill Perkins, a City Council member of Harlem, Mr. Sharpton, alone among New York's African-American leaders, spoke at the annual hatefest of a man so extreme he had been expelled from the Nation of Islam. Writing in The Observer , Joe Conason expected reasonably enough that "the only likely loser at Khallid's carnival is the Rev. Al Sharpton." But Mr. Conason overestimated the intelligence and integrity of the New York press corps. Mr. Sharpton has moved beyond criticism. His attacks on Mayor Rudolph Giuliani have earned him the status of a liberal icon. But when I appeared with City Council member Ronnie Eldridge of the West Side on New York 1, she talked about how Mr. Sharpton was "worried about the little people," and then gushed that she wished she were "as smart and witty as Reverend Sharpton."

In the wake of the Diallo verdict, Mr. Sharpton's relative restraint has produced almost Eldridge-like praise in the press, which is grateful that the city has been spared Mr. Sharpton's wrath. Mr. Sharpton and his enablers count on our remembering the history of racial oppression in America and forgetting Mr. Sharpton's history.

New Yorkers, myself among them, take great pleasure in mocking the credulity of the Tammy Faye Bakker, Jesus-speak and Southern racist Holy Rollers. How, we ask ourselves, can these people be played for suckers time and again? But New Yorkers have to ask the same kind of question of themselves. How is it that Mr. Sharpton has been able to put his con over time and again? It turns out that we are just as susceptible to the appeal of political militance mixed with racial guilt as some Southerners are to white identity politics in religious guise. In a city where institutional liberalism collapsed under the pyre of the Dinkins administration, liberals in the press and politics need the gestural radicalism of Mr. Sharpton to maintain their own identity.

If Sharpton V has yet to appear, it's because, having already gotten away with so much, he no longer has a need to feign contrition. The Confederate flag will probably be taken down from the State Capitol in South Carolina by the end of the year. But we in New York, who have already had more New Sharptons than there were New Nixons, will have Mr. Sharpton for a long time to come.

Three powerful currents, each likely to surge turbulently against the others, are shaping the terrain of post-Giuliani New York. First there is the emergence of a digital economy, symbolized by Silicon Alley, which gives New York its first new economic sector since television. Then there is intensified immigration, which means that New York is now 35 percent foreign-born and headed higher. Finally, there is the likely return of the Dinkins Democrats to City Hall. The danger is that these currents will come together to create not a mighty river but rather a brackish backwater, cut off from the main currents of innovation and economic power in Silicon Valley and the Sunbelt.

It was with these currents in mind that I turned to Ric Burns' New York: A Documentary Film , 10 hours of video done for PBS that recently aired in New York and nationally, and the series' companion book, New York: An Illustrated History , published by Alfred A. Knopf. Mr. Burns' Gotham stands alone in this profoundly provincial documentary. It is always the first, the biggest and the best or the worst. There is no sense of how New York fared compared to other great cities like Chicago or London. We learn from the video that "New York is America," and that it was not London or Amsterdam but New York that invented modern capitalism. We're also told that, in the words of architect Robert Stern, air transport is such that "you see New York, and then you see the rest of America." None of this is true. Mr. Stern will be shocked to discover there are now direct flights from almost every corner of America to almost every corner of the world.

Mr. Burns' mythopoetic treatment is not just bad history, it leaves us worse prepared to face our coming challenges. An accurate assessment of our past would have mentioned our race against rivals Philadelphia and Baltimore to reach the trans-Allegheny West. It would have noted that the skyscraper was developed first in Chicago, and that the consolidation of the five boroughs in 1898 was driven in part by the fear that Chicago was about to surpass Manhattan in population and prestige. And Mr. Burns might have recognized London's enormous influence on New York: everything from subways to settlement houses. That's the sort of discussion that might help prepare the city for both global competition and the new digital economy, in which we are neither first nor foremost but are, despite the current new media boom, still a second-rank player in high tech, well behind-gasp!-Dallas.

The video describes how the Erie Canal reorganized America's economic geography and, in the words of a 19th-century observer, "defied nature and used it like a toy." The same can be said of the Internet and the digital economy, which have already turned San Francisco into a suburb of Silicon Valley. It's made Fairfax County in northern Virginia, which has more than double the office space of downtown Boston, Philadelphia, Houston, Denver, Dallas or Seattle, into a center of Internet traffic. In fact, northern Virginia has more office space than all but four of America's cities. And most surprising of all, the new economy has made Cape Cod-yes, Cape Cod-into a home for high-tech start-ups.

In this new economic landscape, New York is by no means the Empire State. It ranks but 44th out of the 50 states as an entrepreneurial hot spot, while the New York City region ranks 47th for entrepreneurship out of the 50 largest metro areas, according to economist David Birch of Cognetics Inc., a highly respected Cambridge, Mass., research firm.

Nineteenth-century and early 20th-century technology was centralizing. When, in the late 1860's, telegraph wires were strung between New York and other Eastern cities, we gathered in most of their financial business. But the digital economy, like the automobile, disperses economic activity. Network technology means that price information is instant and almost ubiquitous, so that trades can bypass the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The "Net" effect is that, between on-line competition for the exchange and bank mergers, financial-sector employment in New York City has dropped almost 8 percent during the course of the 1990's equities boom, with further reductions to come.

But there's been a saving grace. The record employment growth of the last two years has finally brought back almost all the jobs lost in the Dinkins years. One hundred thousand jobs, one-third of the new work, have come from new media and software firms. The hardware of the digital economy is created in what Joel Kotkin, senior fellow at the Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University, calls "nerdistans," the campuslike settings of exurbia where teams of middle-aged engineers feel most at home. But the twentysomething content providers for the Internet are drawn to the straight and gay singles scenes of the big city. They've been richly rewarded. In 1998, $500 million was invested in New York Internet companies. In the first nine months of 1999, that number grew to $4 billion, producing, according to Crain's New York Business , 1,000 new millionaires.

The ripple effects of the tech boom have been extraordinary. Dot-com advertisers have produced a 30 percent increase in radio advertising, and even greater leaps in rental and co-op costs. Even more important, they're changing the way people think about doing business. Manhattan's corporate economy runs along fixed and formal lines, but in the e-world the lines blur, as accountants and lawyers are becoming accustomed to taking equity shares from start-ups in lieu of payment for their services. Landlords, said Harry Greeley of the Cushman & Wakefield real estate firm, "need a different psychology to deal with a continuous flow of tenants rather than one continuous tenant." And instead of the usual boundaries between competitors, the numerous small firms of the e-world engage in what's called "co-opetition," a series of shifting alliances in which one month's competitor can be next month's ally to tackle a new project.

The Sandpaper of Politics

So far the digital sector has been small enough to fit into the interstices of the Manhattan real estate market and city politics. But if growth continues, the frictionless world of e-commerce will collide with the sandpaper world of New York politics. The digital world, explains Richard Johnson, chief executive of the fast-growing search firm Hotjobs.com Ltd., is organized around "a war for talent." The value of software programmers, for instance, is sharply stratified by what's been described as "the Hollywood effect." The best, the most creative programmers are worth many multiples more than the others.

But to attract the top talent, firms run into the rent control problem, which imposes enormous costs on newcomers looking for apartments, costs that are, of course, then passed on to the e-companies who are competing not just with other New York City firms, but with companies around the country and globe. Similarly, when e-companies look to move or expand, they run into New York's land-use regulations, which keep them out of the garment district and littoral areas zoned for light commerce. The largest companies, like Doubleclick Inc., are pushed into cutting the same kind of deals that the corporate big boys like The New York Times have won. But for small, fast-growing companies, the search for new space can lead them to either move out or expand outside of Manhattan.

Kevin O'Connor, chief executive of Doubleclick, just wants the government to go away and get off his back. At a recent Crain's breakfast, he was challenged by David Shaw, the founder of Juno Online Services Inc., who argued that the city needs a more expansive government to reduce economic inequality. A few minutes later, however, Mr. Shaw explained that he was moving a number of his operations to India to take advantage of the lower costs. It's Mr. Shaw who is likely to have his way when it comes to expansive government.

At the same time that the Net has been thriving, the traditional tide of New York's statist politics has begun to breach the sand barriers to spending temporarily erected by the Giuliani interregnum. In November, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's ill-conceived effort to deny Public Advocate Mark Green the mayoralty doomed charter reforms designed to "lock in" city tax and spending constraints. The coalition of public employee unions and Democratic politicians that defeated the Mayor's charter proposals by 3 to 1 set the stage for the upcoming labor negotiations with all of the city's major unions. After seven years of spending constraints, the pressure for wage and benefit increases that outstrip productivity will be unavoidable, if not in this administration, then in the next, when the unions' raises are likely to be treated as constituency service.

New York After Rudy

The coalition that defeated Mayor Giuliani on the charter is a dry run for the next mayoral election, when public sector unions will be joined by the social service industry in seeking additional money from a city already near the legal limit for public debt. The next Mayor, quite likely to be supported by a coalition that includes the Rev. Al Sharpton and perhaps even Lenora Fulani, will argue that it is only fair for a city with a considerable surplus in the midst of a boom to provide generous support for those who have "suffered" through the Giuliani years.

Viewed from the perspective of the Ric Burns video and the accompanying book, New York: An Illustrated History , this will be only right and just. In the Burns video, New York is always brutally divided between the rich and the poor; there is no middle class, there is no upward mobility. Nothing stands between the government and the individual. There are no voluntary organizations, no ethnic organizations, no religious institutions to help people up the social ladder. Neither private sector growth nor state sponsorship of infrastructure projects that aid the private economy can do much to alleviate the suffering of the poor: Only the paternalist state can do that.

As an example of this mindset, consider the video's treatment of Gotham's crucial 1886 election. We are told by the video only that the radical Henry George was the sole hope of the immigrant masses and that Abram Hewitt, the lowdown Tammany candidate, defeated him. But there was far more to this election, including the third candidate, the young Teddy Roosevelt, who goes unmentioned. Hewitt was the son-in-law of Peter Cooper, the founder of the Cooper Union for Arts and Sciences (I'm a professor there), where the bright children of immigrant mechanics could receive a free education. Hewitt, a visionary reformer who accepted Tammany support only reluctantly, joined George in campaigning against the city's "fat cats." But while George's solution was redistribution, Hewitt, one of the fathers of both the subway system and the consolidation of the five boroughs into greater New York in 1898, proposed to increase opportunity by rebuilding the city's crumbling docks, streets and transit facilities. As Mayor, he began to do just that, and it laid the foundation for the city's economic future.

New York: An Illustrated History is a bit better in that it acknowledges that Hewitt was a moderate and a supporter of the Brooklyn Bridge. The video ends in 1931, but the book, which continues through to the Giuliani years, gets worse as the story moves closer to the present. In the closing chapters, we learn nothing about what happened when Mr. Burns' wish came true and John Lindsay created a social welfare state by doubling the welfare rolls in the midst of one of the greatest economic booms in American history. Welfare gets one nondescript paragraph. The destruction of the immigrant city's great asset, its school and university system in the late 1960's and 1970's, gets similarly short shrift. However, what we do learn in chapters that seem to have been written by members of the committee to re-elect David Dinkins in 1993, is that John Lindsay was "exciting," that Robert Moses was a bad man and that the automobile was the devil's spawn. The diminuendo comes in Philip Lopate's closing chapter, where we learn that Mr. Dinkins was "unlucky" and that crime was curtailed because of unknown causes, or perhaps the national economic boom, or whatever. The dramatic drop in welfare goes unmentioned, though if Mr. Lopate had looked around he could have seen that the new face of poverty is not that of welfare dependency but of the working immigrant poor struggling to get a toehold on the mobility ladder.

The choice for the future is not between Mr. O'Connor's libertarianism and Mr. Shaw's social-service paternalism. Although the former is welcome as a counterbalance, it can never and should never be a governing philosophy for New York. The latter might help assuage the conscience of would-be limousine liberals, but it has already done untold harm. If government is going to help incorporate the vast new tide of immigration to our shores, it's going to have to walk and chew gum at the same time. The cost of the public sector has to be held in check because if it isn't, we will push away high-tech start-ups. But government also has to worry about "diminishing industrial space," explains "The Big Squeeze," a new report from the Center for the Urban Future that describes how printing and garment, furniture, jewelry and mattress making, which employ unskilled immigrants, have been priced out of Manhattan.

This is the second time a wave of economic development has driven businesses that employ the unskilled out of New York, at great social cost. From the 1920's to the 1950's, the regional planners promoted white-collar work for Manhattan without making much of an effort to move manufacturers from Manhattan to the outer boroughs. Nor did the regional planners give much thought to the great harbor that created New York and employed a vast blue-collar work force.

Listen to this story of a young Puerto Rican man in the 1950's as he told it to journalist Robert Suro: "I started after school hauling ice, and then as soon as I was 16, I dropped out of school and went down to the Fulton Street docks to become a stevedore. When there was no work on the docks, you could always go to the garment district and just look for signs … and I never spent a day on relief." Since 1960, the Puerto Rican labor-force participation rate has dropped from 85 to 50 percent, and the city's 900,000 Puerto Ricans have become not only downwardly mobile but also perhaps the poorest group in the country. Today they are joined in their downward mobility by the city's fastest growing ethnic group, its roughly 750,000 Dominicans.

This time, the city has to hold on to older blue-collar jobs even as it allows new work to expand. There has been some effort to relocate garment manufacturers to the Brooklyn Army Terminal. But city government has never, notes executive editor Steve Malanga of Crain's , made the kind of effort in the boroughs that was put into reviving lower Manhattan with the Downtown Plan. Resuscitating the economy of the outer boroughs requires the same kind of high-profile mayoral campaign, combined with rebuilding and expanding the city's long-neglected infrastructure. We can learn something from Boston, where the Federally funded "Big Dig" has literally remade the city by rerouting and rebuilding highways while reconnecting the city to its waterfront. For New York, the long-hoped-for tunnel connecting the deep-water Brooklyn docks to the mainland would be an economic tonic, but in the interim, repairing and rebuilding the perpetually traffic-jammed Gowanus Expressway is an immediate necessity. And while the next Mayor is at it, he or she ought to look to bridging the gap between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn's Red Hook by turning part of Governors Island into a high-tech research center-our own little nerdistan-that could enhance our high-end industries. (Full disclosure here: I'm on the board of an organization dedicated to just these ends.)

This is probably a pipe dream. The Ric Burns video, however provincial, reflects the prevailing political ethos of the city: Mayor Giuliani pushed New York's dysfunctional political culture beyond where it was willing to go, and now, in incident after incident-from the Amadou Diallo shooting to the current dust-up over the problems of drug- and alcohol-addicted people wandering the streets-it's pushing back. In a city where the Rev. Al Sharpton is on the right side of history because he supports the social welfare industry, the next Mayor is likely to spend the surplus on pent-up demands from the city's near-permanent public-sector political majority, rather than on the infrastructure projects that create economic opportunity for the working immigrant poor. The squeaky wheels are likely to be greased while enterprising companies and immigrants quietly leave for greener pastures. Not that the Ric Burnses of the world will notice; they'll never have a clue.