Yes, Rudy Giuliani Is a Conservative

Rudy Giuliani, like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, successfully applied conservative policies to turn around declining societies. Currently his political rivals are applying the misnomer that he is not a real conservative. The facts, however are overwhelming, as this must-read article demonstrates.

Giuliani is just behind the probably unelelectable Newt Gingrich in "getting" the threat of Islamism. Incidentally it is interesting to note that the only negative consequence Arafat ever received for his multiple murders of US diplomats was a humiliating eviction from a party by Rudy Giuliani.

Not since Teddy Roosevelt took on Tammany Hall a century ago has a New York politician closely linked to urban reform looked like presidential timber. But today ex?New York mayor Rudy Giuliani sits at or near the top of virtually every poll of potential 2008 presidential candidates. Already, Giuliani?s popularity has set off a ?stop Rudy? movement among cultural conservatives, who object to his three marriages and his support for abortion rights, gay unions, and curbs on gun ownership. Some social conservatives even dismiss his achievement in reviving New York before 9/11. An August story on the website Right Wing News, for instance, claims that Giuliani governed Gotham from ?left of center.? Similarly, conservatives have been feeding the press a misleading collection of quotations by and about Giuliani, on tax policy and school choice issues, assembled to make him look like a liberal.

But in a GOP presidential field in which cultural and religious conservatives may find something to object to in every candidate who could really get nominated (and, more important, elected), Giuliani may be the most conservative candidate on a wide range of issues. Far from being a liberal, he ran New York with a conservative?s priorities: government exists above all to keep people safe in their homes and in the streets, he said, not to redistribute income, run a welfare state, or perform social engineering. The private economy, not government, creates opportunity, he argued; government should just deliver basic services well and then get out of the private sector?s way. He denied that cities and their citizens were victims of vast forces outside their control, and he urged New Yorkers to take personal responsibility for their lives. ?Over the last century, millions of people from all over the world have come to New York City,? Giuliani once observed. ?They didn?t come here to be taken care of and to be dependent on city government. They came here for the freedom to take care of themselves.? It was that spirit of opportunity and can-do-ism that Giuliani tried to re-instill in New York and that he himself exemplified not only in the hours and weeks after 9/11 but in his heroic and successful effort to bring a dying city back to life.

The entrenched political culture that Giuliani faced when he became mayor was the pure embodiment of American liberalism, stretching back to the New Deal, whose public works projects had turned Gotham into a massive government-jobs program. Even during the post?World War II economic boom, New York politicians kept the New Deal?s big-government philosophy alive, with huge municipal tax increases that financed a growing public sector but drove away private-sector jobs. Later, in the mid-1960s, flamboyant mayor John Lindsay set out to make New York a poster child for the Johnson administration?s War on Poverty, vastly expanding welfare rolls, giving power over the school system to black-power activists, and directing hundreds of millions of government dollars into useless and often fraudulent community-based antipoverty programs. To pay for all this, Lindsay taxed with abandon. The result: sharply increasing crime, a rising underclass inclined to languish on welfare rather than strive to uplift itself, a failing school system that emphasized racial grievance and separateness, and near-bankruptcy.

When Giuliani?s predecessor, David Dinkins, came into office?thanks to voters? hopes that as the city?s first black mayor, he?d defuse Gotham?s intense racial tensions?he wholly embraced the War on Poverty?s core belief that the problems of the urban poor sprang from vast external forces over which neither they nor the politicians had much control. Under Dinkins, the city?s welfare rolls grew by one-third, or some 273,000 people. By 1992, with some 1.1 million New Yorkers on welfare, the city?s political leadership seemed stuck on dependency, too. Dinkins became the chief proponent of a tin-cup urbanism, constantly hounding Washington and Albany with demands and grim warnings about what would happen if they were not met.

Dinkins?s political philosophy substituted can?t-do fatalism for the can-do optimism that had made New York great. As crime spiked?there were 2,262 murders in Dinkins?s first year, compared with fewer than 600 in 1963, two years before Lindsay became mayor?Dinkins declared: ?If we had a police officer on every other corner, we couldn?t stop some of the random violence that goes on,? since it resulted from poverty and racism, not poor policing.

Accordingly, Dinkins wanted to turn the police into social workers. His police commissioner, Lee Brown, believed that cops should stop reacting to crime and become neighborhood ?problem solvers.? In an article on that ?community policing? approach, the New York Times informed readers that such experiments in Houston and in Newark, New Jersey, were ?enormously popular??but ?neither city experienced a statistical drop in crime.? Under that policing regime, New York?s already high crime rate soared, prompting the New York Post to plead, in a famous headline, dave do something.

As crime and welfare rocketed up, Dinkins decided that government should promote diversity and multiculturalism??a gorgeous mosaic,? in his phrase. Though the performance of the city?s schools was crumbling, so that by 1992 fewer than half the pupils were reading at grade level, the board of education turned its energies to two controversies unrelated to education: it tried to adopt a ?Rainbow Curriculum? geared to instilling in first-graders respect for homosexuality, and it proposed to distribute free condoms in high schools to promote safe sex among students. Although many parents objected that the board was promoting values that they did not share, Dinkins supported the board on both fiercely controversial issues.

By the time Giuliani challenged Dinkins for a second time, in 1993 (his first try had failed), the former prosecutor had fashioned a philosophy of local government based on two core conservative principles vastly at odds with New York?s political culture: that government should be accountable for delivering basic services well, and that ordinary citizens should be personally responsible for their actions and their destiny and not expect government to take care of them. Giuliani preached the need to reestablish a ?civil society,? where citizens adhered to a ?social contract.? ?If you have a right,? he observed, ?there is a duty that goes along with that right.? Later, when he became mayor, Giuliani would preach about the duties of citizenship, quoting the ancient Athenian Oath of Fealty: ?We will revere and obey the city?s laws. . . . We will strive unceasingly to quicken the public sense of civic duty. Thus in all these ways we will transmit this city not only not less, but far greater and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.?

In New York, where generations of liberal policy had produced a city in which one in seven citizens lived off government benefits, in which lawbreakers whose actions diminished everyone else?s quality of life were routinely ignored or excused, in which the rights of those who broke the law were often defended vigorously over the rights of those who adhered to it, Giuliani?s prescriptions for an urban revival based on shared civic values seemed unrealistic to some and dangerous to others. The head of the local American Civil Liberties Union chapter described Giuliani?s ideas on respect for authority and the law as ?frightening? and ?scary.? But New Yorkers who had watched their city deteriorate were more frightened of life under an outdated and ineffective liberal agenda. Giuliani rode to victory in 1993 with heavy support from the same white ethnic Democratic voters who, nearly a decade earlier, had crossed party lines even in liberal New York to vote for Ronald Reagan.

To those of us who observed Giuliani from the beginning, it was astonishing how fully he followed through on his conservative principles once elected, no matter how much he upset elite opinion, no matter how often radical advocates took to the streets in protest, no matter how many veiled (and not so veiled) threats that incendiary figures like Al Sharpton made against him, and no matter how often the New York Times fulminated against his policies. In particular, offended by the notion that people should be treated differently and demand privileges based on the color of their skin, Giuliani was fearless in confronting racial extortionists like Sharpton. Early in his tenure, he startled the city when he refused to meet with Sharpton and other black activists after a confrontation between police and black Muslims at a Harlem mosque. And though activists claimed that Giuliani inflamed racial tensions with such actions, there were no incidents during his tenure comparable with the disgraceful Crown Heights riot under Dinkins, in which the police let blacks terrorize Orthodox Jews for several days in a Brooklyn neighborhood.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Here is a must-see interview with Giuliani that confirms this.