We talked earlier this week with Elliot Williams, the CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor and the author of a new book, Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation. As Heather Ann Thompson does in Fear and Fury and Jonathan Mahler in Gods of New York, Williams looks at how the problems of New York City in the 1980s — racism, inequality, a sense of “inevitable victimization” — went on to define today’s politics.
We talked about:
Why fears of city life persist, even if on today’s New York sidewalks you’re “more likely to step over a labradoodle than a crack pipe”
How much the 2024 election was about fear of unrest in American cities
The idea of “inevitable victimization” and how it’s pushed Americans to the right
How militarization of the police contributed to ICE’s and CBP’s slide into fascism
Why Democrats fail to validate the lack of safety people feel — and how Zohran Mamdani has bucked the trend
Why Donald Trump’s dismissals of real anxieties about affordability may backfire
How qualified immunity may save ICE officers from ever facing justice
You can’t understand American politics today without understanding New York City’s crisis in the 1970s and 1980s — and you won’t want to miss this. Just click on the video player above to watch.
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