What this view fails to understand is that, as Stuart Hall argued after the 1987 victory of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, “politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them.” People of all classes and places feel keenly the effects of the present and its crises-economic, viral, ecological-including both real and imagined dangers in public space. want, largely, better and fairer policing, not the absence of it”-a position neatly in line with Adams’s own.Īccording to this point of view, Adams simply responded to the pre-existing needs and desires of a solid, stable political majority-needs and desires that the left, overinflated by the energies of the George Floyd rebellion, badly misjudged. Many self-identified leftists staked out a similar line: Ross Barkan asserted that “the Black working-class and poor. Mainstream media outlets from Reuters to The New York Times portrayed Adams’s ascent in the final weeks of the campaign as nearly inevitable, emphasizing voters’ anxieties about crime, Adams’s credentials as a former police officer, and his campaign’s targeted attacks on the movement to defund the city’s police department. In this telling, Adams not only rallied the law-and-order bloc that had previously swept mayors like Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani into power, but also brought into the fold the outer-borough Black and Latino residents who voted for his campaign en masse-the very working-class Black and brown communities on behalf of whom the activist left aims to speak when it advocates dismantling those same repressive state forces.

According to most coverage of New York City’s 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, Eric Adams won by identifying rising crime and diminishing safety as the primary sites of voters’ dissatisfaction, and by answering their fears with appeals to increase the powers of the state’s repressive agencies.

Liberal crime squad disband