The entire existence of the right wing in NYC is a post-traumatic response to the 1960s–80s. It is always 1975, the city is always about to descend into crime and decay and white flight, and the answer is always more cops and harsher sentences, of which too much is never enough.

There are few people I have so much contempt for as those who live here and enjoy the positive externalities of cosmopolitan urban life but hate the city so much they believe it can only function as an authoritarian police state.

More broadly, I am constantly frustrated by the inability of people on all sides to understand that the urban politics we have right now in this country can best be understood as a response to a highly specific, traumatic, atypical set of historical circumstances.

To me the big problem of US urban politics in the 21st century—aside from responding to the ways in which current global and national problems affect our cities—is how to recover from and move past the events of the second half of the 20th, which were similar to war.