New York Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s recent brush with mortality reminds us how clearly his administration showed that people, not impersonal forces, make history— especially men of vision and courage like him. His mayoralty also offers today’s floundering New York the fundamental lesson that good government can make a city flourish, while bad government impairs it.

Reigning wisdom when Mr. Giuliani took office in 1994 was that the problem-ridden city was “ungovernable.” Crime had skyrocketed in the preceding decades, with murders doubling in the 1960s and doubling once more over the next two decades before reaching 2,154 in 1991—one every four hours, roughly. Dope dealers hustled on the street alongside pushy panhandlers and prostitutes. Derelicts slept alongside graffiti-smeared buildings. An epidemic of car break-ins led owners to post “No Radio” signs in their windows, and auto alarms blared indignantly at all hours. Businesses fled: The 116 major corporate headquarters in Gotham in 1971 had dwindled to 49 by 1995. Small-business owners buzzed customers in through locked doors and, at closing time, rolled down metal security gates, luring graffiti vandals.

Mr. Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, ignored the cliché that you could cut crime only by addressing so-called root causes, poverty and racism. He instinctively grasped the theory of social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling that stopping small crimes would prevent more serious crimes, just as replacing a broken window halts more window-breaking by showing that somebody watches and acts. He had seen this theory proven in the subways in the two years before his election, when Robert Kiley, head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, kept subway trains and stations hosed clean of graffiti and transit police chief William Bratton started arresting turnstile jumpers and graffiti vandals. Crime in the subways began to fall. When Mr. Giuliani entered City Hall, he named Mr. Bratton the city’s police commissioner.

With the mayor’s vocal support, Mr. Bratton put broken-windows policing to work, arresting “squeegee men” who smeared dirty rags across motorists’ windshields, holding them hostage for a “contribution.” Even minor crime, he showed, had no place in Mr. Giuliani’s New York—a lesson he amplified by arresting graffiti taggers and public urinators. Police stopped, questioned and frisked those suspected of carrying weapons or casing a business, dissuading the ill-intentioned from packing guns while reducing shootings. Mr. Bratton made computer maps of crime hot spots and concentrated cops where thugs operated. City Hall’s revolutionary idea was that cops should prevent crime, not solve it after it happened.

The results were spectacular. Murders fell 20% to 1,561 the first year and a further 58% to 649 in 2001, Mr. Giuliani’s last year in office. With newly safe streets and subways, New York roared back to life. As the mayor cleared sex and smut businesses out of Times Square, he enticed Disney to restore a stately vacant theater as that area’s anchor. A visionary private effort had turned Bryant Park from a dope dealers’ den into a green oasis, and that district now thronged with tourists and office workers.

Restaurants and theaters boomed. Old businesses grew, and new ones opened, including even a tech Silicon Alley. Columbia and New York University became hot schools once parents stopped fearing urban crime. With opportunity burgeoning and the city’s rich inheritance of museums, concert halls, and landmark buildings safe to use, property values skyrocketed. Global tycoons looked to city real estate as a glamorous safe haven for money. New development proliferated, and construction workers, service staff and luxury retailers all profited. New York became once more the capital of the world.

Policy can change culture, Mr. Giuliani showed. It wasn’t the legacy of slavery that had created the disproportionately black urban underclass, he understood, but the message of victimhood and helplessness sent by framing crime as an inevitable response to oppression and welfare as deserved reparations. Criminals, not society, were to blame for crime, and welfare recipients were also citizens with agency who were responsible for their own fates.

Seizing on the 1996 welfare reform act, the Giuliani administration started an ambitious workfare program. Welfare offices became “job centers” and set welfare recipients to painting park benches, raking leaves and cleaning courtrooms. Recipients learned discipline and gained self-respect. Many moved into conventional jobs and, as in the nation as a whole, caseloads dropped dramatically.

A remarkable dividend of the new approaches to crime and welfare, one with only anecdotal rather than social- science evidence, was a dramatic thaw in race relations, as fear and resentment abated. But it didn’t last.

Beginning with the De Blasio administration in 2014, the Giuliani reforms slipped away while Amazon and then Covid and Zoom sharply challenged New York’s economic model of retail stores and office towers. As it holds on to old economic engines and searches for new ones, the city urgently needs the culture of personal agency and public safety that Mr. Giuliani fostered.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani evidently believes that legacy businesses and institutions are inexhaustible wealth-generators that, even as lowtax states beckon, will enable him to cultivate the tax-eaters and punish the taxpayers. That will prove a costly and tragic mistake.

You didn’t need a legal case to know that the Southern Poverty Law Center, to stay alive, badly needs the perils it claims to deplore. The federal indictment, which charges the nonprofit with wire fraud, false statements and conspiracy to conceal money laundering, alleges that the Montgomery, Ala.-based group paid hefty sums to “informants” supposedly operating inside extremist groups. Millions of dollars allegedly went to these “field sources”—Klan members, neo-Nazis—even as the SPLC labeled the same organizations dangerous extremists on its website.

One of the indictment’s claims, if borne out, so perfectly captures the cynicism of radical politics in the 2020s that you’d call it far-fetched if you read it in a novel by Christopher Buckley. The indictment alleges that one source “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC.” This person, say prosecutors, “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.” Between 2015 and 2023, the nonprofit paid this informant $270,000.

The SPLC’s lack of compunction amazes, but its intrigues flow from the nature of the activist nonprofit enterprise. Like almost all advocacy organizations, the SPLC faces the temptation to exaggerate the urgency of its mission and the extent of its accomplishments. Donors respond to big claims and menacing specters. Hence the SPLC’s desperate effort to defame people and organizations on the political right—Charles Murray, Prager University—as promoters of ” hate” and “extremism.” The war for America’s soul may go well or poorly, but the money’s got to keep flowing.

Which is why that Unite the Right rally was the best thing ever to happen to the SPLC. A gathering of, at most, 500 young nincompoops high on racist humbug metamorphosed, in the minds of anxious Americans—and with the media’s help—into a mass movement of brownshirts ready to seize the country’s institutions and overthrow its government. Donations to the nonprofit ballooned in the year after the rally.

The SPLC didn’t create the Charlottesville rally, though its machinations probably helped at the margins. The import of the episode, though, lies in the fact that the nonprofit’s leaders plainly felt it had an interest in making the threat of white racial bigotry appear to hold more sway over American life than it does. “Interest” in the crassest, monetary sense.

The modern liberal outlook, to borrow the political philosopher Kenneth Minogue’s metaphor, must have dragons to slay. When the dragons diminish in size or die out altogether, the civic-minded liberal naturally wants to invent bigger ones, if only to have things to worry about. As with every such mental pathology, this one offers financial rewards to determined exploiters.

The late Jesse Jackson based a lucrative career on the fiction that America in the 1980s and ’90s still excluded black Americans from opportunity in the way the South had under Jim Crow. The static

history of racist America he helped to propagate allowed Jackson, in the 2000s and 2010s, to threaten large companies with boycotts on the grounds that they hadn’t done enough to mitigate racism. His attacks would conveniently cease when the companies agreed to donate to Jackson’s political operation.

Al Sharpton followed the same path. Only Mr. Sharpton, unapologetic perpetrator of the 1987 Tawana Brawley hoax, spun the perception of perennial racism into a decadeslong media career. Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo and other “antiracist” theorizers attained celebrity status by persuading millions of well-meaning people to fear and loathe nonexistent monsters.

The District of Columbia teems with nonprofits dedicated to the proposition that one thing or another menaces the citizenry. Human Rights Campaign, to take one example, regularly informs its followers and donors that gay, “trans” and “gender-expansive” Americans suffer from routine violence and bigotry at the hands of their countrymen. In 2025, HRC brought in $46 million in contributions.

Climate catastrophism has grown into a global grift, with poor countries demanding billions in “reparations” from nations with functioning markets, but consider climate alarmism’s role in American politics. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency and related government bodies have doled out grants to climate- related nonprofits that return the favor by churning out apocalyptic reports about an always-imminent climate crisis. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act supersized that effort. In 2023, the Biden administration came up with what it called the American Climate Corps, to “mobilize the next generation of clean energy, conservation and resilience workers”: that is, to send millions of public dollars sluicing through climate nonprofits around the country.

To its credit, the Trump administration canceled the program, but similar funding streams proliferate across federal and state agencies. A cynical observer might feel inclined to use the word “racket”: Environmental agencies fund activist groups, which make apocalyptic claims more credible, thus enabling the agencies to demand more funding and regulatory authority from government budgetwriters. Now that’s what I call sustainability.