Who Rules New York Today?

New York City politics are at a low point. The city that pioneered in municipal unionism, public hospitals, and a university system, the city that seemed to be a “social democratic bastion” in a capitalist nation and a significant factor in establishing the New Deal, is now presided over by a mayor whose public stance, at its worst, alternates between comedian and spokesman for the politics of resentment.

We have had other low points. The 1920s and the 1950s, decades when c...