On Crime, Buckley Understood What Mamdani Fails to See

‘T he protection of the individual against the criminal is the first and highest function of government,” William F. Buckley Jr. explained in launching his Conservative Party bid for New York City mayor in 1965. “The failure of government to provide protection is nothing less than the failure of government.”

Zohran Mamdani, the current holder of the office that Buckley quixotically sought, sees the matter differently.

Mamdani no longer explicitly calls to defund the police as he did during the heady days of George Floyd Summer in 2020. But in surrounding himself with such advisers as Brooklyn College sociology professor Alex Vitale, Mamdani lays bare his vision of New York as a sort of Lagado awaiting ideas imposed from the Laputa above.

Indeed, Vitale’s The End of Policing conjures up thoughts of the Gulliver’s Travels academy, where labored “a most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method for building houses, by beginning at the roof, and working downward to the foundation.”

Mamdani’s effort to build a safe community from the roof down includes the promised dismantling of the the Strategic Response Group, a unit trained for counterterrorism and to quell riots (whose proponents periodically mistake them for “protests”), and the promised launch of a Department of Community Safety, which would deploy social workers rather than cops to deal with mental health crises of the type so bewitching that they often avert visitors’ eyes from the lights of Times Square.

The Safer Sanctuary Act, which expands the city’s existing prohibition on local officials cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to prohibitions on cooperation with all federal agencies involved in immigration enforcement, recently landed on the desk of an eager Mamdani.

Mamdani named Stanley Richards, who spent time on Rikers Island after a robbery conviction during the late 1980s, as the commissioner of the city’s Department of Correction. While this appointment may prove more symbolic than substantive, the symbolism of an inmate running the prisons shakes observers because it seems a fair representation of the policy substance.

The likes of Ratso Rizzo, Travis Bickle, and the Baseball Furies populated New York streets before storytellers cinematically projected them to the world. It seems less remarkable that Buckley could foresee such a future in 1965 than that Mamdani remains blind to that past in 2026.

Buckley’s campaign more than six decades ago shows that New York’s crime problem did not start with Mayor Mamdani. The abolition of cash bail and so much else preceded this moment, yes, but it paved the way for it, too. And likely its inevitable failure will someday invite a just as inevitable Bernie Goetzish backlash. In late-2020s Gotham, a neoconservative will be a Mamdani supporter who has been mugged by a mugger.

“He knew he couldn’t win but he was interested in having to hone his own ideas on municipal problems as opposed to national and international problems,” a 98-year-old James Buckley told me in 2021 about his brother’s mayoral run. “So, it was instructive for him, and it was fun for him.”

It seems noteworthy that Buckley did not run for mayor emphasizing anticommunism, the marriage of freedom and tradition often found in the pages of his magazine, or any of the other issues that made him a national figure by the time of this run for local office. Instead, as his older brother put it, he took the time to learn what issues animated voters in the five boroughs.

Mamdani, and so many officeholders in other municipalities, do the opposite. They imagine the national (abortion) and even international (Israel-Hamas) issues that motivate them as the top concerns of city dwellers. Think trans rights, not trash pickup.

A reread of his memoir of that lone political run, The Unmaking of a Mayor, shows an elastic Buckley pushing not abstractions or hobby horses on voters but instead hearing and addressing their concerns. Then, as now, law and order amounts to a top voter concern.

“The first mark of the civilized community is the ability to control its criminal element,” a Buckley campaign policy paper announced in October 1965. “By this standard New York City has lapsed into barbarism.” New York’s current compulsion to literally let loose without bail all but the worst of its criminal element amounts to not a lapse but a rush into barbarism.

For Laputans, even barbarians kicking in their front door cannot shake them of their commitment to a beautiful, if wrong, idea. Most New Yorkers, including most Mamdani voters, inhabit Lagado and not Laputa. They will put up with the theory but not its outcomes. And once the outcomes come kicking in the door, then voters exile Mamdani, Vitale, and the rest to the Academy of Projectors — and the barbarians, finally, to a guarded place under lock and key.