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FS

Fred Siegel

Senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor. An expert on market-friendly public-policy solutions for urban governance, he is a professor emeritus of history at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Series

3 Whisky Happy Hour4 episodes

Recent Episodes

3 Whisky Happy Hour
3 Whisky Happy Hour

‘The Sixties Never Ended’—Fred Siegel Reflects on Our Mob Rule Moment

When our cities start to come apart and people say it seems like 1968 all over again, that can only mean one thing: time to get in touch with Fred Siegel. Among Fred's many fine books is The Future Once Happened Here: New York, LA, DC, and the Fate of America's Big Cities, which explained the high cost of incompetent liberal rule of our major cities in the 1960s and 1970s, which included soaring crime rates, physical decay, and economic decline. Reversing urban decline was one of the great achievements of the last 25 years, but it appears we may be about to throw it all away, and start a new cycle of leftist urban rule and decay. Why has this happened? It can't be just because of one shocking instance of police malfeasance. There must have been something latent in our political culture that has been triggered. Fred's explanation: "The sixties never ended." Are we fated to repeat that cycle, and now have to look forward to 10 or 20 years of unleashed leftism? We treat these and other questions, including the question of whether our universities have passed the point of no return, and what must be done to counter their increasingly malign influence on America as a whole.
Host:
Steve Hayward
Organization
Ricochet

March 2019

3 Whisky Happy Hour
3 Whisky Happy Hour

Fred Siegel—An Origin Story, Part 2

In this second part of our long conversation with Fred Siegel, Steve Hayward walks him through the final decay of New York in the 1980s after four decades of unrelenting liberal governance, how Rudy Giuliani turned it around in the 1990s, and what the prospects are for Mayor de Blasio. (Remember that this interview was originally recorded for video four years ago). From there we have a long conversation about what might be called Fred's summa, his last book The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class. This show is a grand tour of some of the key moments and thinkers of liberalism in the 20th century, and even though this interview was taped before Trump emerged as a presidential candidate in 2015, Fred is remarkably prescient about the defects of conservatism that Trump perceived and exploited, how liberalism was running headlong into the ruin of identity politics, and how the Obama presidency was unwinding in its final year.
Host:
Steve Hayward
Organization
Ricochet

February 2019

3 Whisky Happy Hour
3 Whisky Happy Hour

Fred Siegel—An Origin Story, Part 1

Steve Hayward goes back into the archives for an audio file from a video interview he conducted with Fred Siegel a few years back in which Fred explains how he came to shed the liberalism of his youth. Along the way, he provides a grand tour of some of the leading intellectuals he knew or read in the 1960s and 1970s, how he regarded the Vietnam War, what it was like working as a field rep for George McGovern's 1972 campaign, and the many things wrong with leftist thought today. Since the show talks a lot about the sixties, the choice of exit music was obvious: "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield.
Host:
Steve Hayward
Organization
Ricochet

February 2018