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.