13 - Against the liberal state: ACT-UP and the emergence of postmodern politics

Summary

The election of Rudolph Giuliani as New York city's first Republican mayor in more than twenty years challenged a number of political assumptions that had solidified into myths in the city's political culture. Among them, none was more significant than the idea (vigorously promoted by the person Giuliani defeated, Mayor David Dinkins) that, despite Staten Island and Queens's fabled conservatism, New York remained, indeed, a gorgeous mosaic of different ethnicities, races, and sexual orientations, the sum of which added up to one of the last liberal outposts in the midst of an increasingly rightward drift of the national polity. Even though Giuliani was a Republican and a militant champion of the now hegemonic doctrine that the chief role of government was to insure law and order by pursuing an unrelenting war on crime, his other political priorities were carefully disguised during the 1993 mayoral campaign as they had been in his unsuccessful bid of 1989. The political spin doctors assured us after his narrow victory over Dinkins – the city's first African-American mayor – that, beneath his conservative exterior, Giuliani was really a “Rockefeller” Republican, a designation that marked him as a softie, committed to the provision of social welfare and public goods even as he might be tough on crime. After all, who could deny that Rockefeller's administration of New York state government followed the broad pattern established by welfare liberalism during the 1930s and 1940s? Rockefeller's one great crime initiative, mandatory sentencing for drug dealers and drug users, and his order to brutally suppress the famous Attica uprising of 1969 were not, in any case, partisan political gestures.