Blog the Vote-Giuliani A Man for America

AMERICA NEEDS a Pym Fortuyn, and Rudolph Giuliani may be the man for the job.

Pim Fortuyn, you may recall, was the gay, flamboyant sociology professor turned "right-wing" Dutch politician who took a hard-line position against immigration and Islamic extremism — two issues inextricably linked in a country where whole communities have become enclaves of Sharia law. Fortuyn was labeled as right wing by identity-politics leftists for his unapologetic view that the Netherlands should stay both liberal and libertine.

The United States is not the Netherlands, and Rudy Giuliani is no Pim Fortuyn in his personal life. But Giuliani is still a social liberal, as Americans define the term these days. He's for same-sex unions, though not gay marriage. He's pro-choice. A Catholic, he's been married three times. His first marriage was annulled on dubious grounds — he suddenly discovered his wife was his second cousin. And his second marriage ended in a tabloid divorce of biblical proportions. Giuliani also has a decidedly liberal record on immigration; how could a mayor of New York not?

But Giuliani was considered a raging right-winger as mayor. No doubt this had a lot to do with the fact that the city's political center is so far to the left. But there was a lot more to Giuliani's philosophy. When I grew up in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, the job of mayor was, essentially, to manage the city's decline. Crime was not only seen as permanent, some on the left even tried to rationalize it as part of the city's charm.

By the time Giuliani arrived, social chaos was seen as the natural order of things. Giuliani heroically challenged these assumptions on almost all fronts. He and his first police commissioner, William J. Bratton (now chief of the LAPD), refused to accept that mere containment was the best that crime fighters could hope for.