Fred Siegel, city historian and former liberal, has passed away at the age of 78

Fred Siegel, a passionate urban historian whose rejection of the liberal establishment’s response to crime, poverty and public courtesy transformed him from a spokesman for Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern in 1972 to a voter for Donald J. Trump in 2020. his home in Brooklyn . He turned 78.

The cause was complications from a series of infections that had landed him in the hospital during a trip to California, his son Harry said.

Mr. Siegel was a professor emeritus at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in Manhattan, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank, and an author.

His ideological evolution is reflected in the titles of his books: “The Future Once Happened Here: New York, DC, LA, and the Fate of America’s Big Cities” (1997); “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life” (2005), co-authored with Harry Siegel; and “The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class” (2014).

Mr. Siegel served as an advisor to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was elected mayor of New York City in 1993 and came to regard him as the city’s greatest leader to hold that office since Fiorello La Guardia, who was president during the Great Depression . He argued that the Giuliani administration had greatly reduced crime and debunked the conventional view that the city was ungovernable.

Mr. Giuliani “revived the republic with more than a whiff of Machiavelli’s corrupt wisdom,” wrote Mr. Siegel.

As a historian, he would identify the roots of liberalism in the writings of Herbert Croly and H. G. Wells, who had envisioned graduates as a new elite class leading enlightened democratic government where the European aristocracy had failed.

Even as a disillusioned liberal, Mr. Siegel maintained a love affair with his Ditmas Park neighborhood in Brooklyn, which he never left despite his disenchantment with what he perceived as New York City’s wayward progressive government. He defended immigrant rights and mocked Newt Gingrich, the Georgia Republican who was Speaker of the House in the late 1990s, for claiming that New York was dependent on Washington when, in fact, Gingrich’s own district benefited from huge federal grants .

And, perhaps more saddened than angry, he quoted former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as saying that his fellow Democrats had “rewarded the articulation of moral goals more than the achievement of practical good.”

Mr Siegel said in an interview with City Journal in 2020 that John V. Lindsay, who served as mayor from 1966 to 1973, “was a classic liberal in that intentions mattered more than results, and the compromises we always have to make to make policies work were foreign to him. “

In the same magazine in 1991argued Mr. Siegel: “Middle-class citizens have become convinced, rightly or wrongly, that modern liberal city governments are primarily focused on misbehaving the poor at the expense of the middle class, and paying government employees very well to do very bad things. to provide services. .”

A protege of the literary critic Irving Howe, he more or less followed his ideology before turning right.

Mr. Siegel’s metamorphosis—from a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to a Fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute, and a voter for Independent John Anderson in 1980 and Democrat Walter F. Mondale in 1984 (each time voting against the Republican Ronald Reagan) – peaked (depending on one’s political stance) in 2020.

After a lifetime of sitting out presidential elections or mostly voting for losers, he cast his vote for Mr. Trump.

He summed up his reasons for doing this in 2020 in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, praising Mr Trump for “crushing ISIS, pulling us out of the Iran nuclear deal, moving our embassy to Jerusalem and ridiculing those people who insist that the Palestinian issue is at the heart of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.” He also favored Mr. Trump, he said, for demonstrating “the ability to withstand a protracted coup attempt by the Democrats and the media” and for championing “civic values.”

In an online tribute this week, Brian C. Andersonthe editor of City Journal wrote that Mr. Siegel had identified what he called an “insurgency ideology” that gripped officials in major cities, “making them reluctant to face public disorder and crime for fear of violent opposition.”

“His work has been central to the renewal of American cities since the 1990s, especially New York,” wrote Mr. Anderson.

Lawrence J. Mone, the former president of the Manhattan Institute, said Mr. Siegel, by becoming a fellow at the research organization, “opened it up to disillusioned people on the Democratic left who had a vision of the way the world worked and realized it wasn’t working.”

“He created a safe haven to protect these people from the cold,” Mr Mon said.

Among the progressives Mr. Siegel did not convert was Ester R. Fuchs, a political scientist at Columbia University and Mr. Siegel’s opponent in a debate.

“Fred was a sweet, gifted, intellectual puzzler who never stopped thinking or caring about New York City,” Professor Fuchs said. “His judgment was clouded by his disappointment with the liberal establishment (who were also wrong!). While he understood the white ethnic working class, he did not understand the black and Hispanic poor and working class.”

Frederick Fein Siegel was born on March 27, 1945 in the Bronx to Albert and Selma (Fein) Siegel. His parents ran an employment agency until it was shut down during the 88-day New York newspaper strike in 1978.

Fred Siegel attended Rutgers University, where he was an errant student. He set out to make his fortune, but was disappointed when the busy pool turned out to be a dead end. He later received his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh.

In 1976 he married Jan Rosenberg, a sociologist. In addition to his son Harry, she outlives him along with another son, Jacob, and four grandchildren.

Mr. Siegel taught on New York State University campuses from 1973 to 1980; at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1980 to 1981; and as a professor of history and humanities at Cooper Union from 1982 to 2010. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, from 1989 to 1990; the editor of City Journal from 1990 to 1993; a columnist for The New York Post from 1994 to 1997; and a residency at St. Francis College in Brooklyn from 2011 to 2018.

Harry Siegel said his father’s liberalism was largely shaped by conversations with his maternal grandfather, a garment worker and labor organizer, and that his political conversion as an adult was gradual.

The essayist Irving Kristol famously defined a neoconservative, a race that Mr. Kristol embodied and popularized, as “a liberal bereft by reality.” But Mr. Siegel’s conversion wasn’t the result of a single personal experience, his son said — even though a thief once snatched a $100 bag of kosher meat from him on the subway and several of the family’s cars were stolen.

If Mr. Siegel approached a philosophical epiphany, however, it was during the blackout of 1977, when looters rampaged through parts of Brooklyn, looting stores and burning them in a night of rioting.

Mr. Siegel, whose favorite restaurant, Jack’s Pastrami King, was one of the places destroyed, reflected in 2017: “The city itself had been raided, I realized. I am still haunted by that moment from 40 years ago when my political re-education began.”