Introduction

In the summer of 1975, as New York City's fiscal crisis deepened and police officers, sanitation workers, and other municipal employees faced layoffs, angry police unionists began circulating a pamphlet that warned tourists that they might not be safe on New York's streets. "Welcome to Fear City," the pamphlets proclaimed, as they detailed evidence of spreading crime, rampant arson, and accumulating trash. Taking its title from that infamous pamphlet, Kim Phillips-Fein's searing book, Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, goes on to recount in gripping fashion both the financial meltdown and the policy response that triggered that protest and many others. Taking us inside one of the most consequential events of the past half-century of our history, Phillips-Fein provides us with a 360-degree view. She allows us to see the crisis from the perspective of bankers as well as trade unionists, politicians as well as protesters. It is an analytically sophisticated and dramatically told story.

Rarely does a work of history illuminate the dynamics of its author's times as well as Fear City illuminates the troubled passage through which we have been living.¹ As Phillips-Fein's richly evocative account of the meltdown makes clear, it became the urtext of the austerity politics that ascended in its aftermath, a politics that has yet to loosen its grip on power. That politics has not only strengthened the hand of capital, introduced greater insecurity into workers' lives, and undermined unions, it has narrowed the compass of democratic governance and contributed to the sharply diminished faith in democracy itself that now threatens us from multiple directions.

Even as it signaled the onset of our own times, New York's fiscal crisis both symbolized and catalyzed the decline of the New Deal order. By explaining what happened in New York in the mid-1970s, Phillips-Fein not only closes the circle she began with her acclaimed first book, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade against the New Deal (2009), she provides a road map to the emergence of the post—New Deal order.² As her account reveals, the roots of many dominant features of today's America were already evident in the crisis-beset New York of 1975: financialization and the increased control of powerful financial institutions over public priorities, the emergence of an urban politics driven by real-estate developers in which tax subsidies for private interests increasingly starved public services, the drive to privatize public goods; the erosion of support for the welfare state, the explosion of wealth inequality, and a turn toward increasing racial inequality.

New York's crisis foreshadowed other episodes of crisis capitalism that would follow. What happened with great intentionality in Katrina-flooded New Orleans and post-Maria Puerto Rico, in the Great Recession—battered Midwest where Governor Scott Walker stripped Wisconsin's public workers of their bargaining rights, and where Michigan's venture-capitalist governor, Rick Snyder, presided over Detroit's Chapter 9 bankruptcy and placed Flint's finances under emergency control (leading to the lead poisoning of its water) owed much to what had happened through ad hoc experimentation in New York decades earlier.

Fear City helps us see our present circumstances more clearly. Indeed, if we seek to understand why so many teachers in 2018 feel that the Great Recession never ended for them and their schools, why in thirty-six states total state and local funding to public education was lower in 2017 than it had been in 2008, and why 220,000 education jobs were cut in this period even as enrollments grew by over one million, we can find clues in Kim Phillip-Fein's story. In postcrisis New York—then arguably the nation's most liberal city—corporate taxes began to give way to corporate tax abatements, "and a reorientation of city government toward policies that might help developers and the wealthy" took place (260) that either directly pitted public-sector workers against increasingly beleaguered middle-income taxpayers, or foisted off on later generations the costs of the vital public services for which the wealthy...