It had been a long time since a Democrat had a “Sister Souljah” moment. But when Eric Adams stated last July that his main concern heading into the general election in November wasn’t his opponent on the ballot but a “movement,” he shocked a New York City Democratic Party that had just nominated him for mayor.
The “movement” that Adams was concerned about, he said, was the Democratic Socialists of America, a minor though increasingly influential party in New York. It was the DSA that gave the country Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and many other young leftist leaders. Ocasio-Cortez and her House “Squad” have become not only the young stars of the Democratic Party but also its future.
“All across the country, the DSA socialists are mobilizing to stop Eric Adams,” he said at a fundraiser in the upscale Queens neighborhood of Douglaston. “They realize that if I’m successful, we’re going to start the process of regaining control of our cities.”
In challenging the DSA — and, in the eyes of most New Yorkers, AOC — Adams was signaling that despite the Left’s success in capturing much of the energy in the Democratic Party and in President Joe Biden’s national political agenda, the party’s centrists were alive and well.
The Left does reciprocate Adams’s enmity; AOC has castigated him as insensitive to the poor. But Adams is a hard man to attack from the Left. He is a black man who rose from poverty and brings a background in law enforcement. He also has the ability to speak the political language of his party’s woke wing. For example, he invoked the specter of “white supremacy” in his first days as mayor to justify a controversial appointment of his brother to a high-ranking police post.
There is a lot riding on Adams’s success. If an avowedly nonideological Democrat such as him can succeed not only in winning in deep-blue Gotham, but in restoring the morale of a citizenry battered by crime, COVID, and eight years of a leftist mayor indifferent to the city’s decline, then Adams will rightly be seen as having found a winning formula that could succeed elsewhere.
Adams benefited from the usual internecine warfare that characterizes the Left in New York. The primary included a host of candidates in a contest that was further complicated by a new weighted voting system that confused many voters. His main rival for nonleftist votes was former tech executive and 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who flamed out in the primary despite making a last-minute alliance with Kathryn Garcia, one of the left-wing favorites.
Among the votes cast for first choice, Adams won a plurality with 30.8%; left-wingers Maya Wiley and Garcia trailed him with 21.4% and 19.6%, respectively. When the weighted votes were counted, Adams narrowly edged out Garcia by a 50.4% to 49.6% margin. In the general election, which has become an afterthought in a city where the Republican Party has all but disappeared, Adams won handily over an easily marginalized GOP candidate, Guardian Angels head Curtis Sliwa.
Adams’s primary victory came as something of a shock to the seemingly dominant left wing of the Democratic Party in New York City. Bill de Blasio may have served for eight years, but he left Gracie Mansion as one of the most unpopular mayors in the history of New York City, which, let’s face it, has had many others who were widely despised. His arrogance and cluelessness about what makes a city livable or an economy work helped send the Big Apple into a steep decline. He was assisted in this effort by a state government that enacted terrible laws such as “bail reform,” which fueled a rise in crime, and the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. Not only did it wipe out New York’s entertainment and restaurant industries, but all this together convinced many in the world of finance, key to the city’s tax base, that they no longer needed to be physically present in Manhattan in order to conduct business.
By the time he left City Hall, even many on the Left understood that having a mayor as incompetent as de Blasio was something New York could no longer afford. Still, he embodied the sensibilities of the city’s liberal elites, who lived in upscale neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Manhattan, as well as their DSA allies. De Blasio’s brand of Democrat seemed not to care about what the surge of homeless people was doing to middle-class neighborhoods and the families that live in them.
They had embraced woke ideas about race and law enforcement and looked down upon the city’s dwindling middle and working classes. These were the citizens who couldn’t insulate themselves from the cost of de Blasio’s New York, nor afford to flee to the suburbs or Florida to get away from the mess their betters were making of their city. And it’s these middle- and working-class New Yorkers who appear to have elected Adams.
That it falls to Adams to attempt to restore New York to its former glory says a lot about how much New York has changed. It’s been nearly 30 years since Rudy Giuliani rode a backlash against David Dinkins, a much-better-liked but equally incompetent liberal and African American mayor, to a narrow win in 1993. New York’s demography is less white than it was then, but it is also more diverse, and less black, with Hispanics and Asians growing in numbers.
While some perceive Adams as seizing the mantle of Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, this mayor is nothing like them. His past is far more complicated, and his affiliations and beliefs are far more palatable to a more left-wing electorate than the one that elected the tough-on-crime former U.S. attorney or the billionaire publisher. After Donald Trump and the leftward move of the NYC Democratic base, it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone running with the GOP tag winning an election in New York City today, let alone those with the kind of technocratic credentials those two men had.
The fourth of six children, Adams was born in 1960 to working-class parents who had emigrated from rural Alabama to the rough streets of the poverty-stricken Brownsville section of Brooklyn. His father was a butcher who struggled with alcoholism, and his mother was a house cleaner with only a third-grade education. Even so, after living in a rat-infested tenement in Bushwick, the family eventually succeeded in buying a small home in lower-middle-class South Jamaica, Queens.
As a child, he worked as a squeegee boy, and at 14, he joined a local gang, the Seven Crowns. Along with his brother, Adams got into trouble for stealing from a prostitute for whom they had run errands but were not paid for their work. In custody, he was beaten by white cops before a black officer intervened. That, and a few days in a juvenile detention center before being sentenced to probation, left an impression on him, he says, as well as a desire to change police culture.
Despite suffering from undiagnosed dyslexia that hampered his grades until he got to college, Adams managed to graduate high school and then get degrees from the New York City College of Technology, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Marist College. By the time he graduated college, he had already embarked on a 22-year career as a policeman. He served first with the New York City Transit Police and then with the NYPD, from whose academy he graduated second in his class in 1984. He rose eventually to the rank of captain.
It was as a New York officer that Adams’s political career began. Eschewing the traditional nonpartisan stance of law enforcement officials, Adams was a strong supporter of Dinkins in his capacity as head of the Guardians, the black patrolmen’s association. It was Dinkins’s top adviser, Bill Lynch, who encouraged Adams to get his college degree, rise in the ranks, and then get into politics.
Adams’s first taste of notoriety came in 1993, when he was quoted as saying that if Herman Badillo, who was a Giuliani-allied, veteran Puerto Rican politician who was married to a Jewish woman, cared about his community, he should have married a Hispanic. But even then, it was hard to pin down where exactly Eric Adams fit on New York’s political spectrum.
In the 1990s, he was publicly associated with the Nation of Islam and its hatemonger leader, Louis Farrakhan, because of his work with the group in fighting crime in New York housing projects. He had an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1994 as a Democrat and the following year served as a bodyguard for champion boxer Mike Tyson after his rape conviction. Around the same time, he helped organize a group of black officers to protest police brutality as a response to Giuliani’s successful “broken windows” anti-crime policies.
But in 1997, the same year Giuliani won reelection in a landslide, Adams registered as a Republican. Perhaps he sensed that the GOP was a better option at the time, as he switched back to the Democrats only four years later when the mayor ended his second and last term.
Adams finally landed his first political office in 2006 when he was elected to the state Senate from Brooklyn. He would serve in Albany until being elected Brooklyn borough president in 2013. There was little to distinguish Adams in terms of policy or concrete accomplishments in either office. But he did display throughout this period a mastery of political alliances, making friends and allies across the spectrum and specifically among New York Democrats. These included de Blasio, whom Adams sometimes defended during the former’s troubled mayoralty.
Comfortable with poverty activists as well as big business and political fundraising, Adams always seemed to have his eye on his goal of being elected mayor. Yet he also became notorious for living well, including owning a home in New Jersey as well as one in Brooklyn, a fact that opponents sought to use against him in the 2021 mayoral election.
While his is a model resume for a New York politician, it also demonstrates exactly why the ideological Left doesn’t trust him. He has been all over the place politically over the last 30 years, with as much experience supporting a hard line on policing as with criticizing officers, and with cozying up to big business as attacking it as insufficiently civic-minded. Liberals and the DSA leftists not only don’t trust him — they find his comfort with a degree of inscrutability to be particularly daunting. It was not for nothing that a New York Times profile of him on the eve of his general election win was headlined, “What Kind of Mayor Might Eric Adams Be? No One Seems to Know.”
The one thing his liberal critics do know about him is that he has no interest in relying on their support. Indeed, as his challenge to them made clear, Squad members such as AOC are as useful a punching bag for Adams as they are for right-wing Republicans. Though the DSA wields considerable power in New York politics, the same working-class people who voted for Adams are the ones who bitterly resent the way AOC helped chase Amazon out of New York and ended plans for the company to build a facility in Queens that would have brought more jobs to the city.
So far, Adams has sought to triangulate such issues, and to signal a willingness to take a more sensible approach to crime and homelessness and to work with business (he has been particularly cozy with Chinese interests seeking to invest in Brooklyn). These positions, contra de Blasio and AOC, are giving many hope that Adams can turn the city around just like Giuliani did a generation ago. And that is, as Adams boasted, exactly what worries the Left since it would undercut its ideology-fueled dominance of New York that made terrible ideas such as “bail reform” possible.
This fact is encouraging for those who hope that the city can be saved after the crisis that it has undergone in recent years. But it is not clear Adams has anything like a coherent plan to achieve that goal. Having spent his career focused on curating his image, being recognized as an advocate for African Americans and building political alliances, Adams may be independent, but he has no track record as an able manager of a bloated city bureaucracy or of achieving better success in dealing with the state government in Albany. He has demonstrated the political wit and the courage to take on some of the forces that are doing the most to drag New York down. But that, in and of itself, won’t restore confidence in law enforcement or make middle- and working-class neighborhoods more livable.
In 1993, few thought Giuliani could reduce crime and make the city again a prosperous destination for those who wanted to make it in the entertainment and business capital of the country. If there is more faith in Adams pulling off the same trick, it is because it has already been done once before in living memory and because the prime obstacles to success oppose him. Democrats nationwide are looking to see whether Eric Adams can make centrism popular again, but New York City’s immediate future will depend on whether his political skills can translate into the sort of managerial brilliance that has saved it before.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
