Heather Ann Thompson

It was grim.

It felt dangerous to be in the subways.

It felt abandoned to walk down almost any city street, wherever you grew up.

And it felt like we were in an absolute crisis in the 1980s.

And so it wasn't that I doubted the sentiment on the ground, but what was striking to me was why was it that people were interpreting that

really terrible urban situation as the fault of its weakest residents, its most marginalized residents, those who were already poor, those who were suffering, frankly, this crisis far worse than they were.

And that was when I really began to dig into the politics of the Reagan 80s and, more importantly, the economics of the Reagan 80s.

The Reagan Republicans were so fascinating because they weren't new in the sense that they wanted to undo the social safety net and the kind of legacy of the New Deal liberal America.

Rich people in America had long wanted to do that.

Conservatives in America had long wanted to do that.

But they were kind of brilliant in that they were able to understand the power of racial resentment.

They were able to connect that racial resentment to a critique of liberalism in a really kind of brilliant way, alarming but brilliant way.

And so by the time they take the White House, they are meanwhile dismantling the very funding that people need for their public schools to have the trash picked up, to

Fund public health centers and research for public health and all of the things that New Yorkers really need are being stripped and are being eroded.

But no one's eye is on that ball, right?

They are instead focused on the wreckage that they see on the ground.

Well, before we can actually even get to what happens next, I think we need to go back a few years in the South Bronx where Troy Canty came from and his three teenage friends that were on the train that day.

The suffering that Bernie gets saw on the street every day he left his Greenwich Village apartment.

was all happening in the South Bronx in a far more acute way.

This is a neighborhood where people are absolutely in despair.