I am off to New York for a few days.

When and why do places like New York decay and then recover?

Radical thinking plays a part in it:

almost all modern revolutions, from the Jacobins to the Nazis and the Communists, have ended with the streets running with blood, because murder has been at their heart, rather than an incidental means to an end. For revolutionary leaders like Stalin, “the really great prize of power was unobstructed enjoyment of murder,” while the revolutionary masses in turn “loved the man strong enough to take blood guilt on himself. For them an elite must prove itself in this ability to murder …

… when a revolutionary elite calls for the overturning of restraints and the trashing of culture, it can end in something still worse—in the elite’s seizing control of the government and unleashing against some of its own citizens the very same murderous violence that government theoretically exists to curb.

But in such situations as in normal politics, the mass of people can realise that somehow, somewhere, things have just gone Wrong.

And when that happens, they make their views known in a rather brisk way.