Martin Eisenstadt’s Blog

Kudos to Matthew Continetti on his excellent piece in the Weekly Standard called Rudy Giuliani, Disciplinarian. He concludes thusly:

Just as Giuliani disciplined an anarchic city, so too would he try to discipline a disordered world. “Civilization must stand up and combat the current collapse of governance, the rise of violence, and the spread of chaos and fear in many parts of the world,” he wrote in a much derided, and little-studied, recent essay in Foreign Affairs:

I know from personal experience that when security is reliably established in a troubled part of a city, normal life rapidly reestablishes itself: shops open, people move back in, children start playing ball on the sidewalks again, and soon a decent and law-abiding community returns to life. The same is true in world affairs. Disorder in the world’s bad neighborhoods tends to spread. Tolerating bad behavior breeds more bad behavior. But concerted action to uphold international standards will help people, economies, and states to thrive. Civil society can triumph over chaos if it is backed by determined action.

The boldness of such a metaphor–that the world is nothing more than a really, really big New York City–is unmistakable; a Giuliani presidency would test whether or not the metaphor actually is true. One thing is clear, however. You sometimes hear that Giuliani is a cipher, that he has hidden or downplayed his true self in order to appeal to the Republican primary electorate, and the American electorate more generally. Nothing could be further from the truth. His instincts, his thoughts, his goals, his tactics, his audacity–it is all there in the open, like it or not, as it has been from the beginning.