I’d lived the two ends of American politics within the span of a few years: the Republican corporate-funded machine of the Giuliani juggernaut, weaponizing fear and grievances and promises of more cops being more aggressive on the streets, and the ethnic equation of the Democratic machine, tallying up a winning number of constituents based on ground-level appeals and bite-sized government programs that didn’t alter the structure of things. On some level, I knew this.
