The death of Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute is a sad moment for all of us at The New York Sun. As a scholar and journalist he was an important figure in establishing the intellectual framework of the Giuliani years, during which the city was redeemed. He helped frame the editorial architecture of these columns, including, as noted by our early managing editor, Ira Stoll, through his son Harry, the first op-ed editor of the Sun.

Siegel père was not only a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute but a contributing editor of its City Journal and a professor at Cooper Union. His books include “The Prince of the City,” about Mayor Giuliani and New York; “The Future Once Happened Here,” about the fate of America’s major cities; and “The Revolt Against the Masses,” about how liberalism undermined the middle class. Each was a major contribution to shaping his time.

There’s an illuminating interview with Siegel by Steve Hayward of Powerline. Siegel talks about, among other things, two of his greatest heroes. One was his grandfather, a vice president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, one of the anti-communist unions that did so much to help win the Cold War.* The other was Siegel’s father, who’d landed at D-Day and later helped run guns to Israel in advance of independence.

Siegel’s great strength is that, having been inspired by these examples, he became a rigorous scholar and careful writer with a cheerful spirit. Siegel talked to Mr. Hayward about how he’d made a fool of himself in 1972 by campaigning for Senator McGovern in blue color districts of Pittsburgh. That’s where he learned that labor and middle class families took him for a fool. He met Henry Wallace and realized that Wallace thought Russia was right.

We didn’t actually know Siegel well. One of the things we cherished about him, though, was the time he was prepared to give us when we phoned him. That was often as we wrestled with the issues New York was confronting in the post-9/11 era. He knew the history and the statistics. If a neoconservative is a liberal who was mugged, Fred Siegel was the one who made a citizen’s arrest of the policy accomplices of the metaphorical mugger.

One of the best things about Siegel, at least in our view, is that he nonetheless clung to certain elements of American liberalism. It was the craziness and radicality from which he fell away — or reasoned his way from. Hence we perceived him as something of a unifying figure at a time when the old political alliances were disintegrating. Yet he was also prepared to take off the gloves and contend with powerful factions on the left. 

Siegel helped popularize the notion that public employee unions were the “new Tammany hall” — even more dangerous than the old one. The “old Tammany,” he wrote once, with Daniel DiSalvo, “was subject to electoral defeats.” The “new Tammanies,” though, “have proved self-perpetuating.” In our view that line of thinking was one of the most trenchant observations of Fred Siegel’s time.

And we are still in the thick of the fight, as, say, President Biden and Senator Schumer campaign to fight inflation with vastly increased government spending. The city Siegel loved so much is in what is close to an existential crisis, though — or because — both houses of the legislature at Albany, the governorship, and the Court of Appeals are controlled by Democrats who spurned his counsel. How we’re going to miss Fred Siegel in the coming seasons.

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* The editor of the Sun likes to describe the free trade union movement that included the ILGWU and culminated with Solidarity in Poland as having driven through the beating heart of Soviet communism the stake of free labor.