Tonight’s debate among the candidates for the Democratic nomination in the New York mayoral race will serve as a stark reminder of how far left the city’s political climate has skewed. The failure of conservative ideas to blossom in this year’s race marks a contrast with the mayoral election six decades ago, when an icon of the right, Bill Buckley, launched a quixotic bid for mayor in what he called “a campaign of ideas.”

Buckley’s candidacy, chronicled in Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of the conservative, came at a time of “crisis,” in the words of the Herald-Tribune, for New York. The city’s budget had surged 128 percent in 10 years, and taxes doubled, yet deficits still yawned. The city had America’s highest unemployment rate, and crime was surging — especially in the subways. Racial tensions seethed. Sixty years later, it sounds all too familiar.

Faced with a liberal Republican, John Lindsay, squaring off against a machine Democrat, Abe Beame, Buckley joined the race in 1965 under the Conservative banner as a chance to give the right’s ideas an airing. Even so, Buckley was aware it was an uphill climb. Asked what he would do if elected, he joked: “Demand a recount.” Yet he took the race seriously, putting forward a series of policy solutions whose logic still resonates today.

“New York boils with frustration, injustice, and demoralization,” Buckley averred. His campaign had four large themes: restoring law and order, based on the view that the problem was “too much crime, not too much police brutality,” cutting taxes and spending, reforming welfare, and reviving public education by reversing the trend of using schools as “laboratories for social experiments.” His call for tax incentives prefigured Jack Kemp’s “enterprise zones.”

It added up to a platform that might have set up New York for decades of growth and prosperity. Yet the liberal establishment was dismayed. Lindsay denounced Buckley as “an assassin from the ultra-right,” linking him to Ronald Reagan, Mr. Tanenhaus reports. A Times editorial said Buckley was “pandering to some of the more brutish instincts in the community,” with “appeals to racism and bigotry” that were “artfully masked.” 

Although Buckley lost the race to Lindsay, the campaign served as a springboard for the conservative candidate and helped put his ideals of limited government and free markets on the political map across the country. Not so in New York, though, where Lindsay’s victory ushered in an intensified era of liberalism that would push New York in 1980 almost to bankruptcy via policies that created what historian Vincent Cannato calls an “ungovernable city.”  

Although Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg made strides toward reviving New York’s fortunes, the city has regressed since their terms. The leading candidates for mayor seem to be vying with each other to see who can cater more to the far left of the Democratic Party. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani is calling for a confiscatory rent freeze that will disrupt the housing market. Governor Cuomo wants to raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour.

Mr. Cuomo’s policy would lead to job losses and more self-service kiosks at grocery stores, fast-food eateries, and other stores that rely on low-skill labor — a reminder of how the minimum wage distorts the right of contract between employers and their workforces. It’s but one concrete case of how the liberal policies pushed by the mayoral candidates will yield a further deterioration in the city’s economy and quality of life.

This is not to overlook the Republican in the race, Curtis Sliwa, whose dedication to public service has long been clear from his work with the Guardian Angels. Yet Mr. Sliwa lost decisively four years ago and isn’t generating much traction this time. Today, as in 1965, the signs again point to a doom spiral for New York — yet without any prospect of a Giuliani or a Bloomberg, much less a candidate like Buckley, to steer the city back to the right track.