My wife and I saw “Drop Dead City” tonight at the IFC in Manhattan. It’s a riveting documentary about the New York City Fiscal Crisis of 1975.

I know that statement sounds like a parody of a lecture in a poli sci class, but it happens to be true. The documentary is also riveting just as a cinematic experience. If you love the scene and soundscape of New York City film from the 1970s—from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three to Dog Day Afternoon—you’ll love this documentary. The archival footage alone will bring you back to the feel and time of another place.

For me, the film was not just political (more on that below) but also personal. Figures from my childhood, whom I hadn’t thought about in years, were brought back to life on screen. My family had moved back to the United States in 1974, settling the following year in Chappaqua, about 45 minutes north of New York City. New York’s mayor Abe Beame—a machine politician from Brooklyn, but a decent man, if hapless mayor—played an outsized role in my family.

First, he was the first Jewish mayor of New York City (though some people say that was really LaGuardia, who, despite being Episcopalian, had a Jewish mother).

Second, Beame always reminded me of my Grandpa Nat. Not because they looked or sounded alike. But they were both short, stocky Jewish immigrant men of a certain generation (born a year apart), and they were both children of New York City—Beame from the Lower East Side, my grandfather, from Brooklyn.

Last, Beame’s son, Buddy, was a member of our synagogue in Chappaqua. I didn’t know this until tonight, but Buddy Beame actually ran his father’s mayoral campaign in 1973. I remember Buddy very well because in 1977, our synagogue took a trip to Israel. My grandmother had just died the year before, and my grandfather came along with my family on the trip.

One day on the trip, we stopped at and swam in the Dead Sea. The tour guides had told us that, under no circumstances, should we put our heads underwater. I somehow garbled the instructions to mean that we shouldn’t open our eyes underwater. So I dove underwater, or at least tried to dive (it’s hard to submerge your whole body in heavy saltwater), but I kept my eyes closed. When I came up and opened my eyes, well, you can imagine the pain I felt as the saltiest saltwater in the world rushed into my eyes. I started screaming in pain. Buddy Beame ran into the water, pulled me out, and hustled me into the showers where he flushed the salt out of my eyes. My mother was furious with me.

Speaking of my mom, in the early part of the documentary, we’re introduced to Hugh Carey, the governor of New York. He’s another figure I hadn’t thought about in decades. The film tells us that he had eleven children, two of whom died, and that he was a widower, raising the children on his own. Instinctively, I thought, I’ve got to run home and call Mom to tell her that. Then I remembered she was dead. I felt such a pang, wishing to tell my mom this news about Hugh Carey’s family, only to have her tell me that she remembered this factoid all too well and proceed to recite some of the names of the Carey children, which she probably would have known and still remembered at the age of…she’d be 87 now. With my mom, all politics was personal.

And speaking of the politics of the personal, two of the big villains in the documentary are Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. They were, of course, power players in Gerald Ford’s White House. But what I hadn’t realized—and I’m not sure this is really true, but the documentary plays it up for all it’s worth—was just how much they had pushed Ford to refuse to bail out a bankrupt city and tell the City to “drop dead.” Watching this movie, you begin to realize how adept these two thugs were at taking advantage of a crisis. From the beginning of the Fiscal Crisis, they saw how they could leverage the power of the federal government to force a confrontation with Northern urban liberalism, using the City as a demonstration effect for austerity everywhere. If the City wanted to get any kind of a federal bailout, it would need to crush its unions, lower wages, force students to pay for their education at CUNY, and on and on. It seems only natural that 26 years later, back in the White House, they were ready to use 9/11 as they did.

A more ambiguous figure in the film is Al Shanker, the powerful head of the New York City teachers union. Growing up, I had two images of Shanker. One was his semi-permanent column in the Sunday Times, which was just a paid advertisement for the AFT. The other image was that line in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, where Allen’s character, having been woken up after being frozen for 200 years, learns that the United States was destroyed a century earlier when “a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”

Anyway, the documentary does a good job of showing how loathed, on the one hand, Shanker was by almost everyone in the New York establishment, including virtually every leader of the labor movement, yet how beloved he was by the teachers of New York City. It also shows how despite being almost maniacally focused on the interests of his union, and his union only, he was by far the most prescient leader of New York City labor, who understood full well the stakes of the austerity being asked of NYC workers and that it would be the bankers who would emerge from the crisis even more empowered. Though the film doesn’t quite say this, it seems like Shanker was pushing for a different path out of the crisis.

Another interesting element in the documentary, which the filmmakers depict well, is to show how differently the politics of safety and security, which we associate with the right, could be pitched in a different world. For background, the City was demanding that City workers take massive concessions, both in terms of wages and benefits, and also in terms of overall levels of hiring and staffing. The cops and the firefighters were furious, particularly since homicide and arson rates were skyrocketing. (Also, despite the talk of violence in our contemporary moment, the amount of personal violence in the 1970s was truly shocking; the film shows virtually every journalist carrying a gun just to protect themselves.) They produced a pamphlet called “Fear City,” which they distributed to tourists, warning them that they were entering a death zone and that they should beware.

But what’s interesting about the fearmongering these union workers engaged in is where they lay the blame: instead of demonizing Black people or poor people or immigrants, they blamed the government and the banks for imposing austerity. They emphasized that New York City was a union city, a city of workers. We’re so used to the politics of fear being wielded by the right, always at the cost of the most marginalized and powerless. This was an example of how to do a different kind of politics of public safety, a politics that’s nearly gone, and that Zohran Mamdani is, in his way, trying to revitalize.

One last note: I mentioned in a post the other day that I’ve been reading Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich’s amazing oral history of the end of the Soviet Union and the shift to Putin’s Russia. I’ve been struck in reading her book just how anathematized money and selfishness were under the Soviet Union, even during the cynical years of Brezhnev and his successors. Though she in no way underplays the cruelty and terror of the Soviet regime—many of the individual stories she reports are harrowing, giving Solzhenitsyn a run for his money—her interview subjects speak out of and from a genuine idealism, again, even during the Brezhnev years, and from a genuine horror of everything that capitalism would bring about.

Watching this documentary tonight you could see a similar mix in the New York City of the postwar years—a mix of cynicism and idealism, a hardbitten realpolitik married to a sense of social solidarity. You realize what the working class created the world over, from the banks of the Hudson to banks of the Volga, and what was lost when the world gave up on socialism.

It’s often been said that the showdown in New York in 1975 was an urban prelude to neoliberalism across the globe. If you want to get a palpable sense of how we got the world we’ve got, check out this film.