He’s a former cop who crusaded against police brutality, a leading Democrat who was once a registered Republican, a machine politician who casts himself as a foe of city bureaucracy, a self-described progressive who’s friendly to charter schools and real estate developers and, most recently, a champion of law-and-order who refutes the idea that a Black leader must also be on the left.

For the rest of big-city America, not to mention the Democratic Party that usually runs it, he’s a godsend.

That’s because Democrats are again becoming the party of urban misrule, just as they were in the 1970s. In Portland and Seattle, progressive mayors have ceded the public square to anarchists and rioters. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, to homeless encampments and addicts. In Chicago and Baltimore, to street gangs and gun violence.

And, in New York, the city that in the 1990s and 2000s led the way in the historic and nationwide reductions in crime, 981 people were shot this year as of Sunday. That includes two women and a 4-year-old girl hit by stray bullets in May in Times Square, in broad daylight.