A few of the questions we asked Kim: Like most historians of 20C US we first became familiar with your work when we read Invisible Hands, about how rich right-wingers created a libertarian intellectual movement. Why did you focus your early scholarship on the political right?

In a 2011 JAH state of the field essay, you wrote about recent volume of historiography on conservatism: “With this work done, the field has arrived at a new maturity. As a result, we now have the opportunity to move beyond the closely focused studies of movement history..."

"that have dominated the scholarship thus far & to reconsider our ideas about the relationship of the Right to the broader trends of American political history. While we now know a great deal more than we once did about the internal history of the conservative movement..."

"we're just beginning to rethink the broad sweep of the twentieth century in light of what we have learned.” Do you think scholarship since 2011 is moving in this direction? How would you survey the field now? (She dropped LOTS of historiographical knowledge in answer to this.)

We focused most of conversation on Fear City. Most surprising thing was how deep social democracy was embedded in the city prior to the crisis of 70s. Was this surprising to you? Is this a gap in our collective memory? If so, what explains the gap?

Main takeaway of Fear City seems to be that understanding this history is important to our larger understanding of the rise of neoliberalism. Which makes sense as it being a piece of your larger body of work—a sort of sequel to Invisible Hands.

A much grainier history of neoliberalism, less about an ideological movement and more about how people take advantage of a crisis. Agree with this assessment? Was this one of your objectives?

Budget crisis led to a crisis of democracy in that elites took control of the commanding heights of the city. Seems consistent with Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine about how crises allow neoliberals to restructure things to their advantage. New Orleans schools as a classic example.

But your book makes it seem that the elite had far less agency, at least in this case. What do you make of this comparison and evaluation?

As capitalism shifted from a focus on heavy industry to finance, were urban crises like this overdetermined? And this is not even to mention deindustrialization, suburbanization, white flight, etc, the other developments that contributed to crises and neoliberal restructuring.

Argument made by some New Yorkers that New York City bore the costs of the American South’s racism, not to mention poverty induced in part by American imperialism, seems really important—a really good argument that the nation should support cities like New York. Thoughts on this?

Trump hangs over this history like a dark shadow. You dedicate 3 or so pages to his redevelopment of the Commodore Hotel when he was a young man, & the hundreds of millions of dollars the city gifted Trump in tax breaks over decades related to that single redevelopment project.

When you began researching this project, it had to have been before Trump emerged as a serious presidential candidate. What was it like seeing his rise as you worked on this particular book?