Rudy of the Right : The conservative case for Giuliani.

In his five and a half years as mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani has driven down crime, slashed welfare, pushed charter schools, and confronted labor unions. Most of the local newspaper columnists hate him, the New York Civil Liberties Union calls him a fascist, and Al Sharpton compares him to Hitler. Meanwhile, he may be the only thing standing between Hillary Clinton and a seat in the U.S. Senate.

And this guy has a problem with conservatives?

Well, yes. Some conservatives have never forgiven him for his decision in 1994 to cross party lines and endorse that quintessential liberal, Gov. Mario Cuomo, for reelection over the eventual Republican winner, George Pataki. And others, fearful of Giuliani's liberal positions on social issues (he's pro-choice, pro-gun control, favors gay rights, and opposes limitations on immigration), harbor suspicions that he's an Italian John Lindsay--a Democrat in Republican clothing.

Giuliani will never pass muster with the litmus-test crowd. But he is one of those politicians whose root beliefs and governing philosophy can't be measured simply by scoring him on the issues. Argues Myron Magnet, editor of City Journal, "Rudy Giuliani's core principles, which focus on public order and personal responsibility, are inherently conservative: that government exists to make people safe in their homes and on the streets, and that for every government benefit there is a concomitant personal responsibility."

Indeed, Giuliani's astounding success as mayor is rooted in one of conservatism's most important missions: exposing the fallacy of decades of liberal assumptions.

"New York has become probably America's most rigid city intellectually," Giuliani said in a recent speech to the Manhattan Institute, the think tank that is to him what the Heritage Foundation was to Ronald Reagan. "Up until the last four or five years, it was quite common to refer to the City of New York as unmanageable and ungovernable. And people would just shake their heads and agree." The danger, Giuliani noted, is that "if you can convince people that something is ungovernable, then [the mayor is] totally unaccountable, because people have no expectations. . . . And even if things get worse, then the answer is that things are ungovernable and unmanageable."

Giuliani refused to concede that any of the city's myriad problems--crime, the economy, schools, welfare--couldn't be solved. He therefore made specific commitments and demanded to be held accountable for them. That, he contends, "allowed us to think thoughts that were impossible for New Yorkers to really embrace in the past."

Which meant saying previously unsayable things about public order. Giuliani's initial police crackdown on squeegee men and other "quality of life" offenders was widely ridiculed--but it put into concrete action the arguments of such political thinkers as James Q. Wilson about society's vanished sense of outrage over increasingly deviant social behavior. Giuliani understood that squeegee men weren't the city's most dangerous lawbreakers; but he also understood that removing them from street corners would send a powerful signal about his intent to restore order.

Similarly, Giuliani became a fervent advocate of Wilson's symbolic "broken window" argument: that leaving one broken window unrepaired is a sign of community indifference and so inevitably leads to more broken windows and community decay. Going after quality-of-life offenders also yielded an important criminal-justice dividend, because those who commit such crimes more often than not have committed other, more serious crimes. That helped get recidivist criminals off the streets in record numbers and dropped crime rates to levels not seen since the 1960s. It also recognized that public spaces belong to the public and not merely to the deviant and disturbed.

Giuliani's success with welfare has been even more remarkable--in large measure because he approached the problem not primarily from a standpoint of its fiscal impact on New York but rather its spiritual impact. "New York City looked upon welfare as something not only that people were entitled to, but that people actually should be encouraged to get," he said in his Manhattan Institute speech. Under Lindsay's mayoralty in the '60s, New York's welfare rolls grew from 200,000 to an astonishing 1.1 million. "Remember the era in which politicians who supported expanding welfare were described as progressive?'' Giuliani asks. "When you're moving people from work to welfare . . . [that's the] opposite direction."

There are now 480,000 fewer New Yorkers on the welfare rolls, a figure larger than the population of most American cities. And, as the mayor points out, the dire prophecies of welfare advocates--that cutting the rolls would plunge the city into crime, homelessness, and chaos--did not materialize.

Giuliani's fervor about the spiritual benefits of "workfare" bespeaks a "conservative soul," says Magnet. "This is a guy who was educated by the nuns--and he listened to them very carefully."

The mayor, no wallflower, boasts that as a young lawyer he berated people on the street who violated the city's "pooper scooper" law, yelling, "You're a slob! Pick up after your dog!" Last fall, he called on his constituents to do the very same thing to anyone they see littering on the streets. "You go up to somebody and say, 'You're a slob,'" Giuliani said during a radio call-in show. But shouldn't the hint be less confrontational? he was asked. "No, not so polite," the mayor responded. "You don't have to be too polite about somebody who's taking advantage and trampling on the rights of other people."

This insistence on direct confrontation infuriates Giuliani's critics, and even some of his supporters. But it underscores his belief that what he considers harmful social behavior is not to be tolerated, no matter how seemingly small the offense. Moreover, he is willing to apply the same argument to larger issues.

Magnet notes that, unlike his predecessors, Giuliani "in two State of the City addresses used the word 'illegitimacy' and said it's a bad thing and said that it's appropriate to say to fathers of kids out of wedlock, 'You're a bum.' I mean, people have been lectured by left-wingers for using the word 'illegitimate.' Giuliani recognizes that it's one of the key undiscussed social issues of our time."

Giuliani's crusade against immoral behavior led him to do something that no previous mayor had ever even attempted: shut down New York's burgeoning sex industry. The Times Square peep shows, the strip clubs, the porn theaters--they're all gone now, victims of Giuliani's refusal to tolerate the so-called "combat zone" approach that concentrated the city's sex industry into one area. "Some people romanticize the old Times Square," Giuliani observed earlier this year. "They think it was somehow charming to have graffiti on every wall and sex shops on every block. But remember what it was really like. Remember the fear, the disrespect for people's rights that went unchecked in that climate. It seemed like no one cared."

The ACLU types were convinced it would be child's play to knock down Giuliani's policies on First Amendment grounds. To their astonishment, however, some two dozen judges have upheld them. The sordid Times Square district of just a half-dozen years ago is no longer recognizable, porn stores having given way to family-oriented businesses.

Giuliani's vision of a new--actually, an old--social order has also been realized in his more controversial efforts, like a lusty crackdown on jaywalking, littering, noise pollution, and reckless cabdrivers. This has led critics to bray that Giuliani is trying to impose his personal morality on 8 million New Yorkers. But those complaints come largely from those who once hailed the sex shows as a reflection of New York's social diversity and who idealized homelessness as just another alternative lifestyle.

Admittedly, Giuliani's tenure has not been a total, unqualified success. Despite his best efforts, New Yorkers remain severely overtaxed and their businesses overregulated. And while the city has benefited from the Wall Street juggernaut, joblessness remains above the national average. Nor has the mayor been able to deal effectively with New York's failing school system. He has challenged the entrenched education bureaucracy--including the teachers' and principals' unions--but progress has been minimal.

Limited by law to only two terms as mayor, Giuliani now thinks his "practical reality" would "be good for a legislative body"--the U.S. Senate, for example. He is the all-but-certain Republican opponent to the all-but-certain Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. The New York Republican party, usually fractious, recently united behind Giuliani's prospective candidacy.

The mayor has a strong idea of right and wrong, of what society should be like. And while he may sometimes be wearisomely zealous in pressing his personal vision of civility, no one can deny that New York City today is a far different--and far better--place than it was before he took office. The Rudy Revolution has done for New York what the Reagan Revolution did for the rest of the nation: It has challenged liberal orthodoxy and intellectual rigidity by redefining the political debate and placing a new set of options--stressing accountability and responsibility--squarely on the table, for good.

You can't get much more conservative than that.

Mr. Fettmann is an op-ed columnist and associate editorial-page editor for the New York Post.