Tom Hayden on Bill de Blasio's Win: A Harbinger of a New Populist Left in America?
Bold
stances on inequality and overzealous policing propelled a progressive
victory. If he holds true, can De Blasio shift the national debate?
November 6, 2013
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The overwhelming support of
New York City voters for
Bill de Blasio is
the latest sign of the shift towards a new populist left in America. De
Blasio owes his unexpected tailwind to campaigning on issues considered
by insiders to be too polarizing for winning politics.
One is De Blasio's promise to redress the "
tale of two cities" inequalities among New Yorkers, an issue forced into mainstream discourse by the 2011
Occupy Wall Street movement – not by New York
Democratsaligned
with Wall Street. The other is De Blasio's pledge to sharply curb
police stop-and-frisk policies directed against young people of color –
aggressive tactics
favored by a majority of white voters and overwhelmingly criticized by African Americans, Latinos and Asian-American voters.
Despite its Democratic voter majority, New York in recent decades has been the political stronghold of the plutocratic Mayor
Michael Bloombergand, before him, the abrasive law-and-order Mayor Rudolph Giuliani – both
Republicans with
national, even global, reach. Democrats have lacked a progressive voice
on the national stage of American politics often provided by the New
York mayor's office – until now.
De Blasio will have a mandate for economic and social reform backed
by a newly-elected 51-member city council, the most progressive in
years. As
Juan Gonzáles of Pacifica's DemocracyNow! put it:
I can't think of a time like this when so many progressives have been elected at once.
With American politics polarized between the Obama center and the
thriving Tea Party, the only opening for the left is through state and
local federalism serving as "laboratories of reform", to
paraphrase former Justice Louis Brandeis.
After the Gilded Age and the Great Crash of the 1920s, New York Mayor
Fiorello LaGuardia (1934-47) and legislators like Robert Wagner created
the first pillars of the New Deal before it become the national platform
of the Democrats. They successfully fought not only Wall Street
bankers, but a virulent and racist American right.
De Blasio is positioned to similarly shift the nation's dialogue,
policies and priorities in a progressive direction – assuming he
delivers on his campaign pledges. Since the financial crisis of 2008,
the federal government has passed a
loophole-ridden Dodd-Frank reform
law, which failed even to regulate the trillions floating in the
derivatives industry. Wall Street investors have been richly rewarded
since then, while
middle-class incomes stagnate and the numbers of poor Americans reach the highest in 50 years. A report last week from the respected
American Community Survey noted:
No other major American city has such income inequality when it comes to rich and poor when it comes to New York.
Among De Blasio's first challenges will be prodding Governor Andrew
Cuomo and the state legislature in Albany to permit local tax increases
to fund universal pre-kindergarten in New York City. Cuomo and most
pundits say the De Blasio proposal is going nowhere, but seasoned
reporters like Gonzales are not so sure. "It's hard but doable. I'm not
sure that Albany will resist the home rule message from a new mayor with
a large mandate."
De Blasio has direct power over New York City's $70bn budget and
re-zoning policies, which, under Bloomberg, showered favors on a real
estate industry bent on
competing with London and Hong Kong at the expense of residential neighborhoods. An early test for De Blasio will be the
Midtown East re-zoning project left
unfinished by Bloomberg, which would erect Empire State Building
skyscrapers from the East River to downtown. De Blasio wants to "fix"
the proposal, while community groups are 100% opposed, saying they would
be left in permanent shadows.
Bold
stances on inequality and overzealous policing propelled a progressive
victory. If he holds true, can De Blasio shift the national debate?
De Blasio also can tackle income inequality by signing the living
wage ordinance on city contracts, or by preventing Wall Street
developers getting special city abatements – measures that Bloomberg
vetoed. De Blasio didn't flinch on the issue when confronted in closed
meetings with developers during the campaign.
When De Blasio first
raised his opposition to the police stop-and-frisk policies, according to
Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights,
the candidate began rising in the polls against other contenders in the
Democratic primary. The stop-and-frisk policy, a variation of racial
profiling against black and brown young people, is generally supported
by white and worried New Yorkers and overwhelmingly opposed by
communities of color.
De Blasio and his African-American wife have a teenager, named Dante, whose
Afro style even caught the attention of President Obama.
As Dante leafleted with his father at subway turnstiles, emotional
memories of the murdered Florida teenager Trayvon Martin were palpable,
if rarely mentioned.
New York under Mayor Giuliani fanned then popular American policies
of mass incarceration towards youngsters who resembled Dante de Blasio.
From 2008 to 2012, the
NYPD stopped
nearly 2.9 million New Yorkers, a majority of them young, about 85%
black or brown. On average, 88% of those stopped were
completely innocent of any crime or misdemeanor.
When a federal appeals court
halted a judicial order ordering
detailed changes in the NYPD last week, De Blasio expressed "extreme
disappointment" and pledged to move forward on police reform from day
one. How he will do so is procedurally muddled for the moment, but there
is little doubt that another staple of the Bloomberg era is ready for
the dustbin.
Will De Blasio adhere to his promises? He is, after all, a mainstream
Democratic party operative and policy wonk who once managed Hillary
Clinton's centrist campaign for the US Senate. Decades ago, he was
deeply involved in the Nicaragua Solidarity Movement against Ronald
Reagan's illegal contra war. De Blasio seemed nervous when this past
association surfaced earlier in the campaign. But the Republicans could
gain no traction on the issue.
It is reassuring that De Blasio has roots in past social movements
instead of the usual pedigrees for a political career. If he has veered
back to his lefty roots, it is enabled by a popular anger among voters.
This anger was fanned by the growing gap between the haves and
have-nots, reinforced by heavy-handed policing, in a city whose power
brokers are addicted to opulence.
The media widely acknowledges that Occupy Wall Street "
changed the conversation"
in America. De Blasio won't represent the 99%, but a healthy majority
will do. From Wednesday, Bill de Blasio will have the largest megaphone
of any conversation-changer on the national scene.
Tom Hayden was a leader of
the student, civil rights, peace and environmental movements of the
1960s. He served 18 years in the California legislature, where he
chaired labor, higher education and natural resources committees. He is
the author of ten books, including "Street Wars" (New Press, 2004). He
is a professor at Occidental College, Los Angeles, and was a visiting
fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics last fall.
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