Tom Edsall explores the meaning and implications of Bill de Blasio’s impending election as the next mayor of New York City. We haven’t seen such an old school, unapologetic liberal hold such an influential office in a very long time. Why is de Blasio succeeding, and what, if anything, does it mean for the future of our national politics?
THIS then leads to a broader question. Does the advent of a new era of urban populism under [Bill] de Blasio suggest that the country is moving in a decisively liberal direction?
It may be, rather, that the rise of de Blasio signals the growing strength of liberal forces within the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, a development that may actually work to prevent this wing from leading the entire country to the left.
In addition to the growing leverage of minority and low-income voters in the Democratic Party, the center-left coalition includes many upscale, well-educated social liberals, who have found common ground with their less fortunate allies in shared animosity toward the Republican Party.
The stronger the pro-government poor-to-lower-middle class wing gets, the more likely the coalition will fracture along class and economic fault lines.
As many affluent progressive-leaning voters move to the suburbs (by 2010 New York lost 129,165 residents who had been between the ages 25 and 34 in 2000), have children, buy homes and pay significant property taxes, they are more likely to join the ranks of those who oppose a political party that seeks to increase their tax burdens. They will become legitimate targets for recruitment by a Republican Party that is reasonably conservative — if that stops being an oxymoron.
There we are again, hitting on my recent theme that Republicanism in the Mid-Atlantic is no longer respectable (or reasonable). As the Democratic Party grows to absorb the progressive-leaning, but tax-averse, population that previously voted Republican out of naked self-interest or status-consciousness, it is also ballooning out on the other side to embrace a more populist anti-rich set of policies. Eventually, that balloon will grow so taut that it will pop. But, so long as the GOP is a party strictly for morons, the balloon is going to grow and put the everything thing else in its shadow.
Maybe, but there’s a lot of room for leftward movement before people who are merely affluent rather than stupendously wealthy start freaking out over their tax rates. Edsall is foreseeing a swing back to the right before the pendulum has really even started to move to the left. The kind of reforms we just urgently need shouldn’t affect anyone whose salary is under seven figures anyway, so let’s take one thing at a time.
There’s a lot of room for well structured, mindful movement to the left. A mindless return to the excesses of an earlier era will provoke an equally mindless freak out. I remember New York in the 60s and 70s. I remember the 1968 Ocean Hill – Brownsville strike, in which the left turned against itself as the Black Power movement came into conflict with the traditional white, Jewish progressive movement.
A local school board in a neighborhood that had gone from mostly Jewish to mostly African-American flexed its muscle by dismissing teachers who were white and Jewish, leading to a split with the United Federation of Teachers. The school board quickly proved itself incompetent, but the long-term result was that it drove the teacher’s union into an unholy alliance with business interests that remains to this day.
Jessie Jackson was there to demagogue at Brownsville, which led to his rift with New York Jews, which later inspired his “Hymie-town” remark. The echos can be felt to this day.
Brownsville was but one example of an excess on the left leading to a backlash. Every move in politics must be mindful and well thought through. Every move must be designed to serve human interests in the best and most enlightened possible way. Every move must stand the test of time.
“But, so long as the GOP is a party strictly for morons…”
And there, BooMan, goes any chance of you getting a job in MSM!
Spades, can’t be called spades, don’t you know…
To be fair, they aren’t all morons. It’s true that most of the lunatics and sociopaths in the party are also morons, but not all of them.
But he COULD get a job at the NSC. I hear there’s an opening suddenly…
I just have two reservations about this article:
de Blasio scares me. It wasn’t all that long ago that liberal excesses opened space for the Republican party to strip away middle class support from the left. We need to remain open to ideas that originate on the right to the extent they make sense. My son attended an excellent charter school and I later served on its board. My father was a teacher in the New York City school system and I’ve seen what a botched and decayed system it is. Neither the union nor the administrators give a rat’s ass about the well being of its students.
Charter schools are no panacea. Some are terrible. But a well-constructed charter school experiment presents opportunities for teachers who truly care about students to demonstrate what great education can look like, which in turn pressures public schools to get their act together.
A lurch back to the left will only fuel a later lurch to the right. We need to be open to the best ideas from both sides of the aisle.
Charter schools are a mechanism for transferring public money to private profits. They succeed or fail academically exactly as often as public schools.
You don’t make good public schools by supporting charter schools. The people that own the corporations that profit from charter schools want to kill public schools.
-Jay-
It depends how they’re structured. Charter schools should have to live by all the same rules as public schools. Their funding should be exactly the same as what public schools get per child. If the rules are set up correctly, then it forces all schools to compete for students. If a corporation can do it most efficiently, good for them.
In reality, the charters that I’ve seen succeed were developed by teachers and administrators who got tired of the inefficiency and hypocrisy of public schools and set out to do better.
That said, I see no need to cut off the private sector. As long as they’re forced to play by the same rules, the best schools will win out. I watched as the Tucson Unified School District was forced to respond to the charter school movement by creating its own small schools modeled after the best of the charters.
In reality, the charters that I’ve seen succeed were developed by teachers and administrators who got tired of the inefficiency and hypocrisy of public schools and set out to do better.
LOL!! Yes, it’s always the teachers fault and not that of the school boards and superintendents!!
I’m not sure where I said it was always the fault of teachers. The charter school I served was founded by three teachers from a privileged public school who got tired of having to cow-tow to the demands of administrators. They brought other dedicated teachers on board. Together, they were the most amazing group of people — willing to work long hours for modest pay. Some of them had earned far more in other professions. One had been in an engineer. The principal was a graduate of Dartmouth. Both of them went into teaching because they loved kids and they loved teaching. The charter school allowed them to be teachers, to serve kids, to live a meaningful life.
Not all teachers are so amazing. There are also many who are lazy, who don’t give a rip about the kids, who just show up to collect their paychecks. Such teachers had no interest in working at this charter because it wasn’t a place where you could just go through the motions. Everyone worked long hours and it was a small community. The kids would have recognized a teacher who didn’t care, as would the parents and the rest of the staff. A poor teacher wouldn’t have lasted long there, though I do not recall one ever getting hired.
actually the best schools do not win out. Many schools – and teachers, for that matter – that serve very difficult populations get hopelessly punished while charter schools manipulate their enrollment and get credit for “saving” kids who would have been fine just anywhere.
I was horrified a few years back when Minneapolis considered closing North High School, which has been decimated by charters promising (and failing to deliver) better performance for kids in the predominently african american nieghborhood of north minneapolis.
Closing the “terrible” public schools like North, or a huge percentage of schools in St. Louis for another example, is advantageous to those who discriminate against low-income populations and minorities, as it masks the problem – kids dissipate across many schools, especially charters that come and go with the wind, and these students drop out at the same rates as before. but now it’s harder to see them. It’s easier to dismiss the problem this way.
And Minnesota now has the worst achievement gap in the nation, despite years of charter schools promising to elevate african american kids, in particular.
Not all charter schools are for profit. In fact, many people in the charter school movement believe that for profit schools should be illegal. I certainly do. My children attend a Waldorf-inspired charter. Our school actually gets by on less per student because we have to rent our campus from the school district. Our teachers are paid less than their counterparts. We work hard on fundraising to make up the difference, and make sure that every teacher gets additional training every year. We don’t discriminate based on income, in fact, 41% of our students qualify for free or reduced lunches. And we don’t choose for only the best grades. The only advantages a child can have is if a sibling is already a student, or if they are coming from another Waldorf school. The difference in what the children are offered is amazing. Every child learns to paint, to knit, to cook, to garden, and to play a musical instrument. They are expected to help do chores around the campus. Each class stays together, and with the same teacher, for the entire eight years. The older students are on the same campus as the younger, and expected to set a good example. I have no fear of a child bringing a gun to shoot a teacher, because everyone is so close and well known that we make sure anyone who needs help gets it. And our eighth graders test at 80% on standardized tests. It is incredible. Please don’t judge all charter schools based the those who are in it for profit rather than educating children. They do not speak for all of us.
One of the uglier rightwing fictions about the US left and how Republicans began taking back power after the 1960s. Corruption isn’t a liberal principle and just as many corrupt GOP pols can be cited as DEM pols. Far more damage was done to the left in the 1060s-70s by Cointelpro. You know the guys that planted all sort of stuff to discredit the left.
OT:
Does this:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/senior-virginia-politicians-to-host-event-honoring-fired-ap-st
affers
smell really bad to anyone else?
Looks like Very Serious People being Very Serious, but scaled down a bit to reflect chummy state politics rather than chummy national politics.
Oh my. A party? Couldn’t McAwful has simply sent a letter to the AP saying apology accepted and wouldn’t object to the reporter being given a second chance after a few weeks of unpaid leave to reflect on and improve his journalistic skills? With the bi-partisan VA gang seconding the letter?
can it be as simple as the GOP view of the economy has finally been proven to be absolutely bullshyt and those who no longer cling to Whiteness have woken the fuck up?
Nope. The best part about this is as more Republicans peel away we can get farther away from New Deal economics by electing more neoliberal and centrist Democrats. That’s the best thing about stealing Republicans. They come over for the social issues and help insert market based issues into the Democratic party. Shit that’s why I’m here, everyone I know is a Democrat for social issues but does not want to move the party in a populist direction.
More of us gives us more power, we’re great donors as well. We can get what we want and have technocratic solutions. I voted for Obama in the primaries because he spoke about curtailing entitlement growth and of them as old relics. We need more of this, and we need more of us donating to like minded Democrats and gaining leadership power.
However… raise the payroll tax rather than putting into place chained CPI and tax cuts, I’ll bolt. Fuck that noise, we are not going back there and we are not bringing back the New Deal Democratic Party.
Goodbye then, and good luck getting even sane neoliberal policy out of the Republicans.
I agree! Anything but the nightmarish New Deal.
so I take it you’ve got you’re retirement all arranged, sans-social security?
I thought about troll rating this, but decided to allow free expression in the tradition of this blog.
And in the spirit of free expression just let me say:
“GO FUCK YOURSELF!!!”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; you’ve got it completely wrong. You think young people and POC are here for social issues? We think higher of socialism than we do capitalism, and we’re the future of the party.
Right now most people on this site vote Democratic not out of ideological allegiance but because the GOP’s views are both insane, and arguably they’re not capable of governing. This gives the Dems room to move left because finally at long last we’ll be able to say to the “centrists and moderate conservatives,” “well where else are you going to go?”
You’re not going to have influence, you’re going I be tagging along for the ride. Push all your liquid assets into a Roth and pay those taxes now, bubba, because we’re going to tax the fuck out of you.
Was in New York last weekend and passed by a deBlasio campaign office stacked with several of the most enormous teamsters I have ever seen. Every one of them looked like Wreck-it-Ralph. I can only imagine how a teabegger might wet his shorts if he saw them, but I suspect there were few of those in the area.
I do wish deBlasio luck. In the end it doesn’t matter as much where he lands on the left side of the spectrum as much as whether he can govern competently and cleanly. He’s likely facing a period of time with at least modestly rising crime rates – regardless of any “stop and frisk policy” – so he will already have a bit of a headwind against him. Democratic unity and clean governance have kept Mark Dayton popular in Minnesota, and I hope the same goes for deBlasio.
And by the way, his opponent’s crime-baiting ads on TV are disgusting. Yikes.
He really believes that “upscale, well-educated social liberals” are going to move to the GOP over taxes? Seriously, that’s offensive. Anyone who considers equal rights and the social safety net less important than saving a few dollars isn’t a real democrat. They’re just too cowardly to admit they are on the side of the lunatics. I don’t mind using them for the moment, but when they decide to move back to their proper home, I sure as hell won’t miss them.
This essay is so obtuse, it actually made me angry. I do not know Mr. Edsall’s political affiliations, if he has any, but he writes like a suburban Republican. (I hear he’s actually from Massachusetts).
The most astonishing thing about this piece is that it makes no reference to the times in which we actually live. And although Mr. Edsall lives at least part of his time in New York, he does not seem to understand the place.
For Edsall, apparently, politics works according to self-referential, abstract categories, with rules supposedly set in stone around the 1970s/80s. Rules about “liberals” and “whites” and minorities” and “the poor”.
De Blasio signals the beginning of a response to the times in which we find ourselves, a response that all the powers that be have tried their utmost to hold off but no longer can. Yes, I’m sure the “coalition” behind this response will split apart at some indefinite point in the future, and I’ll bet Mr. Edsall can’t wait, otherwise why would he bring it up?
It’s unstable in the sense that everything is unstable. But how odd to emphasize that at the point when it is just starting to emerge.
New York City has a healthy, dynamic middle class. I know because I grew up in it. Things have changed a lot since those days, but that’s why it’s still such a cosmopolitan city not only for the wealthy, but for people from all over the world who are middle class or who are striving for the middle class.
New York has become just too expensive, and the city’s priorities have been for set toward the extremely wealthy. De Blasio’s popularity is not so much about the poor, it’s about a well-educated, feisty middle class, of all creeds and colors, that is tired of being treated like second-class citizens in their own city.
De Blasio represents the same thing as Elizabeth Warren, who are simply responding to real,broad needs in this country. People like Mr. Edsall are puzzled, they are not used to it.
More evidence for my thesis.
It’s good to learn that voters are learning now. What situation we are in right now gave a great impact that we realized to decide harder when it comes to practicing our rights. Liberal, left or democrat, all of us wish for a major change and a good change for that matter. And I wish we can do something about it soon.
______
spine physical therapy
A function of Occupy, which ostensibly started in NYC, perhaps?
Also, if you’re a