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.