Bill De Blasio revives econonmic liberalism

Eric Alterman, Nation - Bill de Blasio’s recent surge in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary tells us that, moribund as it may have appeared in recent years, economic liberalism in America is not dead yet.

True, it looked to be buried alive until recently, beneath not only exploding economic inequality but also liberals’ own myopia. Nowhere has this pattern been more evident than in the world’s greatest city, where, in the eleven years since billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, the top 1 percent have garnered a third more of the city’s income than they had before, and where today nearly half of its residents qualify as poor or near poor. Bloomberg, of course, is totally cool with this. The same mayor who set the cops on Occupy Wall Street, and threw hundreds of people legally and peacefully protesting the 2004 Republican National Convention in jail, elected to pay a solidarity call to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein on the day after the poor fellow found his bank criticized by a former employee on The New York Times’s op-ed page...

Bill de Blasio, a former Brooklyn City Councilman who ascended to the job of public advocate, made a campaign bet that enough was finally enough. He has made economic inequality—a “tale of two cities,” as he calls it—the centerpiece of his campaign. His most significant proposal, a slight tax hike on incomes above $500,000 to pay for citywide pre-kindergarten classes and after-school programs, is a near-perfect expression of the kind of sensible public policy that most Democrats have feared to propose in recent years, lest they be labeled “tax-and-spend liberals.”...

Having a wife who is African-American and a former lesbian activist and a son with a gravity-challenging Afro puts a massive kibosh on the kind of identity-politics demands that have too often doomed Democratic candidates with broad electoral appeal. De Blasio is, according to the most recent polls, winning with blacks and women, despite the presence of both in the race (I don’t know about lesbians). Moreover, he has succeeded in uniting these constituencies through an inclusive class-based appeal, one that is bolstered by the fact of his being the only serious contender in the race whose kids attend our public schools. Together with his hardline opposition to Bloomberg’s illegal stop-and-frisk obsession, de Blasio has credibly positioned himself as the voice of those who, in Bloomberg’s New York, had been silently shunted off to the sidelines.

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