A week after his election, the mayor-elect, a tall crane of a man, edged into a low-ceilinged conference room in Downtown Brooklyn to celebrate the city’s progressive movement and its progressive victory, which happened to be his own.
Bill de Blasio smiled at the activists, who washed him in waves of applause. “The best thing we can do is keep winning progressive victories,” he said. “Superficial democracy isn’t good enough.”
The progressives who have taken possession of Gracie Mansion and the New York City Council are fond of chatting of historic moments. After a dozen years of a billionaire’s version of quasi-liberal government, they are not shy about doubling down on their ambition. They want to take a city focused intently on the top and train its eyes on the remaining 97 or 98 percent.
They played a sometimes bare-knuckle game to get here. The greatest torrent of so-called independent spending in the last election came from the teachers’ union and a group ostensibly opposed to carriage horses but closely aligned with the de Blasio campaign
When a primal tug-of-war arose to control the City Council, Mr. de Blasio cut a deal with the Brooklyn Democratic boss to hand the speakership to a progressive. Asked by reporters what he had traded away, the mayor-elect offered the laugh of a non-answer.
Ideological discipline is central. It will be a rare Republican, Mr. de Blasio has suggested, who takes a senior position. “They have to share our values,” he said. “That might be a high bar.”
But for all their self-assurance and claims made about historical turning points, the progressives have yet to define themselves. How will they distinguish themselves from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose policies on housing, the streetscape, transportation, public health and taxis edged noticeably to the left?
A forest of question marks rises around the new mayor. He was a political operative, a public advocate with little power and a Council member who stood in the liberal mainstream. Now he carries a standard for urban progressives. What is the nature of his vision?
There is more at stake than his success or failure. New York City has taken its place in a row of global jewels: Paris, London, Los Angeles and Berlin. Turbocharged attention to wealth and privilege has become central to how these cities define their economic advantage.
In this city, inequality has reached appalling levels, and a growing body of research finds that the chasm could poison economic growth. New York has added jobs at a fast clip, but most offer low wages and come without the benefits that are markers of civilized societies. Affordable housing is a wellspring turned dry.
The de Blasio family embodies middle-class anxiety about the direction of New York. They lived in a modest Park Slope rowhouse with three bedrooms and a single bathroom. It is worth north of $1 million. But the children’s generation could have difficulty finding a reasonably priced apartment anywhere near the city’s core.
Can progressives raise taxes, hold down rents and build dikes against the waves of riches without spooking the wealthy? Can they preserve benefits and wages that allow pensioners and municipal workers alike to scrape by without emptying the treasury?
“Politicians see a tremendous market out there now for progressive rhetoric,” said Elvin Wyly, a geographer at the University of British Columbia and a chronicler of the gentrification of America’s cities. “But retail presentation of these politics is not the same as dealing with the fundamental production of inequality.”
A transition committee for Mr. de Blasio recently considered candidates to run a meat-and-potatoes city agency, the sort to which most New Yorkers give little thought unless its services fail.
Which qualifications, the chairman asked, do we desire? “A progressive,” a committee member offered. A progressive, another chirped. Nods and assents. A progressive, definitely.
Put to the side esoteric questions of whether there can be progressive garbage collection or firefighting. Defining the word “progressive” can prove elusive.
New York progressives share a traditional-left concern with class, labor unions and higher wage standards. Mr. de Blasio nods to this when he speaks in support of organizing fast-food and carwash workers.
But progressives, particularly Mr. de Blasio, do not share the old New Left’s penetrating critique of American society. Many distinguish between their interests and those of municipal labor. And the new mayor is careful to note that he so far proposes just a single tax increase — to support universal prekindergarten.
He was also careful to share postelection laughs with real estate barons.
Lonnie Soury, a former Dinkins administration official sympathetic to the de Blasio agenda, noted that President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed prekindergarten a half-century ago. “It’s a measure of how far our politics have drifted to the right that this now establishes Bill’s left-wing bona fides,” Mr. Soury said.
Progressives are assertive about racial, ethnic and gender diversity. Quite a few members of the liberal gentry labored in the Bloomberg administration, but few were Latino or black, and fewer still were working-class. Mr. de Blasio insists that his administration will look and sound like the city.
It is no accident that he has picked three Hispanic women, all respected government hands, for high-ranking slots: Lilliam Barrios-Paoli as deputy mayor for health and human services, Gladys Carrión as child welfare commissioner and Carmen Fariña as schools chancellor. And he has picked a black former prosecutor, Zachary W. Carter, as corporation counsel.
“We liberals often define ourselves as an intellectual class,” said Denise Scott, executive vice president of programs at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a national community development group. “But sometimes we tend to be out of touch with issues that affect the majority of New Yorkers. We talk about it, but are not always in tune with it.”
Peter Beinart, a liberal essayist for the news website The Daily Beast, rustled the tea leaves after Mr. de Blasio’s victory in the Democratic primary and divined a glorious future.
“The deeper you look, the stronger the evidence that de Blasio’s victory is an omen of what may become the defining story of America’s next political era: the challenge, to both parties, from the left,” Mr. Beinart wrote.
The difference, he said, is the influence of the millennial generation (born between the early 1980s and about 2000), whose left-wing populism gave rise to Occupy Wall Street. It is, Mr. Beinart wrote, remaking the Democratic Party.
Amid the huzzahs, keep a desultory fact in mind: Fewer than 25 percent of registered voters cast ballots in the mayoral election, a record poor turnout. An exit poll by Edison Research found that nearly two-thirds of the voters were 45 or older.
If you overlay the map of 2013 on that of 2009, you see that many tens of thousands of New Yorkers who supported Mayor Bloomberg voted for Mr. de Blasio. That so many forded this ideological brook suggests more continuity than progressives might imagine.
Last, it’s instructive to compare the 1989 election of David N. Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor and the inheritor of a liberal populist movement, with that of Mr. de Blasio, who as a young man worked for Mayor Dinkins.
The Democratic primary in 1989 between Mr. Dinkins and Mayor Edward I. Koch drew nearly one million voters. The general election, in which Mr. Dinkins beat Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican, drew 1.8 million voters.
New York City’s population has grown by one million people since those elections. Yet 700,000 fewer New Yorkers voted in the general election of 2013.
Mr. de Blasio will lay claim to a mandate for change. But his election offers a more modest lesson in popular and generational mobilization than his oratory suggests.
Progressives did not create our torpid democracy. But it’s their inheritance.
Again and again, elected officials speak, almost giddily, of their progressive moment. “Today we commit to a new progressive direction in New York, “ Mr. de Blasio said at his inauguration. “And that same progressive impulse has written our city’s history. It’s in our DNA.” But moments can prove evanescent. It has been two decades since New York’s progressives held the wheel of power. Should they fumble, the wilderness beckons.
The new mayor’s greatest challenge is to handle his putative allies in the municipal labor movement. The former mayor left behind expired contracts like a pile of dirty laundry. If Mr. de Blasio miscalculates, settling those contracts could empty his coffers.
And with that we circle back to the most intriguing question: Who is this new self-styled progressive mayor?
He proved to be a masterful tactician, enlisting his family in choreographed commercials. He played political boss, and he has raised expectations. Now, alone on the stage, he must define himself and that progressive movement.
“Bill de Blasio probably doesn’t know precisely who Bill de Blasio is just yet,” a long-serving liberal said. “He’s going to find out, and my guess is that he’s got a window of months, not years.”
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