Bill de Blasio on the Crisis of Inequality and the Blind Spots of the Democratic Party
Eric Alterman on May 14, 2015
The Nation



By almost any measure, Bill de Blasio enjoyed a remarkable year of accomplishment as New York City's first progressive mayor in twenty years. To the surprise of many, he was able to institute a universal pre-K program for 50,000-plus 4-year-olds in time for the September 2014 school year. Whether the issue was education, housing, criminal justice, immigrants' rights, or public welfare, de Blasio made important down payments on his promise to use the power of the nation's largest municipal government to address the inequality crisis that fueled his landslide 2013 election victory.

But as de Blasio himself has repeatedly noted, city government can do only so much. So long as Washington remains crippled by the power of money—to say nothing of the capture of the Republican Party by reality-rejecting right-wing extremists—New York City's, and indeed, all municipalities' power to address the crisis will remain severely hamstrung....

...I sat down with the mayor on the year's first sunny spring afternoon at his official residence at Gracie Mansion to question him about the nuts and bolts of his effort and how he plans to try to institutionalize it over time. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity and space....

...EA: Speaking specifically about the Democrats, what's been the problem up until now? Surely, the midterms were not an encouraging sign.

BdB: Well, you can be smart and you can be blind at the same time. There is a blindness in our party. I've spoken about the problem of a money-heavy, consultant-heavy political culture that negates the reality that people are experiencing on the ground and undervalues vision and platform and message. That's one piece of what's going on here. In the Democratic Party, many people in the party have moved away from our historic values and have gotten lost in a different set of assumptions about how to go about the electoral process. But I think obviously there's great fear of donors—that pervades the process. I am always quick to point out that I have the blessing of running under a progressive campaign finance reform system. It helped immensely.

I think if you look under the hood of 2014, you see sort of the ghost of the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council], and you see the deep desire to homogenize rather than to be distinct. It surprised me given that from 2008 on we saw clear change in our country economically. It surprised me given that 2012, the president clearly thematically addressed the concerns people had about an unfair economy. So you sort of see a progression, and then the bottom fell out in 2014 and sent a lot of Democrats seeming to go in the wrong direction.

I think one of the things that I'm trying to address here is that that lesson can't be missed.

EA: Well, you bring up the DLC and I wonder if what is most needed today is a progressive DLC. One thing that always drove many progressives crazy about Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns was that, as exciting as they may have been, he never left anything in his wake. There was no institution building. There rarely is on the left. So, I'm curious who you're thinking about, as a movement guy and as a guy who got elected with a 50-point spread, are you thinking about building institutions on the model of the DLC?

BdB: Well, I'll say it this way: I think your question is exactly right and I was actually a very active volunteer in the 1984 Jesse Jackson campaign and was disturbed for the same reason. We're building a coalition to begin and a coalition that will have substantial form, meaning, not just a group of names on paper but a coalition that can do real work. Where it goes from there is an open question, but what is certain to me is that we have to reshape the debate and that takes enough organization to drive a message and a demand.

That's why we're doing a progressive "Contract With America." We want to take the same bold, sharp, clear, simple vision that Republicans managed, at least the House Republicans managed in 1994 and put together something that speaks to the inequality crisis and gather a substantial number of leaders around it. We've also introduced today this notion of doing a presidential forum explicitly on income inequality. These are building blocks. Could a more lasting institution emerge out of that? Absolutely, it's a real possibility. We haven't gotten that far yet, but I think at minimum for this cycle, and what we are talking about transcends just electoral politics and it transcends just the next two years. But what we can certainly say is, the party is failing to respond to the issues that we're experiencing and this coalition I hope will be a real weight pushing for that kind of response....

http://m.thenation.com/article/207377-bill-de-blasio-crisis-inequality-and-blind-spots-democratic-party

I believe there's an emerging American majority for progressive economic change. The only way we're going to find out is to go down the road. We don't have the federal government to play with. That's what they had in the New Deal—we don't have that tool. We don't have the vast resources that the right wing and the Republicans have, but we have a political moment and we still have a lot of reach and firepower of different types. We've got to try and knit it together. I have no illusions of grandeur. I just know as the mayor of the biggest city in the country I have some license. And I know as I reach out to others, they're thinking the same stuff anyway. This is all occurring simultaneously with a lot of the same people. If we do this right, the first coalitional effort will bear some immediate fruit and start some ripples. If that's working, I think it well could lead to something more substantial and more permanent. But right now, especially in the name of urgency, I want to get something off the ground to grab the moment.