The system & the resistance
he system works!” So says Mayor de Blasio, and it’s working for him at least. Which is a local manifestation of a national problem. Let me explain: The mayor’s allies in the Working Families Party have been talking for years about building a “Tea Party of the Left,” and de Blasio has endlessly tried to position himself as a leader of a national progressive movement. Be careful what you wish for.
Just as the Tea Party emerged as a model of resistance after Democrats ran the table behind Barack Obama in 2008, “The Resistance” — a movement still in search of a better, more positive name — is taking shape and picking up speed following 2016’s Trump-Republican sweep.
At the end of both those years, the losing party saw its more moderate representatives stripped of their seats or with their standing diminished and the true believers saw themselves strengthened, perversely, by their party’s defeats.
Think about it: After five years of disruptive protest theater from the left — from Madison to Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter — culminated in President Donald F. Trump, the movement’s response isn’t to patch up and expand its tent but to “take the streets” in further protest.
In New York, these centrifugal dynamics help explain why an accidental and not very popular mayor who two of three New Yorkers with an opinion on the matter think did something unethical if not illegal in the course of his “brazenly transactional dealings” is nonetheless on an apparent glide path to reelection, as my colleague Alyssa Katz lays out today.
Showing a downright Trumpian disinterest in irony or competence, de Blasio sent out his message about how “the system works!” in a fundraising appeal to small donors on the very day that he finally sat down in person with U.S. attorneys to make his case for why his hyper-aggressive fundraising operation aimed at big donors with business in the city he runs weren’t criminal acts.
Later that same day, as de Blasio flew to Atlanta to help choose the head of the Democratic National Committee in his latest botched effort to make himself a national player, he fired without warning or explanation a deputy commissioner at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services whose work tied in to two of the probes into cases where the mayor seemed to put a finger on the scales on behalf of big donors.
The timing, City Hall said, was the result of incompetence, not malevolence. And sure, says de Blasio himself, I’ve made calls as mayor to commissioners on behalf of my allies and backers, but I’m “convinced the agencies know they should make the decision” on the merits after that.
Which is all he can say, having painted himself into a damn tight corner, and not seeming to give much of a damn what most New Yorkers think of it so long as his core voters don’t care.
Oh, did I mention de Blasio intends to pay his mounting legal bills by raising money for a “legal defense fund,” on terms TBD? So look forward in term two to the probe of his fundraising to pay for the probe of his fundraising.
Or that James Capalino — the lobbyist and longtime de Blasio confidant at the center of one of the scandals already being probed (and who the mayor announced in the fall he’ll no longer meet with as such) — took in $13.5 million last year lobbying the city, the biggest single cut in a total take of $95.4 million, up more than 50% since Bloomberg left office? The system works!
Meantime, de Blasio, right now in the midst of a fundraising run to Chicago, Florida and California, has yet to make a public appearance in Staten Island this year. I know he’s not going to win a lot of votes there, but he’s hardly even going through the motions of appealing to the whole city. “This is what democracy looks like,” as demonstrators like to chant, when the mayor doesn’t really have reason to bother with the 50% and change of the city that’s never come around to him so long as the right 15% or so show up on primary day.
Those are the prime Democrats he thinks he’s appealing to when, like some mirror-image Trump, he publicly rips the other New York tabloid as a “fake news” source. Whatever its politics, beware the pig declaring that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
And vote and participate in public life, or don’t complain later about how system we get pays off for those who do.