Bill de Blasio or the Awakeningof the Left in the US?

People think Bill de Blasio won the race for New York City mayor because his family embodies the demographics of the city: 28.8 percent Hispanic, 25.5 percent African-American, 8.2 percent Italian-American, 4 percent homosexual, etc. Another possibility is that he won — and by a comfortable margin — because he is staunchly left-wing.

De Blasio is not just the candidate of minorities: He is also a man of well-defined economic convictions and one who intends to break from Bloomberg’s “pro-business” era.

He has campaigned against growing inequalities and to put an end to the “tale of two cities” — one of rich people and another of poor people, a reference to Dickens. He intends to increase taxes on the wealthiest citizens and finance child care centers. To Bloomberg’s outgoing team, he represents a return to the 1970s.

The Left Did Exist in the United States

Some go even further: In a recent article on The Daily Beast, columnist Peter Beinart suggested that de Blasio’s rise could represent a tipping point. His victory could mark the beginning of the end of an era, which has lasted for more than 30 years and during which American political life has been polarized between the right-wing Republican Party, loyal to Ronald Reagan, and left-wing Democratic Party, inspired by Bill Clinton.

We sometimes forget it, but the left did exist in the United States — a true left wing, non-Marxist, of course, that encouraged equality, public intervention, trade unionism, protection of the weak and well-established tax brackets on the wealthiest citizens.

That left wing, Roosevelt’s left wing, was shattered when Ronald Reagan came into power in 1980 with his cohort of “Chicago boys” and other neoconservative ideologists. The neoliberal discourse was so powerful that it not only spread to the conservative parties of many other countries, but also to the American Democratic Party itself. As such, Bill Clinton’s “third way” is the fruit of “Reaganism.” “Clintonism” and its European reincarnations — “Blairism” in Great Britain, the “Second Left” in France — all tried to reconcile the left wing with economic liberalism.

Of course, New York Democrats are traditionally more left-wing than Democrats from the rest of the country, but the extent of de Blasio’s victory is so impressive that it will get party strategists thinking.

Indeed, they know that American political life can experience major fluctuations related to new generations of voters but also crises. The 1929 crisis led to Roosevelt and his “New Deal,” the oil crisis to Reagan and his neoliberalism. We must not forget that the subprime mortgage crisis is having a significant impact on political life.

The Tea Party: A Flash in the Pan?

We thought the upheaval would have come from the right, but this has not happened. The tea party may have just been a flash in the pan. The recent electoral disappointments of the Republicans this movement supports, in any case, seem to show that it was not the groundswell we might have feared.

The demographic evolution of the U.S. — becoming less and less “WASP” — and its social evolution — becoming more and more unequal — do not make it easy to advance the tea party’s reactionary discourse, which advocates the return of traditional values and rejection of public solidarity.

It is unclear how the trend could be reversed. A study by two economists shows how generations that reach adulthood during a time of economic crisis are more in favor of social redistribution than others. The millennial generation — those who were younger than 20 in 2000 — is also the Occupy Wall Street generation.