When America Slides to the Left

With a good sense of moderation, the tabloid the New York Post warned its readers: “Back to the USSR” (also the title of a Beatles song). If 52-year-old Democrat Bill de Blasio’s election as mayor to New York last Tuesday isn’t exactly a descent into communism, it’s a serious swing to the left after 25 years of Republican governance. It is even a tidal wave; de Blasio, married to a formerly out black woman, got 73 percent of the vote against 24 percent for his Republican opponent.

The Big Apple’s return into the Democratic camp isn’t spectacular just for its sweep. It also supports a very progressive program by the American yardstick. In effect, it proposes to make the rich pay in order to build day care centers and schools in the town where Wall Street is one of its hubs, to reduce social inequalities (49 percent of New Yorkers live below the poverty line) and to end the policy of a very muscled and omnipresent police. Obviously, a practice of inspection and arrests [stop and frisk] will lead to disputes, and criticism, but it’s had some results, making New York a town whose subway has become infinitely more safe than certain Paris RER lines. There were also 2,245 murders per year in 1990, but 418 last year, in a town of 8.5 million inhabitants.

De Blasio has four years to make his case and show how he can apply a more liberal social program without jeopardizing hard-won security. Those examples of Detroit or Chicago, where gangs rule the suburbs, show what is constantly threatened in a country where multiculturalism is the rule. But whatever its demographic and symbolic importance, New York isn’t America. And there are other slips to the left, or rather the center, during these off-year elections that are maybe more significant for the country’s political future.

Slides to the Left and toward the Center

Virginia voters selected Terry McAuliffe, a moderate Democrat who faced a candidate shown to be an extremist tea party Republican, Ken Cuccinelli. In Alabama, moderate Republican Bradley Byrne also won a Senate primary election against a tea party rival, Dean Young.

Also above all is the re-election in New Jersey of Republican Governor Chris Christie, who has made no secret of his hostility to pure and rigid conservatives who blocked the American government during the famous shutdown last month; 26 percent of Democratic voters voted for him. Christie, 51, has already shown last year, when Hurricane Sandy pounded his state, that he could rise above political divisions by spectacularly praising Obama’s actions during his campaign for re-election. That was seen as a betrayal by the Republicans’ right wing.

Following his election by 60 percent of voters from New Jersey, Chris Christie is going to be chosen as leader of the Association of Republican Governors in a few days. That has already made him the most serious candidate from his party for the presidential election in 2016. It looks especially possible, after the hits of the last two years from the tea party, to bandage the wounds of the Republican Party and to tack back toward the green pastures of the center right that always permitted them to reach the White House.