a Year to test liberalism's fighting faith
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/01/a-year-for-liberalisms-fighting-faith.html
Is 2014, finally, the liberal moment?
With the financial crisis and Barack Obamas ascent to the Presidency, 2008 struck many observersincluding this oneas reminiscent of the watershed election year 1932. Even Obamas personal moderation recalled the careful, budget-balancing F.D.R. of that campaign. It was national calamity and need that would push President Roosevelt in a more radical direction, and it seemed that similar eventsbank failures, mass unemployment, epidemic foreclosures, despairwould drive President Obama the same way, toward equally far-reaching policies.
It didnt happen like that, and for many reasons: this time around, the onset of an incipient depression nearly coincided with the arrival of the new Administration, and the hard times never ran quite deep enough to unite the country; the new President showed his inexperience, governed more cautiously than he had campaigned, and lost the rhetorical power that had connected him to the voters; his opponents, far from beaten, grew more extreme than ever; key institutions like Congress, the media, and corporations were no longer responsive to the demands of democracy; the public had lost its trust. And so weve had five years of far-from-unmitigated letdown.
The new year began with the inauguration of Bill de Blasio. In his first address as this citys new Mayor, he aligned himself with New Yorkers from that earlier era: Roosevelt himself; Al Smith, the reform-minded machine pol, who fought for improved working conditions in sweatshops and later turned against the New Deal; Frances Perkins, the social worker who became Roosevelts labor secretary and implemented the forty-hour week and the minimum wage; and Fiorello La Guardia, de Blasios favorite predecessor in the mayors office, a Republican who, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., played the broker between New York radicalism and the progressivism of inner America.
Along with Elizabeth Warren, de Blasio is the most visible face and potent voice of a new political spirit. For the first time in decades, liberalism is once again becoming a fighting faith (Whitmans phrase, revived by Schlesinger). This spirit has almost nothing to do with the perpetual battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, or the Center for American Progress against the Third Way, or Clinton vs. Warren in 2016. It is the political articulation of a wide and deep sense of outrage and disenchantment, which is why it has legs. It has to do with a sense that the deck is stacked in favor of the few, that ordinary peoples aspirations hardly stand a chance.