"Progressives take Manhattan, and many other U.S. cities"

[applegrove]

Progressives take Manhattan, and many other U.S. cities

By Harold Meyerson at the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-progressives-take-manhattan-and-many-other-us-places/2014/04/23/8f727cf0-cb17-11e3-a75e-463587891b57_story.html

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These changes in cities’ political profiles are not themselves sufficient, however, to explain the ascent of the new urban regimes. In virtually every city that has elected such governments, new coalitions have powered them into office. Almost invariably, they are composed of local unions: not — perhaps surprisingly — public employee unions but the private-sector unions of janitors, hotel housekeepers, health-care workers and supermarket clerks whose members are disproportionately immigrant and black. They are also made up of immigrant rights groups, organizations of the urban poor, affordable housing advocates and liberal churches. These are groups whose members benefit from living-wage and local hiring ordinances, the establishment of universal pre-K and policies that keep local police from handing over undocumented immigrants to federal agents.

Some of these new blue cities are nestled in deep-red states. Arizona may have enacted some of the country’s most viciously anti-immigrant and anti-Latino laws, but in Phoenix, its largest city, a progressive city council and mayor have told the city’s lobbyists to push Congress to enact immigration reform.

This is not the first time that cities have changed their political profile en masse. From 1880 through 1924, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe transformed the population of urban America, but they didn’t really start going to the polls until 1928, when New York’s Democratic governor, Al Smith, became the nation’s first Catholic presidential nominee. The United States’ largest cities had previously voted Republican in presidential elections, but the surge in turnout that Smith engendered turned them Democratic in 1928 and presaged their support for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

A similar dynamic is at work today. Obama’s presidential campaigns transformed the urban electorate much as Smith’s did, bringing voters of color and millennials to the polls in record numbers. In cities where those constituencies have built a political infrastructure, they now control city hall, too. Obama’s agenda may be stymied at the federal level, but in city after city, municipal versions of minimum- or living-wage increases, curtailment of immigrant deportations and the construction of green infrastructure are underway. Cities lack the funding to make many of the changes new Democratic mayors seek — most are scrambling to find the funds for universal preschool, for instance — but, in the spirit of Louis Brandeis’s laboratories of democracy, they are incubating the future of liberalism, and the nation




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[msongs]

1. good thing for repubs that they have gerrymandering dems into urban cores nt