Wednesday, November 9, 2011

The myth of the progressive city With mayors like Bloomberg and Emanuel, urban areas have become bastions of privatization and corporatist economics By David Sirota / Salon

Monday, Nov 7, 2011 10:00 AM 22:41:59 PST

The myth of the progressive city

With mayors like Bloomberg and Emanuel, urban areas have become bastions of privatization and corporatist economics

Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel
Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel (Credit: AP)
If you’ve listened to a political pundit predict any election in the last 50 years, you’ve been told that there are Republican small towns whose politics are organized around the three G’s (guns, God and gays) and there are Democratic cities whose politics are organized around the two L’s (labor and economic liberalism). While this binary mythology is insulting for its hackneyed stereotyping and lack of nuance, it has at least half the story right — in terms of sheer partisanship, many rural areas do tend to go red, and many urban areas do tend to go blue.
Where this story goes wrong is in its ideological suppositions about the cities — and specifically, about Democratic cities. Sure, two or three decades ago, there may have been some truth to the notion that the American city is a union-driven bastion of populist progressive economics. But today, while cities may still largely vote Democratic, they are increasingly embracing the economics of corporatism. The result is that urban areas are a driving force behind the widening intra-party rift between the corporatist, pro-privatization Wall Street Democrats and the traditional labor-progressive “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.”
David Sirota
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota

No comments:

Post a Comment