Chapter 8 Identity Politics

Working Families Party: Is It the Moment? (May 2014)

The sinking of the Titanic started as little punctures along the starboard of the front of the ship, from scraping the iceberg it was trying to avoid. The holes covered a mere 12.5 square feet or so of the titanic ship. So too there are tiny holes in the side of the seemingly invincible culture of liquidation, the huge oligopolies, homes of the global corporations in which the culture thrives. Frankenstein monsters of the post-Golden age brought to life by presidents Reagan and Clinton via the revamping of the US and in turn the European financial systems. In the still-nascent struggle of people to regain some control over these institutions, there are faint signs that the culture of liquidation may be pricked enough to eventually be opened up. And perhaps, amazingly, the monsters as we now know them will suddenly sink into the darkness of the sea, like the unfortunate Titanic. Right now, one of those tiny but precious punctures could be made by New York State (NYS) in the coming months. It may mark the beginning finally of a break in the two-party stranglehold on the political system in one of the leading states in the US. The Republican and Democratic parties, increasingly seeped as they both are in the culture of liquidation, challenged by a third party, one that publicly stands for those victimized—the 99%—by that very culture. Not incidental to pricking the corporations’ protective skin is the clear repu- diation of Michael Bloomberg in the recent nomination and then election of Bill de Blasio as New York City (NYC) mayor. Bloomberg himself could not run again, having already violated once the NYC 2-term mayoralty restriction. But when his would-be successor, Christine Quinn, was defeated handedly by de Blasio it became obvious that New Yorkers had had enough of being ruled by a mayor from the 1%, or even just sympathetic to it. It was a rejection of Bloomberg’s uncompassionate attitude toward the poor, his unthinking drive to corporatize primary and high school education, his po- lice department’s racist treatment of the community, his unyielding stance in refusing to negotiate with public worker unions, and in general Bloomberg’s pronounced social isolation, characteristic of the culture. The Working Families Party (WFP) has been for a long time a major support- er of de Blasio, and in various states along with NYS it is strongly allied with the

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004352506_009 identity politics 169 labor union movement writ large. It is the most established political party on the Left in New York, which itself of course is a very blue state. Like other minor political parties in New York in relation to one or the oth- er of the major parties WFP often nominates Democratic nominees. In those cases, therefore, the candidate appears twice on the ballot, the voter choosing the party supported. As a result, especially in the NYC area WFP receives a sig- nificant number of votes attributed to Democratic candidates, particularly in races for the higher-level state and city offices. This affords an important seg- ment of the NYC public and that of certain other localities in the state as well, the ability to be unaffiliated with both of the major parties without effectively benefitting Republican candidates. The question being raised now, however, by the WFP leadership is: Is this the time to move decisively toward transforming WFP into a third major party in New York? This is to say, not nominating Andrew Cuomo, but rather one of putting forward a well-established candidate roughly the same political stripe as de Blasio. WFP has written to its members that there is much debate about who the party will endorse at their state convention in late May and that in a Siena college poll, 24% of New Yorkers support a progressive WFP candidate for Governor—just 15 points behind Governor Cuomo. Given with the election of de Blasio such a decision seems feasible because Cuomo has been caught in clumsy—and at this point obvious—Clintonesque triangulations in wake of the mayoral election. Like a boxer who throws a punch with his head arched up, Cuomo’s chin has certainly been exposed to a knockout counter. Right after the mayoralty election Cuomo voiced his disapproval of a tax increase to be paid by the richest of the rich, a popular proposal de Blasio had put forward in his campaign as means of financing universal pre-kindergarten classes. This opposition was coupled with Cuomo’s executive budget in Janu- ary, which set a cap of 2% growth of state-government expenditures, so as to produce projected surpluses, while pronouncing myriad corporate, business and property-tax extensions and cuts. In a similar fashion, but in even starker opposition to de Blasio, Cuomo has quickly proved to be, like Bloomberg, an unabashed backer of the charter- school movement in New York, putting him in line nationally with the push toward corporatization, and ultimately financialization of public education. The quality of the city’s schools of course is a local issue of great concern to parents and children. Cuomo not only has opposed de Blasio’s popular call for charter schools to pay rent on their use of public school space if they are operated privately. He’s gone further, cutting a deal (as is done in Albany) by which State legisla- tion was passed giving charter schools in the city much wider protections from