How the rise of Occupy and decline of the neoliberal narrative helped shape the “de Blasio moment”

King’s emphasis on the zeitgeist ran the risk of diminishing Parks, who in fact was serving as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter at the time and actively participated in planning the civil disobedience campaign. Likewise, de Blasio has a long record of social and economic progressivism, with a grassroots sensibility that winds all the way back to his youthful activism on behalf of the Sandinista government. As chair of the New York City Council’s General Welfare Committee and later as public advocate, he was a staunch progressive, supporting increased taxes on the wealthy, greater investment in social services, racial justice and workers’ right to organize; as a candidate for mayor, he was unwavering in his commitment to chart a new course.

Yet his forthright advocacy of a new model of bottom-up government activism cannot be traced solely to his personal history. It can be fully understood only in the context of long-term, deeply rooted developments in the national, even global, political economy.

Others have noted this broader historical significance. In the Daily Beast, Peter Beinart argued that the de Blasio campaign reflects the political crystallization of a generation of young people who have grown up in an era of dismal economic prospects and a tattered government safety net. This, Beinart predicted, will give rise to a new mass anticorporate politics that will benefit populist politicians like de Blasio and Senator Elizabeth Warren at the expense of more conventional centrists like Cory Booker and Hillary Clinton. Similarly, Harold Meyerson has written that de Blasio’s victory signifies the potential breakup of “the Democratic Party’s romance with Wall Street.”

But I would argue that the de Blasio moment reflects something deeper than shifting generational political allegiances or a delayed backlash against the Democratic Party’s Wall Street love affair. It represents a potentially profound challenge to the dominant economic policy arguments of the last two generations, a long overdue electoral response to the corporate offensive launched by the global elite in the mid-1970s.

http://www.thenation.com/article/177720/zeitgeist-tracked-down-bill-de-blasio