If states are, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, laboratories of democracy, then modern cities are laboratories of progressivism. From Baltimore to Seattle, New York City to Houston, American cities are aggressively taking on climate change, gay rights, and living wage ordinances at a time when state legislatures are sluggish and Washington is outright sclerotic. Even the do-nothing congress that President Harry Truman decried when challenged by New York Governor Thomas Dewey in 1948 passed more legislation than the current one.
Of course, the wheels of an united government turn quicker. Of the 15 largest cities in America, only two—Indianapolis and San Diego—have Republican mayors. Thirteen of those 15 cities also have Democratic-controlled city councils. What began as a leftward tilt of American cities after the demise of the Republican machines in the 1920s has now become a permanent and lopsided majority.
In the 1920 presidential election, Republican nominee Warren G. Harding beat the James Cox-Franklin Roosevelt ticket by a collective 1.5 million votes in the 12 largest cities. In 2012, the nation’s 12 largest cities preferred the Democratic incumbent Barack Obama by 4.46 million votes over Republican Mitt Romney.
America’s biggest cities are employing that electoral advantage to great effect in enacting signature policies of the left even while the national appetite for them has waned: minimum wage increases, universal preschool education, and expanded protections for gay Americans.
But cities are not just liberal havens. Cities are also increasingly non-white, educated, and wealthy. Since the 1980s, college graduates, drawn by amenities and high wages, have flocked to urban centers, attracting businesses and even greater amenities, which in turn attracted more skilled college graduates. According to research from Stanford economist Rebecca Diamond, the college employment ratio in major metropolitan areas has shot up along with college and non-college wages.
The prosperity of America’s cities today might have been hard to believe in the 1970s, when vital steel, shipping, and manufacturing industries were ravaged by globalization and financial stagnation, leaving grand metropolises like New York and Pittsburgh gasping for air. Now they’re back with a fury.
PRE-K FOR ALL
Universal preschool has been the clarion call for education advocates since research demonstrating its critical role in future educational incomes, and especially in reducing achievement gaps on the basis of race and class, came to light in 2002.
In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama pledged “to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America” through a federal tobacco tax increase. No progress, however, had been made by the time of his 2014 address to the nation, leaving Obama to “repeat that request tonight” and plead, as “a president and a parent.” Six months since, universal pre-K remains as unrealized and unlikely as comprehensive gun control, immigration reform, or nearly any of the president’s policy initiatives.
In New York City, Bill de Blasio ran his 2013 mayoral campaign on the promise to “tax the wealthy to fund pre-K and after-school,” propelling him from the obscure office of public advocate into Gracie Mansion ahead of the Bloomberg-anointed City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Unlike Obama, de Blasio largely got what he wanted.
Governor Andrew Cuomo, a more centrist Democrat, fought de Blasio on the tax hike on New Yorkers making more than $500,000 for months. Cuomo won that battle, but de Blasio won the war. He fulfilled his signature campaign promise when the New York State Legislature approved funding in March for universal, daylong pre-school for four-year-olds. Of the $340 million that the mayor had requested, $300 million was granted by the budget deal.
Of course, no political victory is a clean one—as part of the budget deal that could bring full-day preschool to as many at 50,000 children who currently receive part-time or no instruction, de Blasio had to stomach some of the most protective legislation for charter schools in the country. After his rookie mistake in February of rescinding three charter-school plans already greenlighted by the Bloomberg administration charter-school advocates like Cuomo and state senate Republicans seized on the blunder to push through protections that would make many liberal education reformers shudder: The city would have to help find space for the charter schools in public buildings, or be on the hook for private rental fees up to $40 million.
While de Blasio’s preschool initiative has received the most attention—commanding headlines both local and national—New York is far from the only city making reality out of a distant gleam in President Obama’s eye. San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, a perennially discussed Democratic presidential contender, introduced the Pre-K 4 SA program in 2011 that would use funding from an one-eighth cent sales tax to provide preschool education to more than 22,000 children over eight years. Though not universal, the model of funding unbeholden to federal grants or state dollars, as de Blasio is, is one that other localities have showed renewed interest in.
In June, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed a bill to fund universal preschool through a property tax increase of $58 million over four years—a measure that voters will vote on in the upcoming November elections. It’s a startlingly fast response for observers accustomed to the lethargic pace of governance in Washington, D.C.
“If public policy were based just on what we know works, universal pre-kindergarten education would already be the law of the land,” a Seattle Times editorial put it. “But such a utopia is not to be found. The Washington legislature is moving, slowly, in that direction; Congress, less so. Cities have begun to redefine the public duty to the tiniest of students.”
MINIMUM WAGE
Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, has introduced a Fair Minimum Wage Act each of the last three years. It’s failed to pass each time. During his 2008 campaign, Senator Barack Obama pledged to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011. That didn’t happen either.
The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 was set by legislation passed by Congress in 2007 and hasn’t seen an increase since 2009. When accounting for inflation, the minimum wage has lost nearly 30 percent of its value since its high point in 1968—a loss that advocates of an increase say fuels income inequality and dependency on welfare.
As is the case for most of his campaign agenda President Obama has found almost no bipartisan willingness in Congress to take on minimum wage increases, which conservative groups like Heritage Action and Chamber of Commerce strongly oppose. Instead, in what may be a leitmotif for his second term, the president has only been able to expand the minimum wage through executive orders and actions. An executive order signed by Obama in February raised the pay for employees of federal contract workers to $10.10 an hour effective in 2015.
While executive orders have often been a bellwether for future progressive change—like Truman’s order desegregating the military in 1948 or Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order prohibiting federal discrimination on the basis of race—the probability of a nationally ordained minimum wage hike within the next two years is vanishingly slim.
Not so for cities. Seattle made national headlines in May when it announced a plan brokered between Mayor Ed Murray and the city council to phase in a $15 minimum wage by the end of the decade. (Citizens of SeaTac, the nearby airport town, also approved a $15 minimum wage one year ago.) Washington, D.C. passed a minimum wage increase to $11.50 an hour last year.
On August 18, San Diego’s Democratic-controlled city council overrode the veto of Republican Mayor Kevin Faulconer on a minimum wage increase, resulting in a wage hike to $11.50 per hour.
Most economic research indicates that small minimum wage hikes have little effect on employment, but the effect of large minimum wage increases remains uncertain because they are so rare. Whether businesses flee, prices rises, and employees lose benefits over the next few years in the cities that have chosen to raise their minimum wage will provide a rare natural test of a large minimum wage increase.
Surprisingly, Bill de Blasio, the face of the progressive changes spearheaded by mayors nationwide, has had the most difficulty in realizing his campaign promise of a living wage for New Yorkers. A previous pledge to expand the living wage through executive order by the end of February wasn’t met, and de Blasio has found himself yet again at odds with Governor Cuomo, since existing law requires state approval to set municipal wages. One proposal could allow de Blasio to pass a $13.13 minimum wage—not the $15 passed in Seattle, but a near 50 percent increase over the current state minimum wage of nine dollars.
GAY RIGHTS
Most of the rapid expansion of same-sex marriage legalization has come through federal courts dismantling state constitutional amendments or laws piecemeal after a Supreme Court ruling last year struck down a section of the Defense of Marriage Act.
But while same-sex marriage is now legal in 19 states and the District of Columbia, 28 states have no workplace anti-discrimination laws on the books for either sexual orientation or gender identity—a fight that is seen as the next chapter in the gay rights movement.
On the national level, the issue has faced a familiar pattern. Congressional initiatives, namely the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, have failed even after some gay rights and human rights groups dropped their support over what were seen as overly broad exemptions for religious organizations. In response, President Obama signed a landmark executive order in July barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity for federal contractors. The future of a nationwide non-discrimination policy still remains uncertain.
But where Congress and local state legislatures have fallen short of progressive expectations, cities have stepped in by passing in fairness ordinances limiting educational, housing, and workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. In Kentucky, fairness ordinances have been passed by not only recognizable cities like Louisville and Lexington but also smaller municipalities: Frankfort, Morehead, Danville, and Vicco (population 334). Of the nation’s 12 largest cities, only two—San Jose and San Antonio—lack non-discrimination ordinances, according to data compiled by the Human Rights Campaign.
THE FIRE NEXT TIME
Progressive governance has never been an easy task—a progressive candidate must not only channel populist disdain for the establishment before an election, but also helm those slow, sclerotic bodies to affect the very change that spurred them to office. Perhaps that is why Democrats angling for national office oft prefer centrism to unbridled liberalism—from prominent governors like Cuomo or Maryland’s Martin O’Malley to the Clintons, Bill and Hillary both, and even the current president.
City Democrats can thank today’s lopsided demographics for not having to dilute their views—Seattle recently elected an out-and-out socialist, Kshama Sawant, to their city council, after all. But when the ballots are counted, those idealistic progressives must ultimately work with the bureaucracies they inherit, not the bureaucracies they want—a lesson Mayor de Blasio has learned all too well in the past few rocky months.
Universal preschool may have been the signature promise of de Blasio’s campaign, but his strident opposition to the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics was what initially got him noticed. And it’s another area where his administration has proven successful, albeit less so than some supporters would have liked.
The stop-and-frisk policy, a hallmark of the Bloomberg administration and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, allowed police officers to stop people for reasons as nebulous as “furtive movements” in a manner that many opponents charged was racially motivated.
Stop and frisk resulted in 4.4 million stops from January 2004 to June 2012, 80 percent of which were of blacks and Hispanics, according to the federal court findings of Judge Shira A. Schiendlin. Only about 6 percent of stops resulted in an arrest. Judge Schiendlin’s ruling in August of last year found that the policy was unconstitutional, amounting to “indirect racial profiling” and the routine stopping of “blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white.”
Bloomberg angrily vowed to fight the ruling, saying that it did not give the city “a fair trial” and declaring, “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a lot of people dying.” But Bloomberg didn’t win the election in November—de Blasio did. And come January, stop and frisk was no more.
But on July 17, police in Staten Island attempted to arrest Eric Garner, a 350-pound, 6-foot-3-inch, 43-year-old, asthmatic black male, for selling untaxed cigarettes. Police used a chokehold on Garner, a tactic prohibited by Police Department protocol, and the man’s last words were “I can’t breathe.” A recent inquiry into abuses at the Rikers Island correctional facility has already forced the New York Correction Department’s top investigator to resign, and threatens to topple even more heads after damning reports from both the U.S. Attorney’s office and The New York Times.
Suddenly, de Blasio has found himself on the other side of a police outcry—this time as the man in charge. Quelling a fire is a much harder task than fueling one, and with the country already ablaze over police practices in Ferguson, Mo., it is still clear that—for all the success cities are having in enacting their policies—there are still some in dire need of change.