Bill de Blasio, Conservative Hero
20th June 2014
When Bill de Blasio crushed his Republican rival, Joe Lhota, by 49 points in 2013, more than a few New Yorkers were worried. De Blasio was an unabashed leftist who proudly served with Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and fervently condemned economic inequality, especially the pro-business administration of billionaire Mayor Bloomberg.
…
In a nutshell, de Blasio has turned out to be less a Lenin and more a Santa Claus and this pleases everyone. Unlike past soak-the-rich revolutionaries, he has ignored inequalities in power and instead uses government to bestow countless social welfare benefits on the poor. He has made the city’s poor so dependent on government for their daily existence that a revolution to upend the status quo is now unthinkable. Why would any poor person riot when that might interrupt the conveyor belt of government-supplied goodies? Thus understood, Mayor de Blasio’s policies are conservative in the sense of strengthening the status quo, even if that status quo undergirds capitalism.