Bill de Blasio Still Loves New York

Bill de Blasio officially moved out of Gracie Mansion, the New York City mayor’s residence, at midnight on January 1, 2022. But he didn’t go home. In the kind of bad timing perhaps only possible in New York, the ex-Mayor’s house in Brooklyn was undergoing a long-planned renovation at the very moment his eight years in office were up. When we were setting up this interview, he asked me to suggest some private places where we could meet. I mentioned The New Yorker’s offices, in downtown Manhattan, or—not quite expecting him to take me up on it—my apartment in Brooklyn. The next morning, the ex-mayor rang my doorbell at ten o’clock.

De Blasio’s political allegiances were in many ways shaped by his family history: his parents, who had both worked for the federal government, were questioned for alleged Communist sympathies during the McCarthy era. His father, a veteran of the Second World War, who lost half a leg fighting at Okinawa, died, by suicide, in 1979; de Blasio was eighteen. “When Trumpism came along, it didn’t seem that new to me, because McCarthyism was arguably worse,” he said, taking a seat at my dining table. “My parents and so many other good people were victims of it. And it almost won the day.”

Most American politicians resist the label “ideologue.” Not de Blasio. “What an interesting thing, that it’s become a pejorative to have a set of values,” he told me. “To have a world view that animates everything you do, I think that’s healthy.” He recalled another formative experience: his older brother’s participation in a protest at the site of the Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant, in New Hampshire, in the late nineteen-seventies. “That was probably one of the most pivotal moments in turning America away from nuclear power,” de Blasio said. “I was very proud of him. And I was thinking about it, sitting on the steps of my high-school building, and something came over me. I was, like, I guess I’m supposed to be a progressive, you know, or whatever word came into my mind. I guess this is what I’m supposed to be.”

His mayoral administration was marked by consequential reforms in the city’s public-school system and police department, frequent tangles with then Governor Andrew Cuomo, wayward Presidential aspirations, and, finally, the catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic. He came to office with votes from working-class Black and liberal white New Yorkers, and, on his election, he was heralded as a progressive champion. But the political energy generated by his victory soon dissipated, and his attention, at times, drifted in the years that followed. A series of personal quirks and bloopers—commuting from Gracie Mansion to his old gym in Brooklyn, eating pizza with a knife and fork, dropping a groundhog at a Groundhog’s Day event—became tabloid fodder. White liberals tired of him, and the rise of a new kind of left in the aftermath of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Presidential campaign seemed to cut him off from movement politics.

The day after he came to my apartment, de Blasio and I met again at The New Yorker’s offices. During our conversations, which have been edited and condensed, he told me that being an ideologue, to him, doesn’t necessarily mean being rigid. “I’m happy to say I’m also pragmatic,” he said. “In the philosophical sense, I’m materialistic. I want actual outcomes—I don’t want a debate society.”

Does being out of office make you feel differently about the job of mayor?

Look, it allows you to reflect. I think what’s misunderstood about the mayoralty is the sheer intensity of it. It’s a kind of surround sound. There’s no separating from it. Essentially, you key into the life of 8.8 million people, and then whatever problem you hear about, whatever crisis, whatever issue, it gets very personal. My mind races all the time about what to do. It’s almost like a train on a track. You get on the first day—of course, humorously, my first full day as mayor there was a blizzard—and then it’s almost like a blur to the last day. When you get to break out of that, you get to think. It makes me think about the things I’m proud of, and it makes me self-critical, in a healthy way, about things I could have seen differently.

It was not a secret that you were frustrated with the news coverage of your administration. What was that frustration about?

I’ve thought about this a lot. The first thing I’d say is, “Physician, heal thyself.” I think I got frustrated in part because of that totality. The role of mayor has no beginning, has no end, has no morning, noon, night. And I think at times I let that get to me. And what I should have done more was just recognize that I needed to communicate better. I needed to not take personally some of the questions that might have had a tough tone.

What was it like to watch the Democratic primary race to succeed you?

I didn’t watch too intensely. I was in the middle of a war against COVID. But I don’t think much of a real dialogue about the future occurred. In 2013, when I ran, sharp, real questions were on the table. Were we going to keep the Bloomberg stop-and-frisk policy or get rid of it? Were we going to provide paid sick days to more New Yorkers or not? Was it going to be X or Y vision for affordable housing? Was income inequality a foundational issue or not? And I had a core proposal which affected the discussion: a tax on the wealthy to provide pre-K to all the kids of New York City. Obviously, people were in-person, life was normal, and it wasn’t COVID. But I do think the dialogue never jelled this time.

It was an open secret during the campaign last year that Eric Adams, who eventually won, was your choice. Which made some sense, since the other front-runners—Kathryn Garcia, Maya Wiley, Andrew Yang—were very critical of you personally. But Adams was the candidate most critical of the state of the city that he would inherit. Do you agree with him that the city is dysfunctional and verging on out of control?

I don’t hear him saying that.

That it’s dysfunctional?

No, dysfunctional yes. But not out of control. Look, put aside that in every election campaign people paint in very bright colors. I’ve always judged Eric by his history, and by the personal relationship I’ve had with him. This was about someone I knew deeply. We had a lot in common, coming out of Brooklyn. My impression of him was, he was a reformer within the police department, when it was very hard to do. He came up addressing dysfunctionality, and calling it out. But that’s not the same as thinking everything is wrong. Or that nothing has changed. He has spoken about the changes we made in my eight years very clearly and positively.

I thought, of all the candidates, he was the most connected to everyday working people. So, for example, when he talks about the problems at the Department of Education, I’m sympathetic to his world view. I struggled with the Department of Education bureaucracy for eight years. And I’m quite certain that he believes in pre-K for all, 3-K for all, and Advanced Placement courses in every high school regardless of the income of those families or the race of those families. He’s saying there’s still more to be done. And the bigger system wasn’t built properly, to reach all children. To me, there’s a kind of core progressive critique running through everything he says, and I think a lot of the time that is not given its due.