Filled with stacked milk crates, the tent, through which more than 5,000 people have already passed, is meant to convey a soapbox theme. Rows of tablet computers allow visitors to answer survey questions, the data eventually to be compiled and disseminated.
The mission is nonideological, a spokeswoman for the venture informed me, but the tone is decidedly leftist. Panel discussions are devoted to subjects including the plight of low-wage workers and the difficulties the poor and the vulnerable face gaining access to health care. Walls are lined with handwritten notes giving expression to what New Yorkers would like to see more of, none of it surprising: higher-paying jobs, affordable housing, equality. One note simply reads, "Love."
The certainty with which it seemed a year ago that Christine C. Quinn would be the next mayor has left some to interpret Mr. de Blasio's ascension as itself a kind of pop-up enterprise. His longtime supporters like to joke about how difficult it was to get reporters to come listen to him in April. But the modern progressive politics on which he has risen to power, the politics that in New York now exist at the fashionable center rather than on the outcast periphery, have deep and expansive roots in the city, roots that predate the Occupy movement and originate largely in the creation of the Working Families Party.
Begun in the late 1990s and seemingly moribund for some time, the party, closely linked to labor and community activism, was founded on the idea that economic humanism and greater equality were essential to a functioning society. "The party injected into the body politic a novel idea: organizing," said Public Advocate-elect Letitia James at a convening of leading progressives at the headquarters of the Service Employees International Union last week. "It's so simplistic. When I first ran in 2001 and 2003, people were so disconnected from politics and so disillusioned."
Ms. James won her second City Council race solely on the Working Families line; she is the only New York candidate in the party's history to have done so. The party exists to recruit, support and cross-endorse those candidates, usually Democrats, who share its values — principles lost to the long reign of neo-liberalism.
Over the past decade, the party has expanded its reach to Connecticut, Washington, D.C., and Oregon, where it successfully backed legislation for a pilot program called Pay It Forward, to help students get a higher education debt-free. (Students will be able to attend Oregon's public universities at no cost, giving a percentage of their post-graduation salaries to the system for a fixed period.) In Bridgeport, Conn., this month, the party was instrumental in electing school board members opposed to the sitting superintendent, an advocate of school privatization. In perhaps a harbinger of alliances to come, the party has periodically backed like-minded Republicans in state legislature races.
When Mr. de Blasio assumes office on Jan. 1, he will have at his hand a City Council with whom he shares a sensibility, again thanks in great part to the efforts of the Working Families Party. (The party determined its name after polling; Working Families beat out Common Sense, among other ideas.) As the party's executive director, Dan Cantor, explained it, Working Families began recruiting candidates for Council races in 2007. In 2009, nine of the 10 candidates it had backed were elected. This allowed formation of the Progressive Caucus on the Council, which will grow to more than 20 members in January.
If not for a man named Jon Kest, a founder of the Working Families Party and a former executive director of another activist group, New York Communities for Change, which grew out of the disgraced community organizing group Acorn, we might now be approaching the era of Mayor Someone Else. Mr. Kest, who died last year, about a month after his daughter was killed during Hurricane Sandy, was one of Mr. de Blasio's earliest and most ardent supporters during his first Council race and was talking about a de Blasio mayoralty 15 years ago. Mr. Kest spoke passionately about economic inequality and committed himself to organizing poor and low-income workers. He planned a large one-day strike of fast-food workers.
To much of this, the mainstream media had not been paying extensive attention. You would have had to be reading The Nation, with its flimsy Emma Goldman-era paper stock and outsider ethos, to keep up. Now, traffic to The Nation's website is soaring, the magazine's editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, told me, and the traffic is being driven by coverage of Mr. de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren, the junior senator from Massachusetts. Progressivism is now "trendy," as Ms. vanden Heuvel put it, "though that isn't exactly the right word because it diminishes the excitement."
EMAIL: bigcity@nytimes.com
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 16, 2013
An earlier version of this column misspelled the given name of a founder of the Working Families Party. He is Jon Kest, not John.
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