Blue City Blues

What's the fundamental difference between an authentically cool city and a contrived, gentrified one? What makes a great music and arts scene, and can deliberate government action actually make a city cool? That’s the topic we take up with our guest (and Gen X contemporary), the legendary indie rock frontman of The Long Winters and one time Seattle City Council candidate John Roderick, now the host of the popular (and omnivorous!) Omnibus podcast that he founded with Jeopardy host Ken Jennings. In the episode, we nostalgia trip with John about the fading of the hipster scenes of our youth, starting with our cohort’s misconceived impulse to 'facilitate' an art scene, as if urban cool can be jumpstarted with a couple of free parking spots outside local music venues. Roderick calls bullshit: the scenes from the '80s and '90s that we wax nostalgic about weren't created. They gestated organically because kids were bored and had something to rebel against, space was dirt cheap, and the grittiness of the urban environment was real.That more authentic youth culture, born in abandoned light manufacturing spaces in declining cities, has evaporated in this era of blue city affluence and progressive permissiveness, Roderick argues, adding that cosmopolitan adults’ indulgent embrace of 'pure justice' and 'absolute equality' has stripped teen life of its necessary friction. What's left, he contends, is a culture marked by 'disconnect and malaise and bitching.' As our paean to the past continues, we get into how Gen X, perpetually the punching bag, never stood up for itself, allowing Millennials to define new cultural rules that were simultaneously affirming and uptight. But true urban cool may be poised for a comeback: Roderick has hope that Gen Z, rebelling against the cultural conformism that took root in the 2010s, are starting to tell older generations to "shut up and leave us alone." That desire for distance and defiance is what cool cities are built from, from the bottom up, even if, all three of us conclude, we are entirely unqualified to opine on what the hell the kids are planning to do next. Our editor is Quinn Waller. Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

This is a free preview of our latest Patreon-only episode of Blue City Blues, with writer David Rieff, a war correspondent, an essayist, and a leading cultural critic. David, the son of sociologist Philip Rieff, author of The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and author Susan Sontag, one of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20th century, is a formidable intellectual and critic in his own right. He is also a self-described cultural pessimist, who argues in his 2024 collection of essays, Desire and Fate, that the rise of woke ideas in blue cosmopolitan America heralds the decline of Western culture. In our wide ranging conversation – subscribe to Blue City Blues on Patreon to listen to the full episode – we discuss with Rieff why he fits neither on the political left or the political right, and why he has such antipathy to wokeness. Rieff tells us that woke is the cultural handmaiden to late stage capitalism, providing a moral fig leaf that acts as a legitimization mechanism for neoliberal institutions, as he further argues that it medicalizes grievance and prioritizes emotional safety and identity over political economy and universalist humanist claims. As we delve farther into David’s critique of wokeness, and what he describes as its censorious safetyism, he suggests that his father’s great insight about the rise of culture of the therapeutic has been superseded by what he calls a rising culture of the traumatic. And he says he sees wokeness ultimately as a form of kitsch, one that presents a grave risk to the Western tradition of culture and art.   Our editor is Quinn Waller.OUTSIDE SOURCES: David Rieff, Desire and Fate, Columbia University Press (2024).A recent profile of David Rieff referenced in the episode: David Klion, "Woke Obsessions," The Ideas Journal, Jan. 22, 2026Support the show

Is a return to good, effective governance not just a glaring need in blue cities but a key to saving liberal democracy? NYU law professor Richard “Rick” Pildes is the author of an insightful scholarly article that recently caught our attention titled, “The Neglected Value of Effective Government.” A leading scholar of constitutional law and democratic governance, Rick is a Guggenheim Fellow, Carnegie Scholar and a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. After reading his article, we asked him to join us on the latest BCB episode to make the case for making government work. If you’re a regular listener you’ll know that it’s been a recurring theme – and indeed a foundational premise – of this podcast that the quality of governance in blue cities has atrophied over the last 15 years. Blue cities were on a roll in the Obama years. But now, not so much. Well, it’s not just a problem at the local level, Rick tells us. Public dissatisfaction with governance has emerged as a global phenomenon in the liberal democracies of Europe as well as here in the US. And people who care about reinvigorating the liberal democratic center against the rising tide of extremism need to pay a lot more attention as to why. In our discussion, we unpack the forces that have been rendering American government, local and federal, so incapable of addressing the problems they are tasked with addressing. In alignment with recent much discussed arguments made by Marc Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance, Pildes contends that rising mistrust in government on both the left and the right in the late 1960s and ‘70s led to the proliferation of processes and veto points that have made it much more difficult for governments to accomplish big things and address serious challenges. That needs to change, he argues. Moreover, we discuss with Rick the role of increasing ideological polarization and purism in rendering government brittle and ineffective, and he offers up intriguingly counterintuitive arguments about why the push for transparency in government process may have gone too far, and how social media's ability to turn politicians into “free agents” who can build bases of power and fundraising outside the party hierarchy and its power structures is a problem that makes it much harder to build coalitions of support for bold legislative actions. “We shouldn’t take liberal democracy for granted,” Rick tells us. “It has to show it can deliver. People need to see that it’s delivering for them.”Our editor is Quinn Waller. OUTSIDE REFERENCES:Richard Pildes, "The Neglected Value of Effective Government," University of Chicago Legal Forum (2024).Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

There are the superstar cities that act as the seedbeds of American cultural cosmopolitanism and the great engines of blue America's knowledge economy: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle etc. These are the cities that we obsess over and that typically provide the grist for this podcast. And countering them, of course, is the red America of small towns and rural areas that powered the rise of Trump and MAGA.Both the urban powerhouses and the rural heartland receive more than their share of attention. But then there are also the often overlooked or ignored second tier cities of blue America, big cities with large populations that no one outside of their regions pays much attention to. That’s a mistake, contends Halina Bennet, a reporter at Slow Boring, the Substack newsletter founded by Matt Yglesias. Bennet is the author of a provocatively counterintuitive recent piece titled, “The case for the ‘Solid B’ city,” in which she compellingly argues that these largely ignored second tier cities – places like Columbus or Indianapolis or Fayetteville – are leading the way on urbanist policy innovations while offering their residents a high quality of life in affordable environs. Halina's piece challenged some of our assumptions, so we asked her to come on BCB to explain why she thinks these "Solid B" burgs merit more of our attention. David and Sandeep launch the conversation with their reminiscences of Portland, Oregon in the 1980s. Back then Portland was very different, they say, an economically depressed “downscale Northwest gearhead” town with good beer and ultra-cheap rents, before its transformation into the “bougie emo twee” Portlandia we know today. We then quickly get into a discussion with Bennett about what these Solid Bs offer that differentiates them positively from the world class cities that dominate the national discourse.She points first to Columbus, a city (as Sandeep mentions) disparagingly nicknamed “Cowtown.” But in reality Columbus is now the second-largest city in the Midwest, a fast growing metropolitan center with a burgeoning tech economy where the median home price is still a fraction of what houses cost in A-list megacities. And Bennett also praises Indianapolis, where the rapid spread of a bus-rapid-transit system is enhancing livability. And Fayetteville too, the first city in the country to experiment with eliminating all parking minimums.As the conversation continues, we get into why these B cities are able to move so much faster than their higher profile counterparts in reshaping their urban landscapes in productive ways, building housing and infrastructure and innovating on policy. Often blue dots in vast red seas, these cities are shaped by a more pragmatic politics focused on results, rather than the ideological progressive monocultures of the A cities, where culture war purity tests, entrenched interests and the high cost of doing business militate against change and innovation. We close with Halina speculating that the salvation of the Democratic Party may be found in these B cities, which she suggests are well positioned to produce the next politician with broad enough appeal with normie Americans to capture the presidency. Our editor is Quinn Waller.OUTSIDE REFERENCES:Halina Bennet, "The case for the 'Solid B' city," Slow Boring, March 27, 2026.Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Keith Humphreys, a friend of the pod, is widely recognized as the country’s leading expert on drug and addiction policy. The Esther Ting Memorial Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, Keith served as a senior advisor on drug policy in the Obama White House and on the White House Advisory Commission on Drug Free Communities under President George W. Bush. We had Keith on BCB last March for an insightful conversation about why the drug reform and decriminalization efforts that swept West Coast blue cities circa 2020 failed so spectacularly. So now, a year later, we invited Keith back on to share his insights about nascent moves by some prominent blue city mayors to turn away from a progressive-libertarian model of dealing with addiction, and instead embrace a more proactive, interventionist approach to street addiction that mixes therapeutic carrots with coercive sticks.Over the last year, Keith has been meeting with and advising mayors like Philadelphia's Cherelle Parker, the city’s first African American female mayor, who herself grew up in a crack-ravaged neighborhood. Parker has made a concerted effort to clean up Kensington, one of the country’s most notorious drug neighborhoods; Keith explains how Parker has set up a wellness court where arrested addicts are given the opportunity for rapid diversion as well as a Wellness Village where recovery housing is available to people exiting in-patient treatment. In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie has also been moving to reimagine addiction policy, adopting a “recovery first” approach that prioritizes not just reducing harm but prodding the addicted towards recovery. Most recently, Lurie has launched a bold experiment with a RESET Center where arrested street addicts are detained until they sober up, with outreach workers attempting to engage them with services in the interim. And in San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan, a previous BCB guest now running for California governor, has pushed to establish new interventions to engage people suffering on the streets, including threatening arrest for those who repeatedly refuse offers of shelter.“So if you have a failed War on Drugs followed by a failed libertarian policy, what’s going to be the next act?” Humphreys says. ”What I see the brightest, most creative blue city mayors doing is finding a new way… a city should aspire to more than just reducing overdoses, as important as that is, but should aspire to get people into recovery and back into work and back connected to their families, and some pressure is justified with addiction.”Our editor is Quinn Waller. OUTSIDE SOURCES:Keith Humphreys. "Blue Cities Are Finally Showing Sanity on Drugs and Crime," City Journal, March 30, 2026.Keith Humphreys, "Forced Drug Treatment Isn't Horrific. It's a Relief," New York Times, Sept. 2, 2025.Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In late February, Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon, who have both had extensive careers in Democratic governance – Nicholas was Chief Legal Counsel for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer until 2022, Robert most recently served as a Deputy Assistant to the President on the Domestic Policy Council of the Biden White House – went where few left-of-center commentators have been willing to go: they directly called out what they see as the excessive political influence of public sector unions.Those deep-pocketed unions are, of course, one of the major power centers within the Democratic Party, which may explain why even reform-minded commentators on the left, like the Abundance faction, have been noticeably reluctant to scrutinize their influence over governance in blue jurisdictions. But in a much discussed New York Times op ed titled, “Mamdani Will Need to Change How he Governs,” Bagley and Gordon broke ranks. “If blue-state governors and mayors want to get serious about delivering excellent public services, they will need to do more than battle billionaire elites or embrace abundant housing and energy,” they wrote. “They will have to push back against a core constituency within the Democratic Party that often makes government deliver less and cost more: unions representing teachers, police officers and transit workers.”So we invited Nicholas, currently a law professor at the University of Michigan, and Robert, now a visiting fellow at Harvard, to delve into why they think public sector unions have too often become an impediment to effective Democratic governance, particularly in big blue cities like New York or Seattle. Over the course of our conversation, they argue that while public sector unions play a crucial role in advocating for their members, they can also hinder progress by prioritizing generous pay, pensions and seniority over efficiency, accountability, and results. They cite examples like Chicago's severe fiscal strain due to unaffordably generous pension benefits doled out to public sector workers, and we also get into the impact of police and teachers unions on efforts to reform policing and public education. We discuss the outsized role these unions play in electing Democratic politicians, and Bagley and Gordon emphasize the need for Democratic leaders to push back against unions in instances where they stand as an impediment to delivering better public services and governance.“We wrote this piece because we think it’s important. If we want blue cities to achieve their promise, and if we want to have a viable and effective alternative to what the Trump administration is giving us, this is a conversation we need to have,” Bagley told us.  Our editor is Quinn Waller. OUTSIDE SOURCES:Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon, “Mamdani Will Need to Change How He Governs,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 2026.Seattle Nice podcast: “Mayor Elect Katie Wilson says Seattle Nice is ‘Special,’” Nov. 20, 2025. Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Eboo Patel, an Ismaili Muslim, is the founder and president of Interfaith America, a Chicago-based non-profit that works to promote pluralism and foster cooperation across differences of religion. He is a fierce advocate for diversity - "America is a diversity project," he contends - and for the importance of identity to our conception of self. And yet he is also a sharp critic of DEI regimes as they are typically practiced on college campuses or within other culturally progressive institutions. For our latest episode, at the invite of Seattle University President Eduardo Peñalver and as part of his excellent Presidential Speaker Series, we spoke with Eboo Patel live on the Seattle U campus. In the conversation, we asked Eboo to explain why he believes a conception of diversity rooted in pluralism will serve Americans better than one rooted in identitarian and anti-racist precepts. "I dislike anti-racism as a paradigm. I detest it as a regime. I find it interesting as a critique," Patel told us. "But any point of view that insists on separating people into two categories - racist and anti-racist - is going to get itself into trouble very fast." Instead, he argues that pluralism, which he defines as five interconnected beliefs -- 1. Diversity is a treasure. 2. Identity is a source of pride, not a status of victimization. 3. Faith is a bridge, 4. Cooperation is better than division and 5. Everybody is a contributor - is a better foundation on which to understand the importance of American diversity. And the idea of pluralism, particularly religious pluralism, he adds. goes back to the founding fathers and the beginnings of the American republic.As we get deeper into the conversation, we also talk to Eboo about why he sees American as a "potluck" and not a "melting plot," and why he doesn't think colorblindness works as a goal finding common ground across identity divides. Our editor is Quinn Waller and this episode was produced by Jennie Cecil Moore.OUTSIDE REFERENCES:Eboo Patel, Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice and the Promise of America, Beacon Press (2012). Eboo Patel, "Teach Pluralism, Not Anti-Racism," Persuasion, April 6, 2025. Eboo Patel, "A Pedagogy of the Empowered," Persuasion, May 26, 2025.Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In the 1970s, as a young left wing activist seeking to upend capitalism, Karen Bass was a leader in the Venceremos Brigade, an organization that sends Americans to Cuba in support of the Cuban revolution. From those outsider beginnings Bass went on to become a progressive Speaker of the California State Assembly, and then chair of the Congressional Black Caucus in Congress, before defeating law-and-order former Republican mall developer Rick Caruso in 2022 to become Los Angeles’ 43rd mayor. In other words, the 72 year-old Bass, once a young radical, is now a leading light within California’s progressive power structure. But she’s also reeling politically – with a job approval rating barely above Trump’s in deep blue LA – in the lingering aftermath of the devastating Jan. 2025 Palisades fire that consumed more than 6,800 structures and raised widespread doubts about the competence of LA’s municipal governance. Which makes Los Angeles' municipal politics very interesting all of a sudden. As a beleaguered incumbent, Bass now finds herself fighting for her political life against a surprise challenger from her left. On the last day of candidate filing, an ostensible Bass ally on the Council, Nithya Raman, 44, a smart, former urban planner with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, shocked LA’s political class by jumping into the race.The Democratic establishment has loudly rallied to Bass’ defense, denouncing Raman as a disloyal backstabber. But do the voters see things the same way? Or is Raman poised to be the next Zohran Mamdani or Katie Wilson, the democratic socialist insurgents who defied expectations to get elected mayors of NYC and Seattle last November? For answers we turn to Melanie Mason, Politico’s California Bureau Chief and co-author of their California Playbook. Melanie has written vividly and revealingly about Bass’ mayoralty and about Raman’s dramatic entry into the race, and we dive in with her to understand better the contours of LA’s currently roiled politics. Mason offers her insights about Bass’ first-up-then-down tenure, why Raman’s last minute move to throw her hat in the ring is seen as such a betrayal by LA political insiders, how much of a Mamdani analogue Raman actually is, what her chances are of overthrowing Bass, and what this all means for the politics of one of the country’s largest and most prominent blue cities. Our editor is Quinn Waller. OUTSIDE SOURCES:Melanie Mason, "The plot twist shaking Los Angeles," Politico, Feb. 14, 2026. Melanie Mason, "New mayoral challenger in Los Angeles draws Mamdani comparisons," Politico, Feb. 9. 2026.Liam Dillon and Janaki Chadha, "The left's housing civil war is ending," Politico, March 7, 2026.Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Author, journalist, and political analyst John B. Judis cut his political teeth in the (briefly) ascendant New Left politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A member of Students for a Democratic Society until 1969, a founding member in 1971 of the New American Movement (a predecessor organization to today’s Democratic Socialists of America), and a founder of the rad left journal Socialist Revolution, Judis had a bird’s eye view of why that previous generation of leftists flamed out before getting anywhere near achieving their lofty goals for a transformation of American society. Now a new generation of younger, energized progressives and democratic socialists is leading a resurgent leftism in blue cities. Boston and Chicago have ardently progressive mayors; New York and Seattle just elected self-described socialists to take the reins of municipal governance, a development that would have been all but unthinkable just a decade ago. And John Judis, currently a contributing editor at Talking Points Memo and previously a senior writer at National Journal and The New Republic (and a co-author of two books with recent BCB guest Ruy Teixeira), has some wisdom to impart to this New New Left. In our conversation, Judis argues that while the rising college-educated urban left may not be the old industrial proletariat, it should nonetheless legitimately be considered a new working class of younger people “proletarianized” by automation and AI. And he says they are responding to their increasingly precarious material conditions and their decreasing control over their working conditions by driving this new push for class-based change. But Judis warns them not to run too far down a radical path.He advises this new crop of leftist leaders to focus instead on “bread and butter” economic issues and avoid the “culture trap” of taking extreme social positions or imposing endless litmus tests that shrink and marginalize the movement. As we discuss American leftism then and now, Judis recalls the “religious frenzy” of performative radicalism that derailed the New Left in his youth as something that the new generation must strive to avoid.Our editor is Quinn Waller.  Outside sources:John B. Judis, “A Warning from the ‘60s Generation,” Washington Post, January 21, 2020.John B. Judis, “The Left’s Project Has Just Begun,” Compact, December 5, 2025.John B. Judis, The Socialist Awakening: What’s Different Now About the Left, Columbia Global Reports (2020).John B. Judis, "The Feminist Revolution and the Democratic Party," American Affairs, Volume IX, Number 3 (Fall 2025). Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

A former Yale English professor, William Deresiewicz has become one of the country’s most erudite and insightful commentators on the cultural trends that have remade higher education on elite campuses. He is a prolific essayist and the author of four books, including Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite (2014), which is based on an essay in the American Scholar that went viral, and which argued that the country’s most prestigious colleges were producing conformist, incurious careerists riven with status anxieties and uninterested in self-discovery or critical thinking.Deresiewicz remains a sharp critic of elite universities’ self-congratulatory self-fashioning, and of their dogmatic commitment to a set of cosmopolitan progressive cultural beliefs around issues of race, gender and sexuality. And he has been arguing for some time – and with pointed urgency in the wake of Trump’s 2024 re-election – that the culture of the elite universities is no longer confined to their campuses, but rather has been colonizing the broader culture of blue urban America. With disastrous results for the Democratic Party, and, by extension, the country.So we welcomed Bill on to the latest episode to talk about what has gone wrong with elite education in America, and how and why it has contributed to the current political disaster of Trump's ascendency. It’s a fascinating (for us, former grad students ourselves) and candid conversation, one in which Deresiewicz pulls no punches, arguing that the rise of wokeness and identity politics in academia has undermined liberal values and led to a rejection of enlightenment principles. The conversation also delves into the broader implications of these trends for American society and politics, including the disconnect between academic elites and working-class voters.As Bill tells us, “This politics that had incubated in the academy for a long time, had leaped the walls of the zoo and was now running loose in the country… it is rhetoric of a very extreme variety, and it is now driving a certain segment of our politics. And outside of very blue areas… people don’t want it.”Our editor is Quinn Waller.  Outside sources: William Deresiewicz, “On Political Correctness: Power, class and the new campus religion,” The American Scholar, March 6, 2017William Dereseiwicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, Free Press (2014).William Deresiewicz, “Academe’s Divorce from Reality: Americans are fed up, and not just people who voted for Trump,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 21. 2024 Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Authoritarianism is on the march, not just here in the US but across the globe. It hardly bears repeating that we live in perilous and troubled times, as a potent and fundamentally destructive combination of nihilism and right-wing populism challenges the very foundations of the post-war liberal democratic order. That’s why we were thrilled that the latest episode of BCB is a live taping with historian, celebrated journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic. Applebaum is perhaps the foremost chronicler of the rise of global authoritarianism, including the serious threats to democratic traditions posed by Trump and his administration, and our taping drew a near capacity crowd to Town Hall Seattle (total audience including live streaming of around 1000). Seattle, it turns out, is an Anne Applebaum kind of town where people were ready to hear her speak about "Resisting Authoritarianism Here and Abroad." In our conversation, made possible by friend of the pod Haeryung Shin, and co-sponsored by Town Hall and the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Policy and Office of Public Lectures, we dig in with Applebaum about the nature and dimensions of the authoritarian threat both here and abroad, and how to combat it. We begin by asking Anne to dissect the essential nature of Trump 2.0, touching on the ways the administration threatens our existing democratic institutions. We talk about the current situation in Minneapolis, as well as Trump’s ominous call to an assemblage of generals last September to fight “the war from within” as he suggested the American military should use the streets of blue cities as training grounds. Are the guardrails in place to protect our democracy?  In the second part of our conversation, we delve into the global nature of the rising authoritarian threat. We discuss whether Trumpism is just the symptom of a much larger global disease, and ask Applebaum about her call in her 2024 book, Autocracy Inc., for the world’s democracies to cooperate more closely in countering the increasingly unified – and serious – threat posed by autocratic regimes like Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela. Applebaum also offers her views on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent speech at Davos and what it might mean for the United States. Our editor is Quinn Waller. This episode was produced by Jennie Cecil Moore and edited by Robert Scaramuccia.  About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urbPlease send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In 2002, political analyst and commentator Ruy Teixeira co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book, published near the zenith of the Bush presidency in the aftermath of 9/11, gave beleaguered Democrats cause for hope. Demographic change, Teixeira and co-author John Judis predicted, would soon create the political conditions for Democrats to forge an enduring political majority.  When an emerging coalition of educated knowledge economy professionals, minorities, young people and women powered the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 and 2012, Teixeira’s optimism appeared prescient. But the big Democratic majorities of Obama’s early years were ephemeral. The country remained closely divided politically, yo-yoing back and forth between the two parties. Trump won narrowly in 2016, and then again, catastrophically, in 2024. Teixeira, now a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, has spent the years since Trump’s first victory excavating what went wrong for Democrats. So we invited him to join us on the latest episode to dissect the current state of the Democrat Party and its future prospects. In our conversation we explore why the leading optimist about the party’s future fortunes two decades ago has today became one of its most vocal pessimists. Why did demography not turn out to be destiny? We discuss the core findings of Teixeira’s more recent analyses, laid out in a string of articles published at The Liberal Patriot (the Substack site Teixeira co-founded) and in a follow up 2023 volume also co-authored with Judis. He argues that, from Obama’s second term on, the party’s increasingly strident promotion of the cultural beliefs of the educated elites of blue urban America has caused the party to hemorrhage working class voters of all races. Teixeira further explains why he thinks the party continues to be in deep trouble in the mid-to-longer term, despite benefitting currently from public backlash to Trump’s authoritarian excesses. We dig in with him into Democrats’ positions on immigration, race, and gender and why he believes they create a political anchor around the Democrats’ necks. And we close with a discussion of how the increasing polarization between the parties distorts our politics, with Teixeira arguing that the educated cosmopolitans who now comprise the Democratic Party’s vocal core need to stop treating politics as a self-ratifying moral crusade and focus on what matters: building a winning coalition.“Politics is not supposed to be fun, It’s supposed to be about getting shit done, and that’s hard, typically, and you have to make compromises,” he tells us. “You don’t always get to stand on your soapbox and talk about how you’re on the right side of history.”Robert Scaramuccia edited this episode.Outside references:John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002).Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (2023)Ruy Teixiera, "The Democrats' Common Sense Problem," The Liberal Patriot, March 24, 2022Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin, "Politics Without Winners: Can Either Party Build a Majority Coalition?" American Enterprise Institute, OcPlease send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

We spoke with San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan last April about his groundbreaking approach to municipal governance and the new directions he wants to take the Democratic Party. Now, he's running for governor of California, which makes this a good time to give this interview a second spin.A Harvard grad who made his bones in the disruption-centered world of Silicon Valley tech startups, Mahan tells us he's put his focus on prioritizing results over ideology since becoming mayor of one of California’s biggest blue cites in 2023. Along the way, Mahan has been more than willing to touch progressive third rails. Take Prop 36, a 2024 CA ballot measure toughening sentences for drug and theft crimes. Openly bucking Gavin Newsom and the Democratic establishment, Mahan went all in advocating for Prop 36. Fed up Cali voters backed it too, passing it by more than two to one. He hasn’t stopped there. Mahan’s call for “a revolution of common sense” has led to breaks with public sector unions over pay raises and linking pay to performance, to prioritizing shelter over housing, and – most recently – to his controversial proposal to arrest homeless people who repeatedly refuse offers of shelter. So far, it’s working at the ballot box: Mahan was re-elected last year in a cakewalk, with 87 percent of the vote.So we decided to go deep with one of the nation’s more unique blue city mayors. “Historically, cities have been engines of economic opportunity and upward mobility, and I think that's where we're struggling most,” Mahan told us in explaining his motives for broadly rethinking blue city governance. Is Mahan a role model or a pariah? Listen to what he has to say and decide for yourself.  Our editor is Quinn Waller. About Blue City Blues Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

While David is away, we are reposting some early days Blue City Blues episodes that many of our more recent listeners may have missed. We thought this one, with author and cultural critic Freddie DeBoer, was a great conversation on a topic that remains timely. We'll be back with fresh episodes shortly:Freddie DeBoer knows a thing or two about mental illness. He’s been admitted into psychiatric hospitals five times; he was involuntarily committed in 2002. He has, as they say, lived experience. Freddie is also one of our most original and independent commentators on American cultural trends. A self-described Marxist and a cogent critic of recent ideological turns within blue city progressive culture, he has written extensively, with clarity and passion and urgency, about why the idea of involuntary commitment of the severely mentally ill has long been a third rail in progressive blue city politics, and why that needs to change. We asked Freddie on to make his case for reforming our laws and procedures, and also our attitudes, about how to address the problem of the mentally ill suffering on blue city streets. And to discuss why the disability rights community has gotten this issue so wrong.  "If the left does not have a vision for how to solve these problems, then the people will elect strong men who will come in and do it in a worse way," he told us.  Our editor is Quinn Waller.Outside References: Freddie DeBoer, "Psychotic Disorders Do Not Respect Autonomy, Independence, Agency or Freedom," Substack (Freddie DeBoer), May 24, 2023Freddie DeBoer, "The Case for Forcing the Mentally Ill into Treatment," New York, June 20, 2024Freddie DeBoer, "'Well I Don't Know About This Involuntary treatment Business!' He Said, Stepping into the Safety of a Closed Tab," Substack (Freddie DeBoer), July 3, 2024Freddie DeBoer, "You Call that Compassion?" Substack (Freddie DeBoer), Aug. 5, 2024Freddie DeBoer, "What Is Freedom for the Mentally Ill?" City Journal, Dec. 2, 2024Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In 1955, three men in the bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village got together to form what they thought would be a local community newspaper. But the Village Voice would soon morph into the voice of New York City’s political outsiders and cultural dissidents, as it became the progenitor of a new kind of journalistic outlet – the alternative newsweekly – and a new genre of engaged, inside out journalism that rejected the antiseptic detachment of traditional post-war newspapers. The model pioneered by the Voice spread rapidly across the country, and alt weeklies became a ubiquitous fixture in the media landscapes of large American cities in the second half of the 20th century. Tricia Romano, our guest on this BCB episode, spent eight years as a writer and columnist for the Village Voice in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. She is the author of The Freaks Came Out to Write, a sweeping, magisterial oral history of the original, and most storied, of the alts. Over its 88 chapters and 572 pages, Romano’s definitive account weaves together more than 200 interviews to tell the inside story of the paper that radically remade a large corner of the American journalism world in its own image. With David away, Sandeep and Tricia discuss the epic factional ideological battles and the soap operatic personality clashes between legendary writers – Hentoff, Christgau, Gornick, Musto, Crouch, Brownmiller, Whitehead and so many others – that shaped the Voice’s quarrelsome and often overwrought internal office politics. But we also explore how the Voice became not just the chronicler, but the nurturer and the advocate, of a series of once fringe subcultures and artistic movements that fundamentally changed not just New York City but blue city cosmopolitanism more broadly. Experimental theater, radical feminism, hippie bohemianism, avant garde film, gay liberation, hip hop, all were catapulted from the social fringes to the city’s cultural mainstream by the early and loving attention of the Voice, Romano says. We dive into the series of colorful owners -- including Rupert Murdoch, the founder of Fox News -- and editors who shaped the paper in its heyday  and discuss how the Voice lost its distinctiveness in the ‘90s as once stodgy mainstream papers like the New York Times aped its concerns and poached its writers, and once the rise of the internet stole away its classified ads cash cow. And finally we lament how it finally began to unravel into its current hollowed out husk when the owners of the New Times chain of weeklies bought the Voice in 2005 and rapidly stripped it of its countercultural cool. We close by talking about how the latter day fracturing and fragmentation of our online subcultures cries out for a cohering voice of the sort that alt newspapers like the Voice once provided.Our editor is Quinn Waller.  Outside sources:Tricia Romano, The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture (2024). Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

The pervasiveness of untreated mental illness on the streets of blue cities – about 20 percent of the homeless population in the United States is severely mentally ill – is a glaring feature of the urban landscape. So we invited sociologist Neil Gong, the author of an eye-opening book, Sons, Daughters and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles, to join us on this latest BCB episode to talk about his observations of how class dynamics drive radically different social expectations of how to address this problem.Gong spent years observing public outreach and treatment efforts directed at the mentally ill in Los Angeles, first with the homeless on the gritty streets of Skid Row, and then in the city's tony private pay clinics where wealthy families sent their mentally ill relatives. His book insightfully unpacks the complicated – and often counterintuitive – ways that social inequality shapes not only how we address, but also how we think about, mental illness in urban America. We dig in with Gong on the “two different worlds” that exist in LA for handling mental illness. The public system for the homeless focuses on what Gong terms “tolerant containment.” This is the effort, born of civil libertarian ideas about the personal autonomy of the mentally ill combined with a woeful lack of public resources, to accept the problematic behaviors of the mentally ill so long as they remain out of public view in subsidized apartments or flophouses. But Neil contrasts that with the “concerted constraint” work of private clinics that, driven by the concerns of the patients’ families and loved ones, limit the freedoms of their clients as they intensively work to make them as high functioning as possible. In the latter part of the conversation we talk about what we should be doing to improve our response to mental illness in American cities. Gong argues we don't need new approaches, but rather greater investment in a more balanced system that combines a variety of approaches, from sober housing to intensive residential programs to in patient hospitalization capacity that compliments the existing, clearly inadequate, post-deinstitutionalization community care system.Our editor is Quinn Waller. Outside sources:Neil Gong, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (University of Chicago Press, 2024).About Blue City Blues: Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer. America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, as rising tribalism and growing polarization constrained discourse and reinforced cosmopolitan progressive groupthink among educated urban elites. Blue City Blues aims get beyond that conventional wisdom in offering a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Through conversations with a diverse array of smart thinkers and expert guests, we're committed to expanding the horizons of dialogue about the challenges blue cities face. Please send your feedback, guest and Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

We invited writer Sherman Alexie on to weigh in on recent cultural trends in blue cities.  Alexie has long been recognized as one of the country’s most talented, interesting – and funny – literary figures. The author of two dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, along with many short stories, essays and poems, Sherman has spent his life, and much of his writing, negotiating the boundaries between vastly different cultural communities: after growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, the child of alcoholic parents, he went on to become an “urban Indian” in cosmopolitan Seattle as his highly lauded body of work catapulted him into the rarefied ranks of the  literary elite. Much of Alexie’s recent writing has been on Substack, where he has a large and devoted following. That work touches, in layered and nuanced ways, on the beliefs and the failings of blue city urban cultural, intellectual and activist elites. Alexie, sometimes subtly and obliquely and sometimes more directly, questions the assumptions of the self-righteous, puncturing the sense of certitude and moral perfection that has gripped much of the educated left. In our conversation, Alexie tells us why, drawing on a terrifying youthful encounter with a budding murderer-in-training on the reservation, he felt compelled to question the abolitionist pieties of Ivy League academics, why he now has a complicated relationship with leftist politics, and why he describes himself as “artistically a libertarian” and has come to believe that “every writer is an individual who owes loyalty to nobody.”Our editor is Quinn Waller.About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

This week we take a close look at the damning decline in the quality of public education in progressive cities where, as Sandeep puts it, the "glaring contradiction" between a fixation on equity and shockingly inequitable results "drives me bat shit crazy." Our guest, Kelsey Piper, formerly at Vox and now a staff writer with The Argument, doesn't pull any punches either, arguing that "illiteracy is a policy choice.” In a series of cogently argued recent pieces (links below), Piper has provided yeoman service in jump starting a debate, largely dormant during the years of the Great Awokening, among left-of-center commentators about the declining quality of public education in blue jurisdictions. Her work details how Mississippi went from dead last to near the top of the nation in fourth-grade reading scores – demonstrating particular success with poor and minority children – via a combination of mandated phonics-based curriculum, teacher training, and accountability measures, including the controversial rule that holds back third-grade students who fail to demonstrate basic reading proficiency. Rather than joining her call to follow Mississippi’s lead, some prominent thought leaders on the left have instead worked overtime to try to discredit the success that Mississippi (and several other Southern states) has achieved. But Piper’s defense of the underlying data supporting “the Southern surge” in test scores is convincing. Beyond the Mississippi Miracle, we go deep with Piper on other misguided pedagogical trends that have emerged out of progressive education circles, like the move away from tracking and the push to eliminate gifted and talented programs, as well as rampant grade inflation and the lowering of standards in the name of equity. And we delve into the history of education reform in recent decades, and why the accountability ideas that were ascendant in the Clinton, Bush and Obama years have fallen into such disrepute on the left.Drawing on a shocking recent UC San Diego report acknowledging a massive surge in admitted students requiring remedial math instruction despite boasting stellar high school transcripts with A’s in higher level math classes, Piper explains how a cynical focus on credentials over competence — giving kids a passing grade instead of making sure they reach basic competency — is a catastrophic mistake that only delays accountability, putting students at a profound disadvantage in the real world. Our editor is Quinn Waller. Outside references:Kelsey Piper, “Illiteracy Is a Policy Choice: Why Aren’t We Gathering Behind Mississippi's Banner?” The Argument, Sept. 25, 2025Karen Vaites and Kelsey Piper, “Is Mississippi Cooking the Books? No, the Skeptics Are Wrong. The Southern Surge Is Real,” The Argument, Oct. 7, 2025Kelsey Piper, “Education Isn’t a Zero-Sum Game: The Strange Equity Crusade Against Algebra,” The Argument, Nov. 3, 2025Kelsey Piper, “When Grades Stop Meaning Anything: The UC San Diego Math Scandal Is a Warning,” The Argument, Nov. 18, 2025And ICYMI, previously on BCB: "Whitney Tilson on Why Kids in Blue City School Districts Are Being Left Behind," Oct, 9, 2025About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. OvePlease send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In November 2024, fed up San Francisco voters elected an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune the city's 46th mayor. Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat and a newcomer to City Hall politics who largely self-funded his own outsider campaign, ran on the promise of fundamental change, reversing course away from the permissive - and often performative - radical chic progressivism of the peak woke era. For a city reeling from spiking crime and street disorder, he won by offering a return to what he calls "common sense" policies that involve getting tougher on encampments, crime, and public drug use, while beefing up policing and speeding construction of new housing. Now Mayor Lurie is approaching the first anniversary of his tenure in office, and we want to know: how well is he delivering on his promises, and has life in San Francisco improved as a result? For answers we turn to San Francisco Chronicle editorial columnist Emily Hoeven, a relatively recent transplant to the city whose sharply drawn and impactful writing about San Francisco issues - and in particular about the failures and foibles of municipal governance - has quickly established her one as of the most prominent journalistic voices in the city. Hoeven tells us that there are good reasons for Lurie's broad popularity (recent polling has his approval rating north of 70 percent). The mayor's relentless cheerleading for a San Francisco comeback, particularly through his prolific and much viewed output of Instagram videos that lean in to his "earnest dad vibes," has changed how San Franciscans are feeling about their city, Hoeven tells us. And tangible signs of progress are readily visible: crime has significantly dropped, new businesses are opening and some big new housing developments are coming on line. "Overall, I do think the city is in a good place, and hopefully we'll continue heading in that direction," Hoeven says.But she also emphasizes that significant challenges remain, and as the mayor's honeymoon with the public fades "it's probably only going to get harder" for Lurie to maintain the city's positive momentum. This is San Francisco, after all. Untreated addiction and serious mental illness remain a problem on the streets of the city, city government faces budget and labor challenges, and the city's notoriously fractious politics may be poised for a comeback. "The realities are going to become more real," as Hoeven puts it. Our editor is Quinn Waller.Outside references:Emily Hoeven, "S.F.’s giant naked woman sculpture brought out the worst in our city," San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 2025Emily Hoeven, "People are ‘obsessed’ with Daniel Lurie’s Instagram. But will it actually help S.F.?" San Francisco Chronicle, May 28, 2025Correction: The first version of the audio for this episode misidentified the artist who created "Father and Son" for Seattle's Olympic Sculpture park. The artist is Louise Bourgeois. We have removed the reference in the audio to avoid misinforming listeners. About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefiPlease send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care was a National Book Award finalist. Drawing on the life stories of several foster children, author Claudia Rowe, a long-time journalist and now an editorial writer at the Seattle Times, exposes the chilling truth: the nation's foster care system is a "major gear" driving mass homelessness and the incarceration crisis in American cities.  She shares shocking statistics—including studies that found up to 59 percent of youth who grew up in foster care have been incarcerated by age 26—and outlines how the system's structural failures lead to such devastating outcomes. Rowe joins us on this episode of BCB to share the story of this broken system through the eyes of the former foster care kids who lived it. As we discuss the profound social implications of this systemic failure, she argues for a fundamental transformation of how the state sees and supports those children in its care, grounded in insights gleaned from modern brain science.Our editor is Quinn Waller.About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

This Thanksgiving week, Blue City Blues sits down with former traffic engineer and urban planner Ray Delahanty, better known as “CityNerd” on YouTube. We get into the essential question: “what makes a great city?” Ray also shares his insights on the concept of "affordable urbanism" and gives us his honest assessment of one of modern transportation's most divisive projects, the "Vegas Loop."Our editor is Quinn Waller. About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

One of Seattle's most insightful chroniclers, longtime Seattle Times metro columnist Danny Westneat, joins us in this episode to discuss the blues that have settled on one of the country's bluest (and most educated and affluent) cities. For more than a decade now, Westneat wrote in a recent post-election column, both Seattle city hall and the voting public have seemed torn between the agendas of the city's two competing political camps: on any objective scale Seattle's left and center left may not be that far apart ideologically, but subjectively in the city they feel -- and act -- as if they are diametric opposites. The result, Danny says, has been an extended period of discord and paralysis within Seattle's municipal governance, as voters yo-yo between the two poles, making it close to impossible for elected officials on either side of the divide to fully enact their agenda while briefly in the ascendency. In the elections two years ago, moderates swept out the left at City Hall, but this year the pedulum is swinging hard in the opposite direction. "This failure to choose has become a core part of Seattle’s identity," Westneat writes. "It’s why the city feels sort of 'stuck' much of the time. Directionless."In out conversation, we discuss the city's struggles to come to grips with rampant street level fentanyl and meth addiction and the terrible toll it is taking on affected neighborhoods, and the equally deep divide over how to address the homeless encampments that have become a seemingly permanent feature of Seattle's streetscape. Danny relates the story of a homeless man in his neighborhood who ended up dying in a bus shelter as the local community could not come to agreement about how best to help him, suggesting that failure is emblematic of the Seattle public's conflicted psychology. We also delve into the city's sharply contested mayoral race -- the outcome of which, at the time of our taping, hung on a razor's edge -- and discuss our impressions of Katie Wilson, the progressive activist (and self-proclaimed socialist) challenger to incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell. And we assess whether we think (if she emerges victorious) she might be able to break the political logjam and address the city's seemingly intractable street-level problems, mostly born of what Westneat has termed the "prosperity bomb" that exploded over the city over the last decade.Our editor is Quinn Waller. Outside references:Danny Westneat, "Seattle shows it's a fickle city," Seattle Times, Nov. 8, 2025.Danny Westneat, "After a homeless man;'s death, a Seattle neighborhood confronts the limits of helping," Seattle Times, Nov. 22, 2023.About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their ownPlease send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In New York City, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani routed scandal-tainted Andrew Cuomo, completing his at first unthinkable, then inevitable rise to become the next mayor of New York City. His David vs. Goliath triumph has vaulted Mamdani from backbench obscurity to political superstardom; progressives around the country are swooning, seeing his success as proof that the unapologetic embrace of bold redistributive policies and vastly expanded government interventions into the marketplace represent the pathway forward for a reeling Democratic Party still struggling to come to terms with its failure to vanquish Trump. Nor is Mamdani a unicorn. Increasingly in blue cities young, energized socialists are mounting grassroots insurgencies against what they decry as a sclerotic establishment too cozy with corporate power and billionaire elites. In Seattle, self-described socialist Katie Wilson is on the cusp of ousting an incumbent mayor once thought to be sailing to reelection. In Minneapolis, the veteran incumbent mayor just survived a spirted challenge from another Mamdani-like young, Muslim, democratic socialist challenger. So is this the tip of a new political spear? Is socialism the future of governance in blue cities? And anyway, why shouldn't urban America adopt policies that make transit and child care free, freeze rents to increase housing affordability, and open publicly owned groceries, as Mamdani is proposing?Because those are dumb ideas that ignore basic economic realities and are doomed to fail, contends libertarian Nick Gillespie, an Editor at Large at Reason Magazine and a sharply incisive observer of the American political landscape. After having progressive Dem pollster Celinda Lake onto BCB after Mamdani's initial primary win to make the affirmative case for the young, charismatic socialist, we turn to Gillespie, the author of a recent piece (link below) arguing Mamdani will make NYC a less vibrant and livable city, for the counter argument. In our conversation, Gillespie argues that Mamdani’s rise is a function of the “symbolic grievances” of educated, relatively well off voters with unrealistic expectations, a rudimentary at best understanding of market economics and no grounding in history. We then turn to a discussion on whether individualism is passé in the US, on both the left and the right, dissect the mounting failings of the Democratic establishment, and then conclude with a look at what “socialism” really means in the context of blue cities.  Our editor is Quinn Waller.Outside references:Nick Gillespie, “Mamdani’s Socialist Mayorship Will Make New York a Worse Place to Live and Do Business,”Reason, Nov. 1, 2025.Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

On July 24, Donald Trump declared war on the homeless. At least that was how his Executive Order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” was received in blue urban America by many homeless advocates and Democratic elected officials. With billions in federal funding at risk of being pulled from Housing First providers, who operate on the assumption that helping homeless people address their underlying issues like addiction or mental illness is most likely to be successful when those people are first housed, the National Alliance to End Homelessness denounced the EO as “a broadside threat to the nation’s homeless response systems, people experiencing homelessness, and the providers who serve them.” At first read, the language of the EO certainly seems to take aim at the Housing First and harm reduction policies that hold sway in blue cities. It requires “ending support for ‘housing first’ policies that deprioritize accountability” while  calling for expanded use of involuntary commitment to get mentally ill homeless people into institutional care. It even raises the specter of criminal sanctions against providers who “permit the use and distribution of illicit drugs on property under their control.”  But is this Executive Order really a declaration of total war on blue city approaches to homelessness? Or is there, embedded in its carefully worded language, some opportunity for Housing First advocates to find common ground with the Trumpist right?For answers we turned to one of the main intellectual authors of the Trump EO, Devon Kurtz of the conservative Cicero Institute. In our conversation, Kurtz argues that common ground is not only possible, but is the desired outcome. He argues that Housing First too often means Housing Only, and that programs that don't make serious efforts to address their clients’ underlying issues cause harm and should have their funding cut. But he contends that more responsible providers in blue cities should see the EO as an opportunity to put more emphasis on needed interventions like addiction treatment and job training for their clients. But Kurtz acknowledges that in our current polarized environment, whether blue cities and conservative advocates of more interventionist approaches to homelessness can reach an accommodation remains an open question. Our editor is Quinn Waller. Outside references:Trump Executive Order: “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” July 24, 2025Devon Kurtz, “Trump Forces D.C. to Get Real About Homelessness,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2025Paul Webster and Devon Kurtz, “Trump’s Executive Order on Homelessness Is an Opportunity,” City Journal, Sept. 25, 2025Seattle Nice podcast w (former BCB guest) Lisa Daugaard, "Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Like almost everything else in present day America, crime in blue cities has become a deeply partisan and polarized issue. While progressives routinely downplay levels of urban crime and call for a singular focus on “root causes” like poverty and racism, Trump, with the enthusiastic backing of the MAGA law-and-order right, grossly exaggerates the dangers of blue cities. He has ludicrously referred to such cities as “war zone(s)” and "hellhole(s)" as, in a dangerously authoritarian escalation, he’s deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., Chicago, and more recently Portland. So, what’s true and what’s not about crime in blue cites? And what works and what doesn’t in fighting it?For answers, we turn to one of the country’s most prominent and respected criminologists. David Kennedy is a long-time professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, and the director of the National Network for Safe Communities. Several decades ago, Kennedy famously drew upon insights into urban crime spikes associated with the crack epidemic to devise innovative intervention strategies to interrupt the surging violence that plagued major American cities in that era. Recently, Kennedy authored an incisive New York Times op ed titled “What Both the Left and Right Get Wrong about Crime.” Kennedy tell us that there’s some truth in the both the left and the right’s characterization of urban crime, but that each sides’ approach, conducted in isolation, is doomed to fail. Rather, he points out that much of the violent crime in blue cities is driven by a very small number of relatively easily identifiable people who are themselves likely to be both the perpetrators and victims of violence. Interrupting those patterns of violent action and reaction requires carefully calibrated, carrot-and-stick interventions targeted directly at those individuals, Kennedy argues. Kennedy also emphasizes the deep social harms created by urban drug markets, and he strongly rejects progressive claims that targeted enforcement efforts to disrupt such markets just “move the problem around.” Finally, he tells us that while “broken windows” policing originated as a sensitive and effective approach to preventing serious crime, the concept has been fundamentally discredited as it morphed into the blunt and unevenly applied “zero tolerance” approaches in cities like New York. Our editor is Quinn Waller. Additional References:2009 New Yorker profile of David Kennedy: John Seabrook, “Don’t Shoot,” June 15,2009. David Kennedy op ed, “What Both the Right and Left Get Wrong About Violent Crime,” New York Times, Sept. 10. 2025 Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

The modern Democratic Party has a class and culture problem. Blue city leaders struggle to understand their cultural and political disconnect with working-class voters. Why did so many, both within and beyond blue cities, cast their ballots for Donald Trump, who gives tax breaks to the wealthy? When and how did the Democratic Party lose the allegiance of the white (and increasingly of the black and brown) working class?In this episode, former politics reporter and author David Paul Kuhn joins us to unpack a pivotal, yet often overlooked, event: New York City's "Hard Hat Riot," a spontaneous May 1970 attack by hundreds of blue collar construction workers, in lower Manhattan building the World Trade Center towers, on long-haired anti-war protesters four days after the shootings at Kent State University.Kuhn, whose richly textured book and fascinating new PBS documentary delve into the riot and its cultural and political import, discusses with us the crack up of the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition as a chasm grew between traditionally patriotic blue-collar workers and countercultural, college educated anti-Vietnam War "elites" amidst the economic shifts of the late 1960s and early 1970s.Kuhn argues the riot serves as a microcosm for an emerging – and enduring – political and social polarization in American politics. He argues that the "hard hats," frequently mischaracterized as pro-war, were in reality anti-anti-war, feeling their patriotism and sacrifices were being disrespected by protestors who were waving Viet Cong flags and burning the Stars and Stripes. The conversation explores how white ethnic working class Americans felt increasingly alienated from blue city leaders and the New Left counterculture, and how first Richard Nixon and then subsequent Republican politicians weaponized that rift for their own political advantage.  Drawing contemporary parallels, the episode explores how the events of 1970 New York City triggered the Republican Party's rapid inroads with non-college educated working-class Americans. The discussion examines the lasting impact of deindustrialization, cultural tensions, and the ongoing challenge for the Democratic Party to re-engage with this critical demographic, offering a historical lens through which to understand the persistent polarization affecting blue cities. Our editor is Quinn Waller. Read David Paul Kuhn, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working Class Revolution (Oxford University Press), selected as one of the New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2020” Also watch PBS’ American Experience documentary, Hard Hat Riot, aired Sept. 30. 2025Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Children in urban public school districts are falling behind. While a handful of lower spending red states – Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and, most notably, Mississippi – have delivered remarkable academic progress over the last 12 years, high spending districts in big cities like New York and Seattle have seen test scores plunge. And it’s not just because of Covid. While over-long school closures in blue jurisdictions did wreak havoc on the educational attainment of children in those communities, the declines began long before the pandemic, coinciding with the shift away from (however imperfect) national accountability efforts that were born of the federal No Child Left behind law and other reform initiatives. And yet, progressive politicians and school leaders in blue cities often hand wave away the declining performance of their schools, particularly with respect to the sinking test scores of low income children of color, even as they loudly proclaim their allegiance to trendy pedagogical approaches justified in the name of increasing equity. Nor has the declining performance of schools and reduction of choices and standards (like eliminating gifted and talented programs) in blue America generated much public pushback. Although it's also evident that falling enrollments in cities like Seattle are due to more affluent parents in these areas quietly moving their children into higher performing private schools. So what are the root causes the sinking performance of public education systems in well-funded blue city school districts? For answers we turned to Whitney Tilson, an ardent (and unfashionable!) education reformer – Tilson is a founding member of Teach for America and of Democrats for Education Reform – who earlier this year ran unsuccessfully for mayor in New York as a Bloomberg-style technocrat, on a platform that significantly focused on fixing what ails New York City schools. While New York City spends more per pupil than any other jurisdiction in the country, academic achievement has declined sharply since the Bloomberg years, falling far behind Mississippi. Tilson argues that a trendy rejection of the culture of accountability that undergirded school reform efforts through the late Obama years, along with the hegemonic power of  teachers unions, is to blame. As one example, he points to blue cities’ rejection of proven phonics-based reading instruction in favor of the supposedly more equitable (and less accountable) “whole language” reading approach: “as a nation we allowed a dangerous left-wing ideological curriculum to infect our schools in a way that resulted in millions of kids not being able to learn to read properly.” You can read the plan to fix New York City's schools that Whitney Tilson offered during his mayoral campaign here.Our editor is Quinn Waller. Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Four years ago, a 36 year-old Harvard Law grad and City Councilmember named Michelle Wu rolled to victory as the first elected female, non-white mayor of Boston. Since then, she's racked up further governing successes: Boston these days is often touted as the safest big city in the country, and Wu has delivered progressive wins (albeit incremental ones) on free transit, fair housing and a municipal Green New Deal.Wu, up for re-election this year, provided an eye-popping demonstration of her  broad popularity in the September primary. She blitzed her free-spending establishment opponent -- the son of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft -- by a whopping 49 percentage points, prompting him to raise the white flag and exit the race. In so doing, Wu has, in less than four years at Boston's helm, established herself as a national progressive icon who has seemingly cracked the complex code of turning movement left ideology into a successful governance strategy, and who now stands as a role model for other young, energized progressives on the cusp of taking the reins in blue cities like New York and Seattle.  So what, exactly, is Wu's secret sauce of successful governance? How has she seemingly so rapidly turned the old, white ethnic, two-fisted Boston into a multi-culty latter day symbol of how progressives can not only win, but deliver tangible quality of life results on homelessness, crime and other hot button municipal issues?For answers, we turn to Emma Platoff, the political enterprise reporter at the Boston Globe, who has been covering Wu's remarkable rise since the mayor's successful 2021 run. Platoff tells us that Wu is indeed a talented politician who has threaded the needle of being both a progressive standard bearer and a supple pragmatist, finding success by forging alliances with previous ideological adversaries -- like the police union -- and by triangulating against political forces she can not overcome. But we are left asking a question that only time can answer: will the progressive mayors who follow in her footsteps be able to emulate her success?Our editor is Quinn Waller. About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

This week we take a look back at the COVID-19 pandemic with Steven Macedo, a professor of politics at Princeton University and co-author of "In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us" (Princeton University Press). The book offers a self-critical examination of how blue leaders and institutions in government, academia, science and the media navigated the unprecedented crisis. Macedo makes a provocative argument: that cosmopolitan elites, influenced by political divides and class blindness, made some significant mistakes in pandemic response. The conversation highlights a lack of public debate surrounding the trade-offs inherent in lockdown measures, school closures, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions. We also discuss the economic and social costs, disproportionately borne by low-income and minority communities. The episode was taped live before an audience at Seattle University at the invitation of Seattle University President Eduardo M. Peñalver (a fan of the pod!) as part of his presidential speaker series, which brings nationally known speakers to Seattle to discuss issues related to freedom of speech, viewpoint diversity and campus culture. Our editor is Quinn Waller.  About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

New York Times contributing opinion writer Nicole Gelinas, who writes regularly on New York City issues, is the author of a deeply researched and informative book, Movement: New York’s Long War to take Back Its Streets from the Car. In this fascinating account, Gelinas cogently argues that NYC’s unwinding of its robust early 20th century streetcar system, followed by decades of relentless effort by the city’s political elites to remake the landscape of the dense urban city to be car friendly, sharply undercut New York's livability and brought the city to its proverbial knees. Unwinding NYC’s car fixation, and restoring a welcoming and functioning transit system – and with it the city’s vitality – has been a 50-year struggle.A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Gelinas is that most fabled of unicorns (at least in our experience), an ardently pro-transit conservative. Her deep dive into New York’s 20th century car wars offers up some fascinating insights, not just about New York, but about blue cities generally. In this episode, we tease lessons from the grassroots political organizing in Greenwich Village, led by housewife Shirley Hayes, that in the 1950s stopped a Robert Moses road that would have split Washington Square Park, and how that decade-long battle raised the consciousness of a young Jane Jacobs. And we go deep with Gelinas on why transit is so central to the health of dense urban environments, and why, given that reality, so many urban electeds and residents  continue to worship at the altar of the automobile. We also talk about how important it is that transit systems are well run and welcoming. In particular, we discuss the wave of crime that beset the New York’s subway system in the 1970s and ‘80s, and how a young transit police chief named William Bratton, appointed in 1990, got a handle on subway crime by putting an emphasis on apprehending fare evaders. Bratton's “broken windows” approach worked, sharply reducing subway crime – a lesson forgotten by blue cities in the 2010s, when the curtailment of fare enforcement efforts sparked a new wave of transit crime and disorder, which again began to drive riders away. And we close with a discussion of why Trump’s move to send the National Guard to police blue cities won’t work.Our editor is Quinn Waller.About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In this special episode we venture outside our respective basements to explore a sprawling open-air drug market in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood, which resembles similar drug markets in poor, blue city neighborhoods across the US that have been overrun by the urban fentanyl and methamphetamine crises. Whether it's the Tenderloin in San Francisco, or Kensington in Philadelphia, or Skid Row or MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, the well intentioned, largely permissive policies towards hard drug use that in recent years took root in progressive-dominated bluer cities is coming under increasing challenge, and not just from Trump and the MAGA right.In the fall of 2024, Oregon rolled back its famous 2020 experiment in full drug decriminalization - as did Vancouver, B.C. earlier last year - after Portland neighborhoods like Old Town were overrun by addicts committing petty crimes to fuel their addictions. Recently installed San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has embraced more aggressive law enforcement and treatment interventions, as part of a nascent shift heralded by the city’s adoption of “Breaking the Cycle” and “Recovery First” policies.Our guide in Little Saigon is Andrew Constantino, a former heroin addict and outreach worker, whose recent Seattle Times op-ed, “Here’s what I Learned about Addiction at 12th and Jackson,” has struck a nerve in Seattle’s social services provider community. Constantino walks us through the streets of Seattle’s most notorious open air drug market, where methamphetamine, fentanyl, and stolen goods are openly exchanged at all hours of the day and night, and explains why so many fentanyl users are stuck here on the streets, trapped in a cycle of rising hopelessness and despair – due to the fleeting, highly addictive nature of the drug.With a searing candor, disarming humor and electric cowboy green hair, Constantino rejects many prevailing progressive orthodoxies to offer his own, deeply compassionate yet sharply questioning perspective on addiction, personal autonomy, and opportunities for productive interventions on the mean streets of blue cities.Our editor is Quinn Waller. Our producer and editor for this episode was Jennie Cecil Moore. About Blue City BluesTwenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

The Windy City is not just a great American metropolis – the third largest in the United States – it is a world class city, recognized globally as a center of finance, trade and economic dynamism, and as a cultural and tourist mecca. But there is an emerging counter-narrative about Chicago, a declension story of a great and proud urban powerhouse now fallen to its knees, beset by incompetent governance, fiscal mismanagement, declining quality of life, and shocking levels of crime and violence. There’s an argument to be made – and you’ll hear it in this episode – that present day Chicago is in dire trouble.How could a great American city lose its mojo so quickly? For answers we turned to Forrest Claypool, a man who could credibly be dubbed (and we mean this as a compliment) the Robert Moses of Chicago, a consummate power broker. Claypool boasts a breathtaking résumé: two stints as Chief of Staff for Mayor Richard M. Daley (son of Richard J. Daley), another under Rahm Emmanuel, a former business partner with David Axelrod, and who at various points ran the Chicago parks department, transit authority and school system. But Claypool is also a committed reformer who took on the old political machine as a Cook County Commissioner and who believes in the importance of good governance.The author of The Daley Show, a recent, fascinating account of the tenure of the younger Mayor Daley, who led the city for six terms (leaving office in 2011), Claypool tells us he wrote the book out of anger at witnessing the sharp decline in Chicago’s governance since Daley left office. While Daley was far from perfect and was ultimately brought down by accumulating scandals and controversies, Claypool cogently argues that the city worked, and thrived, in the Daley years. But no longer. We explore with Forrest what’s gone wrong since first Lori Lightfoot and then in 2023 Brandon Johnson – arguably the most unpopular big city mayor in the country – took the reins of power in Chicago. And we conclude by discussing what it will take for the city to regain its tattered glory. Our editor is Quinn Waller. About Blue City BluesTwenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In the latest installment of Blue City Blues, we welcomed Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, to join us in delving into the Trump-led defunding of public broadcasting. Zimmerman, whose incisive public commentaries have been published at the New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere, is the author of a recent op ed at The Hill in which he called on public broadcasters (and elite universities) to “openly admit their liberal biases.”As a highly educated cosmopolitan, in that piece Zimmerman (who outs himself as an NPR donor and lifelong Democrat) argues that it is glaringly obvious that NPR “caters to people just like me.” Openly acknowledging this orientation, he adds, might have enhanced the network’s credibility and bolstered public support in the face of Trump’s grossly exaggerated caricature of public media as advancing “radical, woke propaganda,” among other false claims.Our conversation explores how NPR, while always liberal, in recent years allowed a creeping "one-sidedness" to shape its coverage, alienating many core listeners, traditional liberals as well as conservatives. He argues that calling for self-reflection isn't "capitulation" to the Trump administration, but rather a necessary step toward fostering viewpoint diversity and upholding "small-l liberal values" like open exchange. While acknowledging the existential threat Trump’s defunding poses for smaller, rural NPR stations, the discussion turns to the broader political ramifications and lessons for blue cities, where public broadcasting’s core demographic and donor base reside.The conversation also goes beyond the plight of public media, drawing parallels to the challenges faced by elite academic institutions as they navigate unprecedented authoritarian, ideologically motivated attacks from Trump 2.0. Zimmerman believes that, despite these alarming attacks, universities must continue to build on recent efforts to redress their own turn towards cultural authoritarianism and work to restore an internal culture embracing intellectual pluralism. Zimmerman provides examples of where he thinks both universities and public media have failed to embody principles of open discourse, making them more vulnerable to conservative attacks and external pressures. The episode concludes by considering the future of public broadcasting in a post-funding era, and the possibility of restoring the "enlightenment liberal principles" that once defined these institutions.Read Jonathan Zimmerman, “On NPR and at elite universities, liberals should openly admit their biases,” The Hill, July 12, 2025.Quinn Waller is our editor. About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provinciaPlease send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

The political gulf between educated urban progressives and rural and blue collar Americans has accelerated in recent decades. The consequences for blue cities - and for the Democratic Party - are profound.In this episode, we explore the evolving rural/urban divide with Blue Dog Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who represents Washington’s State’s 3rd Congressional District in Southwest Washington. Outside the blue urban enclave of Vancouver, WA,  the 3rd CD is largely red-leaning Timber Country: it voted for Trump in all three recent presidential elections, and no Democrat had carried it in any race, federal or statewide, in more than a decade before Marie pulled off a stunning upset victory in 2022. She was then re-elected to the seat in 2024.In our conversation, Gluesenkamp Perez, who owned an auto repair and machine shop with her husband before her election to Congress, brings a thoughtful and unique perspective on the nature of growing hyper-partisanship. We begin by exploring what she learned from her experience running for the county commission in deeply rural, overwhelmingly Trumpy Skamania County in 2016, a race she lost, but one where she listened intently to the anger and resentment of her fellow rural voters who felt ignored by urban elites.The conversation also explores the challenges Gluesenkamp Perez faces from progressive Democrats who expect her to align with their positions on every issue. She argues that deliberative democracy is not about nationalized political tribalism or cookie cutter ideological checklists, but should be about authentically representing the values of the local community.We also talk with Gluesenkamp Perez about her efforts to revive and reinvent the moderate Blue Dog Coalition as the voice of blue collar voters within the Democratic Party. She emphasizes her "hyper-local" and "anti-partisan" approach, and the importance of focusing on tangible constituent needs.Finally, Gluesenkamp Perez, raised as an evangelical Christian, discusses the growing divide between secular cosmopolitans in blue cities and voters of faith. She emphasizes the importance of understanding and engaging with religious communities, arguing that it is a mistake to walk away from such a core part of the fabric of American life.Quinn Waller is our editor. About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Zohran Mamdani's upset victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary wasn't just a win; it was a seismic event that's shaking the foundations of the Democratic Party. How did a self-described socialist unseat a political giant like Andrew Cuomo? And what does it mean for the future of progressive politics in America's blue cities?This week we spoke with leading Democratic strategist and pollster Celinda Lake, who polled for Joe Biden in 2020 and polls for many progressives including AOC, to try and understand Mamdani's surprising win. Lake argues that Mamdani's "positive, solutions-oriented" message and "coherent plans"—from freezing rents to free daycare and city-run grocery stores—offered a compelling alternative to Cuomo's "horrible" campaign. We also explore how Mamdani's effective messaging and viral videos resonated with voters, offering a potential blueprint for Democrats looking to "stand for something" in an increasingly polarized political landscape. Quinn Waller is our editor. About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In this episode of Blue City Blues, we invited writer Sherman Alexie on to weigh in on recent cultural trends in blue cities.  Alexie has long been recognized as one of the country’s most talented, interesting – and funny – literary figures. The author of two dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, along with many short stories, essays and poems, Sherman has spent his life, and much of his writing, negotiating the boundaries between vastly different cultural communities: after growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, the child of alcoholic parents, he went on to become an “urban Indian” in cosmopolitan Seattle as his highly lauded body of work catapulted him into the rarefied ranks of the  literary elite. Much of Alexie’s recent writing has been on Substack, where he has a large and devoted following. That work touches, in layered and nuanced ways, on the beliefs and the failings of blue city urban cultural, intellectual and activist elites. Alexie, sometimes subtly and obliquely and sometimes more directly, questions the assumptions of the self-righteous, puncturing the sense of certitude and moral perfection that has gripped much of the educated left. In our conversation, Alexie tells us why, drawing on a terrifying youthful encounter with a budding murderer-in-training on the reservation, he felt compelled to question the abolitionist pieties of Ivy League academics, why he now has a complicated relationship with leftist politics, and why he describes himself as “artistically a libertarian” and has come to believe that “every writer is an individual who owes loyalty to nobody.”Our editor is Quinn Waller. About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?Outside references:Sherman Alexie essay, "The 'I' in BIPOC," Persuasion, June 2, 2023.Sherman Alexie poem, "Unsayable," April 22, 2025.Alexie on "decolonizing literature."Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In 2020, when the power of social media – Twitter, in particular – to police the boundaries of acceptable thought in blue cities was at its cultural zenith, journalists Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal launched their boundary-shattering podcast, Blocked and Reported. BARPod, as it’s referred to by its growing legions of fans (us included), is focused on “scour[ing] the internet for its craziest, silliest, most sociopathic content, part of an obsessive and ill-conceived attempt to extract kernels of meaning and humanity from a landscape of endless raging dumpster fires.”A lot of that crazy, silly, sociopathic content involved detailing the self-righteous foibles of cancel culture-era social media authoritarians, which made sense since both Katie and Jesse had previously been on the receiving end of Twitter mob cancellation attempts (after writing stories about detransitioners) from the very online commissars of cosmopolitan progressivism. So over four plus years and now more than 260 highly entertaining BARPod episodes, Herzog and SIngal have, humorously and insightfully and with commendable sanity, cataloged the crazy and the bizarre and the hurtful across social media platforms and other online spaces. But since the purchase (and renaming) of Twitter by Elon Musk, things have changed a lot in the virtual world. Once the online town square for blue city elites, X has now been enshittified, and the online cadres of urban progressives have decamped en masse, either self-ghettoizing themselves at Bluesky or scattering across a wide range of increasingly siloed platforms. So we asked Katie, formerly a staff writer at the Stranger in Seattle and the author of an upcoming book, Drink Your Way Sober, set to be released in September, onto BCB to explore what this new era of social media fragmentation means for the culture and politics of blue cities.  We discuss the origin story of BARPod and what prompted Katie and Jesse, in that semi-hysterical moment that layered anxieties over COVID, Trump and the fallout from the murder of George Floyd, to decide it was the right time to call out online progressive excesses. And we talk about what the downstream consequences were of the old era of social media cultural dominance in blue cities, why her podcast was such an instant hit, and how BARPod and its audience – and blue cities – are evolving given that the cultural Maoism of the woke era now is seemingly giving way to the new Trumpist era of cultural fascism. And we speculate about what, if anything, might fill the void left by the post-Musk wreckage of Twitter.Our editor is Quinn Waller. About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s UrPlease send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In January of 2022, The Atlantic published staff writer Derek Thompson’s manifesto calling for a fundamental reform of progressive governance. “We need an abundance agenda… focused on solving our national problem of scarcity,” he asserted. Fleshed out by New York Times journalist Ezra Klein and a small nucleus of like-minded, mostly Bay Area-based thinkers, including Misha David Chellam, the co-founder of The Abundance Network, that new progressive policy agenda – centered on how to unleash the power of government, particularly in blue cities, to build more housing and infrastructure and deliver better quality-of-life results – soon followed.  Since then, Abundance has gone national. Earlier this year Klein and Thompson published their New York Times #1 bestseller on the topic, sparking an enormous (and ongoing) new wave of discussion – and in some corners sharp push back – among left-of-center elites about what Klein had previously dubbed “supply side progressivism.” So what exactly is the Abundance agenda? Is it the technocratic answer to what ails blue cities? Or is it the same old, failed neoliberalism with a cosmetic, progressive-sounding makeover, as some of its critics within the movement left claim? To explore these questions, and to discuss where the still nascent Abundance movement is heading, we invited Misha David Chellam, who writes on Abundance topics at the Modern Power Substack page, onto Blue City Blues. Chellam described Abundance to us as a “non-ideological, truth-seeking exercise to improve governance,” and added, “We should pursue a model of governance that holds liberal values and pro-government values, but also holds a high bar for institutions to deliver and solve problems.”Our editor is Quinn Waller. About Blue City Blues: Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Public safety policy reformer Lisa Daugaard won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2019 for her work creating the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which has become a much touted national model for progressive criminal justice reform. The idea is to help low-level homeless offenders arrested for crimes like shoplifting by connecting them with shelter and mental health and addiction services, as opposed to just jailing them before releasing them back onto the streets.But Daugaard is no police or prison abolitionist. In fact, she argues that the politics of abolition that emerged before 2020 helped provoke a backlash, which slowed some of the progress blue cities had been making to improve how police and the courts operate.So what does she think of Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom's controversial call for local governments to clear more homeless encampments? Tune in and find out!Our editor is Quinn Waller. Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Seattle venture capitalist and Democratic megadonor Nick Hanauer doesn’t fit neatly into pre-fab boxes. He’s a wildly successful tech investor who denounces tech moguls as “narcissistic sociopaths.” He’s a billionaire “class-traitor” (his term) who’s been sounding the alarm about what he sees as the dangerous obliviousness of the ultrarich to the resentment their class privilege engenders. He’s a proud capitalist who rails against neoliberalism and who developed and popularized the concept of “middle out” economics.In short, Hanauer, a host of the popular Pitchfork Economics podcast (President Joe Biden was a recent guest), has strong opinions on lots of topics, including what ails blue cities, and why. In our wide ranging conversation with Nick for the latest BCB episode, Nick voices his frustrations with the seemingly intractable problems evident on the streets of blue cites: unsheltered homelessness, untreated mental illness, unchecked street disorder. While he blames ideologically misguided governance in blue cities for not appropriately tackling these problems, he says the blame for their existence, and their daunting scale, lies elsewhere: with 50 years of neoliberal policies that have led to disinvestment in public priorities like institutions for the mentally ill or affordable housing. Policies he says Democratic elites – and in particular Barack Obama – and the party’s donor class have been complicit in. “That was Obama-ism to me: we’re going to put a good face on how much we care about the little people, but we’re really not going to do anything about it,” Nick tells us. “A kinder, gentler form of trickle down economics.”Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In a quest to reinvent municipal governance, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is breaking ranks and breaking a few eggs. A Harvard grad who made his bones in the disruption-centered world of Silicon Valley tech startups, he tells us he's put his focus on prioritizing results over ideology since becoming mayor of one of California’s biggest blue cites in 2023. Along the way, Mahan has been more than willing to touch progressive third rails. Take Prop 36, a 2024 CA ballot measure toughening sentences for drug and theft crimes. Openly bucking Gavin Newsom and the Democratic establishment, Mahan went all in advocating for Prop 36. Fed up Cali voters backed it too, passing it by more than two to one. He hasn’t stopped there. Mahan’s call for “a revolution of common sense” has led to breaks with public sector unions over pay raises and linking pay to performance, to prioritizing shelter over housing, and – most recently – to his controversial proposal to arrest homeless people who repeatedly refuse offers of shelter. So far, it’s working at the ballot box: Mahan was re-elected last year in a cakewalk, with 87 percent of the vote.So we decided to go deep with one of the nation’s more unique blue city mayors. “Historically, cities have been engines of economic opportunity and upward mobility, and I think that's where we're struggling most,” Mahan told us in explaining his motives for broadly rethinking blue city governance. Is Mahan a role model or a pariah? Listen to what he has to say and decide for yourself.  Our editor is Quinn Waller. About Blue City Blues Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

This week, we take a close look at Trump's tariff-happy trade war and its impact on blue cities with New York Times global economics correspondent Peter Goodman, the author of Davos Man and How the World Ran Out of Everything.We explore the political tightrope blue city and Democratic Party leaders are walking on trade policy. Are they anti-tariffs or just anti-Trump’s tariffs? And we ask Peter: Is Trump dismantling the global neoliberal free trade regime as left-progressive activists have been demanding dating back at least to the Clinton Administration? And, if everyone agrees the status quo is failing American workers, how much of the blame for that falls on blue city Democrats?  Goodman argues Trump’s erratic, on-again-off-again tariffs chest thumping is not rescuing the American working class. But it is killing confidence in the U.S. as a safe harbor for investment and ushering in an extreme form of crony capitalism. We also get into the possible real-world consequences of Trump’s tariffs for the non-investor class in blue cities, including the potential for a recession and shortages of essential goods. Our editor is Quinn Waller. About Blue City Blues Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Donald Trump is in full retribution mode and the anxiety – and anger – in blue cities is spiking. Sex advice columnist and friend o’ the podcast Dan Savage joins us to talk about how blue cities should (and should not) resist an aggressively authoritarian administration that sees them as the enemy.We go deep on the April 5th protests, dissecting everything from the signs ("We’re all the couch now”) to the range of concerns roiling blue city residents. Dan shares his thoughts about grassroots movements, the power of showing up, and whether marching actually changes anything. We also talk about the best path to growing the anti-Trump resistance, how blue city  resistance could be more effectively framed and messaged, the pitfalls of "purity tests," and whether a general strike could be on the horizon. Plus, we get into some serious blue city governance talk. How should mayors and city councils be pushing back against this administration? Should they be laying low, or leading the charge? And is building more damn housing a form of resistance?Our editor is Quinn Waller. About Blue City Blues Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In recent years San Francisco, widely regarded as America’s most progressive city, has experienced a far-reaching anti-progressive backlash. In 2022, voters recalled three progressive school board members and progressive DA Chesa Boudin. Then moderates took control of the city’s Board of Supervisors. Last year they won a majority on the city’s Democratic Party central committee, and in November San Francisco elected a new moderate mayor and decisively re-elected the centrist tough-on-crime DA who replaced Boudin. In a detailed, deeply reported piece in The New Republic titled “The Shadowy Millions Behind San Francisco’s ‘Moderate” Politics,” left-leaning journalist Laura Jedeed connects the dots to argue this remarkable political shift did not happen organically, but rather was sparked by a sustained, lavishly funded organizing campaign backed by a handful of tech industry titans. We invited Jedeed on to Blue City Blues to tell us what she found when she followed the money that helped to fuel San Francisco’s moderate backlash. While she sees this effort as fundamentally deceptive and illegitimate, we probe with her how much, big spending aside, voter unhappiness with progressive rule in San Francisco is rooted in something real, and how much San Francisco’s moderate backlash differs from the backlash experienced in other blue cities like Seattle.You can follow more of Jedeed's writing at https://www.bannedinyourstate.com.Our editor is Quinn Waller. About Blue City Blues Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Former National Public Radio and Slate journalist Mike Pesca, host of the longest-running (and highly entertaining!) daily news podcast, "The Gist," joins us to talk about the tough challenges blue city media is facing during the terrifying roller coaster ride that is Trump’s second term. Especially at a time when public trust in the media is at a record low.Mike's got some well informed - and strong - opinions on whether major blue city outlets like the Washington Post and LA Times are caving to pressure from the Trump administration, and if the media outlets that shape the worldview of urban archipelago elites – the New York Times, NPR, et al – are doing enough to win back the public’s trust. We also chat about whether the whole "moral clarity" approach to news (a major hallmark of the Trump 1.0 era) is about to make a comeback, or whether old-school “objectivity” approaches are in the ascendency. Plus, we discuss what the hell is up with California Governor Gavin Newsom's new podcast that features right-wing guests like Charlie Kirk, and whether the mainstream media is correctly interpreting Newsom’s political and media play. Nor do we shy away from the big questions, like, how should legacy blue city newsrooms adapt to the rise of social media?    Our editor is Quinn Waller.About Blue City Blues Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.   America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

In this episode, we dive deep into some of the big questions every left-of-center political observer has been asking: what the hell went so wrong in the last election? Why did so many urban working class voters in blue cities swing hard towards Trump? And is there any reason to think that the Trumpist right is making a credible and serious economic (as opposed to cultural) play to build a durable blue collar, multi-racial Republican majority?To answer these questions, we sit down with veteran progressive labor movement strategist David Rolf, who until his retirement was a national leader in the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and who ran the biggest union local in Washington State, representing 55,000 home care workers. A little over a decade ago, Rolf lit the match that sparked the $15 minimum wage movement that swept big blue cities from Seattle to New York. The author of The Fight for $15: The Right Wage for a Working America (2016), Rolf is also one of the smartest thinkers in the country about the role of organized labor in our broader economy and politics. In our conversation, he breaks down the historical trends around the union vote, and explains why working class Americans have been drifting away from the Democratic party in recent years. We also ask Rolf why an ardent progressive trade unionist like himself has entered into dialogue with conservatives like Oren Cass, whose think tank, American Compass, is pressing the Republican Party to adopt a pro-blue collar policy agenda. And we get Rolf's take on the emerging debate within the GOP around economic policies aimed at appealing to workers. Plus, he shares his insights into the apparent cultural disconnect between union leadership and their rank-and-file members, and what the labor movement needs to do to reconnect with the broader working class.  Our editor is Quinn Waller About Blue City BluesTwenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

The wave of bold new decriminalization-centered approaches to drug policy reform that swept West Coast cities from San Francisco to Vancouver, B.C. starting around 2020 has failed, according to one the nation’s leading drug policy experts, former Obama White House drug policy advisor and Stanford psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys. On this week’s Blue City Blues, we invited Professor Humpreys on to explore why.  Humphreys, the author of a recent Brookings Institution paper on “The rise and fall of Pacific Northwest drug policy reform,” blames the failure on a sharp shift by reform advocates away from proven public health and harm reduction approaches to new notions about the individual autonomy of drug users, ideas that emerged out of a strange conflation of progressive and libertarian ideas. In an effort to “destigmatize” addiction, reformers created new policy models that rejected the idea that addiction to drugs like fentanyl or methamphetamine is a problem that necessarily even needs solving. Humphreys believes these West Coast reformers were right to want to correct the punitive excesses and other shortcomings of the War on Drugs. He does not want society to put more drug users behind bars. But in his view, blue city reformers swung too far, and made the mistake of embracing dubious approaches that sought to normalize addiction to hard drugs and ignored its serious personal and social harms.Humphreys criticizes reformers for refusing to consider the way addiction can rip families apart, or how crimes associated with drug dealing and rampant addiction can injure neighborhoods. The conversation also gets into the serious challenges posed by the displacement of heroin by fentanyl on the streets of blue cities, and the limitations of the Portuguese drug reform model in the U.S. West Coast context.Our editor is Quinn Waller. About Blue City BluesTwenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Democrat Adam Smith has spent the last several years engaged in a (perhaps quixotic?) crusade to save the Democratic Party from itself. The veteran congressman, who represents parts of Seattle and its South King County suburbs in Washington's 9th Congressional District, recently played the starring role in a New Yorker article titled "The Not-Quite-Anti-Woke Caucus." In the story, Smith joined a few like-minded congressional colleagues in forcefully calling out recent shifts within the left-progressive culture that dominates blue cities, changes which he believes are leading to governing failures and poor outcomes. By moving away from traditional cultural beliefs in notions of personal responsibility, accountability, the need for maintaining standards and emphasizing hard work, blue city leaders are screwing up, Smith says. "The way we Democrats have chosen to govern over the course of the last ten years has not succeeded,” he bluntly told the author of the piece. He's worried that incompetent blue city governance on issues like homelessness and crime is hurting his constituents and the Democratic Party's brand locally and nationally. We asked Congressman Adam Smith to join us on the podcast to elaborate on why he thinks that the current ideological and cultural landscape of blue cities contributed to Trump's victory in November, and why he feels such a strong need to speak out about what he sees as he the mounting failures of blue city governance. Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Freddie DeBoer knows a thing or two about mental illness. He’s been admitted into psychiatric hospitals five times; he was involuntarily committed in 2002. He has, as they say, lived experience. Freddie is also one of our most original and independent commentators on American cultural trends. A self-described Marxist and a cogent critic of recent ideological turns within blue city progressive culture, he has written extensively, with clarity and passion and urgency, about why the idea of involuntary commitment of the severely mentally ill has long been a third rail in progressive blue city politics, and why that needs to change. We asked Freddie on to make his case for reforming our laws and procedures, and also our attitudes, about how to address the problem of the mentally ill suffering on blue city streets. And to discuss why the disability rights community has gotten this issue so wrong.  "If the left does not have a vision for how to solve these problems, then the people will elect strong men who will come in and do it in a worse way," he told us.  Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi is having a well-deserved moment. His highly praised new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press), released last October, has caused quite the stir, becoming the cutting edge of a burgeoning elite cultural reassessment of the decade plus-long “Great Awokening” that we all just lived through.Professor al-Gharbi's provocative thesis, that the complex of identitarian ideas that came to be known (and later disparaged) as ”woke” gained prominence in the 2010s when it became the defining ideology of a rising knowledge economy elite he dubs “symbolic capitalists,” and that the rise of woke was always far more about intra-elite struggles for power and status than it was about uplifting the actually marginalized, has the ring of truth. And it explains a lot about the recent cultural and political trajectory of blue cities, where, if anything, the poor and the downtrodden have fallen farther behind even as the progressive ruling class of urban America has spent years paying ostentatious lip service to the language of social justice. Musa al-Gharbi joins us on Blue City Blues to talk about why blue cities went woke, why that shift did nothing to help the truly marginalized, where the symbolic capitalist class may be headed in the era of Trump 2.0, and other insights from We Have Never Been Woke. Our editor is Quinn Waller. Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected] the show