Blue City Blues

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 Sa...

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 i...

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...

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...

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, S...

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 cul...

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-Gha...

America’s bluest big cities are in a tense, co-dependent relationship with the tech giants that power their economies and anchor their prosperity.  It didn’t start out that way. When tech giants first decided, about 20 years ago, to decamp from their cloistered suburban enclaves to embed themselves in the vibrant hearts of big blue cities, a torrid big tech bromance with urban America flourished....

In decisively winning the presidency, some of Donald Trump’s biggest gains came in the places you’d least expect them: big blue cities and urban suburbs. A lot of Trump’s victory is due to voter dissatisfaction with mass migration and the price of eggs. But Dan Savage suggests urban progressives also need to look in the mirror: did an “insufferable" censorious streak within the culture of the...

Twenty years ago, in the wake of a searing presidential defeat, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities and to fortify them into an “ Urban Archipelago ” of culturally separatist bastions that rejected the reactionary politics of the larger red American landscape. And he got his wish.  Over the last two decades, rural places got redder and urban areas much bluer, and America’s bl...