Blue City Blues

David Hyde, Sandeep Kaushik
  • 4.9 (84)
  • POLITICS
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

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? 

  1. 4D AGO

    Democracy Dies in Ineffectiveness with Richard Pildes

    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 bluecitypodcast@gmail.com Support the show

    57 min

  2. APR 8

    In Praise of “Solid B" Cities with Halina Bennet

    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 – that 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 bluecitypodcast@gmail.com Support the show

    47 min

  3. MAR 31

    Three Blue City Mayors Innovating on Drug Policy with Keith Humphreys

    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 bluecitypodcast@gmail.com Support the show

    47 min

  4. MAR 24

    Do Public Sector Unions Wield Too Much Power in Blue Cities?

    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 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 bluecitypodcast@gmail.com Support the show

    56 min

  5. MAR 20

    Eboo Patel Says Blue America Needs to Rethink How We Do Diversity

    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 bluecitypodcast@gmail.com Support the show

    57 min

  6. MAR 14

    A Dem Socialist Insurgency in Los Angeles?

    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 see 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 bluecitypodcast@gmail.com Support the show

    48 min

  7. MAR 7

    John Judis Has Advice for Young Leftist Mayors in Blue Cities like New York and Seattle

    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 bluecitypodcast@gmail.com Support the show

    53 min
  8. Why Does William Deresiewicz Believe the Culture of Elite Universities Elected Trump?

    FEB 25

    Why Does William Deresiewicz Believe the Culture of Elite Universities Elected Trump?

    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, 2017 William 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 bluecitypodcast@gmail.com Support the show

    57 min
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About

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? 

Information

  • Creator
    David Hyde, Sandeep Kaushik
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    51
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Blue City Blues
  • Show Website
    Blue City Blues

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