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PODCAST

Blue City Blues

David Hyde, Sandeep Kaushik

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

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All Episodes

57:08

Democracy Dies in Ineffectiveness with Richard Pildes

Blue City Blues ·

2026/04/16

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...

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47:24

In Praise of “Solid B" Cities with Halina Bennet

Blue City Blues ·

2026/04/08

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 m...

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46:52

Three Blue City Mayors Innovating on Drug Policy with...

Blue City Blues ·

2026/03/31

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 d...

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55:51

Do Public Sector Unions Wield Too Much Power in Blue...

Blue City Blues ·

2026/03/24

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-pocket...

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56:34

Eboo Patel Says Blue America Needs to Rethink How We...

Blue City Blues ·

2026/03/20

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 institutio...

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47:33

A Dem Socialist Insurgency in Los Angeles?

Blue City Blues ·

2026/03/14

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.&n...

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52:53

John Judis Has Advice for Young Leftist Mayors in...

Blue City Blues ·

2026/03/07

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 ...

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57:16

Why Does William Deresiewicz Believe the Culture of...

Blue City Blues ·

2026/02/25

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, incuriou...

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59:46

Anne Applebaum (Live) on Resisting Authoritarianism...

Blue City Blues ·

2026/02/12

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 Atlant...

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46:39

Ruy Teixeira on the Democrats’ Cultural...

Blue City Blues ·

2026/02/06

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 ...

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46:30

Best of BCB: Why Is San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan...

Blue City Blues ·

2026/01/30

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...

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58:51

Best Of BCB: Freddie deBoer on Why Blue City...

Blue City Blues ·

2026/01/23

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...

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61:24

Tricia Romano on the Village Voice, Alt Journalism,...

Blue City Blues ·

2026/01/16

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 pionee...

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59:43

Neil Gong on How Class Dynamics Shape Our Approach to...

Blue City Blues ·

2026/01/05

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 soci...

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54:42

Best of: Sherman Alexie Talks “Monsters,”...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/12/30

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 ...

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58:03

Kelsey Piper on the Shameful Truth that Mississippi...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/12/18

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 p...

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46:53

Emily Hoeven on Whether San Francisco's Backlash...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/12/14

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 call...

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72:12

How a Broken Foster Care System Fuels Crime,...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/12/06

Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care was a National Book Award finalist. Author Claudia Rowe 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% 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...

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30:30

What Makes a Great City?

Blue City Blues ·

2025/11/26

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. Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gm...

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58:59

Danny Westneat on Why Seattle Can’t Seem to Solve Its...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/11/10

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 ma...

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