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?
Blue City Blues
Was the "insufferable left" to blame for Trump's big gains in blue cities?
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 urban left contribute to Trump’s win? We discuss and debate.
Quinn Waller is our editor.
