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
Why Didn't Blue Cities Going Woke Help the Marginalized?
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.
