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 Does Rep. Adam Smith Believe Blue Cities Contributed to Trump’s Win?
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, Smith joined a few like-minded congressional colleagues in forcefully calling out recent shifts within the left-progressive culture that dominates blue cities, changes which he believes are leading to governing failures and poor outcomes.
By moving away from traditional cultural beliefs in notions of personal responsibility, accountability, the need for maintaining standards and emphasizing hard work, blue city leaders are screwing up, Smith says. "The way we Democrats have chosen to govern over the course of the last ten years has not succeeded,” he bluntly told the author of the piece. He's worried that incompetent blue city governance on issues like homelessness and crime is hurting his constituents and the Democratic Party's brand locally and nationally.
We asked Congressman Adam Smith to join us on the podcast to elaborate on why he thinks that the current ideological and cultural landscape of blue cities contributed to Trump's victory in November, and why he feels such a strong need to speak out about what he sees as he the mounting failures of blue city governance.
