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
Defund/Abolition Is Dead in Blue Cities. What now?
Public safety policy reformer Lisa Daugaard won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2019 for her work creating the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which has become a much touted national model for progressive criminal justice reform. The idea is to help low-level homeless offenders arrested for crimes like shoplifting by connecting them with shelter and mental health and addiction services, as opposed to just jailing them before releasing them back onto the streets.
But Daugaard is no police or prison abolitionist. In fact, she argues that the politics of abolition that emerged before 2020 helped provoke a backlash, which slowed some of the progress blue cities had been making to improve how police and the courts operate.
So what does she think of Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom's controversial call for local governments to clear more homeless encampments? Tune in and find out!
Our editor is Quinn Waller.
