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
Katie Herzog on What the Decline and Fall of Twitter Means for Blue Cities
In 2020, when the power of social media – Twitter, in particular – to police the boundaries of acceptable thought in blue cities was at its cultural zenith, journalists Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal launched their boundary-shattering podcast, Blocked and Reported. BARPod, as it’s referred to by its growing legions of fans (us included), is focused on “scour[ing] the internet for its craziest, silliest, most sociopathic content, part of an obsessive and ill-conceived attempt to extract kernels of meaning and humanity from a landscape of endless raging dumpster fires.”
A lot of that crazy, silly, sociopathic content involved detailing the self-righteous foibles of cancel culture-era social media authoritarians, which made sense since both Katie and Jesse had previously been on the receiving end of Twitter mob cancellation attempts (after writing stories about detransitioners) from the very online commissars of cosmopolitan progressivism. So over four plus years and now more than 260 highly entertaining BARPod episodes, Herzog and SIngal have, humorously and insightfully and with commendable sanity, cataloged the crazy and the bizarre and the hurtful across social media platforms and other online spaces.
But since the purchase (and renaming) of Twitter by Elon Musk, things have changed a lot in the virtual world. Once the online town square for blue city elites, X has now been enshittified, and the online cadres of urban progressives have decamped en masse, either self-ghettoizing themselves at Bluesky or scattering across a wide range of increasingly siloed platforms. So we asked Katie, formerly a staff writer at the Stranger in Seattle and the author of an upcoming book, Drink Your Way Sober, set to be released in September, onto BCB to explore what this new era of social media fragmentation means for the culture and politics of blue cities.
We discuss the origin story of BARPod and what prompted Katie and Jesse, in that semi-hysterical moment that layered anxieties over COVID, Trump and the fallout from the murder of George Floyd, to decide it was the right time to call out online progressive excesses. And we talk about what the downstream consequences were of the old era of social media cultural dominance in blue cities, why her podcast was such an instant hit, and how BARPod and its audience – and blue cities – are evolving given that the cultural Maoism of the woke era now is seemingly giving way to the new Trumpist era of cultural fascism. And we speculate about what, if anything, might fill the void left by the post-Musk wreckage of Twitter.
Our editor is Quinn Waller.
Outside references:
You can read Katie's June 2017 Stranger article on detransitioners here.
David's Post Alley piece on the shifting journalistic standards at Seattle public radio station KUOW can be accessed here.
Sandeep's Post Alley piece calling out the excesses of the Seattle left after the November 2021 election is here.
