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
Best Of BCB: Freddie deBoer on Why Blue City Progressives Need to Get Real on Involuntary Commitment
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While David is away, we are reposting some early days Blue City Blues episodes that many of our more recent listeners may have missed. We thought this one, with author and cultural critic Freddie DeBoer, was a great conversation on a topic that remains timely. We'll be back with fresh episodes shortly:
Freddie DeBoer knows a thing or two about mental illness. He’s been admitted into psychiatric hospitals five times; he was involuntarily committed in 2002. He has, as they say, lived experience.
Freddie is also one of our most original and independent commentators on American cultural trends. A self-described Marxist and a cogent critic of recent ideological turns within blue city progressive culture, he has written extensively, with clarity and passion and urgency, about why the idea of involuntary commitment of the severely mentally ill has long been a third rail in progressive blue city politics, and why that needs to change.
We asked Freddie on to make his case for reforming our laws and procedures, and also our attitudes, about how to address the problem of the mentally ill suffering on blue city streets. And to discuss why the disability rights community has gotten this issue so wrong.
"If the left does not have a vision for how to solve these problems, then the people will elect strong men who will come in and do it in a worse way," he told us.
Our editor is Quinn Waller.
Outside References:
Freddie DeBoer, "Psychotic Disorders Do Not Respect Autonomy, Independence, Agency or Freedom," Substack (Freddie DeBoer), May 24, 2023
Freddie DeBoer, "The Case for Forcing the Mentally Ill into Treatment," New York, June 20, 2024
Freddie DeBoer, "'Well I Don't Know About This Involuntary treatment Business!' He Said, Stepping into the Safety of a Closed Tab," Substack (Freddie DeBoer), July 3, 2024
Freddie DeBoer, "You Call that Compassion?" Substack (Freddie DeBoer), Aug. 5, 2024
Freddie DeBoer, "What Is Freedom for the Mentally Ill?" City Journal, Dec. 2, 2024
Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com
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