The modern Democratic Party has a class and culture problem. Blue city leaders struggle to understand their cultural and political disconnect with working-class voters. Why did so many, both within and beyond blue cities, cast their ballots for Donald Trump, who gives tax breaks to the wealthy? When and how did the Democratic Party lose the allegiance of the white (and increasingly of the black and brown) working class?

In this episode, former politics reporter and author David Paul Kuhn joins us to unpack a pivotal, yet often overlooked, event: New York City's "Hard Hat Riot," a spontaneous May 1970 attack by hundreds of blue collar construction workers, in lower Manhattan building the World Trade Center towers, on long-haired anti-war protesters four days after the shootings at Kent State University.

Kuhn, whose richly textured book and fascinating new PBS documentary delve into the riot and its cultural and political import, discusses with us the crack up of the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition as a chasm grew between traditionally patriotic blue-collar workers and countercultural, college educated anti-Vietnam War "elites" amidst the economic shifts of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Kuhn argues the riot serves as a microcosm for an emerging – and enduring – political and social polarization in American politics. He argues that the "hard hats," frequently mischaracterized as pro-war, were in reality anti-anti-war, feeling their patriotism and sacrifices were being disrespected by protestors who were waving Viet Cong flags and burning the Stars and Stripes. The conversation explores how white ethnic working class Americans felt increasingly alienated from blue city leaders and the New Left counterculture, and how first Richard Nixon and then subsequent Republican politicians weaponized that rift for their own political advantage.

Drawing contemporary parallels, the episode explores how the events of 1970 New York City triggered the Republican Party's rapid inroads with non-college educated working-class Americans. The discussion examines the lasting impact of deindustrialization, cultural tensions, and the ongoing challenge for the Democratic Party to re-engage with this critical demographic, offering a historical lens through which to understand the persistent polarization affecting blue cities.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Read David Paul Kuhn, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working Class Revolution (Oxford University Press), selected as one of the New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2020”

Also watch PBS’ American Experience documentary, Hard Hat Riot, aired Sept. 30. 2025

Children in urban public school districts are falling behind. While a handful of lower spending red states – Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and, most notably, Mississippi – have delivered remarkable academic progress over the last 12 years, high spending districts in big cities like New York and Seattle have seen test scores plunge.

And it’s not just because of Covid. While over-long school closures in blue jurisdictions did wreak havoc on the educational attainment of children in those communities, the declines began long before the pandemic, coinciding with the shift away from (however imperfect) national accountability efforts that were born of the federal No Child Left behind law and other reform initiatives.

And yet, progressive politicians and school leaders in blue cities often hand wave away the declining performance of their schools, particularly with respect to the sinking test scores of low income children of color, even as they loudly proclaim their allegiance to trendy pedagogical approaches justified in the name of increasing equity. Nor has the declining performance of schools and reduction of choices and standards (like eliminating gifted and talented programs) in blue America generated much public pushback. Although it's also evident that falling enrollments in cities like Seattle are due to more affluent parents in these areas quietly moving their children into higher performing private schools.

So what are the root causes the sinking performance of public education systems in well-funded blue city school districts?

For answers we turned to Whitney Tilson, an ardent (and unfashionable!) education reformer – Tilson is a founding member of Teach for America and of Democrats for Education Reform – who earlier this year ran unsuccessfully for mayor in New York as a Bloomberg-style technocrat, on a platform that significantly focused on fixing what ails New York City schools. While New York City spends more per pupil than any other jurisdiction in the country, academic achievement has declined sharply since the Bloomberg years, falling far behind Mississippi.

Tilson argues that a trendy rejection of the culture of accountability that undergirded school reform efforts through the late Obama years, along with the hegemonic power of teachers unions, is to blame. As one example, he points to blue cities’ rejection of proven phonics-based reading instruction in favor of the supposedly more equitable (and less accountable) “whole language” reading approach: “as a nation we allowed a dangerous left-wing ideological curriculum to infect our schools in a way that resulted in millions of kids not being able to learn to read properly.”

You can read the plan to fix New York City's schools that Whitney Tilson offered during his mayoral campaign here.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Four years ago, a 36 year-old Harvard Law grad and City Councilmember named Michelle Wu rolled to victory as the first elected female, non-white mayor of Boston. Since then, she's racked up further governing successes: Boston these days is often touted as the safest big city in the country, and Wu has delivered progressive wins (albeit incremental ones) on free transit, fair housing and a municipal Green New Deal.

Wu, up for re-election this year, provided an eye-popping demonstration of her broad popularity in the September primary. She blitzed her free-spending establishment opponent -- the son of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft -- by a whopping 49 percentage points, prompting him to raise the white flag and exit the race. In so doing, Wu has, in less than four years at Boston's helm, established herself as a national progressive icon who has seemingly cracked the complex code of turning movement left ideology into a successful governance strategy, and who now stands as a role model for other young, energized progressives on the cusp of taking the reins in blue cities like New York and Seattle.

So what, exactly, is Wu's secret sauce of successful governance? How has she seemingly so rapidly turned the old, white ethnic, two-fisted Boston into a multi-culty latter day symbol of how progressives can not only win, but deliver tangible quality of life results on homelessness, crime and other hot button municipal issues?

For answers, we turn to Emma Platoff, the political enterprise reporter at the Boston Globe, who has been covering Wu's remarkable rise since the mayor's successful 2021 run. Platoff tells us that Wu is indeed a talented politician who has threaded the needle of being both a progressive standard bearer and a supple pragmatist, finding success by forging alliances with previous ideological adversaries -- like the police union -- and by triangulating against political forces she can not overcome. But we are left asking a question that only time can answer: will the progressive mayors who follow in her footsteps be able to emulate her success?

Our editor is Quinn Waller.