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.

This week we take a look back at the COVID-19 pandemic with Steven Macedo, a professor of politics at Princeton University and co-author of "In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us." The book offers a self-critical examination of how blue leaders and institutions navigated the unprecedented crisis.

Macedo makes a provocative argument: that cosmopolitan elites, influenced by political divides and class blindness, made some significant mistakes in pandemic response. The conversation highlights a lack of public debate surrounding the trade-offs inherent in lockdown measures, school closures, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions. We also discuss the economic and social costs, disproportionately borne by low-income and minority communities.

The episode was taped before a live audience at Seattle University at the invitation of President Eduardo M. Peñalver as part of his presidential speaker series.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

New York Times contributing opinion writer Nicole Gelinas, who writes regularly on New York City issues, is the author of a deeply researched and informative book, Movement: New York’s Long War to take Back Its Streets from the Car. In this fascinating account, Gelinas cogently argues that NYC’s unwinding of its robust early 20th century streetcar system, followed by decades of relentless effort by the city’s political elites to remake the landscape of the dense urban city to be car friendly, sharply undercut New York's livability and brought the city to its proverbial knees. Unwinding NYC’s car fixation, and restoring a welcoming and functioning transit system – and with it the city’s vitality – has been a 50-year struggle.

A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Gelinas is that most fabled of unicorns (at least in our experience), an ardently pro-transit conservative. Her deep dive into New York’s 20th century car wars offers up some fascinating insights, not just about New York, but about blue cities generally.

In this episode, we tease lessons from the grassroots political organizing in Greenwich Village, led by housewife Shirley Hayes, that in the 1950s stopped a Robert Moses road that would have split Washington Square Park, and how that decade-long battle raised the consciousness of a young Jane Jacobs. And we go deep with Gelinas on why transit is so central to the health of dense urban environments, and why, given that reality, so many urban electeds and residents continue to worship at the altar of the automobile.

We also talk about how important it is that transit systems are well run and welcoming. In particular, we discuss the wave of crime that beset the New York’s subway system in the 1970s and ‘80s, and how a young transit police chief named William Bratton, appointed in 1990, got a handle on subway crime by putting an emphasis on apprehending fare evaders. Bratton's “broken windows” approach worked, sharply reducing subway crime – a lesson forgotten by blue cities in the 2010s, when the curtailment of fare enforcement efforts sparked a new wave of transit crime and disorder, which again began to drive riders away. And we close with a discussion of why Trump’s move to send the National Guard to police blue cities won’t work.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

In this special episode we venture outside our respective basements to explore a sprawling open-air drug market in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood, which resembles similar drug markets in poor, blue city neighborhoods across the US that have been overrun by the urban fentanyl and methamphetamine crises. Whether it's the Tenderloin in San Francisco, or Kensington in Philadelphia, or Skid Row or MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, the well intentioned, largely permissive policies towards hard drug use that in recent years took root in progressive-dominated bluer cities is coming under increasing challenge, and not just from Trump and the MAGA right.

In the fall of 2024, Oregon rolled back its famous 2020 experiment in full drug decriminalization - as did Vancouver, B.C. earlier last year - after Portland neighborhoods like Old Town were overrun by addicts committing petty crimes to fuel their addictions. Recently installed San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has embraced more aggressive law enforcement and treatment interventions, as part of a nascent shift heralded by the city’s adoption of “Breaking the Cycle” and “Recovery First” policies.

Our guide in Little Saigon is Andrew Constantino, a former heroin addict and outreach worker, whose recent Seattle Times op-ed, “Here’s what I Learned about Addiction at 12th and Jackson,” has struck a nerve in Seattle’s social services provider community. Constantino walks us through the streets of Seattle’s most notorious open air drug market, where methamphetamine, fentanyl, and stolen goods are openly exchanged at all hours of the day and night, and explains why so many fentanyl users are stuck here on the streets, trapped in a cycle of rising hopelessness and despair – due to the fleeting, highly addictive nature of the drug.

With a searing candor, disarming humor and electric cowboy green hair, Constantino rejects many prevailing progressive orthodoxies to offer his own, deeply compassionate yet sharply questioning perspective on addiction, personal autonomy, and opportunities for productive interventions on the mean streets of blue cities.

Our editor is Quinn Waller. Our producer and editor for this episode was Jennie Cecil Moore.

About 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?

The Windy City is not just a great American metropolis – the third largest in the United States – it is a world class city, recognized globally as a center of finance, trade and economic dynamism, and as a cultural and tourist mecca.

But there is an emerging counter-narrative about Chicago, a declension story of a great and proud urban powerhouse now fallen to its knees, beset by incompetent governance, fiscal mismanagement, declining quality of life, and shocking levels of crime and violence. There’s an argument to be made – and you’ll hear it in this episode – that present day Chicago is in dire trouble.

How could a great American city lose its mojo so quickly? For answers we turned to Forrest Claypool, a man who could credibly be dubbed (and we mean this as a compliment) the Robert Moses of Chicago, a consummate power broker. Claypool boasts a breathtaking résumé: two stints as Chief of Staff for Mayor Richard M. Daley (son of Richard J. Daley), another under Rahm Emmanuel, a former business partner with David Axelrod, and who at various points ran the Chicago parks department, transit authority and school system. But Claypool is also a committed reformer who took on the old political machine as a Cook County Commissioner and who believes in the importance of good governance.

The author of The Daley Show, a recent, fascinating account of the tenure of the younger Mayor Daley, who led the city for six terms (leaving office in 2011), Claypool tells us he wrote the book out of anger at witnessing the sharp decline in Chicago’s governance since Daley left office. While Daley was far from perfect and was ultimately brought down by accumulating scandals and controversies, Claypool cogently argues that the city worked, and thrived, in the Daley years.

But no longer. We explore with Forrest what’s gone wrong since first Lori Lightfoot and then in 2023 Brandon Johnson – arguably the most unpopular big city mayor in the country – took the reins of power in Chicago. And we conclude by discussing what it will take for the city to regain its tattered glory.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

About 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?

In the latest installment of Blue City Blues, we welcomed Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, to join us in delving into the Trump-led defunding of public broadcasting. Zimmerman, whose incisive public commentaries have been published at the New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere, is the author of a recent op ed at The Hill in which he called on public broadcasters (and elite universities) to “openly admit their liberal biases.”

As a highly educated cosmopolitan, in that piece Zimmerman (who outs himself as an NPR donor and lifelong Democrat) argues that it is glaringly obvious that NPR “caters to people just like me.” Openly acknowledging this orientation, he adds, might have enhanced the network’s credibility and bolstered public support in the face of Trump’s grossly exaggerated caricature of public media as advancing “radical, woke propaganda,” among other false claims.

Our conversation explores how NPR, while always liberal, in recent years allowed a creeping "one-sidedness" to shape its coverage, alienating many core listeners, traditional liberals as well as conservatives. He argues that calling for self-reflection isn't "capitulation" to the Trump administration, but rather a necessary step toward fostering viewpoint diversity and upholding "small-l liberal values" like open exchange. While acknowledging the existential threat Trump’s defunding poses for smaller, rural NPR stations, the discussion turns to the broader political ramifications and lessons for blue cities, where public broadcasting’s core demographic and donor base reside.

The conversation also goes beyond the plight of public media, drawing parallels to the challenges faced by elite academic institutions as they navigate unprecedented authoritarian, ideologically motivated attacks from Trump 2.0. Zimmerman believes that, despite these alarming attacks, universities must continue to build on recent efforts to redress their own turn towards cultural authoritarianism and work to restore an internal culture embracing intellectual pluralism. Zimmerman provides examples of where he thinks both universities and public media have failed to embody principles of open discourse, making them more vulnerable to conservative attacks and external pressures. The episode concludes by considering the future of public broadcasting in a post-funding era, and the possibility of restoring the "enlightenment liberal principles" that once defined these institutions.

Read Jonathan Zimmerman, “On NPR and at elite universities, liberals should openly admit their biases,” The Hill, July 12, 2025.

Quinn Waller is our editor.

About 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.
Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off,