Blue City Blues is a podcast that's about what's broken, what's working and what comes next in America's blue cities. Hosts David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik bring on a smart guest each episode to dig into urban politics, governance and culture. Clear-eyed conversation for people who care about blue cities and are skeptical of easy orthodoxies. Blue cities, we argue, represent an urban archipelago, which is shaping America's future. Subscribe to Blue City Blues now on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Jack Despain Zhou on Nikole Hannah-Jones and Why Excellence in Education Is So Controversial
Season 2 · Episode 29
Monday, September 28, 2026 • Duration 49:59
Nikole Hannah-Jones’ recent NYT Magazine essay – "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?" – in which she offers her mea culpa for enrolling her daughter in poorly performing, mostly minority public schools in order to demonstrate her commitment to her systemic racial equity principles, has caused a huge stir online. The questions it raises – and to a significant degree, avoids answering – about how best to provide a high quality public education to children in a nation riven with racial and class divides, are at the heart of our latest episode.
Jack Despain Zhou, better known by his social media moniker Tracing Woodgrains, in February 2025 launched the Center for Educational Progress, a nonprofit think tank focused on advocating for excellence in public education. CEP’s Substack page not only published Sandeep’s recent piece about the decline of Seattle’s public schools, but also publishes a wide range of insightful thinking about how to refocus public education on excellence, which Jack defines as in tension with the pursuit of equity that has driven American education for the last half century.
We asked Jack to join us on BCB to talk in more detail about what excellence in public education actually entails, and why those concepts and approaches are so controversial. Jack contends, forcefully, that children enter schooling with different aptitudes and learn at different rates, and that any truly effective and excellent pedagogical effort needs to be built foundationally on that reality.
Over the conversation, we discuss why the push over the last decade plus in progressive jurisdictions to unravel advanced learning opportunities and “detrack” students has produced poor results for students across the learning spectrum. We then dig into Hannah-Jones’ essay: while Jack praises her candor in describing her daughter’s unhappy educational experience in low performing schools, he argues that her explanation puts too much emphasis on the impacts of structural segregation and too little on the schools’ instructional choices, like eliminating homework in middle school or adopting equity grading policies.
“You can teach people, and you should teach people, and it matters that education does, in fact, work to raise the absolute level of students,” Jack tells us. “That is what I think schools should focus on: not equalizing people, but how far can we push people?”
Elizabeth Glazer is a former law clerk for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and federal prosecutor who prosecuted violent gang activity, who then went on to serve first as Deputy Secretary for Public Safety for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and later as Director of the Office of Criminal Justice under progressive New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio. Now Glazer is the founder of Vital City, a respected and influential urban policy ideas shop housed at Columbia Law School in New York City. Launched in 2022, Vital City puts a particular emphasis on championing innovative public safety policies that get past the typical blue city divides between movement left and center left.
Some of Vital City’s public safety ideas have caught the attention of New York’s socialist superstar, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, so we asked Liz to join us on BCB to talk about how to do public safety right in big blue cities with fractious left vs. center left politics and fraught racial and class dynamics. At a time when democratic socialist insurgents are capturing mayor’s offices in cities like New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C., and are then faced with reconciling their progressive ideological commitments with the need to deliver safe and welcoming environments for their constituents, we wanted to explore with Glazer how best to fill effectively the ideological and policy no man’s land between old school, largely discredited “blunderbuss” policing and the willfully naïve anti-enforcement utopianism of many present day progressive activists.
In our conversation, Glazer argues that public safety in blue cities, properly construed, should be understood less as an ideological contest and more as a basic function of effective government. The author of a recent Atlantic piece, “A Cheap Fix for Urban Crime,” that provides a fascinating (no shit, really!) argument that dramatically enhanced lighting and making other landscape improvements in high crime neighborhoods can dramatically reduce violence and other criminal activity, Glazer argues that smart policy choices that marry environmental design, prevention strategies, and social services with carefully targeted law enforcement can deliver the promise of successful progressive governance.
Why Does Joe Trippi Say Democrats’ Divisions Won’t Stop Them from Sweeping the Midterms?
Season 2 · Episode 27
Monday, September 14, 2026 • Duration 01:03:15
Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi came to national prominence in 2003, as the mastermind behind then-Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s internet-fueled insurgent bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. That groundbreaking campaign effort, which presciently harnessed grassroots and online Democratic base energy to challenge a seemingly out-of-touch party establishment that had coalesced early around John Massachusetts Senator Kerry, fell short – remember the “Dean Scream” implosion in Iowa? – but it nonetheless set the stage for a new paradigm in political campaigning.
Trippi then went on to further build his career boosting Democrats willing to challenge the inside-the-Beltway party power structure, working with candidates like Jerry Brown, who crushed former eBay CEO Meg Whitman in the 2010 California gubernatorial race, or former Alabama Senator Doug Jones, now running for governor in that ruby red state. So we asked Trippi, who also hosts his own entertaining and informative political podcast, That Trippi Show, to join us on BCB to dissect the current state of the Democratic Party, and assess the party’s prospects in the upcoming midterms.
Our conversation begins with Trippi explaining how the Dean campaign pioneered a direct relationship between candidates and supporters through blogs, online communities, meetups and small-dollar fundraising, which created a new campaigning infrastructure that made Barack Obama’s successful 2008 insurgent campaign possible: many early Obama supporters and digital organizers, Trippi says, came out of the Dean movement. But Trippi argues that Democratic leaders learned the narrowest possible lesson – how to harness grassroots enthusiasm to raise contributions online – while Republicans eventually grasped the deeper significance of bypassing traditional media and communicating directly with voters. Donald Trump, he says, is the candidate who best recreated the Dean campaign’s direct connection with supporters by turning Twitter into his personal political platform.
When then turn to the current divided state of the Democratic Party, with left-wing candidates like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan or Graham Platner (before he dropped out) winning swing state primaries over more traditional Democrats. Trippi argues, contra the conventional wisdom, that these sorts of energized leftist candidates are actually more likely to unify the party and increase turnout from more infrequent and politically alienated voters than conventional centrists, and therefore have better electoral chances this November. In answer to our objections – don’t these candidates run the risk of turning off more culturally traditional black voters, or working class voters? – Trippi strongly argues that the midterm elections are about one thing: Trump’s chaotic, destructive, and corrupt governance, and that for increasingly angry voters faced with Trump’s insanities the divides within and amongst Democrats fade into irrelevance.
Emily Dufton on the Maddening History of Our Broken System for Treating Opioid Addiction
Season 2 · Episode 26
Tuesday, September 1, 2026 • Duration 01:03:29
Elected on a law-and-order platform, Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs with a June 1971 press conference in which he declared drug abuse on the streets of American cities to be “public enemy number one.” Or so the conventional narrative goes. But drug historian Emily Dufton says that the true story is much more complicated, and interesting.
In fact, Dufton writes in her fascinating new book, Addiction Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs, between 1971 and 1973 the Nixon administration presided over a massive expansion of publicly funded methadone clinics and other treatment services that began to deliver real results in addressing the country’s burgeoning heroin addiction crisis, before largely abandoning the effort in the face of political backlash and public misunderstanding. And that was just the first of many systemic failures in a maddening, decades-long history of missed opportunities and failed approaches to dealing with the opioid addiction problem that plagues blue cities, which Dufton lays out in her book.
So we invited Emily to join us to talk about the history of what has gone wrong with our efforts to treat opioid addiction. That initial, promising early ’70s effort to build an expansive treatment system of methadone clinics was fully defunded once Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. After that, she tells us, the clinic system was largely privatized, and efforts to effectively and comprehensively help people with addiction became secondary to the profit motives of drug manufacturers and clinic operators. This was, she says, the rise of what she terms Addiction Inc., and she points out that today only about one in five Americans with addiction receives medication-assisted treatment (via one of the three approved drugs: methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone), which is the gold standard for treating opioid addiction.
As the conversation continues, it turns personal, as Sandeep explains both his deep reluctance to treat his own spiraling addiction in the ’90s with methadone and how, once he overcame the stigma, “methadone saved my life.” And Dufton tells the story of Dana, a close high school friend whose debilitating opioid addiction led to his suicide shortly after his 30th birthday, a tragedy that inspired her to spend eight years researching and writing the book.
Chris Cillizza on the Media's - and the Democrats'? - Parasitic Relationship with Trump
Season 2 · Episode 25
Friday, August 21, 2026 • Duration 01:02:50
For nearly two decades, Chris Cillizza was a star political commentator for legacy media. In 2005 Chris founded The Fix, the seminal, must read Washington Post political blog, before moving on to CNN in 2017, where he was based until 2022. Then, abruptly, he was laid off, and for a few dark months he thought his career in journalism was over. Instead, he started over in the brave new world of independent online journalism, moving his political coverage to his now hugely popular So What page on Substack and to its companion YouTube channel.
All of which is to say that Chris has had a front row seat to observe – and to directly experience – the 21st century upheavals of the media business. That’s why it caught our attention when Chris wrote a provocative piece in late July titled, “Donald Trump Was Right about the Media. And It Should Terrify Journalists,” where he argued that Trump was on target when he told the assembled media at the White House Correspondents Dinner that “you people have no idea how lucky you are. When I’m gone, you’re all going to be broke. Your business model is going to be finished.”
So we asked Chris to join us on BCB to explain his take on the plight of the legacy media, which he explains was on a sharp glide path towards collapse before Trump famously came down that escalator in 2015. “Donald Trump almost single-handedly saved legacy media from total and complete collapse,” Chris tells us. He juiced the attention economy, massively boosting public interest in his norm-breaking provocations, which in turn drove big circulation and ratings gains for legacy media outlets. But Chris also argues that the boost was temporary, a sugar high, and that the media’s increasing dependence on cataloging Trump's near daily outrages and shenanigans quickly turned parasitic, masking the industry’s ongoing structural problems.
We then turn to discussing Chris’ own searing experience of getting blindsided by his own firing from CNN, and the existential identity crisis it precipitated. But after some dark days, he says, he realized there was an opportunity to go his own way, and build his own brand online. The new world of media he joined was one built around the “disaggregation” of the old multi-faceted journalistic product offered by old media battleships like the . Though he intriguingly predicts that the future of the online independent media may be in a process of “reaggregation.”
Michael Powell Pt. 2: "The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs"
Season 2 · Episode 24
Tuesday, August 11, 2026 • Duration 01:01:12
Atlantic staff writer Michael Powell, our guest on the last BCB episode where we discussed NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the rise of anti-Zionism on the left, rejoins us for a second conversation about his searing new piece, "The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs," which is now available online and will be published in the September issue of The Atlantic.
When David was reporting for Seattle's NPR affiliate, he interviewed a family living a couple of blocks from the open-air drug market in Little Saigon. Their daughter's school was on the other side of it. It wasn't just the degradation she walked past every morning, with people "shooting up in their neck to get a vein, and if they can't find a vein in their neck, you see them bent over, looking between their toes:" the family said she was getting followed, harassed and threatened, until they finally gave up and put her on a bus for a long commute across Lake Washington to a different school. These were progressive, compassionate people who wanted folks on that corner to get help. They called the city. Nothing ever changed.
That’s where we start this episode. Powell spent months working on his piece, which is built around on the ground reporting in Seattle, Vancouver, B.C. and Burlington, Vermont: three well-off, well-meaning, self-consciously progressive places where street addiction is rampant and, he argues, is enabled by a radicalized version of “harm reduction” policies that seek to normalize addiction. In Seattle, he spent time in Little Saigon, Pioneer Square and Dr. Jose Rizal Park, and what he found, he tells us, was "a sad and depressing thing to see in a city that has the resources and the ability to do something other than what it's doing."
We trace how we got here, from the early days of harm reduction, which originated as a pushback to the counterproductive excesses of the War on Drugs as well as a response to the early years of the AIDS epidemic, where the public health benefits of needle exchange programs were obvious. And which then led to Vancouver opening the first supervised injection site, which has now been replicated in dozens of other cities.
Michael Powell on Mamdani, Anti-Zionism, and the New Socialism
Season 2 · Episode 23
Friday, July 31, 2026 • Duration 01:08:03
In 2020, at the height of peak woke, then-New York Times sports columnist Michael Powell decided to make a career zag, abandoning sports to begin covering what he calls the “third rail beat” of the rising tide of progressive left illiberalism: controversies around race, identity, political correctness, and the increasingly censorious, authoritarian and oppressive cultural milieu of progressive institutions. It was a dangerous career move at a time when the New York Times was purging itself of perceived apostates like James Bennet and Bari Weiss. But Powell fearlessly dove headfirst into the verboten world of woke era authoritarian excesses because he believed mainstream journalists were avoiding these topics not because they were unimportant, but because they were controversial - and uncomfortable.
Now at The Atlantic, in March Michael authored a piece entitled “Where Mamdani Has Refused to Moderate,” in which he delves into the charismatic Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated New York City mayor's refusal to moderate on Israel, even as he's compromised on policing and other hot button left wing shibboleths. So we asked him to join us on BCB to unpack how the Israel-Palestine issue is increasingly animating - and defining - the blue city left.
But before we get into the meat of the issue, Powell recounts a 2020 dust-up when New York's DSA chapter disinvited Black Marxist scholar Adolph Reed Jr. over insufficient deference to identity politics, an early warning sign, in retrospect, of the fractures now playing out over Israel. Then we turn the conversation to Mamdani, and we explore the question of why anti-Zionism has risen, so fast and so sharply, to become the defining issue of the rising DSA left, and what this shift says about what it means to be a “socialist” in latter day blue cosmopolitan America.
We discuss how Mamdani's stance reflects a broader generational shift in which support for a two-state solution has given way to absolutist "river to the sea" politics, even as Zionism's own socialist roots in the early decades of the Israeli state get erased from memory. Drawing on his own campus reporting about the Gaza protests at Columbia University, Powell describes an environment where framing Israelis as "colonizers" forecloses any real dialogue. We then discuss whether "Zionists are the new TERFs" — in other words, the left's newest litmus-test heresy — and dig into the decline of AIPAC's political muscle and the rising anti-Israel currents on the populist right (Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes) that complicate any simple left-right narrative.
Is the DSA a Threat to the Democratic Party (with Jake Altman)?
Season 2 · Episode 22
Monday, July 20, 2026 • Duration 58:07
All of a sudden, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) seem to be a potent force within American politics, winning high profile mayoral and congressional races in blue cities across the country. In so doing they have grown from a fringe but scrappy activist group into a national political movement to be reckoned with, challenging the teetering establishment consensus within the Democratic Party.
But is the DSA a welcome reformist movement that brings new and more youthful energy and vitality and vision to a big tent Democratic Party still trying to find its way back to political relevance from the crushing defeats of 2024? Or is it the revolutionary vanguard of an extremist takeover of the Democratic Party that seeks to overthrow the party’s longstanding liberal beliefs and norms in favor of a radical Marxist-Leninist rigidly authoritarian vision that has no room to accommodate the party’s traditionally broad ideological diversity?
In our conversation, Altman traces his path into the DSA through his union organizing in the early 2010s. And then his growing disillusionment as DSA evolved away from a small collegial organization of mostly older believers in social democracy, who emphasized labor organizing, coalition building, and progressive reform. As an influx of hard left newcomers flooded the organization, they increasingly demanded ideological fealty to revolutionary and Leninist traditions and advocated luxury belief cultural positions like abolishing police and prisons that most working class voters opposed.
In so doing, Altman argues they have forgotten the lesson American socialists had learned almost a century ago in the New Deal era about the limits of human perfectability and the pragmatic value of working to regulate and temper, rather than abolish, capitalism. While Altman credits the 2016 Sanders presidential campaign for dramatically expanding the DSA and building its capacity for sophisticated electoral organizing, he says it also accelerated its internal factional conflicts. And those conflicts often resolved with the hardest line, most disciplined and centrally controlled factional caucuses exerting disproportionate influence over DSA conventions and elections.
Jonathan Weber on the Good, the Bad and the Ugly about How Tech Remade San Francisco
Season 2 · Episode 21
Thursday, July 9, 2026 • Duration 01:09:19
In 1990, at the dawn of the internet age, reporter Jonathan Weber was tapped as the LA Times’ first Silicon Valley correspondent. Taking up a perch in San Francisco, where he went on to become one of the city’s leading journalists, Jonathan over the next three plus decades had a front row seat to watch how tech innovation – closely followed by growing pyramids of tech money – transformed an economically down-at-the-heels but funky, counter-culturally adventurous, egalitarian and welcoming city into the affluent but sharply unequal global tech hub that San Francisco is today.
His colorful new book vividly telling the story of that transformation, City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco, has just been published. So we invited Jonathan onto BCB to recount both the gains and the losses for the city from its odd couple marriage with what, from humble and unlikely origins, rapidly became San Francisco’s Big Tech-driven economic engine.
Weber recounts how early internet culture was shaped less by the pursuit of wealth than by countercultural ideals of openness, experimentation, and community. As venture capital flooded into the city during the dot-com boom that began in the mid-'90s, those ideals gradually gave way to enormous wealth, rapid gentrification, and intensifying political conflict. Housing pressures led to rising rents, skyrocketing evictions, and displacement and resentment among longtime residents who did not share in the prosperity the rising tech economy created in the city. Beyond economics, many San Franciscans came to feel that their neighborhoods were being culturally transformed by newcomers with different values and lifestyles.
Our discussion goes on to explore how San Francisco's political leadership – mayors Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, Ed Lee, and London Breed – struggled to manage the tech boom and its attendant growth, and failed to fully capitalize on the enormous wealth being created in the city. We also delve into how, more recently, progressives spectacularly mishandled issues like homelessness and public street disorder, and how relations between the tech industry and blue-city politics have become increasingly strained. With the city now benefiting from another boom driven by artificial intelligence, Weber praises current Mayor Daniel Lurie for reversing the city's pandemic doom-loop vibe, but laments that San Francisco has lost much of the artistic, experimental culture that once made the city so distinctive.
Jamie Paul on the Memory-Holing of the Excesses of Woke
Season 2 · Episode 20
Saturday, July 4, 2026 • Duration 01:02:08
Jamie Paul, a former managing editor of Queer Majority and a contributing editor at Bi.org, is the founding editor of the American Dreaming on Substack, where (among his other writings) he has set out to provide a comprehensive catalog of the authoritarian excesses of the woke era of progressive cultural ascendency. At 11 extensively researched and sharply written installments (so far), Paul’s “Memory-Hole Archive” seeks to preserve for posterity the almost hallucinatory lunacy of what came to be the cultural currency and conventional wisdom in cosmopolitan America in the years between 2014 and 2023.
Paul argues that now that the woke era is behind us, the progressive left is collectively working to deny or deflect its overreach rather than learn from it, and he seeks to force a reckoning on the left of what went so wrong in the period when it monopolized cultural power. “If the innumerable left-wing overreaches of the past decade are not remembered, acknowledged, and learned from, we risk going down that same road again and perpetuating this cycle in which the political culture violently swings between the far left and far right,” he writes.
We are hugely impressed by the scope and scale of Jamie's accounting, and by his insightful and unsparing commentary on the left’s errors, and we agree with his contention that coming to terms with the failings of woke is necessary for the Democratic Party and liberal institutions to regain public trust, so we invited him to join us on this episode of BCB. In our conversation, we discuss how progressive institutions became increasingly intolerant of dissent during the late 2010s, and how the resulting backlash helped strengthen the populist right. And we also discuss how the right, now in the ascendency, exhibits its own dangerously authoritarian tendencies, backed by the power of the state.
Over the course of the discussion with Jamie. we dig into trigger warnings, safetyism, the privileging of lived experience, cancel culture, speech policing, the fixation on trauma and the power of therapy culture, identity politics, and progressives’ turn towards racial essentialism.
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As the discussion continues, we discuss with Glazer how her thinking about public safety has been informed by the original meaning of “broken windows policing,” but how that concept evolved over time into the mass police stops, sweeping gang prosecutions, and police targeting of entire neighborhoods, resulting in racially biased and overly intrusive policing. Liz expresses her optimism about the direction of public safety thinking in blue cities. Ideas once considered radical—civilian mental-health responders, violence interrupters, diversion programs, and summer employment as crime prevention—have entered the mainstream. The next challenge, she says, is integrating those innovations with policing instead of forcing cities to choose one side or the other.
Cities should combine restrained, targeted enforcement with violence prevention, mental-health response, youth employment, good lighting, maintained public spaces, and strong social infrastructure. “There is a way to create a safety strategy in which police are one civic service—but they’re just one—and there are many other civic services that can be woven together in order to provide a safe and vibrant city,” Glazer tells us.
Based on polling, special-election results and his own focus groups, Trippi suggests Democrats are poised to win back the Senate and score unexpected victories well beyond the usual battlegrounds. He identifies races in Alaska, Texas, Ohio, Maine, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Kansas as potentially now competitive. His work for Doug Jones in Alabama has convinced him that Trump’s position has deteriorated even in deeply Republican territory, and he compares the approaching election to the Republican landslide of 1980, when numerous Democratic senators thought to be safe were unexpectedly defeated. This time, he believes, Republicans could suffer the surprise losses.
“Forget about a ‘blue wave,’ this is a massive shock wave in response to Trump and what he’s done,” Trippi argues about the current psychology of the midterm electorate. ““There’s something that has become more toxic in the second [Trump] term than any concerns about what this Democrat or that Democrat might do.”
OUTSIDE SOURCES:
Sandeep's early profile piece on Howard Dean and his presidential campaign: "Tough Guy," The Stranger, May 15, 2003.
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As the episode concludes, we come to the disheartening conclusion that the American debate on addiction is trapped between two poles: either punishment without treatment or, as is too often the case in blue cities, tolerance without intervention. Emily then points to the counterexample of Switzerland, which in the 1980s faced an addiction crisis similar to that in the U.S., but subsequently developed an effective, multipronged approach that combines law enforcement with robust treatment interventions to greatly reduce the suffering and social harm addiction creates.
“Other countries don’t have the same issues with medication-assisted treatment that the United States does, and of course their overdose deaths are significantly lower,” Dufton says. “We should be almost embarrassed in the United States about how poorly we treat this issue. But I think we’re just too angry at drug users and simply too ready to transform their forms of treatment into additional forms of punishment to actually change our way of thinking.”
OUTSIDE SOURCES:
Emily Dufton, Addiction Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs, University of Chicago Press (2026).
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Washington Post
In the second half of the conversation we turn to politics, dissecting the rise of democratic socialism within the Democratic Party and how it has been upending primary races around the country, including Angie Nixon’s surprise win in the Florida Senate primary. We then discuss the implications of AOC’s “Woke 1 was crazy!” comment, the politically toxic legacy of Democrats’ flirtations with “defund the police” rhetoric, the prospects for Democrat Mary Peltola in the Alaska Senate race, and why Chris thinks, if the Senate is divided 50-50 after November, Lisa Murkowski might defect from the Republican Party to give Dems the majority.
And we close by connecting the two parts of our conversation, suggesting that both the legacy media and the Democrats have become too dependent on Donald Trump as the organizing principle for their respective business models. As we close the discussion, Cillizza offers some advice for Democrats: “Don't get blinded by Donald Trump, and that to me is, I think, what Democrats should focus on. They're not yet. We'll see if they do after the election.”
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We then discuss the central question at the heart of Powell’s piece: is it the case that somewhere along the way a movement built to keep people alive until they could get help turned into a movement that says addiction is just a lifestyle we shouldn't judge?
Powell says that if you think about your own family members, the problem with that approach becomes obvious. "Whenever I hear 'meet an addict where he or she is,'" Powell says, "I think, actually, it's a pretty grim place where they're at, and we should by no means assume that's where they want to remain for the rest of their life."
And we also delve into the glaring social costs of rampant addiction, often ignored by harm reduction advocates. Powell describes standing in the little pocket park built for Little Saigon's families at four in the afternoon watching 25 addicts openly using drugs, no kids, no parents, while the only city presence he saw all day was a team handing out foil and pipes in red packets stamped with the image of Martin Luther King Jr.
We also discuss the pushback to Powell's view in Seattle and other blue cities: that none of this is a policy failure, it's only a funding failure, a stance with which Powell disagrees. Powell says the response to the piece has been strong and has come mostly from people who very much do not want the war on drugs back but think the current, libertarian approach is not working.
If you value Blue City Blues, help us keep it going and make the jump to video by contributing at Patreon.com/BlueCityBlues.
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Altman contends that now the DSA has become a threat to the Democratic Party and its electoral fortunes, as it threatens to consume its progressive wing. “"I watched the DSA go from being the left wing of the possible to becoming something much more ideological,” he says. "They want to have the big tent. They just want to be the dictator in the big tent."
If you value Blue City Blues, help us keep it going and make the jump to video by contributing at Patreon.com/BlueCityBlues.
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“There was a period during the 2010s where a lot of people on the left thought that they didn't need to play by the old rules, which were you convince people, you change hearts and minds, you build the foundation, and then you build atop that,” Paul explains. “They thought they could build a third story where there was no first or second story, and it just came crashing down, because you know this isn't Looney Tunes, so now we're in this position where we have to win back trust.”
