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, Zimmerman, who outs himself NPR donor and lifelong Democrat, argues in that piece 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 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, with a n

The political gulf between educated urban progressives and rural and blue collar Americans has accelerated in recent decades. The consequences for blue cities - and for the Democratic Party - are profound.

In this episode, we explore the evolving rural/urban divide with Blue Dog Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who represents Washington’s State’s 3rd Congressional District in Southwest Washington. Outside the blue urban enclave of Vancouver, WA, the 3rd CD is largely red-leaning Timber Country: it voted for Trump in all three recent presidential elections, and no Democrat had carried it in any race, federal or statewide, in more than a decade before Marie pulled off a stunning upset victory in 2022. She was then re-elected to the seat in 2024.

In our conversation, Gluesenkamp Perez, who owned an auto repair and machine shop with her husband before her election to Congress, brings a thoughtful and unique perspective on the nature of growing hyper-partisanship. We begin by exploring what she learned from her experience running for the county commission in deeply rural, overwhelmingly Trumpy Skamania County in 2016, a race she lost, but one where she listened intently to the anger and resentment of her fellow rural voters who felt ignored by urban elites.

The conversation also explores the challenges Gluesenkamp Perez faces from progressive Democrats who expect her to align with their positions on every issue. She argues that deliberative democracy is not about nationalized political tribalism or cookie cutter ideological checklists, but should be about authentically representing the values of the local community.

We also talk with Gluesenkamp Perez about her efforts to revive and reinvent the moderate Blue Dog Coalition as the voice of blue collar voters within the Democratic Party. She emphasizes her "hyper-local" and "anti-partisan" approach, and the importance of focusing on tangible constituent needs.

Finally, Gluesenkamp Perez, raised as an evangelical Christian, discusses the growing divide between secular cosmopolitans in blue cities and voters of faith. She emphasizes the importance of understanding and engaging with religious communities, arguing that it is a mistake to walk away from such a core part of the fabric of American life.

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, 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?

Zohran Mamdani's upset victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary wasn't just a win; it was a seismic event that's shaking the foundations of the Democratic Party. How did a self-described socialist unseat a political giant like Andrew Cuomo? And what does it mean for the future of progressive politics in America's blue cities?

This week we spoke with leading Democratic strategist and pollster Celinda Lake, who polled for Joe Biden in 2020 and polls for many progressives including AOC, to try and understand Mamdani's surprising win. Lake argues that Mamdani's "positive, solutions-oriented" message and "coherent plans"—from freezing rents to free daycare and city-run grocery stores—offered a compelling alternative to Cuomo's "horrible" campaign. We also explore how Mamdani's effective messaging and viral videos resonated with voters, offering a potential blueprint for Democrats looking to "stand for something" in an increasingly polarized political landscape.

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, 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 this episode of Blue City Blues, we invited writer Sherman Alexie on to weigh in on recent cultural trends in blue cities.

Alexie has long been recognized as one of the country’s most talented, interesting – and funny – literary figures. The author of two dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, along with many short stories, essays and poems, Sherman has spent his life, and much of his writing, negotiating the boundaries between vastly different cultural communities: after growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, the child of alcoholic parents, he went on to become an “urban Indian” in cosmopolitan Seattle as his highly lauded body of work catapulted him into the rarefied ranks of the literary elite.

Much of Alexie’s recent writing has been on Substack, where he has a large and devoted following. That work touches, in layered and nuanced ways, on the beliefs and the failings of blue city urban cultural, intellectual and activist elites. Alexie, sometimes subtly and obliquely and sometimes more directly, questions the assumptions of the self-righteous, puncturing the sense of certitude and moral perfection that has gripped much of the educated left.

In our conversation, Alexie tells us why, drawing on a terrifying youthful encounter with a budding murderer-in-training on the reservation, he felt compelled to question the abolitionist pieties of Ivy League academics, why he now has a complicated relationship with leftist politics, and why he describes himself as “artistically a libertarian” and has come to believe that “every writer is an individual who owes loyalty to nobody.”

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.
Blue City Blues 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?

Outside references:

Sherman Alexie essay, "The 'I' in BIPOC," Persuasion, June 2, 2023.

Sherman Alexie poem, "Unsayable," April 22, 2025.

Alexie on "decolonizing literature."

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.

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, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a coll

In January of 2022, The Atlantic published staff writer Derek Thompson’s manifesto calling for a fundamental reform of progressive governance. “We need an abundance agenda… focused on solving our national problem of scarcity,” he asserted.

Fleshed out by New York Times journalist Ezra Klein and a small nucleus of like-minded, mostly Bay Area-based thinkers, including Misha David Chellam, the co-founder of The Abundance Network, that new progressive policy agenda – centered on how to unleash the power of government, particularly in blue cities, to build more housing and infrastructure and deliver better quality-of-life results – soon followed.

Since then, Abundance has gone national. Earlier this year Klein and Thompson published their New York Times #1 bestseller on the topic, sparking an enormous (and ongoing) new wave of discussion – and in some corners sharp push back – among left-of-center elites about what Klein had previously dubbed “supply side progressivism.”

So what exactly is the Abundance agenda? Is it the technocratic answer to what ails blue cities? Or is it the same old, failed neoliberalism with a cosmetic, progressive-sounding makeover, as some of its critics within the movement left claim? To explore these questions, and to discuss where the still nascent Abundance movement is heading, we invited Misha David Chellam, who writes on Abundance topics at the Modern Power Substack page, onto Blue City Blues.

Chellam described Abundance to us as a “non-ideological, truth-seeking exercise to improve governance,” and added, “We should pursue a model of governance that holds liberal values and pro-government values, but also holds a high bar for institutions to deliver and solve problems.”

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.
Blue City Blues 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?

Public safety policy reformer Lisa Daugaard won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2019 for her work creating the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which has become a much touted national model for progressive criminal justice reform. The idea is to help low-level homeless offenders arrested for crimes like shoplifting by connecting them with shelter and mental health and addiction services, as opposed to just jailing them before releasing them back onto the streets.

But Daugaard is no police or prison abolitionist. In fact, she argues that the politics of abolition that emerged before 2020 helped provoke a backlash, which slowed some of the progress blue cities had been making to improve how police and the courts operate.

So what does she think of Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom's controversial call for local governments to clear more homeless encampments? Tune in and find out!

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Seattle venture capitalist and Democratic megadonor Nick Hanauer doesn’t fit neatly into pre-fab boxes. He’s a wildly successful tech investor who denounces tech moguls as “narcissistic sociopaths.” He’s a billionaire “class-traitor” (his term) who’s been sounding the alarm about what he sees as the dangerous obliviousness of the ultrarich to the resentment their class privilege engenders. He’s a proud capitalist who rails against neoliberalism and who developed and popularized the concept of “middle out” economics.

In short, Hanauer, a host of the popular Pitchfork Economics podcast (President Joe Biden was a recent guest), has strong opinions on lots of topics, including what ails blue cities, and why. In our wide ranging conversation with Nick for the latest BCB episode, Nick voices his frustrations with the seemingly intractable problems evident on the streets of blue cites: unsheltered homelessness, untreated mental illness, unchecked street disorder.

While he blames ideologically misguided governance in blue cities for not appropriately tackling these problems, he says the blame for their existence, and their daunting scale, lies elsewhere: with 50 years of neoliberal policies that have led to disinvestment in public priorities like institutions for the mentally ill or affordable housing. Policies he says Democratic elites – and in particular Barack Obama – and the party’s donor class have been complicit in. “That was Obama-ism to me: we’re going to put a good face on how much we care about the little people, but we’re really not going to do anything about it,” Nick tells us. “A kinder, gentler form of trickle down economics.”