In late February, Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon, who have both had extensive careers in Democratic governance – Nicholas was Chief Legal Counsel for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer until 2022, Robert most recently served as a Deputy Assistant to the President on the Domestic Policy Council of the Biden White House – went where few left-of-center commentators have been willing to go: they directly called out what they see as the excessive influence of public sector unions.

Those deep-pocketed unions are, of course, one of the major power centers within the Democratic Party, which may explain why even reform-minded commentators on the left, like the Abundance faction, have been noticeably reluctant to scrutinize their influence over governance in blue jurisdictions. But in a much discussed New York Times op ed titled, “Mamdani Will Need to Change How he Governs,” Bagley and Gordon broke ranks.

“If blue-state governors and mayors want to get serious about delivering excellent public services, they will need to do more than battle billionaire elites or embrace abundant housing and energy,” they wrote. “They will have to push back against a core constituency within the Democratic Party that often makes government deliver less and cost more: unions representing teachers, police officers and transit workers.”

So we invited Nicholas, currently a law professor at the University of Michigan, and Robert, now a visiting fellow at Harvard, to delve into why they think public sector unions have too often become an impediment to effective Democratic governance, particularly in big blue cities like New York or Seattle. Over the course of our conversation, they argue that while public sector unions play a crucial role in advocating for their members, they can also hinder progress by prioritizing generous pay, pensions and seniority over efficiency, accountability, and results.

They cite examples like Chicago's severe fiscal strain due to unaffordably generous pension benefits doled out to public sector workers, and we also get into the impact of police and teachers unions on efforts to reform policing and public education. We discuss the outsized role these unions play in electing Democratic politicians, and Bagley and Gordon emphasize the need for Democratic leaders to push back against unions in instances where they stand as an impediment to delivering better public services and governance.

“We wrote this piece because we think it’s important, if we want blue cities to achieve their promise, and if we want to have a viable and effective alternative to what the Trump administration is giving us, this is a conversation we need to have,” Bagley told us.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon, “Mamdani Will Need to Change How He Governs,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 2026.

Seattle Nice podcast: “Mayor Elect Katie Wilson says Seattle Nice is ‘Special,’” Nov. 20, 2025.

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Eboo Patel, an Ismaili Muslim, is the founder and president of Interfaith America, a Chicago-based non-profit that works to promote pluralism and foster cooperation across differences of religion. He is a fierce advocate for diversity - "America is a diversity project," he contends - and for the importance of identity to our conception of self. And yet he is also a sharp critic of DEI regimes as they are typically practiced on college campuses or within other culturally progressive institutions.

For our latest episode, at the invite of Seattle University President Eduardo Peñalver and as part of his excellent Presidential Speaker Series, we spoke with Eboo Patel live on the Seattle U campus. In the conversation, we asked Eboo to explain why he believes a conception of diversity rooted in pluralism will serve Americans better than one rooted in identitarian and anti-racist precepts.

"I dislike anti-racism as a paradigm. I detest it as a regime. I find it interesting as a critique," Patel told us. "But any point of view that insists on separating people into two categories - racist and anti-racist - is going to get itself into trouble very fast." Instead, he argues that pluralism, which he defines as five interconnected beliefs -- 1. Diversity is a treasure. 2. Identity is a source of pride, not a status of victimization. 3. Faith is a bridge, 4. Cooperation is better than division and 5. Everybody is a contributor - is a better foundation on which to understand the importance of American diversity. And the idea of pluralism, particularly religious pluralism, he adds. goes back to the founding fathers and the beginnings of the American republic.

As we get deeper into the conversation, we also talk to Eboo about why he sees American as a "potluck" and not a "melting plot," and why he doesn't think colorblindness works as a goal finding common ground across identity divides.

Our editor is Quinn Waller and this episode was produced by Jennie Cecil Moore.

OUTSIDE REFERENCES:

Eboo Patel, Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice and the Promise of America, Beacon Press (2012).

Eboo Patel, "Teach Pluralism, Not Anti-Racism," Persuasion, April 6, 2025.

Eboo Patel, "A Pedagogy of the Empowered," Persuasion, May 26, 2025.

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In the 1970s, as a young left wing activist seeking to upend capitalism, Karen Bass was a leader in the Venceremos Brigade, an organization that sends Americans to Cuba in support of the Cuban revolution. From those outsider beginnings Bass went on to become a progressive Speaker of the California State Assembly, and then chair of the Congressional Black Caucus in Congress, before defeating law-and-order former Republican mall developer Rick Caruso in 2022 to become Los Angeles’ 43rd mayor.

In other words, the 72 year-old Bass, once a young radical, is now a leading light within California’s progressive power structure. But she’s also reeling politically – with a job approval rating barely above Trump’s in deep blue LA – in the lingering aftermath of the devastating Jan. 2025 Palisades fire that consumed more than 6,800 structures and raised widespread doubts about the competence of LA’s municipal governance.

Which makes LA’s politics very interesting all of a sudden. As a beleaguered incumbent, Bass now finds herself fighting for her political life against a surprise challenger from her left. On the last day of candidate filing, an ostensible Bass ally on the Council, Nithya Raman, 44, a smart, former urban planner with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, shocked LA’s political class by jumping into the race.

The Democratic establishment has loudly rallied to Bass’ defense, denouncing Raman as a disloyal backstabber. But do the voters see things the same way? Or is Raman poised to be the next Zohran Mamdani or Katie Wilson, the democratic socialist insurgents who defied expectations to get elected mayors of NYC and Seattle last November?

For answers we turn to Melanie Mason, Politico’s California Bureau Chief and co-author of their California Playbook. Melanie has written vividly and revealingly about Bass’ mayoralty and about Raman’s dramatic entry into the race, and we dive in with her to understand better the contours of LA’s currently roiled politics. Mason offers her insights about Bass’ first-up-then-down tenure, why Raman’s last minute move to throw her hat in the ring is see as such a betrayal by LA political insiders, how much of a Mamdani analogue Raman actually is, what her chances are of overthrowing Bass, and what this all means for the politics of one of the country’s largest and most prominent blue cities.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

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Author, journalist, and political analyst John B. Judis cut his political teeth in the (briefly) ascendant New Left politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A member of Students for a Democratic Society until 1969, a founding member in 1971 of the New American Movement (a predecessor organization to today’s Democratic Socialists of America), and a founder of the rad left journal Socialist Revolution, Judis had a bird’s eye view of why that previous generation of leftists flamed out before getting anywhere near achieving their lofty goals for a transformation of American society.

Now a new generation of younger, energized progressives and democratic socialists is leading a resurgent leftism in blue cities. Boston and Chicago have ardently progressive mayors; New York and Seattle just elected self-described socialists to take the reins of municipal governance, a development that would have been all but unthinkable just a decade ago. And John Judis, currently a contributing editor at Talking Points Memo and previously a senior writer at National Journal and The New Republic (and a co-author of two books with recent BCB guest Ruy Teixeira), has some wisdom to impart to this New New Left.

In our conversation, Judis argues that while the rising college-educated urban left may not be the old industrial proletariat, it should nonetheless legitimately be considered a new working class of younger people “proletarianized” by automation and AI. And he says they are responding to their increasingly precarious material conditions and their decreasing control over their working conditions by driving this new push for class-based change. But Judis warns them not to run too far down a radical path.

He advises this new crop of leftist leaders to focus on “bread and butter” economic issues and avoid the “culture trap” of taking extreme social positions or imposing endless litmus tests that shrink and marginalize the movement. As we discuss American leftism then and now, Judis recalls the “religious frenzy” of performative radicalism that derailed the New Left in his youth as something that the new generation must strive to avoid.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Outside sources:

John B. Judis, “A Warning from the ‘60s Generation,” Washington Post, January 21, 2020.

John B. Judis, “The Left’s Project Has Just Begun,” Compact, December 5, 2025.

John B. Judis, The Socialist Awakening: What’s Different Now About the Left, Columbia Global Reports (2020).

John B. Judis, "The Feminist Revolution and the Democratic Party," American Affairs, Volume IX, Number 3 (Fall 2025).

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A former Yale English professor, William Deresiewicz has become one of the country’s most erudite and insightful commentators on the cultural trends that have remade higher education on elite campuses. He is a prolific essayist and the author of four books, including Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite (2014), which is based on an essay in the American Scholar that went viral, and which argued that the country’s most prestigious colleges were producing conformist, incurious careerists riven with status anxieties and uninterested in self-discovery or critical thinking.

Deresiewicz remains a sharp critic of elite universities’ self-congratulatory self-fashioning, and of their dogmatic commitment to a set of cosmopolitan progressive cultural beliefs around issues of race, gender and sexuality. And he has been arguing for some time – and with pointed urgency in the wake of Trump’s 2024 re-election – that the culture of the elite universities is no longer confined to those campuses, but rather has been colonizing the broader culture of blue urban America. With disastrous results for the Democratic Party, and, by extension, the country.

So we welcomed Bill on to the latest episode to talk about what has gone wrong with elite education in America, and how and why it has contributed to the current political disaster of Trump's ascendency. It’s a fascinating (for us, former grad students ourselves) and candid conversation, one in which Deresiewicz pulls no punches, arguing that the rise of wokeness and identity politics in academia has undermined liberal values and led to a rejection of enlightenment principles. The conversation also delves into the broader implications of these trends for American society and politics, including the disconnect between academic elites and working-class voters.

As Bill tells us, “This politics that had incubated in the academy for a long time, had leaped the walls of the zoo and was now running loose in the country… it is rhetoric of a very extreme variety, and it is now driving a certain segment of our politics. And outside of very blue areas… people don’t want it.”

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Outside sources:

William Deresiewicz, “On Political Correctness: Power, class and the new campus religion,” The American Scholar, March 6, 2017

William Dereseiwicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, Free Press (2014).

William Deresiewicz, “Academe’s Divorce from Reality: Americans are fed up, and not just people who voted for Trump,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 21. 2024

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Authoritarianism is on the march, not just here in the US but across the globe. It hardly bears repeating that we live in perilous and troubled times, as a potent and fundamentally destructive combination of nihilism and right-wing populism challenges the very foundations of the post-war liberal democratic order.

That’s why we were thrilled that the latest episode of BCB is a live taping with historian, celebrated journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic. Applebaum is perhaps the foremost chronicler of the rise of global authoritarianism, including the serious threats to democratic traditions posed by Trump and his administration, and our taping drew a near capacity crowd to Town Hall Seattle (total audience including live streaming of around 1000). Seattle, it turns out, is an Anne Applebaum kind of town where people were ready to hear her speak about "Resisting Authoritarianism Here and Abroad."

In our conversation, made possible by friend of the pod Haeryung Shin, and co-sponsored by Town Hall and the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Policy and Office of Public Lectures, we dig in with Applebaum about the nature and dimensions of the authoritarian threat both here and abroad, and how to combat it. We begin by asking Anne to dissect the essential nature of Trump 2.0, touching on the ways the administration threatens our existing democratic institutions. We talk about the current situation in Minneapolis, as well as Trump’s ominous call to an assemblage of generals last September to fight “the war from within” as he suggested the American military should use the streets of blue cities as training grounds. Are the guardrails in place to protect our democracy?

In the second part of our conversation, we delve into the global nature of the rising authoritarian threat. We discuss whether Trumpism is just the symptom of a much larger global disease, and ask Applebaum about her call in her 2024 book, Autocracy Inc., for the world’s democracies to cooperate more closely in countering the increasingly unified – and serious – threat posed by autocratic regimes like Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela. Applebaum also offers her views on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent speech at Davos and what it might mean for the United States.

Our editor is Quinn Waller. This episode was produced by Jennie Cecil Moore and edited by Robert Scaramuccia.

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 provincia

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com

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In 2002, political analyst and commentator Ruy Teixeira co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book, published near the zenith of the Bush presidency in the aftermath of 9/11, gave beleaguered Democrats cause for hope. Demographic change, Teixeira and co-author John Judis predicted, would soon create the political conditions for Democrats to forge an enduring political majority.

When an emerging coalition of educated knowledge economy professionals, minorities, young people and women powered the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 and 2012, Teixeira’s optimism appeared prescient. But the big Democratic majorities of Obama’s early years were ephemeral. The country remained closely divided politically, yo-yoing back and forth between the two parties. Trump won narrowly in 2016, and then again, catastrophically, in 2024.

Teixeira, now a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, has spent the years since Trump’s first victory excavating what went wrong for Democrats. So we invited him to join us on the latest episode to dissect the current state of the Democrat Party and its future prospects. In our conversation we explore why the leading optimist about the party’s future fortunes two decades ago has today became one of its most vocal pessimists.

Why did demography not turn out to be destiny? We discuss the core findings of Teixeira’s more recent analyses, laid out in a string of articles published at The Liberal Patriot (the Substack site Teixeira co-founded) and in a follow up 2023 volume also co-authored with Judis.

He argues that, from Obama’s second term on, the party’s increasingly strident promotion of the cultural beliefs of the educated elites of blue urban America has caused the party to hemorrhage working class voters of all races. Teixeira further explains why he thinks the party continues to be in deep trouble in the mid-to-longer term, despite benefitting currently from public backlash to Trump’s authoritarian excesses.

We dig in with him into Democrats’ positions on immigration, race, and gender and why he believes they create a political anchor around the Democrats’ necks. And we close with a discussion of how the increasing polarization between the parties distorts our politics, with Teixeira arguing that the educated cosmopolitans who now comprise the Democratic Party’s vocal core need to stop treating politics as a self-ratifying moral crusade and focus on what matters: building a winning coalition.

“Politics is not supposed to be fun, It’s supposed to be about getting shit done, and that’s hard, typically, and you have to make compromises,” he tells us. “You don’t always get to stand on your soapbox and talk about how you’re on the right side of history.”

Robert Scaramuccia edited this episode.

Outside references:

John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002).

Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (2023)

Ruy Teixiera, "The Democrats' Common Sense Problem," The Liberal Patriot, March 24, 2022

Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin, "Politics Without Winners: Can Either Party Build a Majority Coalition?" American Enterprise Institute, Oc

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We spoke with San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan last April about his groundbreaking approach to municipal governance and the new directions he wants to take the Democratic Party. Now, he's running for governor of California, which makes this a good time to give this interview a second spin.

A Harvard grad who made his bones in the disruption-centered world of Silicon Valley tech startups, Mahan tells us he's put his focus on prioritizing results over ideology since becoming mayor of one of California’s biggest blue cites in 2023.

Along the way, Mahan has been more than willing to touch progressive third rails. Take Prop 36, a 2024 CA ballot measure toughening sentences for drug and theft crimes. Openly bucking Gavin Newsom and the Democratic establishment, Mahan went all in advocating for Prop 36. Fed up Cali voters backed it too, passing it by more than two to one.

He hasn’t stopped there. Mahan’s call for “a revolution of common sense” has led to breaks with public sector unions over pay raises and linking pay to performance, to prioritizing shelter over housing, and – most recently – to his controversial proposal to arrest homeless people who repeatedly refuse offers of shelter. So far, it’s working at the ballot box: Mahan was re-elected last year in a cakewalk, with 87 percent of the vote.

So we decided to go deep with one of the nation’s more unique blue city mayors. “Historically, cities have been engines of economic opportunity and upward mobility, and I think that's where we're struggling most,” Mahan told us in explaining his motives for broadly rethinking blue city governance.

Is Mahan a role model or a pariah? Listen to what he has to say and decide for yourself.

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?

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com