This is a free preview of our latest Patreon-only episode of Blue City Blues, with writer David Rieff, a war correspondent, an essayist, and a leading cultural critic. David, the son of sociologist Philip Rieff, author of The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and author Susan Sontag, one of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20th century, is a formidable intellectual and critic in his own right. He is also a self-described cultural pessimist, who argues in his 2024 collection of essays, Desire and Fate, that the rise of woke ideas in blue cosmopolitan America heralds the decline of Western culture.

In our wide ranging conversation – subscribe to Blue City Blues on Patreon to listen to the full episode – we discuss with Rieff why he fits neither on the political left or the political right, and why he has such antipathy to wokeness. Rieff tells us that woke is the cultural handmaiden to late stage capitalism, providing a moral fig leaf that acts as a legitimization mechanism for neoliberal institutions, as he further argues that it medicalizes grievance and prioritizes emotional safety and identity over political economy and universalist humanist claims.

As we delve farther into David’s critique of wokeness, and what he describes as its censorious safetyism, he suggests that his father’s great insight about the rise of culture of the therapeutic has been superseded by what he calls a rising culture of the traumatic. And he says he sees wokeness ultimately as a form of kitsch, one that presents a grave risk to the Western tradition of culture and art.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

David Rieff, Desire and Fate, Columbia University Press (2024).

A recent profile of David Rieff referenced in the episode: David Klion, "Woke Obsessions," The Ideas Journal, Jan. 22, 2026

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Is a return to good, effective governance not just a glaring need in blue cities but a key to saving liberal democracy? NYU law professor Richard “Rick” Pildes is the author of an insightful scholarly article that recently caught our attention titled, “The Neglected Value of Effective Government.” A leading scholar of constitutional law and democratic governance, Rick is a Guggenheim Fellow, Carnegie Scholar and a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. After reading his article, we asked him to join us on the latest BCB episode to make the case for making government work.

If you’re a regular listener you’ll know that it’s been a recurring theme – and indeed a foundational premise – of this podcast that the quality of governance in blue cities has atrophied over the last 15 years. Blue cities were on a roll in the Obama years. But now, not so much.

Well, it’s not just a problem at the local level, Rick tells us. Public dissatisfaction with governance has emerged as a global phenomenon in the liberal democracies of Europe as well as here in the US. And people who care about reinvigorating the liberal democratic center against the rising tide of extremism need to pay a lot more attention as to why.

In our discussion, we unpack the forces that have been rendering American government, local and federal, so incapable of addressing the problems they are tasked with addressing. In alignment with recent much discussed arguments made by Marc Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance, Pildes contends that rising mistrust in government on both the left and the right in the late 1960s and ‘70s led to the proliferation of processes and veto points that have made it much more difficult for governments to accomplish big things and address serious challenges. That needs to change, he argues.

Moreover, we discuss with Rick the role of increasing ideological polarization and purism in rendering government brittle and ineffective, and he offers up intriguingly counterintuitive arguments about why the push for transparency in government process may have gone too far, and how social media's ability to turn politicians into “free agents” who can build bases of power and fundraising outside the party hierarchy and its power structures is a problem that makes it much harder to build coalitions of support for bold legislative actions.

“We shouldn’t take liberal democracy for granted,” Rick tells us. “It has to show it can deliver. People need to see that it’s delivering for them.”

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

OUTSIDE REFERENCES:

Richard Pildes, "The Neglected Value of Effective Government," University of Chicago Legal Forum (2024).

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

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There are the superstar cities that act as the seedbeds of American cultural cosmopolitanism and the great engines of blue America's knowledge economy: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle etc. These are the cities that we obsess over and that typically provide the grist for this podcast. And countering them, of course, is the red America of small towns and rural areas that powered the rise of Trump and MAGA.

Both the urban powerhouses and the rural heartland receive more than their share of attention. But then there are also the often overlooked or ignored second tier cities of blue America, big cities with large populations that no one outside of their regions pays much attention to.

That’s a mistake, contends Halina Bennet, a reporter at Slow Boring, the Substack newsletter founded by Matt Yglesias. Bennet is the author of a provocatively counterintuitive recent piece titled, “The case for the ‘Solid B’ city,” in which she compellingly argues that these largely ignored second tier cities – places like Columbus or Indianapolis or Fayetteville – are leading the way on urbanist policy innovations while offering their residents a high quality of life in affordable environs.

Halina's piece challenged some of our assumptions, so we asked her to come on BCB to explain why she thinks these "Solid B" burgs merit more of our attention. David and Sandeep launch the conversation with their reminiscences of Portland, Oregon in the 1980s. Back then Portland was very different, they say, an economically depressed “downscale Northwest gearhead” town with good beer and ultra-cheap rents, before its transformation into the “bougie emo twee” Portlandia we know today. We then quickly get into a discussion with Bennett about what these Solid Bs offer that differentiates them positively from the world class cities that dominate the national discourse.

She points first to Columbus, a city (as Sandeep mentions) disparagingly nicknamed “Cowtown.” But in reality Columbus is now the second-largest city in the Midwest, a fast growing metropolitan center with a burgeoning tech economy where the median home price is still a fraction of what houses cost in A-list megacities. And Bennett also praises Indianapolis, where the rapid spread of a bus-rapid-transit system is enhancing livability. And Fayetteville too, the first city in the country to experiment with eliminating all parking minimums.

As the conversation continues, we get into why these B cities are able to move so much faster than their higher profile counterparts in reshaping their urban landscapes in productive ways, building housing and infrastructure and innovating on policy. Often blue dots in vast red seas, these cities are shaped by a more pragmatic politics focused on results, rather than the ideological progressive monocultures of the A cities, where culture war purity tests, entrenched interests and the high cost of doing business militate against change and innovation. We close with Halina speculating that the salvation of the Democratic Party may be found in these B cities, which she suggests are well positioned to produce the next politician with broad enough appeal with normie Americans to capture the presidency.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

OUTSIDE REFERENCES:

Halina Bennet, "The case for the 'Solid B' city," Slow Boring, March 27, 2026.

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

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