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.

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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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 Washington Post. Though he intriguingly predicts that the future of the online independent media may be in a process of “reaggregation.” 

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.”

OUTSIDE SOURCES: 

Chris Cillizza, “Donald trump Was right about the Media. And It Should Terrify Journalists,” So What, July 27, 2026. 

Chris Cillizza, “Happy anniversary (of being laid off),” So What, Nov. 28, 2023.

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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.

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.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Michael Powell, "The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs," The Atlantic, July 30, 2026.

Blue City Blues, "Maia Szalavitz Makes the Case for Harm Reduction Policies in Blue Cities" — the other side of this argument, from a leading defender of harm reduction.

Blue City Blues, "Michael Powell on Mamdani, Anti-Zionism, and the New Socialism," July 31, 2026.

Blue City Blues, "Neil Gong on How Class Dynamics Shape Or Approach to the Mentally Ill on the Streets of Los Angeles," Jan. 5, 2026.

Neil Gong, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and the Failure of American Psychiatry, University of Chicago Press (2024).

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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.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Michael Powell, "A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk about Race, It Ignited a Fury," New York Times, August 14. 2020. 

Michael Powell, "Where Mamdani Has Refused to Moderate," The Atlantic, March 14, 2026.

Michael Powell, "What Mamdani Doesn't Know about Tenants," The Atlantic, Feb. 11, 2026.

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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?

Our guest in this episode is former DSA member Jake Altman, who believes the latter. Altman, the author of Socialism Before Sanders: The 1930s Moment from Romance to Revisionism (2019), has turned into a sharp critic of the organization since leaving its ranks in 2022. 

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. 

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.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Jake Altman, “I Watched the DSA Go Crazy. The Democrats May Be Next,” City Journal, July 9. 2026. 

Jake Altman, “Will Unions Stick with Democrats in Michigan?” City Journal, April 29, 2026.

Jake Altman, “Labor Unions vs. Working People,” Tablet, Dec. 2, 2024.

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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.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Jonathan Weber, City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco, Simon and Schuster (2026). 

Survival Research Labs, "Illusions of Shameless Abundance" robot battle video (1989), YouTube.

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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. 

“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.”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Jamie Paul, American Dreaming, Substack.

Jamie Paul, "How Trans Activism became So Radical," Persuasion, March 13, 2026.

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Maia Szalavitz, a prominent neuroscience journalist and progressive drug reform champion who has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Salon and other publications, is the author, among other books, of Undoing Drugs (2021), a stirring history of the harm reduction movement. 

A former cocaine and heroin addict, Szalavitz is one of the country’s foremost journalistic critics of the war on Drugs era, and she remains a fierce proponent of non-punitive approaches to addressing addiction. We invited her on to this latest BCB episode to make her case that harm reduction remains the right way to handle the spread of fentanyl addiction, homelessness and open air drug markets in cities like Seattle, San Francisco and Philadelphia. 

Szalavitz forcefully argues the War on Drugs never really ended, and that efforts to criminalize drug use have always been shaped more by politics, race, and social control than by science. She argues that American drug laws have historically targeted marginalized groups such as Black Americans, immigrants, and the poor, while legal substances like alcohol and tobacco remained socially accepted despite causing greater harm. She further contends that criminalization has failed by virtually every measurable standard, citing America's simultaneously high incarceration rates and overdose rates.

The earlier part of our discussion focuses on the emergence of the harm reduction movement during the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Szalavitz recounts how activists in the Netherlands, Britain, and eventually New York pioneered needle exchange programs to prevent HIV transmission among injection drug users. She argues that these efforts demonstrated that treating drug users with dignity and providing clean syringes dramatically reduced disease transmission without increasing drug use.

Later in our conversation, we press Szalavitz on what we see as the limits of the harm reduction ethos in its present, expansive form, questioning policies common in blue cities like handing out foil and pipes to drug users, and suggesting that the current fentanyl crisis may require stronger interventions than previous waves of heroin use. We point to the enormous suffering created by today's open-air drug scenes and the social harm addiction creates in impacted communities, asking whether there is a place for greater "friction" or limited coercion in public policy.

Szalavitz rejects that premise, maintaining that evidence consistently shows voluntary treatment, housing-first policies, medication-assisted treatment (methadone and buprenorphine), supervised consumption sites, syringe exchanges, and social services outperform coercive approaches. She repeatedly emphasizes that there is little evidence that harm reduction increases drug use, while she contends that substantial evidence shows it keeps people alive long enough to eventually seek treatment.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Maia Szalavitz, Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction, Balance (2021). 

Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, St. Martin's Press (2016). 

Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories form a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook, Basic Books (2007). 

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What just happened in the Los Angeles mayoral primary, and why didn't former reality tv star and social media darling Spencer Pratt live up to the incessant, breathless hype (so sorry for your loss, X)? Now that it’s clear that incumbent Mayor Karen Bass is going to face off in the general election with democratic socialist (and alleged political backstabber?) Nithya Raman, how much trouble is Bass in? What are Raman's strengths and vulnerabilities, and what does she need to do to prevail in November? And will Latino swing voters decide the outcome of the Bass-Raman establishment vs. insurgent showdown?

Mike Madrid, one of California’s premier political strategists and the author of the definitive book on Latino voters, The Latino Century, joins us to help unpack the soap operatic twists and turns of the LA mayoral contest. If you’re unfamiliar, Mike is a high profile Never Trump Republican who has served as public affairs director for the League of California Cities, co-founded the Lincoln Project and currently is a fellow at the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. He’s one of the rare political consultants who has prominently advised both Ds and Rs, having consulted on Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa’s 2018 California gubernatorial bid. 

Regarding LA’s particularly juicy mayor’s race, Mike cuts through the noise with us to dish out the hard truths: as a Trumpy Republican, Pratt’s vibe-centered, harshly doom-and-gloom campaign painting Los Angeles as a hellscape may have wowed rich West-side Angelinos wound up about street disorder - and made the hearts of right-leaning social media influencers go pitter patter - but it was never going to get traction with the city’s core of progressive voters. That said, Mike argues, both Pratt’s and Raman’s relative success is a sign that voter dissatisfaction in the city is high. And the general election contest between Bass and Raman will likely turn into a high octane slugfest, where middle class Latino voters will be the swing bloc who will determine the outcome. 

“When you’re in a very strongly Democratic city, a one party town… the questions become less about ideology and more about competence,” Madrid says. “LA is broken. LA is a mess. I love Los Angeles, but it’s broken. LA does not work, and can we say that’s about ideology or not? I don’t think that it is, I think it’s just about competence.“ 

As we go deeper into the episode, we also get Mike's broader download on why and how both parties have missed the boat when it comes to winning over Latino voters, and why Xavier Becerra was able to come out of nowhere to win the California gubernatorial primary, where he will (very likely) face off against Republican Steve Hilton, which will mean he’s all but assured of being the state’s next governor. 

OUTSIDE REFERENCES:

Mike Madrid, The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy, Simon & Schuster (2024).

Rogé Karma, “Why Democrats Got the Politics of Immigration So Wrong for So Long,” The Atlantic, Dec. 10. 2024.

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These days we associate the white working class with rural and small town red America, whereas big blue cities are perceived largely as the playgrounds of the educated and affluent. But it wasn’t all that long ago that the socioeconomics and demographics of blue cities were very different. As early Gen Xers, we vividly remember that during our youth the culture of urban America was indelibly associated with non-college educated white people, and their worldview was deeply ingrained within the broader cultural consciousness. 

So for this episode we asked one of our favorite cultural commentators, Native American author and writer Sherman Alexie, to rejoin us on the pod to for a walk down memory lane as we remembered the lost world of the white urban working class. We were inspired to take up the topic by Sherman’s poem, “Ode to Tonya Harding,” in which he uses Harding as a symbol of the young white working class women he grew up around and interacted with in his youth, vibrant and talented women he laments were destined to be excluded from elite cultural spaces because of class divides, style differences and cultural codes. 

We key off the poem to spark a wide-ranging conversation about class, race and the sharp cultural shifts within urban America since the days of our youth. Sherman reflects on growing up among poor white communities in rural Eastern Washington as a Native American, describing both solidarity and pervasive dysfunction across racial lines. He argues that poverty creates shared experiences across race, while criticizing modern Democratic Party politics for moving away from class-based concerns and decentering working-class interests.

We wax more than a bit nostalgic for 1970s–1990s working-class culture: restaurant and delivery jobs, service work, heavy-metal parking lots, bowling leagues, mall ice rinks, and the informal cross-racial friendships formed through shared labor, music, and youth culture. We don’t shy away from the racism that was prevalent in that era, but we nonetheless lament how deepening political divides, the rise of social media, and an increasingly insular elite culture have weakened those shared spaces and killed the social spontaneity and the capacity for joy that characterized youth culture when we were young. 

“When I was delivering pizzas, it was a bunch of poor white kids. I was the only person of color, I was the only person with more melanin than average, and race wasn’t a part of it,” Alexie recalls. “Inside the place we were all working, we all smelled like pepperoni, we all hated the boss, we all had a crush on that one young woman who had no interest in any of us…”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Sherman Alexie, "Ode to Tonya Harding," April 10. 2026.

Sherman Alexie, "Knuckle Sandwich," May 19, 2026.

Sherman Alexie, "Billy Elliot," Jan. 24. 2024.

And if you haven't seen it, we highly recommend you watch the short (17 mins) documentary "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," a cult classic. 

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