Blue City Blues

Democrat Gina Hinojosa, the incoming governor of Texas, claims the mantle of economic populism. So does James Talarico, the newly elected Texas senator, who argues present day American politics is “top versus bottom” rather than “left versus right.” Senator-Elect Troy Jackson in Maine framed his successful campaign as a battle between “the money and the many.” Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, whose senate bid was strongly backed by Bernie Sanders and AOC, rails against corporate cash in elections and advocates for a wealth tax on billionaires. 

So is left populism destined to be the new lingua franca of a resurgent Democratic Party? And what real economic benefits exactly are these newly elected Democrats likely to deliver to the working class voters who swung hard to the left in this midterm's blue tsunami?

For answers we turned to Zach Silk, the president of Civic Ventures, a Seattle-based public policy incubator and progressive advocacy organization founded in 2015 by billionaire venture capitalist, progressive megadonor and political commentator Nick Hanauer (a former BCB guest). Zach is the co-host of a new podcast, Pitchfork Politics, which is dedicated to charting how Democrats can run and win political campaigns by focusing on economic issues. 

In our conversation with Zach, we key off the Dems’ historic midterm sweep to tease out what it tells us about economic populism, working-class voters, and the challenge this new crop of Dems will face in turning electoral victories into better living standards and tangible economic gains for a public recoiling from Trumpism, but also unsure of what to expect from Democrats. What exactly did voters just endorse? And what can and should Democrats now deliver?

Silk argues that the common thread connecting the successful Democratic candidates across ideological lines is a core economic message: the economy does not adequately reward working people. Describing himself as a “paleo progressive,” he says the new left populism should center on the historical progressive tradition of regulating concentrated economic power to preserve capitalism and democracy. But he distinguishes what he calls “grievance populism,” organized around enemies, from “aspirational populism,” organized around a better future, and while he credits Bernie Sanders with articulating working-class frustration, he favors a more optimistic approach, which he sees elements of in Zohran Mamdani’s communication and Talarico’s appeals to shared values.

That said, Zach acknowledges the risks that these energized new elected populist Dems, with their ardently professed critiques of concentrated economic power, will succumb to expedient political pressures and allow their agenda to devolve into a “slopulism” of unattainable promises and economically illiterate performative policy approaches. 

“What people want from their government is they ultimately want promises made, promises kept. I mean that’s as old as it goes in all politics at every level. And we on the left have gotten away [from that] where we make either faulty or false promises and no longer believe in the delivery mechanism,” Silk contends. “It’s easy to be committed to these things on the campaign trail. Once the governing starts and the stakeholdering begins, and the outside pressures begin, and the arguments internally begin in your caucus, that’s where the rubber meets the road about whether they’re going to be disciplined about delivering.”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Zach Silk (co-host), Pitchfork Politics.

Nick Hanauer, "The Pitchforks Are Coming... For Us Plutocrats," Politico Magazine, July/August 2014.

ICYMI, Blue City Blues, "Why Does Progressive Megadonor Nick Hanauer Blame Blue Cities' Woes on... Barack Obama?" May 11, 2025.

Peter Moskos spent the better part of two years as a cop patrolling the mean streets of East Baltimore on the midnight to 8 am night shift, before he left policing to complete a Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University. He now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, where he directs the NYPD Executive Master’s Leadership Program, and where he writes extensively about the importance of good policing to maintaining order and keeping crime in check in American cities. 

So we asked Peter, the author of four books, including most recently Back from the Brink (2025), an oral history of how the NYPD in the ‘90s was able to achieve an extraordinary reduction in crime in New York CIty, to join us on BCB to share his insights about what works – and what doesn’t – when it comes to policing cities and curbing crime. In our conversation, he challenges the left progressive embrace of abolitionist ideas and the belief that public safety efforts must focus on root causes, instead arguing forcefully that cities can substantially reduce crime through better policing without first solving poverty, inequality or addiction.

In our conversation, Moskos draws a distinction between policing that is actually targeted at generating real world public safety improvements and policing that merely generates process-measuring enforcement statistics. He describes to us how in the 1990s NYPD adopted “broken windows” crime-fighting ideas and innovative approaches that married systemic efforts to track criminal activity with holding commanders accountable for addressing it to great effect. But he is sharply critical of how over time those approaches degraded into a reliance on high volume stop-and-frisk interactions, where counting stops became an end in itself, which damaged the NYPD’s standing in minority communities without producing many additional gains in crime reduction. 

Peter defends proactive policing efforts to maintain order in shared public spaces, though he tells us that the evidence for the claim that addressing minor disorder automatically prevents serious crime is weak. Rather, he contends that maintaining public order matters for its own sake, and that cities should enforce reasonable rules in parks, subways and streets because residents need usable public spaces. He also calls for policing that targets repeat offenders, and offers qualified support for some of the police reforms championed by progressives over the last decade: bail reform in New York was largely successful for low level offenders, he acknowledges, but was extended too far to repeat offenders, and he contends reasonable restrictions on dangerous police pursuits make sense, but overly restricting them allows criminals to evade consequence.

Still, he says, many progressives in blue cities have become reflexively anti-cop and foolishly enamored with radical chic abolitionist ideas. “I actually think opponents of policing are more afraid of good policing than bad policing,” Moskos explains, “because bad policing they can use as a weapon, and good policing shows that they’re fundamentally wrong about the causes of crime.”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Peter Moskos, "The Crisis of Police and Public Safety," The Liberal Patriot, Nov. 24, 2023.

Peter Moskos, "Homicide: Life in the Stats," Vital City, Feb. 28, 2024.

Peter Moskos, "Fix the Subway, Not Society," Vital City, Jan. 22, 2025.

Peter Moskos, Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop, Oxford University Press (2025).

Peter Moskos, In Defense of Flogging, Basic Books (2011). 

In recent decades, visible unsheltered homelessness, and the street disorder that comes with it, have become both the background noise of life in urban America and perhaps the most frustratingly persistent and seemingly intractable problem facing blue cities. But how did we get to this point?

For answers, journalist Emma Pettit joins us on BCB to talk about her fascinating, insightful, and sound-rich Reflector podcast documentary, Street Fight: How America Chose Homelessness, which offers a history of homelessness in America.  (Reflector is the podcasting arm of Longview, a recently formed journalistic entity that focuses on providing explanatory history and context for hot-button public debates.) Over those episodes, Pettit dives deep into the question of how American cities arrived at today’s homelessness crisis – and whether the commitment of homelessness advocates in blue cities like New York and Los Angeles to protecting the autonomy of the homeless has sometimes undermined both care for vulnerable people and the public’s ability to freely access shared public spaces.

Our conversation begins with Emma describing the origins of the homelessness problem in America, as rootless men in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- “tramps” and “hobos” – rode the rails and traveled the country in pursuit of seasonal jobs. As time passed, this cohort would eventually settle in skid row neighborhoods of American cities, circumscribed islands of poverty, vice and relative permissiveness where they could find beds in flophouses and other cheap lodging. We discuss how writers, musicians, and adventurers helped romanticize vagrants’ mobility as a form of freedom, creating an image of homelessness very different from its modern incarnation.

Emma then tells us how overlapping changes in the 1970s and 1980s, such as urban redevelopment and stricter housing standards, along with deinstitutionalization from psychiatric institutions and rising usage of hard drugs, remade the old, romanticized image of homelessness into something grimmer and more sinister. The population living outside became more diverse, and severe mental illness became more visible in public spaces. Pettit emphasizes to us the unintended consequences of well-intentioned reforms: eliminating degrading housing or abusive institutions did not produce better places for their former residents to live. Meanwhile, a new generation of homeless advocates began to emphasize the autonomy of homeless people in the face of urban authorities’ efforts to curtail their antisocial behaviors.

We dissect the emblematic tale of Joyce Brown, a mentally ill woman living on a Manhattan sidewalk whose involuntary hospitalization sparked a major civil liberties battle in 1987. Pettit explains that the national debate then over what to do with Brown, which pitted NYC Mayor Ed Koch and Brown's own family against the ACLU and other advocates for her freedom, set the stage for present-day battles over how much autonomy to give to those living in crisis on urban streets.

The discussion then turns to the rise of Housing First, predicated on offering permanent housing without requiring sobriety or treatment beforehand, alongside supportive services. These new ideas took root in the ’90s with bipartisan support and high hopes of ending chronic homelessness. Why those hopes went unfulfilled remains an ongoing topic of sharp disagreement, with conservative critics now questioning whether voluntary treatment sufficiently addresses severe addiction and mental illness, while supporters point to rising housing costs, inadequate funding, and programs that delivered “housing only” without the promised support.

We close by looking at blind spots across the political spectrum. The left tends to minimize personal behavior and neighborhood harms or use language that obscures profound suffering, Pettit argues, while the right overestimates what punishment and involuntary commitment can accomplish while underplaying housing costs and shortages of treatment capacity.

“People on the left, I think, tend to downplay the personal, mental illness or addiction or choice… On the right, I think that now there is this idea that only punishment and only involuntary commitment… that only bringing down the hammer will solve this problem,” Pettit says. But that binary obscures as much as it reveals: “I don’t even like saying both sides. I like saying all sides because… people’s thoughts about the stuff [are] always more complicated and more kaleidoscopic than we think that it is.”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Emma Pettit, "Street Fight Part I: Hobos, Bums, and the Homeless," Reflector, Sept. 9, 2026.

Emma Pettit, "Street Fight Part II: Cruel & Unusual," Reflector, Sept. 17, 2026.

Emma Pettit, "Street Fight Part III: Can We End It?," Reflector, Sept. 24, 2026.

Benjamin Ryan is a prominent independent journalist who has written for major national publications like the New York Times, NBC News, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Free Press, and who writes regularly on his Substack page, Hazard Ratio. After graduating from Columbia University in 2001, Ben established himself in New York City writing initially about the AIDS epidemic and about scientific research on HIV.

But in recent years, Ben’s growing frustration and skepticism with what he sees as cosmopolitan progressive institutions’ resistance to confronting ideologically inconvenient truths led him to reorient the direction of his reporting work. Covering the outbreak of the monkeypox virus in 2022, Ben questioned the Biden CDC’s unwillingness to forthrightly state that the disease outbreak was overwhelmingly concentrated among gay men engaging in anal sex (it's worth noting here that Ben is himself gay). He then turned his attention to pediatric gender medicine, where he began to uncover the low quality evidence supporting  medical interventions like prescribing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to gender dysphoric children and teens. More recently, Ben’s reporting broke important new ground in the Jason Arday fiasco at Cambridge University.

So we asked Ben (who grew up in Seattle) to join us on BCB to talk about progressive elites’ relationship with the truth. It’s a given in blue America that the MAGA right in the era of Trump lives in an alternate – and often false – reality. But there is much less willingness among culturally cosmopolitan thought leaders, Ben tells us, to follow the evidence when it raises inconvenient facts or uncomfortable truths that contradict their ideological priors. Ben refers to this pattern as “elite misinformation”: powerful institutions and influential people accepting, protecting, or circulating claims because those claims support their progressive political and cultural commitments.

So we dig deep into the elite misinformation problem with Ben, which he sees as rooted in progressives’ laudable commitment to protecting marginalized people and communities. But that commitment, Ben contends, goes off the rails when it takes precedence over honest reporting or objectively assigning accountability. When blue city elites subvert the truth in name of protecting the marginalized, they ultimately harm the very people they are trying to protect. 

This is what has happened in the arena of pediatric gender medicine, he argues. Practitioners and trans rights advocates - along with the cosmopolitan institutions that largely follow their lead - promote elective enthusiasm for favorable studies, provide shifting explanations when findings disappointed, and level personal attacks on reporters who question the evidence. 

And it happened in the Arday case, where the left’s defenses of Arday often substituted accusations of racism for engagement with the evidence. And as our discussion winds down he points the finger at politicians like AOC who, in discussing the Cornell 7 case, have asserted conclusions before the contested evidence has been adequately resolved. Drawing on his own earlier campus reporting, he explains to us how he learned to balance sympathy for accusers with due process for the accused.

“If you lie to yourself, if you make that a habit as an intellectual being, and then you're going to transmit it to other people, they don't know that you're lying to yourself because they trust you because you're an intellectual beacon,” Ben tells us. “And that is very tragic.”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Benjamin Ryan, Hazard Ratio, Substack.

Benjamin Ryan, "You are being misled about monkeypox," Washington Post, July 18, 2022.

Benjamin Ryan, "Psychiatrists learned the wrong lesson from the gay rights movement," Washington Post, May 3, 2024.

Benjamin Ryan, "Star Cambridge Professor Jason Arday Lied for Years About Raising Millions for Charity: Simon & Schuster Scrubbed Financial Details From His New Memoir and Falsehoods From His Bio," Washington Free Beacon, Aug. 4, 2026.

Benjamin Ryan, "‘Frankly, He Has Been Killed’: Angry Scholars From UK’s Top Academics’ Union Blame Jason Arday’s Death on Racist Mob, as ‘Race Realist’ Who Ignited the Firestorm Is Suspended," Washington Free Beacon, Aug. 21, 2026.

[This episode is a live taping of a panel discussion at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle on September 29, done in conjunction with the GeekWire podcast. Become a member of the National Nordic Museum today!].

For this BCB episode David and Sandeep moderate an all-star panel about how the rise of Big Tech has transformed not only the economies, but also the politics and the cultures, of San Francisco and Seattle, the nation’s two largest blue city knowledge economy bastions. Joining us on stage are: University of Washington historian Margaret O’Mara, the author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, veteran San Francisco journalist Jonathan Weber, author of City on the Edge: Technology, Politics and the Battle for the Soul of San Francisco, and John Cook, co-founder and publisher of GeekWire, the Seattle-based technology news site. 

In our conversation, we dig deeply into why the wealth Big Tech has generated has not consistently produced better functioning cities, and explore the dimensions of the divide between tech companies that see themselves as engines of prosperity, and progressive city governments struggling with housing costs, displacement, public safety, and rising inequality. Amazon’s expansion into central Seattle becomes a central topic of discussion, exemplifying the collision between tech growth and urban life. From humble origins, the company's enormous hiring and office footprint transformed neighborhoods and brought thousands of highly paid newcomers into a housing market that could not readily accommodate them, heightening political tensions and spurring a backlash. This closely parallels what happened in San Francisco as the tech boom spurred gentrification, resentment and a rising cost of living. 

The panel describes a breakdown between companies that believe their job creation and economic contributions should be enough, and city governments demanding ever more tax revenues from these companies while struggling to deliver basic services or to provide a safe and welcoming environment for their workers. Cook emphasizes weak civic leadership; O’Mara highlights housing constraints and insufficient public investment; Weber stresses the limits of municipal government in addressing broader social problems.

We close by looking at how AI promises another economic boom, particularly in San Francisco, but also threatens layoffs, further disruptions and even deeper inequality. Our panelist argue that both cities need more housing, more effective municipal governance, and closer cooperation with business and tech leaders – alongside safe, lively public spaces and cultural opportunities that make them attractive to people beyond the tech industry.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

"Jeff Bezos: Nerd of the Amazon," 60 Minutes, CBS (1999).

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

Margaret O'Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Penguin Press (2019).

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?”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Tracing Woodgrains Substack page

Jack Despain Zhou, "Schools Should Pursue Excellence," Center for Educational Progress. Feb. 10, 2025.

If you are in Seattle join us for a live joint taping of the Blue City Blues & GeekWire Podcasts: Two Cities, One Industry: Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco, Sept 29, 2026 

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. 

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.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Elizabeth Glazer, "A Cheap Fix for Urban Crime," The Atlantic, May 19, 2026.

George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, "Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety," The Atlantic, March 1982. 

And you can learn more about the work of Vital City at www.vitalcitynyc.org. 

If you are in Seattle join us for a live joint taping of the Blue City Blues & GeekWire Podcasts: Two Cities, One Industry: Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco, Sept 29, 2026 

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.

We 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. 

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. 

Joe Trippi, "That Trippi Show," weekly podcast.

If you are in Seattle join us for a live joint taping of the Blue City Blues & GeekWire Podcasts: Two Cities, One Industry: Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco, Sept 29, 2026 

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).

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.