Freddie DeBoer knows a thing or two about mental illness. He’s been admitted into psychiatric hospitals five times; he was involuntarily committed in 2002. He has, as they say, lived experience. 

Freddie is also one of our most original and independent commentators on American cultural trends. A self-described Marxist and a cogent critic of recent ideological turns within blue city progressive culture, he has written extensively, with clarity and passion and urgency, about why the idea of involuntary commitment of the severely mentally ill has long been a third rail in progressive blue city politics, and why that needs to change. 

We asked Freddie on to make his case for reforming our laws and procedures, and also our attitudes, about how to address the problem of the mentally ill suffering on blue city streets. And to discuss why the disability rights community has gotten this issue so wrong.  

"If the left does not have a vision for how to solve these problems, then the people will elect strong men who will come in and do it in a worse way," he told us.  

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi is having a well-deserved moment. His highly praised new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press), released last October, has caused quite the stir, becoming the cutting edge of a burgeoning elite cultural reassessment of the decade plus-long “Great Awokening” that we all just lived through.

Professor al-Gharbi's provocative thesis, that the complex of identitarian ideas that came to be known (and later disparaged) as ”woke” gained prominence in the 2010s when it became the defining ideology of a rising knowledge economy elite he dubs “symbolic capitalists,” and that the rise of woke was always far more about intra-elite struggles for power and status than it was about uplifting the actually marginalized, has the ring of truth. And it explains a lot about the recent cultural and political trajectory of blue cities, where, if anything, the poor and the downtrodden have fallen farther behind even as the progressive ruling class of urban America has spent years paying ostentatious lip service to the language of social justice. 

Musa al-Gharbi joins us on Blue City Blues to talk about why blue cities went woke, why that shift did nothing to help the truly marginalized, where the symbolic capitalist class may be headed in the era of Trump 2.0, and other insights from We Have Never Been Woke. 

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

America’s bluest big cities are in a tense, co-dependent relationship with the tech giants that power their economies and anchor their prosperity. 

It didn’t start out that way. When tech giants first decided, about 20 years ago, to decamp from their cloistered suburban enclaves to embed themselves in the vibrant hearts of big blue cities, a torrid big tech bromance with urban America flourished. But what initially seemed to be the perfect marriage of shared progressive cultural values has soured. Now Trump’s big win threatens to further divide blue city leaders from some of the tech giants. 

We ask Professor Margaret O’Mara, author of “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America," why the relationship between tech and blue cities has deteriorated, and what to do to try and repair it.    

Margaret O’Mara's writing about tech regularly appears in the New York Times and other outlets. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of American politics, and the connections between the two at the University of Washington. Back in the 1990s, O’Mara worked in the Clinton White House and the Department of Health and Human Services. 

In decisively winning the presidency, some of Donald Trump’s biggest gains came in the places you’d least expect them: big blue cities and urban suburbs. A lot of Trump’s victory is due to voter dissatisfaction with mass migration and the price of eggs. But Dan Savage suggests urban progressives also need to look in the mirror: did an “insufferable" censorious streak within the culture of the urban left contribute to Trump’s win? We discuss and debate.  

Quinn Waller is our editor.  
  

Twenty years ago, in the wake of a searing presidential defeat, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities and to fortify them into an “Urban Archipelago” of culturally separatist bastions that rejected the reactionary politics of the larger red American landscape. And he got his wish. 

Over the last two decades, rural places got redder and urban areas much bluer, and America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture and politics. 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 yet, as these cities evolved together and formed their own, increasingly shared worldview, the public conversation about this brave new pan-urban world-unto-itself stagnated, relegated to localized conversations in narrowly provincial regional newspapers or local NPR programming. 

On this pilot episode of Blue City Blues we pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America.