Dan Savage and the Blue City Blues podcast preview

[00:00:00] Hey, Seattle Nice listeners. Unfortunately, Erica C. Barnett's out of town this week, undoubtedly in a new secret undisclosed location. So we thought we'd share an experiment with you, a kind of rough draft pilot for a new podcast we're calling Blue City Blues that Sandeep and I taped on October 30th with Dan Savage. So give it a listen. Let us know what you think. We definitely want your notes. And we'll have more to tell you soon about this new podcast.

[00:00:27] And early next week, we promise before the election, another edition of Seattle Nice with Erica C. Barnett. Okay, here goes.

[00:00:46] Hello and welcome to the Blue City Blues podcast. I'm David Hyde.

[00:00:51] 20 years ago, after a heated presidential election, Dan Savage edited a piece called The Urban Archipelago that encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places.

[00:01:05] And that's pretty much what happened. Over the past two decades, rural places got redder, urban places got a lot bluer, and America's bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture and politics.

[00:01:18] They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism, and remade the Democratic Party.

[00:01:27] And as blue cities went their own way, they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trendsetters.

[00:01:33] But they also developed a distinctive set of problems. Inequality swerved. Affordability tanked. Homelessness, drug overdoses, and violence increased.

[00:01:44] And the public conversation about these problems stagnated, relegated to conversations in narrowly provincial local newspapers or local NPR programming.

[00:01:54] The idea for this podcast is to start where Savage's urban archipelago left off, with a national perspective on the present and future of urban America.

[00:02:04] We'll consider blue cities as a collective whole.

[00:02:08] What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?

[00:02:12] On today's podcast, we pick up where Dan Savage left off with Seattle-based political consultant Sandeep Kashuk, who 20 years ago was a politics reporter for Dan Savage.

[00:02:23] Sandeep, nobody can see us on Zoom, but I have to say you've really aged a lot over the last 20 years.

[00:02:31] I've become much more distinguished.

[00:02:33] Distinguished, yeah. Also with us, the editor of the Urban Archipelago from The Stranger 20 years ago, Dan Savage, who hasn't aged at all.

[00:02:40] I had myself laminated. That's where Sandeep went wrong.

[00:02:44] Yeah, yeah. I'll look into that, yeah.

[00:02:47] So it's not just the 20th anniversary of this piece. It's also days before a truly disturbing presidential election. How worried are you?

[00:02:58] I feel obligated to worry because I was so sure that Hillary Clinton was going to win that since I am the central character of the universe, it's my fault she lost because I said she'd win.

[00:03:10] And God hates me personally and singled me out.

[00:03:13] And so I feel like Kamala might win and has a real shot, but I feel like I'm going to jinx it if I feel that way, so I'm not allowing myself to feel that way.

[00:03:22] And even if she wins, even if he loses Trump, Trumpism, this version of the Republican Party, it's not going anywhere.

[00:03:30] Just like supply-side economics and Star Wars didn't go anywhere after Ronald Reagan dropped dead.

[00:03:35] We're stuck with this. Every election from here on out is going to be a life and death nail-biter, and at some point they're going to take it, and then what?

[00:03:44] All right, Sandeep, it's 1932.

[00:03:47] Yeah, we're on the cusp of a frickin' scary election, and I have no idea who's going to win this election.

[00:03:54] But to Dan's point, I do think, right, MAGA is here to stay, right?

[00:03:58] The Republican Party, Trump has fundamentally put his stamp and changed the Republican Party, and this became clear in 2016, right,

[00:04:06] that the beating heart of Trumpism is creating a kind of legitimate white identity politics, right?

[00:04:14] That's what he's doing.

[00:04:15] When he said about Charlottesville that, you know, there were fine people on both sides, right?

[00:04:21] He was like, oh, yeah, there were some Nazis there.

[00:04:23] They're bad, but there are a lot of fine white people there just standing up for their white rights.

[00:04:28] Those people, like, have legitimate grievances, right?

[00:04:31] White identity.

[00:04:33] We're going to, and like, if he wins, we're Rhodesia with nukes.

[00:04:37] I don't want to defend George W. Bush, but wasn't George W. Bush after 9-11?

[00:04:46] The fact that he wasn't taking the GOP in such an explicitly racist direction was different.

[00:04:52] History could have been different if Trump hadn't come along.

[00:04:55] He's a uniquely gifted fascist.

[00:04:58] And I think if he goes away, who knows what'll happen?

[00:05:02] I think there was some window dressing on George W. Bush's iteration of the GOP around wanting to seem to be moving past racism, to seem to be welcoming of immigrants.

[00:05:11] Reagan gave beautiful speeches about immigrants, but Reagan also launched his campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists had been murdered, and that was a loud dog whistle.

[00:05:22] The loud dog whistles are the only thing that are consistent through GOP candidates and administrations.

[00:05:28] Until you get to Trump, it is no longer a dog whistle, it's a bullhorn.

[00:05:32] But it was the Southern Strata.

[00:05:33] It was always there.

[00:05:35] It was always there.

[00:05:37] Since the realignment after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

[00:05:41] Since the Dixie Kratzman Democratic Party, it all shifted to the Republican Party.

[00:05:44] And that was the racist takeover of the GOP.

[00:05:47] And it's what we got.

[00:05:48] It's all we got.

[00:05:50] And, yeah, I don't, we always look back on George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, even Ronald Reagan, and think, well, we survived.

[00:05:57] And in retrospect, I guess it wasn't really that bad, even though at the time could have gone worse, just like the first Trump administration.

[00:06:07] Could have been worse.

[00:06:08] That's the argument that a lot of people supporting Trump right now are making.

[00:06:11] That because it wasn't, it didn't get as bad as it could get or might get, therefore you were just being an alarmist and it was never going to get that bad and there was no threat at all.

[00:06:20] And George W. Bush with we're creating our own reality.

[00:06:23] And they all suck.

[00:06:25] Maybe I'm a partisan.

[00:06:26] They all fucking suck.

[00:06:27] Yeah.

[00:06:28] Yeah.

[00:06:29] Let's get to what we're here about today, which is to talk about the urban archipelago.

[00:06:33] And I just want to kind of set the scene, right, for that piece, Dan, that you edited and inspired.

[00:06:39] And it was in the immediate aftermath of another really searing election in 2004, right, where George W. Bush got reelected.

[00:06:48] And that election happened in the long shadow of 9-11.

[00:06:52] And when I think back to that era, right, September 11, 2001, this shocking attack, 3,000 people die, the towers come down.

[00:07:03] And it unified the country, right?

[00:07:06] You know, there was this all this talk about, oh, so glad that Al Gore didn't win that contested election, that George Bush is our president, right?

[00:07:14] Because it unified the country right around a whole bunch of right-wing ideas.

[00:07:19] The global war on terror and all of that kind of stuff that was happening in that era.

[00:07:24] And three years later, we had a presidential election where we were trying, I think, on the Democratic or the left side to come back from that.

[00:07:34] And it didn't work, right?

[00:07:36] That shadow of 9-11 reelected George W. Bush.

[00:07:39] And in part because, Dan, you remember this, they ran 11 constitutional amendments in states around the country to ban gay marriage during that election, right?

[00:07:50] So they doubled down on this very partisan right-wing culture war kind of stuff in that election.

[00:07:57] And we tried to neutralize Bush's advantage when it came to prosecuting this war by nominating John Kerry, who was a war hero and fought in Vietnam instead of hiding out in the National Guard because Daddy pulled some favors, called in some favors, as George W. Bush did.

[00:08:14] And it didn't work.

[00:08:44] There were delegates all over the floor of the convention wearing band-aids with little purple hearts in the middle, making fun of John Kerry's war wounds and sacrifice, minimizing it, mocking it.

[00:08:57] And then people were like, oh, Trump comes along and he makes fun of and mocks John McCain's time as a prisoner of war during Vietnam.

[00:09:03] And how shocking and different and new and what a break with norms and traditions that was.

[00:09:07] No, that's a GOP norm and tradition to mock and belittle other people's sacrifice and service, even military, even things that you think like the GOP claims that they have the utmost respect for and they honor.

[00:09:23] And fuck no.

[00:09:25] And so, yeah, you know, at the time I was really defensive about it wasn't the 11 anti-gay marriage rapparenda.

[00:09:31] It kind of was like you look after it was really analyzed over the next year and a half.

[00:09:38] And it really did campaigning against gay marriage swing the election.

[00:09:43] Oh, totally.

[00:09:44] It was close.

[00:09:45] There was a tie.

[00:09:45] One of the things that was so devastating about Kerry's defeat was early in the evening.

[00:09:49] It looked like he won.

[00:09:51] Yeah, I knew I had been working in Massachusetts in politics and got a call from somebody who had inside knowledge of the Kerry campaign.

[00:09:57] He was like, it's over.

[00:09:58] Everybody's celebrating.

[00:09:59] He won.

[00:10:00] I called all my friends and my family.

[00:10:01] I was like, that's it.

[00:10:02] John Kerry's the next president.

[00:10:04] It was it was worse.

[00:10:06] I got the exact same call.

[00:10:08] Right.

[00:10:08] I was covering the 2004 election.

[00:10:10] So I was there at the Republican convention.

[00:10:13] And just a really quick anecdote.

[00:10:14] I was in the bar where the Washington state Republican delegation was staying at the convention, which was in New York City that year.

[00:10:21] And Doc Hastings was a very conservative congressman from Washington state was holding court in the bar with a table of folks.

[00:10:29] And there's the TV's on and there's thing comes up about John Kerry's war service in Vietnam.

[00:10:35] And Doc Hastings, I remember, you know, reporter was there.

[00:10:38] I was at a different place in the bar, but he said, oh, you know, I do value John Kerry's war service.

[00:10:47] I value that immensely.

[00:10:49] But, you know, then he came back and he fought against the war.

[00:10:54] Right.

[00:10:54] He spoke out against the war.

[00:10:56] And that's why we should string him up.

[00:10:59] It's what what he said.

[00:11:00] So not even hang Mike Pence's.

[00:11:02] Yeah.

[00:11:04] 20 years ago.

[00:11:05] And they're talking about stringing up John Kerry.

[00:11:08] Right.

[00:11:08] But for for his anti-war activism.

[00:11:12] I had that.

[00:11:12] But David, I had that same call.

[00:11:14] I was I got a call from a Democratic operative that afternoon saying the exit poll show.

[00:11:19] John Kerry's way ahead.

[00:11:20] We're going to win Florida.

[00:11:22] We're going to win, you know, Ohio.

[00:11:24] You know, like and Dan, I remember you and I were super psyched.

[00:11:29] We went to a bar across the street from the stranger to have a free result celebratory drink.

[00:11:36] And you were super excited.

[00:11:38] It's our fault.

[00:11:41] And then we came back to the office and all of a sudden the numbers started coming in.

[00:11:45] And it was fucking not what we thought was good.

[00:11:49] It was the opposite.

[00:11:50] Right.

[00:11:51] And we were Samuel Alito is on the Supreme Court because you and I went and had that drink.

[00:11:56] We are the main characters of the universe.

[00:11:58] And God hates us personally.

[00:12:01] So, Dan, tell us a little bit.

[00:12:03] So obviously your reaction to that is what led to the urban archipelago piece, which ran on November 11, 2004.

[00:12:11] So talk about what was going through your head at that moment and what prompted you to push the right.

[00:12:17] Well, I'm a city kid and I'm not an idiot.

[00:12:20] And for, you know, all my adult life, I've listened to Republican politicians condemning San Francisco values, running against urban America, extolling small towns, real, quote unquote, real America.

[00:12:35] And also witnessing Democrats like John Kerry did going out to shoot ducks or geese or whatever the fuck failing to come to the defense of urban values and the majority of Americans who live in cities.

[00:12:47] And I had been, I was traveling around to a lot of colleges at the time.

[00:12:51] And one of the things I kept saying, it kept coming out of my mouth is there's no such thing as a blue state that when you break the votes down by precinct, when you look at a precinct by precinct map, that's color coded red or blue.

[00:13:04] So there are Washington state.

[00:13:06] Most of it is empty, but most of it geographically is red and Seattle turns it blue.

[00:13:14] So there's no such thing as a blue state.

[00:13:16] There's only red states, but some of them have big enough blue dots.

[00:13:20] And being an urban person all my life, I just, I went from city to city.

[00:13:24] I didn't spend a lot of time in rural areas until I met my husband, Terry, who's from basically a rural area because I didn't feel comfortable.

[00:13:32] And I just thought of, I saw the United States as an archipelago, these islands of sanity, cities, college towns, big cities.

[00:13:41] And if there was a big enough city and enough college towns in a state like California, which when you look at that precinct by precinct,

[00:13:48] but down looks like mostly a red state with some big blue cities, it makes the state turn blue.

[00:13:55] Everyone was despondent and really flattened by Kerry's loss and George W. Bush getting reelected.

[00:14:02] And, you know, Bush, who is obviously and clearly an idiot and is proving himself again to be an idiot by not getting out there and endorsing Kamala Harris right now,

[00:14:11] just as Jeb Bush has proved himself a useless idiot by not getting out there and endorsing Kamala Bush right now.

[00:14:17] He didn't win the election in 2000.

[00:14:19] The Brooks Brothers riot, Google it if you don't know what I'm talking about.

[00:14:22] They stopped the count.

[00:14:24] The already corrupt Supreme Court in 2000 stole the election for Bush, which Gore won the popular vote, just like Hillary did, but by a lot less, by about 500,000.

[00:14:35] And it didn't seem like Bush represented the country.

[00:14:39] It seemed like Bush was, you know, a fluke electoral college minority of Americans president.

[00:14:47] And then when he won that majority in 2004, we were devastated because we could no longer pretend that we were the majority in this way that we had before those results came in.

[00:14:59] And I just, I went into the office and like part of being the editor is like rallying the troops at a time when people feel too despairing to write.

[00:15:08] And I had done that on 9-11 and I, and I feel like there's a few other times I did that and I had to go in and I just started talking about the urban archipelago and like, and I thought this is a piece we should write.

[00:15:18] We should make urban archipelago a thing, a phrase.

[00:15:22] We should put it into the heads of Democrats and remind Democrats like what they're about, but also where their fucking base is and who their voters are.

[00:15:31] And if we can cultivate the urban vote, grow the urban vote, turn more cities blue and make the big blue cities even bluer.

[00:15:43] In part by we endorse denser housing policy, mass transit in urban archipelago.

[00:15:49] It's been really sad to look back over the last 20 years, really two lost decades in, um, of a failure to, to increase density in cities, which would have resulted in more people moving to cities, more people having a home in cities and more people being trans.

[00:16:06] Mortified by being in cities.

[00:16:07] There's something about living in a city cheek by jaw with people who are different than you that does make you, even if you arrived a Republican, eventually makes you a Democrat.

[00:16:16] And if we'd grown the cities over the last two decades, instead of frozen out new development, uh, pandering in Seattle and other cities to single family homeowners and NIMBYs, we would have more bigger blue cities.

[00:16:31] We would have grown the, the archipelago.

[00:16:33] Anyway, I'm really far afield.

[00:16:35] I mean, the urban archipelago is how I conceived of the United States and how I lived in it even before 2004.

[00:16:40] And I thought we should put this out there in a big splashy way, in an obnoxious way where we were being just as scalding and vicious and funny, but right.

[00:16:55] Uh, as they allow themselves to be about us, like this posture of right wingers and Republicans constantly insulting people who live in cities, constantly insulting urban people, calling us not Americans.

[00:17:07] Like we need to turn that back on them and say, you know what?

[00:17:10] You're not the real Americans.

[00:17:12] We're fucking real America.

[00:17:16] And, and Democrats need to get that through their thick fucking skulls.

[00:17:19] Stop chasing fucking people who might be impressed because Kerry shot a goose, which nobody was impressed by.

[00:17:25] He looked ridiculous.

[00:17:26] And start chasing your voters where they are, which are in cities.

[00:17:30] Hey, Seattle nice listeners.

[00:17:42] Seattle politics got you low.

[00:17:44] Well, get high with Uncle Ikes.

[00:17:47] Pissed at the mayor?

[00:17:49] Relax with a dollar joint.

[00:17:52] Pop a tire in a pothole?

[00:17:54] Eat a $2 gummy and chill.

[00:17:57] Whether you need something to pump you up for Saturday's protest or a mellow strain for your next sit-in, Ikes is your best friend.

[00:18:06] Now is the time to roll up, Seattle.

[00:18:09] Download the Ikes app today.

[00:18:11] Or head on over to Ikes.com.

[00:18:14] That's Ikes.com.

[00:18:21] Hey, actually, I wonder if you can continue that same train of thought that you were on about density by saying a little bit more about how you think it's worked out over the last 20 years.

[00:18:33] Blue cities got bluer.

[00:18:34] What progressives came to power, the base was listened to, especially in blue cities like Seattle, at least for a long time.

[00:18:41] So what's worked and maybe what hasn't?

[00:18:44] Obviously, housing hasn't worked because we keep electing people in cities who hate cities or who think it's their job as the mayor or the city council to prevent a city from breaking out in the middle of a city.

[00:18:56] Pandering to NIMBYs who usually are homeowners, usually are older and whiter, are more reliable voters.

[00:19:05] And there is this stranglehold that zoning policies, exclusionary zoning policies that were created basically to keep out poor people by banning apartments and new construction and people of color explicitly and implicitly resulted in cities not being able to grow and absorb as many people as they should have.

[00:19:28] Seattle is a perfect example of that.

[00:19:58] And that's all over town.

[00:19:59] And that will bring down prices, but it'll also bring in more people.

[00:20:03] And cities have this magic effect on people.

[00:20:06] People migrate to cities for jobs.

[00:20:08] People who may move here from redder or more rural areas or move to cities from redder and more rural areas will arrive with conservative values or assumptions that are challenged by the experiences, interactions they have with their neighbors and their coworkers and their friends and the people at the cafes they go to.

[00:20:28] Or the stores they shop at in a way that just doesn't happen in rural areas and small towns.

[00:20:33] It's dying small towns, withering small towns, where people's negative attitudes and assumptions tend to get reinforced and mirrored back at them by other people who stayed there.

[00:20:42] But we stopped building.

[00:20:44] We made it impossible to build cities and cities and to let cities grow.

[00:20:47] And they've stagnated.

[00:20:49] And it's a real indictment of not Republicans.

[00:20:54] It's a real indictment of Democrats.

[00:20:56] Because Democrats control the cities but then wanted to freeze them in amber to please a bunch of NIMBYs who are in their 60s and 70s going to be dead in five minutes anyway.

[00:21:05] And are blocking the construction of the city that needs to come after them for the people who are desperate to get into the cities.

[00:21:11] And I don't understand why idiots like Harold don't want to throw the doors open and get the tax revenues from new residents and new construction and people living in Seattle and living along the infrastructure that we've constructed in Seattle in the form of White Rail.

[00:21:30] One of the things that was really depressing about rereading Urban Archipelago was we were on the verge of building a citywide transit system in the form of the monorail that the Nichols kneecapped at the last minute.

[00:21:40] That would be built out and done.

[00:21:42] We wouldn't be talking about getting to Ballard 20 years from now, maybe, with Light Rail.

[00:21:46] Fingers crossed.

[00:21:47] We would already be in Ballard with monorail if it wasn't for Greg fucking Nichols.

[00:21:52] Betraying not just the city that had voted again and again and again for the monorail, but betraying, or the voters who had voted, but betraying the city itself.

[00:22:00] And what it could be now if we had built out a transit system that worked and knitted the neighborhoods together like monorail would have, and we had allowed for more and new construction and better construction of multifamily homes and the missing middle.

[00:22:19] And all of those homes in the missing middle, if we'd built them, would be filled with people who would be voting increasingly more Democratic if they weren't already Democrats when they arrived.

[00:22:30] Yeah, obviously, for listeners who may not be Seattle-focused, Greg Nichols was the mayor of Seattle back in 2004, and Harold is Bruce Harold, the current mayor of Seattle, who did.

[00:22:40] But to go back to the urban archipelago, right, for me, that piece, and going back and rereading it 20 years later, as I did yesterday, for one thing, it so perfectly captures that moment in time in 2004, right after that searing election loss.

[00:22:54] And all of the anger and pain that progressives and left-of-center people were feeling in that moment.

[00:23:01] But on the other hand, it is a really prescient piece, right?

[00:23:05] It really does lay out a blueprint, so to speak, for the future, a kind of clarion call for a new urban identity politics, right?

[00:23:13] It very explicitly says we need to lean into identity politics, but it's an identity politics that unifies the disparate identities in the urban universe, right?

[00:23:26] Into a singular urban identity, right?

[00:23:29] And I think that a lot of that has happened, right?

[00:23:33] We have created a really distinctive urban, blue, cosmopolitan, progressive, whatever you want to call it, culture in blue city America.

[00:23:43] On the other hand, though, and this is where I think maybe we went off the rails a bit, right?

[00:23:48] Two things.

[00:23:49] One, I'm not sure we ever created that unified urban identity.

[00:23:53] If anything, we as blue city residents have kind of devolved down into this sort of balkanized identitarian.

[00:24:06] We've gone off into our own bunkers of identity, right?

[00:24:09] And we haven't unified around it, right?

[00:24:12] So that's problem A.

[00:24:14] But then problem B is for all the problems we have in blue America right now, Dan, you're talking about density and the lack of housing.

[00:24:21] So it's inequality, right?

[00:24:23] Like, we want to talk about the, if I can use a 50 cent word, the recrudescence of class in America?

[00:24:29] Who did that?

[00:24:30] We did it.

[00:24:30] In blue urban America, we are the engines of class, right?

[00:24:34] We are in part the engines enforcing that economic inequality because we've blocked the construction of new housing.

[00:24:41] Because housing is so fucking expensive and scarce.

[00:24:45] And it is everyone's first need.

[00:24:48] We have impoverished people who are now paying more than 50%, sometimes 70% of their income in housing costs because of scarcity, because of the scarcity of housing.

[00:24:59] We use the phrase like an urban identity politics.

[00:25:02] It's almost like queer, the word queer.

[00:25:06] What does queer mean?

[00:25:07] Well, it means you're either lesbian, gay, bi, trans, asexual, questioning, intersex, and on and on and on.

[00:25:14] But queer is the word that means all of us.

[00:25:16] And there is a balkanization of identity sometimes in urban areas.

[00:25:19] But what I have in common when I'm home in Chicago with the Pakistani guy who runs the corner market that used to be run by an Irish couple when I was a kid, what I have in common is that we're both city people.

[00:25:33] We live in the city.

[00:25:34] We share this space.

[00:25:35] We know how to navigate around each other where there's disconnects or disagreements or misunderstandings.

[00:25:44] And that's what we do.

[00:25:45] We need urban to be layered on top of the gay community in the city or the Jewish community in the city or the whatever in the city.

[00:25:53] If you're in the city, you're urban in the same way if you're LGBTQIA+, you're queer.

[00:25:59] Black, brown, yellow, whatever.

[00:26:00] Right.

[00:26:00] Yeah.

[00:26:01] Right.

[00:26:01] You're a city person and you benefit from being in a city.

[00:26:05] And a city provides a kind of protection to people who are in minority groups, have minority identities, religious practice, sexual practice, whatever.

[00:26:18] The anonymity of the city, but also the – I don't know how to describe it – the niches that become available to you to fully live your life in in a city that would not be available to you in a small town or a rural area.

[00:26:31] And how do we value that?

[00:26:32] But I think the real failure has been the Democratic Party's inability to speak to urban America in the way – and not just using urban as – to mean poor or impoverished or people of color, which is kind of what urban is coded for in national politics, right?

[00:26:53] To speak to urban America, to speak to the cities.

[00:26:56] Dems don't speak to the cities the way the Republican Party speaks to small town America and the villages.

[00:27:02] Yeah.

[00:27:02] Rural America, yeah.

[00:27:04] Yeah.

[00:27:05] Yeah.

[00:27:06] And we should – Dems should embrace the cities.

[00:27:09] What was FDR but like really kind of a sophisticated urbanite.

[00:27:13] And I'm sick of Dems running from sophistication and seeming urban.

[00:27:20] And they still do it in the hopes that they're going to pick up some boats from some rubes and they never do.

[00:27:26] I want to ask about that then.

[00:27:28] I'm not so sure that you're right.

[00:27:30] And I remember this piece and I remember feeling so pissed off because George W. Bush lies us into the war in Iraq and it's just how could America reelect this fucker?

[00:27:41] It just was like such a huge disappointment.

[00:27:44] And I remember thinking then but also dating back to the 90s like what the fuck is wrong with the left?

[00:27:48] Why don't they get more forceful and more tribal?

[00:27:52] The right is doing it.

[00:27:53] Newt Gingrich is doing it.

[00:27:54] Why aren't we doing it?

[00:27:55] That's why we're losing is we're sort of giving in to their anger.

[00:27:59] And why aren't we angry?

[00:28:01] I mean I'm angry.

[00:28:02] You're angry.

[00:28:03] We're angry.

[00:28:03] I'm still angry.

[00:28:04] Yeah, I'm still angry.

[00:28:06] So if we just matched that kind of tribal anger on the right, it would yield things.

[00:28:13] And it did yield things.

[00:28:14] Gay marriage, legalized pot, higher minimum wage.

[00:28:17] Seattle's done a lot of really great things by focusing on what can happen in blue places, right?

[00:28:24] But at the same time, it does feel a little bit like 1932 to me or whatever decade or whatever comparison that you want to make.

[00:28:31] Like if Trump wins, I mean, has this really worked out?

[00:28:35] We didn't do it.

[00:28:37] We didn't.

[00:28:37] It's not like it hasn't worked out.

[00:28:39] It hasn't been tried.

[00:28:39] The marshalling of the anger and the creation of an urban identity politics to unify the urban archipelago, right?

[00:28:47] You don't think we've done it.

[00:28:48] We're really.

[00:28:49] The Democratic Party, at least, has not really leaned in there.

[00:28:53] The Democratic Party is always running from urban America.

[00:28:56] But in the electoral college, if we lose Pennsylvania, it's not because we didn't play enough to Philadelphia.

[00:29:03] It's because there's some, you know, freaking small business owner in western Pennsylvania who likes fracking or whatever, right?

[00:29:11] And I don't know, you know, I don't want to play to fracking.

[00:29:15] But what else is the party supposed to do?

[00:29:17] The electoral college sucks.

[00:29:18] Yeah, the electoral college sucks.

[00:29:20] And if we could have a unifying urban identity politics message that encouraged more people in Philadelphia to get registered to vote and show up to vote and wait in line in places where Republicans are monkey wrenching the vote in urban areas,

[00:29:40] because it wouldn't matter what the person who supported fracking out in the countryside did or thought or how they voted.

[00:29:48] That the point of creating an urban identity politics and really marshalling the strength and power of the cities is to swamp that vote.

[00:29:56] Like, the cities are where the voters are.

[00:29:58] The cities are where the people are.

[00:29:59] And a lot of people in the cities aren't motivated to vote at all.

[00:30:05] And in part because the Democratic Party doesn't rally them, speak to them, defend them.

[00:30:10] Like, how do you show up to vote for somebody who can't defend you and your values and what it means to be an urban person and live in a city when the other side is slagging off San Francisco values and, you know, calling Detroit a shithole?

[00:30:25] It was great to see Kamala get out there and defend Detroit at a rally after Trump attacked Detroit.

[00:30:35] Like, we don't want the country to turn into Detroit.

[00:30:37] And there's been a defense of Detroit.

[00:30:39] You didn't used to see that.

[00:30:40] And that's great.

[00:30:41] And also, Kamala is our first YIMBY candidate for president.

[00:30:45] And maybe we'll finally see a breakthrough on housing crammed down the throats of blue cities and some blue states by the federal government by making some federal funds contingent to Palm Lake, breaking the logjam and allowing the construction of housing where we need housing, which are in urban areas.

[00:31:03] We don't need housing in dying counties in Iowa.

[00:31:06] We need housing in San Francisco and Portland and Seattle and Chicago and New York.

[00:31:13] And if we built that housing and filled it with people who would become urban knights and voters, it wouldn't matter what the fucking asshole in the diner thought about fracking.

[00:31:24] So in some sense, I agree with that.

[00:31:27] And I actually do think there has been, to some extent, the creation of this urban identity, right?

[00:31:32] And it has been successful in this sense.

[00:31:34] Like, it has spread beyond, when I look over the last 20 years, it has spread beyond the confines of, like, if you look at Seattle, like, 20, 25 years ago, the suburbs in Seattle were tilted Republican, right?

[00:31:49] I mean, Bellevue, which is a city across the lake from Seattle, small city, 25 years ago was kind of a rock river Republican.

[00:31:57] Now it is very blue and culturally progressive.

[00:32:00] I mean, the culture of Seattle has sort of expanded outward.

[00:32:04] That's part of what the urban archipelago advocated for was not just, it was growing those islands in the urban archipelago.

[00:32:11] And we have seen success there because the inner suburbs and not quite the exurbs, but places like Bellevue, which used to be red and Republican.

[00:32:21] Bellevue was where people who wanted to live in Seattle, but didn't want to live near Democrats or weren't Democrats, chose to live instead because it was adjacent to Seattle.

[00:32:31] And it was also a business center on its own, but it has, it has turned blue.

[00:32:35] Like our Island has grown in part because it's been increasingly knit together and the arrival of light rail in Bellevue is going to accelerate that process because transit has the power to do that.

[00:32:46] If you allow the construction of new housing by that transit, which in Seattle, we typically don't, which is insane.

[00:32:52] We're spending billions of dollars to build light rail stations by parking lots and golf courses, which is fucking crazy.

[00:33:00] We need to build massive housing complexes by those light rail stations that we spent billions of taxpayers dollars on and fill them up with people who are going to vote blue.

[00:33:12] Right.

[00:33:13] Now, so that's the good side of the story, but coming back to what I think is the, the fuck up on our part, right?

[00:33:20] Is that, so we haven't built a housing.

[00:33:23] You're right.

[00:33:23] We don't have the density.

[00:33:24] The cost of living is exorbitant in a lot of these blue cities.

[00:33:28] And we have enormous inequality and the rise of this kind of gentry class that I, I would say all three of us are kind of beneficiaries, right?

[00:33:36] Of the rise of class again in America.

[00:33:39] But along the way, people coming out of this new stratified urban America are the people that populate the upper rungs and the, and the leadership positions of the democratic party.

[00:33:51] Right.

[00:33:52] And along the way, they've lost the ability to talk to blue collar people like, like blue city Democrats can't talk to blue collar workers or to non-college educated worker.

[00:34:04] Right.

[00:34:04] We were on the verge of losing the Brown and black working class on our side.

[00:34:08] And that to me is where it's kind of gone off the rails.

[00:34:12] Right.

[00:34:12] And in some, the last 10 years, the fixation of the democratic party on identity politics is in some sense, because we don't want to talk about the class part.

[00:34:20] Cause that doesn't, that's not very flattering.

[00:34:23] Right.

[00:34:23] To talk about what's happening with the class in America.

[00:34:26] Cause we, we're the ones who created it, created the problem.

[00:34:30] Did we create?

[00:34:31] I don't feel like, I mean, I live in a very expensive house on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

[00:34:36] Yeah.

[00:34:36] Yeah.

[00:34:37] One of the things that made it possible for me to like show up in Seattle where I lived in a single room occupancy hotel.

[00:34:42] When I moved to Seattle that doesn't exist anymore.

[00:34:45] The bottom rung housing of the SROs that I leveraged myself into, uh, leveraged myself into the life I have in Seattle by availing myself of that opportunity to rent a room without a bathroom.

[00:34:58] Um, I, I don't feel like I'm the architect of the, of the class divide.

[00:35:05] Right.

[00:35:05] I feel like I navigated it.

[00:35:08] Um, and 30 years ago when I moved to Seattle, there was some things available to people on the bottom rung that aren't available to people in Seattle.

[00:35:14] Now, because of the policies, not of me, I didn't run Seattle over the last three years because of the policies of the people who did run Seattle over the last three years.

[00:35:23] And that's the boomers fault.

[00:35:26] Yeah.

[00:35:27] Although I am technically a boomer.

[00:35:28] Yeah, you are.

[00:35:29] I know.

[00:35:29] I'm, I'm first year Gen X cause I'm a, I'm a year younger.

[00:35:34] But like for, I hate to sound like that person who thinks, you know, it all goes back to nuclear fusion or something like that.

[00:35:41] Those class divides been exacerbated by housing.

[00:35:45] And we don't talk about housing enough because the people who are the problem when it comes to housing are the people who are likeliest to donate money to democratic politicians and cities and show up to vote.

[00:35:55] And they are the problem.

[00:35:58] And if you can't find somewhere to live and there isn't the SRO for you to move into, if you're going to, you know, move to an urban area from a dying rural area and try to like.

[00:36:09] Bind your fortune or create your luck.

[00:36:12] You can be demagogued by a Trump.

[00:36:23] Mm hmm.

[00:36:45] And Donald Trump's wife and Elon Musk.

[00:36:48] Fucked you.

[00:36:49] And there is some, you know, there's more than one finger.

[00:36:54] And I didn't wrote.

[00:36:57] I don't know where you're going with that.

[00:36:59] I'm glad you stopped.

[00:37:02] I mean, I hate like I was surprised by how much I think prescient ranting about housing is in the urban archipelago.

[00:37:10] Yes.

[00:37:10] Yeah.

[00:37:11] It's only gotten worse over the last 20 years.

[00:37:14] And we've dug a much deeper hole for ourselves around housing.

[00:37:18] And housing is what's impoverishing people.

[00:37:20] Things would be different if 20 years ago, Seattle had built a shitload of housing, which it could have done.

[00:37:27] Or Seattle could just get the fuck out of the way.

[00:37:29] Seattle doesn't have to do anything.

[00:37:30] Seattle just has to change the regulations.

[00:37:32] That's what I mean.

[00:37:32] Change the zoning regulations.

[00:37:34] Yeah.

[00:37:35] And allow developers to develop.

[00:37:38] And it's shocking that people still cling to this view.

[00:37:43] I mean, urbanism and the idea of density and the rest of it is a lot more popular now than it was in 2004.

[00:37:48] 2004 was still the era of the last vestiges of lesser Seattle.

[00:37:54] When I moved here, Knut Berger was on Week in Review every week on KOW singing the praises of a sort of vision of Seattle as some kind of Copenhagen.

[00:38:06] Copenhagen is so dense, as is Paris.

[00:38:12] One of the things that comes up when you talk about housing is like when you talk about density and you talk about development, people conflate that or assume that what comes with that is gentrification and displacement.

[00:38:24] And density and development only comes with gentrification and displacement if you also add scarcity.

[00:38:30] I think this is part of it, though, is that because we don't have the housing, people feel like their lives are impoverished, even if they own their own homes, because there isn't really the transit.

[00:38:41] Shit's just gotten more expensive.

[00:38:43] You know, their lives haven't improved.

[00:38:45] And then they kind of say, well, yeah, change is bad.

[00:38:47] I mean, old the older NIMBY homeowners that you're describing.

[00:38:50] In some, I could argue that Seattle's actually a in some ways for compared to a lot of other blue cities, a success story on density.

[00:39:00] Going back to the 80s, the left in Seattle was this kind of lesser Seattle.

[00:39:05] We love the fact that we live in this provincial backwater and we want to keep it, you know, we want to kind of freeze it in time and keep it this way.

[00:39:14] And over the last 20 years in particular, there has been the left, I think, has done a 180 here in Seattle and is very urbanist.

[00:39:23] Right.

[00:39:23] And pushing really hard for density.

[00:39:26] Let's get rid of all these rules and these impediments that the previous generation created.

[00:39:31] Damn, this is why you can say you're part of that movement.

[00:39:34] So you're like, it's not my fucking fault that we didn't build a housing and that we have plaza in America.

[00:39:38] Right.

[00:39:38] Right.

[00:39:39] Because there has been this very vibrant kind of kind of movement in Seattle.

[00:39:42] When I look at places like fucking San Francisco, the left in San Francisco is still incredibly nimby.

[00:39:48] All across California, you have this old left nimbyism that is still very powerful.

[00:39:55] And, you know, Berkeley, California, right?

[00:39:57] They haven't built jack shit there.

[00:39:59] And, you know, we've actually built a fair amount of, not enough, but a fair amount of housing here.

[00:40:04] Right.

[00:40:05] We haven't done nearly enough, which is why nobody can afford to buy a house in my neighborhood, which should be all apartments, not houses.

[00:40:16] Because we haven't built enough housing because of scarcity.

[00:40:21] And we need to just blow up the dams and end single family zoning and end this micromanaging by the Seattle housing department and development departments where they're micromanaging what a sixplex can look like or how it should be built or how it should be like, get the fuck out of the way.

[00:40:42] Get out of the way.

[00:40:43] The cities that we love were built before design reviews and these sorts of micromanaging by city bureaucrats.

[00:40:52] I mean, I'm all for safety standards.

[00:40:53] I'm all for those sorts of regulations and inspections all for it.

[00:40:59] But, like, the micromanaging and the dragging the process out and all the veto points and pressure points and lawsuits that people can bring to slow development is just, it's killing not just cities, it's killing the country.

[00:41:14] Yeah.

[00:41:15] And what you're saying is it may fucking elect Trump and, yes, make us Weimar.

[00:41:21] It's making us Weimar, right?

[00:41:23] Right.

[00:41:23] I mean.

[00:41:23] You have to peel back the layers of the onion and you arrive again and again and again at housing.

[00:41:28] You arrive again and again at housing scarcity, at least if you're me and maybe I'm a street lunatic.

[00:41:33] No, no, no.

[00:41:34] I agree with that.

[00:41:35] I thought the best thing Kamala did was when she came out with the how we want to build three million, you know, new units of housing, like as a centerpiece of her talking about housing affordability, right?

[00:41:45] Right.

[00:41:45] But to do that, she's going to have to wage war on blue cities and blue states.

[00:41:51] Totally.

[00:41:51] She's going to have to cram, get legislation somehow through Congress that creates a much bigger stick than a carrot for cities and blue states that are blocking new housing development and density.

[00:42:05] And real density, not mother-in-law units, not, you know.

[00:42:11] Not big around the edges, but really doing something transformative.

[00:42:14] Yeah.

[00:42:15] I mean, I think not to get into local politics, but I think it is noteworthy that the big thing that's sort of blowing up single family, the old single family iron, you know, law, restrictive laws in Seattle didn't originate in Seattle.

[00:42:29] It was actually an Olympian, the state capital and the legislature.

[00:42:31] They passed a law that mandate.

[00:42:33] Now you're going to allow four plexes and six plexes in urban areas.

[00:42:39] Which the city is monkey wrenching right now and kneecapping right now.

[00:42:43] Yeah.

[00:42:44] By making them impossible for people to build larger than one bedroom units and banning the building of six flats, which there are some already in Seattle, six flat apartments and mandating the construction of these ugly fucking skinny townhouses that everybody hates.

[00:43:02] And people blame developers or new arrivals or gentrification for that.

[00:43:06] And it's the city.

[00:43:09] So, Dan, I want you to kind of put yourself in that nightmare space that everybody's been having for the last year or more.

[00:43:17] You wake up next week.

[00:43:19] Trump won the election.

[00:43:20] Maybe it's even a landslide.

[00:43:22] Like none of the blue wall states held.

[00:43:24] What is it about Dems that this is what we fantasize about?

[00:43:27] Right now, the entire mind is fantasizing about his victory.

[00:43:30] We are all curled up in the fetal position.

[00:43:33] I know.

[00:43:34] That's a great question.

[00:43:36] We love disaster porn on our side.

[00:43:39] I'm Canadian.

[00:43:41] The glass was never half full in my house.

[00:43:43] But you edited this piece 20 years ago.

[00:43:46] What's going to be your advice for blue cities if that happens again?

[00:43:52] Well, I think the advice in Urban Archipelago still stands, which the cities increasingly have to go their own way.

[00:44:00] And when cities do go their own way, good things happen ultimately nationally.

[00:44:04] You look at marijuana legalization, which Kamala has endorsed due criminalization.

[00:44:12] And really, that movement began in Seattle with the passage of the law enforcing marijuana bans and restrictions, the police department's lowest law enforcement priority.

[00:44:23] That was the first test at the ballot about how marijuana would do.

[00:44:26] And that became the statewide ballot initiatives to legalize recreational pot and create a commercial market for marijuana.

[00:44:34] And then that is now going national.

[00:44:36] And what you saw in cities was domestic partner registries, which then went national in the form of the marriage equality movement that then ultimately won.

[00:44:44] And so if Trump wins or manages to steal the election, which they're threatening to do, cities have to continue to innovate and go their own way and also fight the federal government and fascism.

[00:45:03] And also still be places that are filled with joy and connection.

[00:45:08] You know, that's what people come to cities for are other people and the ferment and the economic opportunities.

[00:45:17] And they can't enjoy the ferment of the economic opportunities to create those economic opportunities if they don't have somewhere to fucking live.

[00:45:24] And so even if Trump should win, we should allow for the construction of more fucking housing.

[00:45:31] But I can't even wrap my head around how it is this motherfucker might win and how that isn't an indictment.

[00:45:40] Like all this, my entire adult politically conscious life, I've been listening to Republican politicians and right-wing politicians slag off people in the cities.

[00:45:50] As you know, we're the problem and we're degenerates and San Francisco values and whatever.

[00:45:55] And yet the people voting for this motherfucker, they're the ones who have a problem.

[00:46:00] They're the degenerates.

[00:46:01] They're the deplorables, if I may borrow a word, right?

[00:46:04] They're the garbage, if I may borrow another word.

[00:46:07] And it's a real indictment of the American people in the American electorate that this guy is even the nominee of the Republican Party.

[00:46:13] But if he should win, that says something very dark and damning about the American experiment, but also the American people and the millions of motherfuckers who voted for that motherfucker and plan to vote for that motherfucker again on Tuesday.

[00:46:30] And if there's enough of them that he wins, we've failed in some enormous way.

[00:46:37] And I do think, you know, I'm going to go back to my ranting street lunatic housing thing, like contributing to that failure is the blocking of new housing.

[00:46:46] Because a lot of people who might vote for Trump on Tuesday are maybe people who 30 years ago in some alternate reality where cities weren't preventing cities from continuing to grow would have wound up living in San Francisco, would have wound up living in Los Angeles or Seattle or Portland or Chicago.

[00:47:06] Or New York City.

[00:47:08] And by that magic process of living cheek by jaw with people who are different from them, been peeled off the Republican Party and quote unquote Republican values and become more progressive and open to voting Democratic.

[00:47:24] And we would have Trump would have a smaller electorate if cities had continued to grow.

[00:47:29] I think that's irrefutable.

[00:47:30] Like if cities had continued to grow and absorb people, there would be fewer potential Trump voters out there in exurbs and the boonies for Trump to exploit and weaponize in the way he's weaponized his base.

[00:47:48] I would just go just very quickly go even beyond that, because I think to the extent that the right gets traction on calling all of us elitist.

[00:47:58] Right. And, you know, it's because the image of blue cities has become kind of going back to what you're saying, Dan, it's not just about that, that more people would have moved here.

[00:48:09] It's that our image would have been better among people outside of here, too, if we weren't these elitist bastards, you know, that they accused us of being with some reason.

[00:48:20] The public image of New York in the in the 40s, when the city was still able to grow at a pace to absorb the people who wanted to live there.

[00:48:28] There were the elites. There were, you know, the Rockefellers and the Roosevelt's.

[00:48:34] But like part of the image of New York was the Bronx and Brooklyn and workers and truck drivers and.

[00:48:42] Tannements, the Lower East Side.

[00:48:44] Yeah.

[00:48:50] In the city.

[00:48:51] Sure.

[00:48:51] As if there isn't an elite in rural areas.

[00:48:55] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:48:56] People who are going to Trump boat parades with their recreational $500,000 boats aren't exactly not elites.

[00:49:03] They're not hurting if they're out there with their fucking boat on the weekend parading around for Donald Trump.

[00:49:11] Yeah.

[00:49:11] So what we lack in the cities now is something to balance out that perception and the accusation that cities are nothing but elites because we've made it impossible for people who are working class to live in the cities that they serviced with their labor.

[00:49:30] And created the three hour commute, which then creates resentment, which then isolates people in the suburbs.

[00:49:37] Like we've made people miserable.

[00:49:40] By making cities inhospitable to them.

[00:49:42] That was the most depressing thing about reading Urban Archipelago again.

[00:49:46] Wasn't the worry that we might have to write it again if Trump wins.

[00:49:49] Yeah.

[00:49:49] But that we didn't, that they didn't do what they could have and should have done over the last 20 years, which would have made us probably a little less fucked right now than we are.

[00:50:03] If we had built, continued to build the cities and build up the cities and created an urban identity politics and the Democratic Party had gotten with the program.

[00:50:10] Feels like they finally have.

[00:50:11] You got Obama saying yimby shit at the DNC.

[00:50:15] You got Kamala saying yimby shit.

[00:50:17] So fingers crossed.

[00:50:20] Better late than never.

[00:50:22] Dan Savage, thank you so much.

[00:50:24] Thank you.

[00:50:26] That's it for this edition of the Blue City Blues podcast with Dan Savage and Sandeep Kaushik.

[00:50:32] I'm David Hyde.