In 2023 the US Supreme Court issued its landmark – and highly controversial – ruling striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, a decision that has had major repercussions far beyond the confines of college campuses. It was a victory for conservative activist Edward Blum and his anti-affirmative action group, Students for Fair Admissions, who had filed lawsuits challenging admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

Assisting Blum in his quest to dismantle the racial leg up policies long championed by progressives as necessary to promoting campus diversity was an unlikely ally: Richard Kahlenberg, a liberal who draws inspiration from the 1960s idealism of Bobby Kennedy, but who nonetheless testified as a key expert witness on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions. Dubbed a “liberal maverick” by the New York Times, Kahlenberg has long advocated class-based affirmative action, but also has long argued that traditional race-based affirmative action heightens racial animus and allows elite universities to perpetuate themselves as bastions of wealth and privilege.

We were curious why an ardent liberal like Kahlenberg so prominently opposes one of the central planks of progressive orthodoxy, so we invited him on BCB to explain his belief that only by dismantling the race-based affirmative action regimes that were entrenched within elite campuses can we get these institutions to meaningfully address the class privilege that they reinforce.

Richard says that admitting affluent students of different races helped elite universities like Harvard appear inclusive while preserving class barriers and protecting unfair preferences for alumni children and wealthy families. A truly fair admissions system, he contends, would assess achievement in light of obstacles, including parents’ education, family income and wealth, neighborhood poverty, and family circumstances, while removing legacy preferences and other advantages that disproportionately benefit affluent applicants. This would produce nearly as much racial diversity as race-conscious admissions while maintaining strong academic preparation.

As for the aftermath of the 2023 ruling, Richard describes a mixed picture. Some schools have experienced substantial declines in Black enrollment, while others have maintained more racial diversity. But as a political question, Kahlenberg distinguishes between public support for diversity as a goal and public opposition to racial preferences as a means. Helping disadvantaged people of all races, on the other hand, has popular support, he points out. Although he collaborated with Blum in the litigation, he tells us he opposes conservatives who now characterize economic affirmative action as an unlawful substitute for racial preferences.

“Broad majorities support the end goal of diversity and recognize it’s a strength, as I do. Broad majorities hate the idea of racial preferences. They hate the idea of skin color counting in deciding who gets ahead,” Richard says, arguing that the Supreme Court striking down race-based affirmative action now actually opens the door to MLK’s vision of cross-racial class solidarity: ““It’s kind of picking up a lost thread that Dr. King left with us many decades ago, and now we’re finally returning to the wisdom of his approach of a bill of rights for the disadvantaged of all races.”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Anemona Hartocollis, "The Liberal Maverick Fighting Race-Based Affirmative Action," New York Times, March 29, 2023.

Richard Kahlenberg, "How to Fix College Admissions Now: Focus on Class, Not Race," New York Times, July 5, 2023.

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. 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 political pressures and allow their agenda to devolve into a “slopulism” of unattainable promises and economically illiterate performative policy approaches.

“What people want form 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).

[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 knowledge bases 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 dig into 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