This is a free preview of our latest Patreon-only episode of Blue City Blues, with writer David Rieff, a war correspondent, an essayist, and a leading cultural critic. David, the son of sociologist Philip Rieff, author of The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and author Susan Sontag, one of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20th century, is a formidable intellectual and critic in his own right. He is also a self-described cultural pessimist, who argues in his 2024 collection of essays, Desire and Fate, that the rise of woke ideas in blue cosmopolitan America heralds the decline of Western culture.
In our wide ranging conversation – subscribe to Blue City Blues on Patreon to listen to the full episode – we discuss with Rieff why he fits neither on the political left or the political right, and why he has such antipathy to wokeness. Rieff tells us that woke is the cultural handmaiden to late stage capitalism, providing a moral fig leaf that acts as a legitimization mechanism for neoliberal institutions, as he further argues that it medicalizes grievance and prioritizes emotional safety and identity over political economy and universalist humanist claims.
As we delve farther into David’s critique of wokeness, and what he describes as its censorious safetyism, he suggests that his father’s great insight about the rise of culture of the therapeutic has been superseded by what he calls a rising culture of the traumatic. And he says he sees wokeness ultimately as a form of kitsch, one that presents a grave risk to the Western tradition of culture and art.
Our editor is Quinn Waller.
OUTSIDE SOURCES:
David Rieff, Desire and Fate, Columbia University Press (2024).
A recent profile of David Rieff referenced in the episode: David Klion, "Woke Obsessions," The Ideas Journal, Jan. 22, 2026
[00:00:11] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues, a podcast featuring smart guests talking about the problems facing blue cities and how to fix them. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik and this is a free preview of a special Patreon members only episode of Blue City Blues with writer David Rieff, a former war correspondent, an essayist, a cultural critic, an intellectual. And I should mention that David Rieff's parents were Philip Rieff and author Susan Sontag.
[00:00:39] David Rieff's recent book, Desire and Fate is a work of cultural criticism and his target, at least for the purposes of this podcast, is the culture and politics of blue cities. If you want to hear this entire episode or if you just want to support this podcast, just go to patreon.com slash blue city blues. That's patreon.com slash blue city blues. Okay, here's the show starting with my friend Sandeep's first question for David Rieff.
[00:01:06] So David, right? I mean, you've got an extensive body of published work dating back, what, to the 90s, 90s, maybe even a little earlier than that. You've written about blue cities with early, well-received books about, was it Miami and Los Angeles that you wrote about originally?
[00:01:22] And then extensively with humanitarian passion and kind of moral urgency about global war zones, right? Starting with Bosnia back in the 90s, the Iraq war, Afghanistan. More recently, obviously, you've been writing a lot about the war in Ukraine.
[00:01:40] And over the last half decade or so, you've been, I would say, a fierce critic of the woke identitarian term that's happened on the left. And through it all, I think you've been, I would say you've been somebody who's been kind of hard to pigeonhole sort of politically or ideologically. And so let me just start by asking you, is David Rieff a man of the left or of the right or neither? David Rieff a man of the right or not.
[00:02:09] David Rieff a man of the right or not. I'm certainly not someone of the left because I think that if, I've always thought, I'm of the generation, you know, that went to Vietnam protests and all of that. And I suppose, you know, at some point I probably thought I was on the left. But I don't. I never was particularly active politically ever.
[00:02:31] I was always the sort of person who went to demonstrations and as soon as, you know, it was possible, sneaked away to go get a coffee or something. But I think seriously that, I mean, the serious answer is, I think you have to be something of, you have to believe in progress in a fundamental way to be on the left.
[00:02:53] Because the left is fundamentally a progress narrative. It says, we will transform the world for the better. And even though I'm not a person of faith, I do think we're fallen creatures and that the idea of transforming the world for the better is preposterous.
[00:03:11] Because that doesn't mean there aren't things that are better now than there were in the past. It just means that the left to me is a sort of secular version of, of the Christian notions of, of, you know, history as a progress toward something that's better.
[00:03:32] So I never, and I'm much too pessimistic. I mean, I'm also, maybe that's a, what the French call a professional deformation in the sense that, you know, I've spent 30 years now in war zones and zones of humanitarian emergency.
[00:03:50] I mean, I started writing about American cities. I wrote, I started in the mid, late eighties. I wrote two books about Miami Cubans. You were saying blue cities. Miami's a technically a blue city. I'm not sure. If it's, if it's what only recently again, I mean, it was a blue city once upon a time. Miami beach was always a blue city. But, but I guess it's blue again, finally.
[00:04:19] I ended up in Bosnia for, by a series of really accidental facts. I was living in Germany and I was working on another book on migrants, which is what my books on LA and, and Miami are fundamentally about exiles, migrants, et cetera, refugees. And then I would go back to my apartment in the West end of Berlin. And, and I turned on the TV and there was Bosnia burning. So I called up an editor in New York and asked to be sent there.
[00:04:50] And then I stayed for three years and my life changed because then I started writing about all these issues. I got very involved in as a critic of the UN system with the UN, uh, I became professionally connected to various NGOs, notably informally in both cases, the American, uh, international rescue committee and the French weather. And, uh, European doctors, uh, the European doctors about borders.
[00:05:18] And I said, and, uh, and then from then on through the nineties, I was all over the place. Yeah. A lot in Africa as well, uh, in South Sudan and in Liberia, in, uh, Angola. Uh, and, uh, so there's, that's my trajectory. It's very difficult to remain optimistic if that's your experience.
[00:05:45] I suspect I was born that way, but you know, you go to a, you know, a room full of babies and there's the ones who are big smiles and there are other ones who are sort of calm and other ones who are frowning. I suspect I was one of the ones frowning, but I don't, I don't identify myself with the right, unless being an anti-utopian, which I am is makes you right wing.
[00:06:12] I mean, the only writer I feel close to is also someone who I think would be pretty much of a plague on both their houses in terms of the right left distinction. And that's the English philosopher and critic, John Gray. Okay. And I loathe populism. So of course, Trump for me is, you know, completely. It is because he, to the extent I'm in the, on the right, I'm on the elitist, right. Right.
[00:06:40] I certainly have not on the, you know, I'm certainly not for Maga or any of these, which, you know, in some ways is its own utopia. It's a paradise lost fantasy Maga. You know, there used to be this wonderful white picket fence in white America. And then, you know, then all these nasty people in cities, plus all these brown people came and ruined it all. And that, that you can't get more utopian than that.
[00:07:08] But I'm just afraid of mobs and, and, and this, the Trumpian right is a mob as far as I'm concerned. And nothing ever, nothing good ever came from mobs. Okay. That's it for this special free preview of this Patreon members only episode of Blue City Blues with writer David Rieff. If you want to hear the entire episode or you just want to support the podcast, go to patreon.com slash blue city blues.
[00:07:38] That's patreon.com slash blue city blues.