Why Does Rep. Adam Smith Believe Blue Cities Contributed to Trump’s Win?

[00:00:09] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik and we're happy to be joined today by Congressman Adam Smith, who represents Washington's ninth congressional district that includes parts of Seattle. Adam Smith won his first congressional race back in 1996. He's the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee and a member of the Progressive Caucus and the New Democrats. And he's been very public about the fact that he's kind of pissed at Blue Cities.

[00:00:39] Adam Smith, thanks so much for being here. Well, thank you very much for having me. So, Adam, before we get into all of the stuff about, you know, the state of the Democrats, blue cities and stuff like that, we want to kick this off with your thoughts on Trump's first few weeks in office. And especially what you're seeing with how this administration is conducting itself and what that's starting to mean for all of us who are living in blue cities around the country, a place like Seattle and Los Angeles and New York.

[00:01:07] Look, I mean, Trump is every little bit as awful as we expected him to be. And throughout the course of the campaign, that was one of the things, you know, Trump said exactly what he was going to do. And it has been very aggressive, but not not surprising. You know, I keep hearing people say that, oh, this is unbelievable. This is shocking. It reminds me of one of my favorite lines from The Princess Bride where a guy keeps saying, inconceivable to things that are happening.

[00:01:35] And eventually one of the other guys, you know, you keep saying that word. I don't think you know what it means. OK. It's perfectly believable. It's what Trump said. And I think it's really important also to understand the true frame. The individual pieces of it are very, very challenging. I mean, he's cutting off foreign aid and literally starving people to death. They're randomly blocking grant programs that have been pre-approved by Congress. He's, you know, targeting his enemies to take away their security clearances and their security details.

[00:02:05] He's blocking the media. He's doing all of these things. And individually, you can look at each piece of that and talk about how terrible it is. My gosh, he fired the board of the Kennedy Center and has made himself the chairman of it. But understand the frame. What Trump and Musk want is they want to be able to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it without being checked. This is about autocracy. And that is a fundamental threat to our democracy and our republic itself.

[00:02:34] And that's what he's trying to do. You know, communities are terrified. You know, I talk to people about the WIC program and people showing up to get their WIC benefits is down about 60 percent because they're scared of ice. Everything that we thought was going to happen is happening. And it is awful and terrible. And we need to organize an effort to try and stop it and crucially offer a reasonable alternative to the American people.

[00:03:02] So that brings us to the topic of the day, which is this recent piece in The New Yorker where you said one of the reasons why Democrats struggled in the last election and may continue to struggle has to do with Democratic governance of blue cities. I was just looking at the latest Cook Political Report House forecast for 2026, which is a long way off. But the math is not that great for Democrats. It doesn't seem to me that it's a foregone conclusion that Democrats will take back the House.

[00:03:30] So where do you think Democrats haven't been doing a great job in blue cities? And why do you think that's a problem for the Democratic Party? Let me frame this because I think the frame is important. I mean, first of all, Trump is a huge problem, as I just outlined. OK, you know, we have to figure out how to deal with that. The second thing that I really want to make people aware of before I get into this, because there's a tendency to see what I'm talking about in a binary way.

[00:03:57] If I start being critical of our policy towards crime and homelessness and drug abuse here, there's an instant bipolar approach to this goes, oh, so you think Trump's got a better idea? No, no, no, I do not. OK, and I made that very, very clear. The second frame that people want to put it in is a battle that admittedly I have been in the middle of for 40 years. And that's the whole center versus the left thing in the Democratic Party. It's been going on for a long time.

[00:04:24] But Bill Clinton sort of really brought it home with the DLC and the New Democrat movement, much of which I was involved in. But I want to make it very clear. I also do not believe that what we need at this point is moderate centrist triangulation. I began drifting away from that movement circa 2007 and 2008 because I saw the limitations of it, trying to find an artificial point between two lines.

[00:04:51] I am not advocating for a centrist moderate triangulation approach. What I'm arguing for is an effective progressive movement. And my concern is that we don't really have that right now. A lot of what the progressives have been advocating hasn't worked out because of some of the failed policies. Final caveat before getting into this is, you know, I've obviously been aware of all these issues for a while.

[00:05:15] But it was roughly four years ago in 2020, the pandemic, the George Floyd protests and in some cases riots that flew that followed from that. When I started to look around my district and my district is South King County. I grew up in Sea-Tac, Tye High School graduate, Federal Way, Auburn, Kent, Renton, and also Southeast Seattle and also Bellevue and Newcastle. And those areas, I noticed, were really struggling. Crime was out of control.

[00:05:44] Homelessness was a growing problem. It's not just in Seattle. Drug abuse was out of control. And also, we had no affordable housing. Didn't seem to be responding well to the behavioral health crisis. And I was also concerned about workforce development. You know, are we giving people the training they need at an affordable rate to go find a job and make a living? The basic blue-collar upbringing that I had. So, just like, we have some problems. Let's go figure out what's going on.

[00:06:09] So, for four years, I have met with the King County government, suburban cities, a lot of community-based organizations. Just trying to figure out what's going on. And what I found was disturbing in terms of the policy and the approach to governance. It's all about a balance, to my mind. Is society responsible for helping people make it in the world? Are our individuals responsible? And the answer to that question is both. Okay?

[00:06:39] You have to do both. And it just seems to me like the pendulum, you know, Republicans swung it way too far to the right. And we've swung it way too far to the left. And I'm just trying to walk us back to some common-sense progressive approaches to helping people and governing well. Because I think when you look at our criminal justice system, when you look at the way government functions, it's not functioning well. And at this point, I could, you know, I could go into like a thousand different stories.

[00:07:09] So, right after Trump won, a group of progressive staff members back in Washington, D.C. all signed a letter asking that we go to a 32-hour work week for House staff. So, our response to what we all say is an existential threat from Donald Trump is to try to get progressives to work less. And we can argue, I mean, it should be a 40-hour work. How many hours a week should you work? I don't know.

[00:07:35] But the basic principle that, you know, with everything else going on, we'd like to keep getting paid the same amount of money. But we'd like to do, you know, 20% less work. Can I ask you just to add from the New Yorker piece, you bring up this anecdote about this firm called Bonfire Consulting? Because I hadn't heard about this until I read it. What's the story there? Well, you know, that is just an anecdote to a larger problem.

[00:08:02] But it's a consulting firm that was hired, and I'm pretty sure they were in the county council. This was with the county council specifically for five years to do management, team building stuff. I gather, you know, there were some problems within the council staff. They had trouble getting along. And people do this. You know, you bring in a consultant and say, okay, how are we doing things?

[00:08:23] But as I looked at some of the material and some of what they were doing, the general gist of it was the only reason we got a problem here is we're just requiring people to work too hard and worry too much about results. Let's just chill. And then everything will be fine. Okay. Okay. You know, and that's, and it really stuck in my craw when I saw the thing about the false urgency of now. Okay. Because what that pitch is, yeah, your boss is going to come in and say, hey, we got to get this report done. We got it.

[00:08:53] But really, I mean, does he need it today? Does he need it tomorrow? Does he need it this week? I don't think so. Let's just relax. And the juxtaposition with that in Martin Luther King County with the fierce urgency of now, which was Martin Luther King saying, I'm sorry, but you can't relax today. We got work to do because Jim Crow is still a thing and we're still fighting for racial justice. Fierce urgency of now. Let's get to work.

[00:09:23] Now, I'm happy to have a very extended conversation about work-life balance. And I've struggled with that at different points in my life. I had a massive anxiety problem. I did three and a half years worth of psychotherapy, which is enormously helpful. But what it taught me was to be resilient. It didn't teach me that the secret to happiness in life is trying to make sure that you don't ever have to work or you don't ever have to face stress and difficult situations. So, yeah, I mean, it was part of the whole sort of culture around here, like the fact that no one comes into the office anymore.

[00:09:53] You know, we really need to make sure that everyone is absolutely comfortable before we move forward with anything. That's no way to help people. That's no way to help the least fortunate amongst us to try to create more housing and more opportunity for people. So, that whole thing, yes, that's part of the problem. It's a larger problem. That's part. I don't want to get away from the MLK thing because I just thought that's just such a – I mean, I know it's an anecdote.

[00:10:22] It's one little thing. But it's an amazing thing to unpack when to take the – one of the hearts of the I have a dream speech, right, the fear surgency of now, and to convert that into the false surgency of now is essentially to say – you know, is MLK? And to say that's white supremacy, basically, which is what the – you know, what's being said in these sorts of, you know, consultations is pretty remarkable.

[00:10:52] And, Adam, it seems to me you're rooting what you see as the dysfunction of progressive governance in blue cities into a cultural turn. Yeah, into some kind of weird, you know, different counterculture, right? We've gotten away from traditional norms, whether it's personal responsibility, hard work, you know, a commitment to being plain spoken or whatever, right? Yeah.

[00:11:17] Well, let me just throw another anecdote at you that I think will be helpful on this because, look, I'll admit civil society and governance is hard, okay? I'm not saying that if we come in, we show up to work, we do all the stuff magically, everyone's going to be fed, clothed, and housed, and equality will rain down upon us. It's hard. I mean, you've got hard work. You're dealing with people with some pretty deep problems. You're dealing with some solid economic issues. It's a huge challenge, okay?

[00:11:46] But it's impossible if we don't actually try, okay, if we don't apply the basic rules of problem solving, common sense, logic, reason, practical thinking, trying to figure out how to get better. If there isn't a focus on how to do things better. Now, you can become obsessive about trying to do things better. I did. It drove me insane, literally. But I fixed it. But you can go too far in the other direction.

[00:12:13] And what really struck me when I tried to work with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, to begin with, of course, there's the problem of the fact that they selected the board and a lot of the staff based on a lived experience requirement, which was completely disconnected from whether or not people knew how to do the job. Now, don't get me wrong. I think there's plenty of people who have been formerly incarcerated, who have been addicted to drugs, who have been homeless, who are quite capable, and we ought to find them, okay?

[00:12:41] But they're not, by definition, capable just because they've experienced those things, all right? And also, once hired, we probably ought to have some expectations and standards. So, you know, there was this story about how the Regional Homeless Authority, which primarily what they do, they hire service providers to provide, you know, and they give out contracts. They got a lot of money. And frequently, they would forget to send the money out on time. There was several stories referenced from the New Yorker article in that.

[00:13:09] And when I heard about that, I mean, one time they didn't send out the checks and a number of agencies had to shut down. It's sort of like what's going on now with agencies across the world that had grants from USAID. Money suddenly cut off. Well, they got bills to pay, and they can't continue doing their services. So a number of these agencies literally had to kick people out into the streets that they were serving because of this. Now, that's bad. But right about this time, I had a meeting with about eight different service providers. We talked about a bunch of different things. But I brought this up.

[00:13:39] And I said, hey, what are we going to do to fix this? And all eight of the people I was talking to sort of shrugged and looked back and said, well, well, you know, I mean, it's okay. I'm like, no. Can I swear on this podcast? I don't know what to do. Yeah, yeah, please. No, it's not fucking okay. Okay? We're progressives. We care if there are people living out on the streets not getting treated.

[00:14:02] So if you have someone who can't figure out how to send money when it's sitting right there to do their basic job to stop someone from being out on the streets and homeless and not getting the treatment. It's not okay. A. B. It's fixable. Okay? It is. And I'm not even saying that you have to fire anybody. You do have to set expectations.

[00:14:28] Humans, by and large, will rise or sink to expectations. I've worked in a number of different places throughout my life, and culture is a thing. Okay? If there's a culture in the workplace that, hey, we show up, we get the job done. If you're not in a meeting on time, eh, kind of a problem. If you don't do your job, it's a problem. You don't yell at them. You don't berate them. You don't think. There is an expectation. And we are, you know, part of our war here seems to be against expectations.

[00:14:58] Because if you set expectations, you can fail to meet them, and then people will feel bad. Yeah. But that's kind of what we need to be doing. So I think the ideological underpinnings, and this is the argument, and believe me, there are plenty of people coming after me on this. I think I'm the true progressive here. All right? I think the one who's trying to help people, and I'll go to work to help people, and set up the expectations to get there. So I think that's what sort of bled into it.

[00:15:25] And then, of course, the far right uses this as an excuse to elect Trump and implement their fascist agenda. So, Adam, what you're telling us is that what you've seen over the last decade, and this is something I've seen too, is that we've had this set of ideas that have kind of taken over what we might call cultural progressivism, right?

[00:15:51] That are basically bad ideas that lead to bad outcomes and bad governance, right? When you try to sort of, you know, when you say that hierarchy is white supremacy or punctuality or, you know, we've all seen some of the sort of caricature, not even caricatures, but some of the more excessive stuff that's been sort of put out there under the rubric of what conservatives call woke or we can call identitarianism or whatever.

[00:16:19] But this sort of turn over the last decade to this kind of culture that's led to these bad outcomes. But one of the things you've also said is, A, it's leading to bad governance in these cities, and that's hurting people. But it's also, it has a national implication for the brand of the Democratic Party. And you told a columnist for the Seattle Times recently, and I'm just going to quote you here.

[00:16:44] I have Democratic colleagues in the House who bring it up all the time from districts all over the country that's what's happening in the cities is hurting them politically. They say you guys have got to get it together out there. Amen. I mean, it's like if you're running in a swing district in Iowa or Ohio or Texas or wherever, odds are the ads that are being run against you are based on the fact that crime's out of control, homelessness out of control, drugs out of control. And here are Democratic policies that have led to that.

[00:17:13] What are you going to do about it? There's the whole immigration conversation, which is connected to this as well. And that's not peculiar, obviously, just to here. That's a national policy. But look, I also want to just take a step back and understand where this came from. Because that's part of how I approach this is I want to know where people are coming from.

[00:17:31] And the criticism that we just both did of, you know, Democrats governing without any personal responsibility, without standards, without expectations and all of that, it comes from the fact that power can be abused, number one, which obviously it does. And number two, power in America for a very, very long time was straight white men. Okay.

[00:17:55] You know, in a lot of these things that we're talking about, punctuality, you know, doing a good job, you know, completing tasks, however you want to describe it. You know, I mean, there was a time when the white power structure used those things just to maintain their power, even though they were incompetent. And if we're talking about, you know, hires that aren't based on talent, let's just take a walk through Donald Trump's cabinet. Okay. Pete Hagseth, really?

[00:18:24] You know, if he wasn't, you know, a straight white dude with a, you know, with his military history, which is to be respected, but it doesn't mean he knows how to run things any more than someone being homeless means they know how to run a homeless shelter. Okay. So this goes both ways. I mean, the far right frequently promotes people who are not qualified. So a lot of what was moving this leftward moment was a response to that. Well, if these people are going to abuse power, let's take it away.

[00:18:52] But my big point is the lowering of standards or the elimination of standards is not equity. It's failure. And we frequently do that. There's the famous example of the Seattle school district in March of 2020 when everyone had to shut down their schools. One big question was, okay, but what grade do you give the kids? You know, because they're not going to be able to finish their program. My son was at Issa Cua High School. They said, okay, you can do no worse than the grade you have right now.

[00:19:21] There'll be some work the last couple of months. You can bring it up. You can't bring it down. Seattle said everybody gets an A. Yeah. Okay. And by the way, even if they didn't have an A, at the point, you know, and the reason is because they see standards having been used to oppress populations. And that's not wrong. There are times when standards have absolutely been used for oppression. But that doesn't mean you get rid of the standard. Okay. That means you make it fair.

[00:19:50] If you get rid of the standard, you have chaos. Okay. Chaos, inefficiency. The basic rules of logic, common sense, problem solving. They apply. Okay. You know, and they don't go away just because you're trying to deal with some of the legitimate problems of a society that had bigotry and discrimination. So, and I kept trying. And like I said, for four years, I came and said, look, I get it. All right.

[00:20:20] But what about this? Could we fix that? Nope. We still can't get people to come back into the office in King County. And everybody I meet with, I've met with pretty much the whole county council. I've met with many people in the prosecutor's office. I've met with people in Dow's office. I bring this up every time I meet them. Guys, can we get people back in the office occasion? Oh, you're preaching to the choir. I'm with you. That is just ridiculous. We have to do this. Never happens. Okay.

[00:20:49] So, I just want us to try a little harder to deliver on our progressive values. We've touched on this already, but I'm anticipating hearing from our progressive listeners to this and just some of their responses, which I'm sure you're well familiar with. One of which is you're emphasizing this phrase personal responsibility to some ears that these days sounds like a conservative criticism of the Democratic Party.

[00:21:17] And I'm just wondering, like, I'm sure you hear it, but how do you respond to that criticism of your criticism? Well, one of the things I said earlier, and it's really important. We're talking about balance here. Okay. Which is more important? Personal responsibility or a community supporting people to help them succeed? You see, I think they're both important. All right. I don't agree with the Republican thing of getting rid of all these programs. Okay.

[00:21:44] But nor do I agree with the premise that personal responsibility is involved. Let's take a look at criminal justice. Okay. Alternatives to incarceration. A program which I strongly support. But the way we've set them up, not just in King County, but in a lot of places across the country is, so alternative is, so you catch someone who committed a crime. Typically, you would have sent them through the criminal justice system.

[00:22:07] For a while, there were alternatives set up that said, okay, you're charged, but if you do these things for the next year or two, your record will be wiped clean. You come back to the court, you say, here you go, I've done it, all right, you're good, away you go. But if you don't complete it, then we're going to charge you and we're going to prosecute you and you're going to go through the criminal justice system. Well, we moved off of that and we said the criminal justice system is going to be taken completely out of it.

[00:22:32] Now, when we put someone into an alternative program, we are going to send them to a social service agency. And there's a variety of them around here who do these programs. Choose 180, Community Passageways, Downtown Emergency Services Center. Which, okay, I guess you get the courts out of it. But the next thing is, so what is the program? If you send this person to this thing, well, what supposedly is going to be done to help this person and make sure they don't reoffend?

[00:22:58] The county's position is they have no right to know what the program is. And I'm not kidding. You can get the quote from Jimmy Hung where he says, you know, we don't need to know that. So we don't know what it is. And Jimmy's quote was that we'll know if it worked if they come back into the system. In other words, if they commit more crime. Now, I did point out that not everybody who commits a crime gets caught, especially in a place where we've reduced the police force by roughly 20 percent.

[00:23:25] And also set up a variety of different other impediments to the law enforcement arresting people. But also, when you look at what the programs are, and I wish I could pull up my phone, but I'm recording. I have the exact quote from what, you know, one of these alternative programs says. Personal responsibility is irrelevant. It's not even mentioned. Okay. What is mentioned is settler colonialism. It's basically, I blame society. Why can't we balance those two things?

[00:23:55] Why can't we take someone who's committed a crime and says, you know what, we're not going to lock you up for a year or five or whatever. Okay. We're going to help you. What's going on in your life? But understand something. You made a choice. And you made the wrong choice. And there's a whole bunch of people in the exact same set of circumstances as you, no matter how bad they are, who made the right choice. So we're going to work with you to help put you in a better position and also help with your personal responsibility.

[00:24:24] Completely rejected in progressive cities. No. It's not, you know, if you do that, you're simply, you're punishing them. You're judging them. You're making them feel guilty. No. We just have to support them. I don't agree with that. I think you should balance it. And that's another big aspect of this governance problem. The progressive movement that I'm talking about is uncomfortable making judgments, saying, okay, you're not good at that. This person is better at that.

[00:24:50] They make all kinds of other judgments, of course, but we'll leave that for another discussion. And I tie this back to the Joe Biden thing. Why, in the name of God, did anyone look at Joe Biden over the course of the last four years and say, yeah, that's the guy I want out there delivering our message? He clearly wasn't up for the job. And I say that. I think he implemented some really good policies. But as a campaigner, as a communicator, I mean, it's just flabbergasting to me.

[00:25:16] I mean, it's like someone, you know, watching Daniel Jones play quarterback and thinking he's Patrick Mahomes. All right? Sorry, I play fantasy football. That's a little inside baseball there. But, you know, it's like you have to be able to make judgments. And then even after that debate, we were just like, well, who's to say? And it comes from the fact that in our history, straight white power structure people have made a lot of bad judgments.

[00:25:46] They have. Okay? But that doesn't mean we get rid of judgment. Okay? It means we try to refine it a little bit so that it works better. And you will note, it's fascinating. I was out there saying Biden shouldn't run again. A lot of the people who were saying, nope, he should run, were the people on the left side of the political spectrum. They weren't always Biden's biggest fan. But the second he looked like he was being judged because he was vulnerable, they rushed to his defense. And that's a problem if you're trying to govern.

[00:26:15] I think we should treat people well. I'm not saying you make a judgment. You're voted off the island. You know, I'm going to lock you. No, but you shouldn't be nominated to be our Democratic nominee if you can't do the job. And we struggle with that. And I'm just trying to get us to be a little bit better at it. And there are some signs of improvement. I just want to keep building on it. There was another quote from one of your colleagues in the New Yorker piece, Pat Ryan, who represents a swing district in upstate New York. And I thought what he said was striking, too.

[00:26:45] And it sounds like you're saying something very similar. So let me read his quote. He said he told the author of the New Yorker piece that there's a void in the Democratic Party that's been filled by, quote, people that are disconnected from fucking reality. There's no current language for how to describe this. He says moderate versus progressive is not correct. Liberal versus conservative is not correct. So explicate that. Sure. Yeah. It sounds like what. That's kind of what I've been talking about.

[00:27:13] Look, what I'm trying to get at here is, you know, and the folks have grabbed the progressive label. But again, labels are difficult because they mean different things to different people. It's really a very narrow ideology. It is the ideology, oppressed, oppressor, power structure, all this other stuff. And that ideology is kind of academic in the conversation for the most part.

[00:27:40] And it is, as I've described it, it is focused on the idea that because power has been abused, we need to make sure that we take power away and we spread everything out so that, you know, anyone who is designated as having been oppressed has to have the voice. And they need to be heard from all the time. Now, this is another problem, you know, is why we can't build housing and why we don't do things as well as we should. We're drowning in process. And the process is built on the premise that everybody ought to have a say.

[00:28:10] You can't do something that someone doesn't like. I mean, go to some Democratic meetings sometimes and just try to get the meeting started. No, we got to hear from everybody. It's like we're doing something here. Okay. Everyone's going to get their voice in. And I love the story of the $1.7 million toilet in San Francisco. Have you heard about it? Did you hear about that? No.

[00:28:30] Ezra Klein wrote a brilliant piece analyzing this because the story came out that they were going to build this single stall public toilet in San Francisco until it penciled out to $1.7 million. They shut it down. But what Ezra did is he said, why? Okay. And the short answer is because 11 different commissions had to approve that toilet. And each one of them had somewhere between 30 and 50 people on it. And this is another aspect of modern progressive governance.

[00:28:58] In the past, governance has been too few people with too much power over too many. So we're going to fix that. We're going to give everybody the power. And we're not even going to build a toilet until they're okay with it. But there's a downside to that. Okay. And the downside is you don't build things as efficiently. So people don't have housing. And can we get back to a little bit of balance? But to answer the question that Pat Ryan was trying to bring up, that's that it's a very narrow ideology.

[00:29:27] Progressivism historically has been about getting things done. Progressivism as it's been taken over is now about process. Okay. It's about making sure that certain voices are heard as often as possible. It's a big change. I mean, we had a major progressive movement in this country at the turn of the 20th century. And we got shit done. Okay.

[00:29:51] Antitrust laws, Fair Labor Standards Act, child labor laws, eventually Social Security and Medicare and all of those things. Now it's a much more process-oriented thing. You know, you hear about it in a debate and an argument. You know, we have our rules of logic and rhetoric as to who's making a good argument and who's not. No, it's like you have to understand the power dynamic. And whoever has less power is by definition right. Okay.

[00:30:20] What I agree with is whoever has less power, let's make sure that we even that out. But that doesn't change the basic rules of what's logical and what's not. So that's kind of what we're wrestling with. And we see the implications of that in terms of government struggling to build housing, to issue permits. Okay. You know, to send out the check for an important program to help keep feeding people. You know, right down the line, you see the impact of that way of thinking of things.

[00:30:48] And I just think we need to change it a little bit. I've been thinking about this in terms of office politics, because part of what it seems to me you're saying is there's been a lot of attention to kind of fixing office politics. Some of which is good, but an inattention to actual politics and actual results. And what I'm wondering is, I noticed you were born in 1965, first year of Gen X. Same year that I was born. You were also a Gen Xer. Same as me. I'm 65 too. 65. So 365.

[00:31:17] And I wonder how much of this you think is in part sort of generational? Because there has been a change in focus and the definition of progressivism over the last 10 years in ways that probably all of us find frustrating because of that inattention to results, inattention to actual politics. I would call it some ways. But can it be dismissed if it is generational? Generational misses the point.

[00:31:45] I mean, it's generational in the sense that the generation that's come up in the last 20 years has been brought up with this ideology. I make this point all the time with local elected officials. People get involved in politics for a lot of different reasons. But if you're looking at who I was in the 1970s and 80s, young person, interested in getting involved in politics, by and large, most of those people, they're not necessarily that ideological.

[00:32:12] I was a Democrat, came from a union family, support unions and all of that. But mostly, if you get involved in politics, what you want to do is you think you want to lead. You want to be involved in the community. And you just sort of follow what's going on around you. Well, if you've been coming up in politics in the last 20 years, you have been educated in this very specific progressive ideology that we've been talking about. And so, yes, generationally, people have fallen into it. I don't think it's because this generation has to think that way.

[00:32:41] You're seeing a backlash within this generation with the rise of the MAGA people. So I don't think it's generational in the sense that I'm still insisting that people not use smartphones. It's just sort of the way they've been raised to think about these issues, and they haven't thought about them in a practical way. And again, I really want to emphasize that the basic premise of a lot of this stuff is not wrong.

[00:33:10] The basic idea that power should not be concentrated in the hands of the few, that in this country, power has been concentrated in the hands of straight white men. So how do we make sure it's more fair? But the thing is, at some point, you've got to get to balance. And I'll tell you two stories. One, I was at a political event in October of 2023 in the 41st District for off-year elected. So people run up for school board, city council.

[00:33:37] And there was, I don't know, there's about a dozen or 15 either elected officials or candidates at this event. Some, you know, there were state legislators there, but they weren't up for election. I was there. I wasn't up for election. I spoke first. I forget what I said. Not relevant to the story. The next person, who shall remain nameless, got up and was attempting to explain why diversity was important in an awkward sort of way. And at one point, she said, we don't need candidates who look like Adam. Okay? And I'm standing right there.

[00:34:05] And she looked at me and said, well, but he's okay because he agrees with us. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, not as much as you might think. But the interesting thing about this story, as I mentioned, there were probably about 15 either elected officials or candidates there. I was the only white guy. Okay? Look, I don't disagree with that point.

[00:34:26] I spent a lot of time down in South King County as our area diversified saying we got to get other voices in here because the blue collar white suburb that I grew up in, that's not what's here anymore. But when you're saying that one is too many, I think maybe you've lost the plot a little bit and you need to think as things evolve. All right? Love that story. And then on the workplace thing, I like to tell the story of a friend of mine who worked in public housing.

[00:34:55] I met him on the Dukakis campaign, 1987, originally from Boston. He ran a few housing authorities. And he retired two years early from his last job running the Stohomish County Authority. And I asked him why. And he said, well, as a boss, I still thought that part of my job was to tell people what to do. And I realized that was no longer acceptable around here. So I got out. And where that comes from is you don't want a boss who sexually harasses you.

[00:35:23] You don't want a boss who is racist and doesn't hire black people just because he's racist. Okay? But you need a boss. All right? And particularly if you're trying to help people. And I just, I get it. Can we maybe readjust a little bit? You know, it's like a field goal kicker who's been shanking them all the time and then decides to correct and then starts hooking them all the time.

[00:35:49] Let's see if we can't balance out these ideas and get to a better result. Right. I mean, there was a really great Matthew Iglesias piece a couple of years ago where he sort of, he talks about Tema Okun, who's this writer who's written this book, you know, about organizations that sort of said all this stuff, punctuality and hierarchy. All these things are white, you know, the written word are white supremacy. Right.

[00:36:15] And his point was, if the conservatives in the right wing were running some kind of like covert psyop operation to render progressive organizations completely dysfunctional, this is what they would be pushing. Because you can't run an organization if you can't have a higher, you know, if all of this stuff is racist and white supremacy and people are allowed to do whatever the hell they want. But I really want to reemphasize where this came from.

[00:36:42] Yes, some academics took it in a ridiculous direction and we've ran with it. But the idea that concentrating power in the hands of a few people within particular demographics straight white can be assured. Okay. But that doesn't mean that you go to anarchy, which is where we wound up. And, you know, I've seen many progressives are starting to lament this because there are progressives who do want to get things done. And these are the basic rules of it.

[00:37:10] And my goodness, if you if you watch, did you watch any of the DNC last week? Yeah, I mean, so because Adam, obviously, I'm very sympathetic to a lot of what you're saying about where we've gone wrong as a party and where we've gone wrong in blue cities. In fact, I was right after the election, I was on a panel in front of a bunch of Democratic activists talking about what just happened in the last election.

[00:37:34] And, man, I was saying, you know, hey, I really think the Democratic Party has a class problem and it's got a culture problem. And man, was I an outlier on that panel. And people, I don't think they really wanted to hear that kind of criticism. And just whatever, about a week ago, we had the big DNC meeting to pick the new chairman and vice chairs of the party. We'll play this clip.

[00:38:02] Rules specify that when we have a gender non-binary candidate or officer, the non-binary individual is counted as neither male nor female. And the remaining six offices must be gender balanced. Next, with the results of the previous four elections, our elected officers are currently two male and two female. In order to be gender balanced, we must.

[00:38:29] We must select one male, one female and one person of any gender. So, again, this is what we have to do for this vice chair race. And it just goes on and on and on. It's kind of this absurdist extent that we talk to these various caucuses to get their input on the rules and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Isn't that the Democratic Party now? Are they really listening to you, Adam? Yeah, no.

[00:38:58] I mean, look, I share this frustration. And, you know, and yeah, you're kind of right. And, you know, look, in solidly blue areas, they win, but they don't govern particularly well. And I think it is a factor. Now, again, I want to emphasize I'm of the opinion that we need to be going after Donald Trump aggressively and relentlessly every day for what he's doing. But, you know, you can't beat a horse with no horse. Oldest joke in politics. OK.

[00:39:28] And if we don't have a reasonable alternative, you know, and it's not a reasonable alternative, dysfunction is not what people want. You know, and I know one of the things that progressives always throw back at you, they've come up with this mantra. Sorry, I'm a progressive. This other brand of progressives. Well, progressive policies are popular. OK. We just need to pitch them better. You know what that really means? Progressive policies that are popular are popular. OK.

[00:39:57] And that's true. OK. The minimum wage is possible. Paying working people more is possible. Improving benefits for child care is popular. You know what's not popular? Abolishing the criminal justice system. OK. Picking people for jobs based solely on their identity or lived experience as opposed to their ability. Not popular. OK. Stopping all deportations. Not popular. And I try to bring this up. And they're like, those are just Republican talking points. OK.

[00:40:27] Well, they're Republican talking points for a reason. All right. Because they work. And if these... I run into this odd little trap when I'm trying... And again, I want to emphasize. I didn't start out doing this because I wanted to criticize Dow Constantine or Dan Satterberg. I wanted to fix a problem. So I went to them and had this conversation. And man, the resistance to the conversation. There was only sort of like two things that were going on.

[00:40:56] One, they would flat deny they were doing the things that were right in front of me being done. OK. And then two, they would argue as to why those things are really OK. It's like, you know, I mean, I was speaking with a county council member a couple weeks ago. I guess a couple months ago now. And I raised the issue. Look, I mean, King County's policy on criminal justice is abolition of the criminal justice system. And the guy said, that's ridiculous. That's not our policy. I said, OK. The head of your diversion programs is an abolitionist.

[00:41:24] The head of your police oversight committee is an abolitionist. You have a thing called the Care and Closure Commission, which is funded by King County. It's King County government employees whose sole mission is to shut down the criminal justice system. You contract, and I listed a half dozen different agencies, who are all abolitionists. So if that's not your policy, help me out here. What the hell? It's like, pay no attention to what you say. I hate to say it. I really hate this word. I'm going to use this word.

[00:41:54] And you can feel bad about me for you. They're gaslighting people. OK? You know? Oh, don't believe what you're seeing here. And let me tell you, if you go down and you talk to the police chiefs, that's another group of people I've talked to, or law enforcement officers in Kent and Renton and Fettered Way and Auburn, I mean, they'll tell you what they have to try to walk through. So yeah, you're right. The resistance is very strong. And look, you know, it's far easier for a Democrat.

[00:42:21] What I'm doing right now, this is making my life more complicated. You know, Trump deserves to be attacked. And I'm attacking him. Please, I'm not. How can we not say anything about Trump? Except for every single freaking day on every platform I can. I'm not ignoring that. All right? But, you know, it's easier. And it's where the Democratic Party wants to go. They don't want to have that sort of self-judgment. I've always had this thing about me. If things are getting, like, too easy and everyone's too comfortable, and Sandeep, you've sat around a lot of these tables.

[00:42:51] Whenever I'm working on a campaign, I'm sitting around a table, and everyone is really, really happy, and they're telling jokes, and they're satisfied with themselves, my spidey senses start tingling. Totally. Like, guys, I think we may be getting a little too fond of ourselves here. Let's figure out what the other side is thinking. Okay? And let's figure out what we're missing here. Are you optimistic that some of the ideas that you're expressing here in the New Yorker piece and elsewhere are being heard within the Democratic Party?

[00:43:20] Have we started to make that turn? And as part of my question, the thing that we'll probably hear in response to this podcast in Blue Cities Among Progressives is, look, the reason why there's been a rise in crime, the reason why homelessness is up, the reason why we've got a fentanyl crisis, et cetera, et cetera, it's COVID. It's systemic issues like rising inequality. It's not leadership. It doesn't have to do with progressive leadership. And I'm wondering, how do you counter that? How do you message that, I guess, is my question. Yeah.

[00:43:50] No, look, I mean, it's hard because if people in positions of power don't want to solve these problems, I can't convince them to. I mean, I make the arguments, but they don't want to address them. They can't. I mean, I guess, you know, one of the thoughts that occurred to me, and it's a constantly evolving thing. I make arguments here and there. It's like squeezing a balloon. They're looking for everywhere to hide. They're looking for everywhere to not have to address this. And there's plenty of places to hide. All right. But, you know, was it systemic problems that caused the King County Regional

[00:44:19] Homeless Authority not to send out the fucking checks? Okay. All right. Really? Okay. It was racism, Adam. It was racism. Was it a systemic problem that caused the equity and social justice people at King County to not respond to discrimination complaints via email or phone call for two years to simply not get back to people who were complaining about them?

[00:44:44] Was it, you know, systemic racism that passed the laws that told law enforcement that they couldn't pursue or detain people? You know, have you heard the 911 call from the car thief who's in a car being chased by the police, you know, calling up to say, hey, I got to report a crime. Police are chasing me. They're not supposed to be able to do that. You talk to anybody in law enforcement, okay, and they will tell you that people, especially

[00:45:10] juveniles, are getting really wise to the fact that they can act with impunity. You know, a juvenile, because of state law in the state, cannot be detained until they're illegally in possession of a firearm for the fifth time. And let me just make it really dramatic here. Remember, a high school student was murdered in front of Garfield High School in the middle of the day, in front of a couple dozen witnesses, okay?

[00:45:40] There's a law in the books restricting the ability of law enforcement to speak to juveniles without an attorney present. Part of it is if that person could be a suspect. Well, when the cops showed up in that scene, who was the suspect? Everybody. They didn't know what happened. There's a dead kid lying on the street. They don't know what happened, so they can't talk to anyone. So we feel good about the fact that that kid's murderer walked away free. And forget for the moment about the epic injustice done to that young man.

[00:46:10] What signal does that send to everybody else who was there? Let's go, okay? Ain't nobody watching over us, so it's going to be mob rule, all right? So, I mean, anyone who wants to come at me and tell me that, you know, these policies don't have anything to do with it, I'll do it. I mean, but like I said, they got a lot of places to hide, a lot of places to go. And again, I want to help people, okay?

[00:46:37] I'm not coming at this from some Trumpian nonsensical perspective. I'm coming at it from the perspective of, I want to help people get off the streets. I want to help people get off drugs. I want to help people get jobs, okay? And to do that, there has to be an element of personal responsibility that I think we've walked too far away from. I mean, you're saying morally and ethically, if you actually care about the Trump administration

[00:47:03] being in power, if you're worried about fascism taking over the United States, you have to look at this stuff. Yeah. It is irresponsible to not take seriously poor governance in blue cities because it's so clearly linked to what's happening politically. This is what I'm saying. And this is something that I've always felt as a public official. I've never told this story publicly, so I'm not sure how it works. I've thought about it a long time.

[00:47:27] But when I declared to run for Congress back in 1995, I had been an active member of the 33rd District Democrats since I was like 12 years old. There was a lot of people who knew me really well there. And there was this one guy who was a retired federal employee, Mack McDonald. Loved me, okay? He was retired. I had doorbelled his house, so I knew that he was caring for his very, very ill wife who was in that place. And after I made the announcement to the District Democrats, he wrote me a $100 check.

[00:47:57] And the first instinct I had was to say, Mack, you can't afford this. And I'm like, it's what the guy wants to do. It's what the guy wants to do. Okay? But I took that check. And I thought, if I don't do absolutely everything to succeed, okay? And I would have days when it's like, all right, it's 2 o'clock. I'm halfway through the precinct, and it's really starting to rain now. I'm like, I don't want to do this.

[00:48:24] But then I think of my responsibility and my obligation, okay? You know, or all kinds of different things. You know, and the people who have invested in us, whether it's an elected official or, you know, a staffer or anyone, tax people, they've invested in us. And it just kills me that we want to work a 32-hour work week, okay? I do kind of want to work a 32-hour work week or less, but I hear you.

[00:48:53] I mean, I doorbelled 80 hours a week. And I'm not saying that people have to do that. I understand. We come from different places. But can we at least get behind the idea that we owe it to be willing to work hard, willing to be self-critical, willing to get better? Because that's the other part of this that we haven't even talked about. You try bringing this stuff up and boom, they shut you down in an instant, you know? You know, in a variety of different ways. They don't even want to have the conversation.

[00:49:22] I don't get that. Well, sorry. I get it. I don't agree with it. There is a lot of, obviously, resistance out there to this message, you know? But I do want to ask a question about what's the limit of how far it's appropriate to push this critique that you're making and still be productive, right? It's still – so let me give you an example.

[00:49:49] I've heard from a number of people involved in democratic politics locally since the New Yorker piece came out, and a lot of them privately agree with some of the stuff you're saying, but also express some concerns. One elected official, local elected official said to me, and this is basically a direct quote, Adam Smith is walking a fine line between truth-telling and being crazy, right?

[00:50:13] And, you know, a couple of them cited the fact that you cited Chris Ruffo, right? You know, the conservative activist Chris Ruffo who wrote this book. By the way, I didn't bring him up in that interview. The interviewer brought him up. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. Is that the – and I think they were sort of asking the questions of themselves and maybe, you know – I can answer that question. Yeah, I can answer that question. Okay.

[00:50:42] One of the things I have always done, I go wherever I have to go to get the answers I need to get to solve a problem. Okay. Now, I think – well, I don't think. I know. If you read that article, it makes it very clear exactly how much I disagree with Chris Ruffo. Okay. You know, but my approach – and again, this is different than the modern progressive approach. The modern progressive approach is shut down the voices that you don't agree with. Don't let them speak. You know, we've seen it. Okay.

[00:51:10] I mean, gosh, democratic politicians could barely get a word out if people disagreed with them on a variety of different issues. And that's always been the approach. I don't agree with that. Look, you know, I didn't say Chris Ruffo is a genius and I agree with him. I said exactly the opposite. But the dude's got influence. Okay. You know, and he's pushing it on. I want to know. You know, when I'm going – when I'm scrolling through articles, I pick the one out that has a headline that disagrees with me.

[00:51:37] And by the way, this is true on the left as well. What's the guy's name? The Twitch guy? Hassan Piker? Is that Hassan? I can't remember his name. Anyway. He's a far left guy who disagrees with me a thousand percent. Okay. I listened to an hour-long podcast from him. There's a guy called Frederick DeBoer. Oh, yeah. He's coming on our podcast actually. Oh, cool. Yeah. No, and he really disagrees with me. I read his book. Okay.

[00:52:08] I still have enough of a liberal mind – thank you, mom and dad – that I want to explore a wide range of ideas. And this is part of also what has become a little bit of the left-wing culture is you have to indoctrinate people. You have to make sure that they don't see this other stuff because then they might start thinking the wrong way. I don't agree with that. All right. Now, if I came out and said, oh, Christopher Rufo, I love Christopher – but I didn't. Okay.

[00:52:36] I wanted to know what the bastard was up to. Right now, I am reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, Know Thy Enemy. Okay. You know. So I hear the point. And look, I don't push this all the time as I said I'm doing this stuff, but it's part of how I do things. I've also joked that I believe in the power of negative thinking. Okay. You got to think about what can go wrong. What am I missing? You know, and let me tell you something.

[00:53:05] I wouldn't be talking to you right now if I didn't think that way. The first three elections that I won in my life, I won by a razor-thin margin. All right. And I won because of doing exactly this. And I want the same thing when we're trying to figure out how to help people. And also, there's a bunch of organizations and people in our area that are doing great work. I work with the Weld program. Patrick, can't remember his last name. All formerly incarcerated. They set up sober housing. They get people jobs.

[00:53:35] Dress for Success is a nonprofit that I've worked with a lot. I want to give a shout-out to Recovery High School, which is helping addicted teenagers. It's an alternative school operating out of the old Queen Anne High School. You know, there's a ton of people who are doing great work, and I'm helping them. I'm not just sitting here complaining. All right. I like street level. Street level, it gets homeless people off the street and gets them into housing, and I'm supporting them. I met with a Muslim center down in Tukwula about building public housing the other day.

[00:54:05] So I want to get things done. That's it for another edition of Blue City Blues. I'm David Hyde. He's Sandeep Kaushik. Our editor is Quinn Waller. And if you like what you're hearing, please spread the word about Blue City Blues. Tell everyone you know about this podcast, and give us a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, that's it. Thanks so much for listening.