Reason Roundtable: Why Do Big Cities Keep Electing Self-Described Socialists?
Plus: Trump's stupid Project Freedom, sad King Charles visits America, and how BEEF characterizes America as a nation of scammers.
There’s a new Reason Roundtable podcast up, with Kate Andrews of The Washington Post’s Opinions section subbing in for Matt Welch, currently sheltering at an undisclosed location. It’s a rollicking episode in which Kate, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and I talk about Seattle’s hard-left mayor who recently told millionaires not to let the screen door hit them on the way out, New York’s Zohran Mamdani, and similarly successful pols at the city level.
Are we in fact witnessing a leftward lurch at the city level? I don’t think so, but there’s a lot to discuss, especially when it comes to how local pols often take wealth production for granted and skip right to the question of distribution. In places like New York, government incompetence and overreach is baked into the equation. While there’s no question that at times all the taxes and regs and mediocre services push people to flee (this happened during the decade of the 1970s, when Fun City lost about 10 percent of its population), a place like New York has quite a buffer. Smaller cities like Seattle don’t have as big a cushion, for sure, but it’s never clear exactly what set of policies push places into decline. As part of this discussion, Peter Suderman raised my 2005 piece ‘Live Free and Die of Boredom,’ which takes issues with monocausal explanations of why some cities thrive and others die.
We also talk about Donald Trump’s moronic foreign policy toward Iran, who is really to blame for politicians being vote whores, and what’s going on with depictions of the upper classes in prestige TV shows like BEEF, Your Friends and Neighbors, and Euphoria.
Here’s the Reason writeup, followed by links to the episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and SoundCloud.
Below all that is information about a great panel I’ll be on next week in D.C. It’s free and open to the public, so come out if you’re in Washington. And you can also watch live online.
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie are joined by special guest Kate Andrews, opinion journalist for The Washington Post, to discuss how big city governance is playing out in Democratic cities. They examine why candidates with strong ties to organized labor and socialist policy agendas, such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, keep winning in major cities, even as affordability worsens and residents leave. The panel also considers whether these outcomes reflect voter preferences, weak alternatives, or a broader failure of reform-oriented factions on the left.
Next, the panel turns to Iran, where President Donald Trump has announced “Project Freedom,” a plan for the U.S. Navy to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz amid ongoing tensions and uncertainty over the conflict’s trajectory. They discuss the economic stakes, the political fallout, and what the lack of a clear resolution suggests about the long-term direction of U.S. foreign policy. The conversation then shifts to King Charles’ visit to the United States and what it reveals about political culture, symbolism, and leadership on both sides of the Atlantic. Finally, a listener asks why voters continue to reward pandering politicians and whether meaningful change is possible within the current electoral system.
0:00—Why big city Democrats keep electing socialists
23:01—The Strait of Hormuz and “Project Freedom”
36:35—Listener question on voter behavior
45:34—King Charles visits the U.S.
53:03—Gillespie’s interview with Justice Neil Gorsuch
57:08—Weekly cultural recommendations
On Thursday, May 14, I’ll participate in a panel at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. where Sally Satel, Alex Tabarrok, Judd Kessler, and Nobel laureate Alvin E. Roth will discuss his new book Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work. To register to attend in person or watch online, go here.
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