The longer you live, the more you see a series of eternal recurrences. 25 years ago or so, I was sitting in front of a desktop computer, back when our computers still had very specific rooms that they lived in, staring at the draft page of site called Blogspot, where for several years I dumped political musings, cultural observations and a lot of amateur baseball philosophizing into a free website with a readership I could probably count on two hands. From there I went to Livejournal, where I built a similar double-digit audience with whom I shared the ups and downs of my early-to-mid 20s (this page still exists, is profoundly embarrassing and no I’m not going to tell you what it’s called), leading to the same professional cul de sac, before catching on with the Philadelphia City Paper, a long-lost humanities journal called Ethos, Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, The Week, Newsweek, Slate and now The Nation.
I’ve written well over a thousand articles in the past decade, which have allowed me to buy a house, develop an audience that eclipsed my hilarious Blogspot numbers by several orders of magnitude, write several books (including one that I can immodestly say changed the national conversation around American institutional reform) and get promoted to the position of full, complete and whole-ass professor while still, unfortunately, not being nimble or sufficiently forward-thinking to be the first person writing on Substack or making videos on Tik Tok or moving to Bluesky early enough in the churn of creation and destruction that defines our era. I had a child relatively late in life in 2018 and then another even later in life in 2023, and I have always needed the money from freelance writing more than I’ve wanted to pop off on my own and bet on myself. Maybe someone has told you this, but little kids keep you very busy even in the best of times. I’ve lost count of the number of editors I’ve worked with at these outlets, and they always leave or get laid off, taking my ability to get published with them, until I’m left now with one (admittedly fantastic gig) at The Nation, working with one very talented editor. While I hope this relationship lasts forever, it might be time to give in, at last, and create something that belongs to me and only to me.
The reasons I’ve been hesitant to do this are pretty good and hold up quite well if we’re all going to be completely honest with each other. Self-promotion has always been deeply uncomfortable to me — I got red-faced with shame just sharing articles on Facebook, back when I was on Facebook. And I believe in editors, both their role in the journalism ecosystem and the tremendous value that they bring to our writing, sharpening words and phrases, tightening structure and occasionally preventing us from committing career suicide by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. I’m thinking of when Ben Frumin (now at Wirecutter the last time I checked) stopped me from writing an elaborate attack on how John McCain continued to enable Trumpism to his dying breath, the day after he died. I was also so tired of the endless process of invention and re-invention that it took me years to leave Twitter, not because I believed it was salvageable but because how many times can we do this? I believe in the principle of paying one fee to one institution and getting access to a large group of talented writers in return, and I really value being part of a team of writers working in theory toward something larger than ourselves.
But I also don’t want to be the last guy in Yokoi’s Cave, long after the battle has been lost, and I’m also excited to have some creative freedom to write and say whatever I want. The project of this website is social democracy and how to get it in the United States. Many Democrats and progressives, who were called liberals when I was a youngster, have spent their lives and careers working, seemingly in vain, toward some version of European social democracy. For me, the most eye-opening week of my life was a trip to NATO’s Danish Atlantic Youth Seminar in Denmark in the summer of 2000. After flying into Copenhagen and exploring the city, I took a long, pleasant train to the small city of Aalborg on the country’s far northern tip and was genuinely astonished by what I saw. As a native of a struggling, white working class town in New Jersey, I had never in my life seen such horizonless prosperity, seemingly free of the endemic social problems that plagued my home village as well as the nearest city that I had spent significant time in, Philadelphia.
While studying comparative politics in graduate school, I wondered why we couldn’t have such incredibly nice things in the United States, and rejected the strange, racist or nonsensical arguments generally wielded against the Scandinavian countries – that their prosperity is only possible because of their comparative homogeneity, or that well-run and comprehensive social insurance schemes aren’t scalable outside of these small societies. Like many other young Democrats, I gravitated first to Howard Dean’s insurgent 2003 presidential campaign and then to Barack Obama’s 2008 vision of “hope and change” hoping to bring the wonders of European social democracy to America only to be frustrated again and again by the lack of progress and the inability of Democrats to push visionary change through the antiquated policy machinery of the government.
I watched in horror as policymakers reacted to the tragedy of 9/11 by squandering an entire generation’s wealth on the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, responded so inadequately to the Great Recession that they galvanized a global populist revolt and then revolted against their elites in the U.S. by twice electing the absurd and grotesque figure of Donald Trump to the presidency. By election night in 2024, as my wife and I were splitting a Xanax down its teeny tiny little middle and coming up with a ten-point plan to survive the next four years, I knew that we needed to fundamentally reassess the social-democratic project in the United States.
I’ll be sharing some pieces of that project, which for now I’m calling Bluetopia, here over the coming months and years, but also writing about current events in the form of miniature or oversized op-eds, reflecting on the hourly challenges of parenting and talking about whatever I’m watching on TV and reading and….I’ll spare you the baseball, I think. But I can’t make any promises. I’m planning to churn out at least one post a week, to link to my public writing in other forums and above all, hopefully not boring you to tears.
Anyway, welcome to Bluetopia and thank you for reading.