Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining us today from his home in New Jersey is my colleague Steve Malanga.

Steve is City Journal's senior editor, and he's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

He's been writing a lot for us lately, as he normally does, but we asked him to come on the show today to discuss

his feature essay from the autumn issue of the magazine, which was called, or is called City Hall Socialists.

We released the piece online in late October. It's generated a fair bit of attention, and there will be a

link to it in the description.

Steve, thanks very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

Just sitting here, hunkering down, waiting for the massive snowstorm to envelop all of us.

Yes, yes, 17 inches we're supposed to get in my neck of New York, but we'll see.

You know, as you detail in this essay, City Hall Socialists, the last few years, have seen a striking emergence of self-identified

socialists and their political organizations as active players in city politics across America, with dozens of

candidates winning office to various local positions.

Where are we seeing this trend most powerfully?

What cities has this been going on?

Well, first of all, you'd say big cities and big cities that have traditionally

been identified with liberal democratic politics.

And in the past, I would say five years, increasingly identified with more progressive

politics.

I wrote actually about cities becoming more progressive, you know, a couple of years ago in

City Journal and what that meant for a whole bunch of areas, including policing and budgeting.

...