Liberal Talk Radio

Just got back from a meeting with a magazine editor. Nothing much to report, but it got my wheels turning. The guy was talking about how frustrating it was to be from Seattle and yet have gotten more attention on the East Coast than he got in his hometown.

That’s something you hear a lot. And it got me thinking about how the Western U.S. still isn’t taken seriously by the intelligentsia back East. It was a huge deal when Michael Kinsley left the egghead world of Harper’s and The New Republic to head to Seattle and start Slate. I think the only time the East takes the West seriously is when it comes to high-tech, and that’s probably because Silicon Valley enriched the pockets of a lot of Wall Street bankers and IPO underwriters!

Anyway, point being, these thoughts, in combination with this Sunday NYT article on Western Democrats got me thinking today. There’s an emerging idea out there, something that Professor and I come back to a lot, that the liberal ideas have to win in the West to be competitive again. It seems like time someone put together a pointy-headed policy journal that talks specifically about the way you do liberalism out West. For example, what role to citizens’ initiatives play in crafting public policy? They’re much more common out West, and they have HUGE implications for the role of representative democracy in the 21st century. How can they be used to shift the dialogue and get us out of the two-party deadlock on certain issues?

So I dunno. I certainly don’t have the time to start a policy journal right now. But it seems like a useful and underserved market. Liberalism in general has a lot to gain by thinking about how to win decisively in the West. Over the next 30 years, as things like water rights and land use policy shape the debate, it would be great to have someone thinking about these things and their national implications.

More on this to come…