Preview: Why Is David Rieff a Cultural Pessimist about Blue America?

This is a free preview of our latest Patreon-only episode of Blue City Blues, with writer David Rieff, a war correspondent, an essayist, and a leading cultural critic. David, the son of sociologist Philip Rieff, author of The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and author Susan Sontag, one of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20th century, is a formidable intellectual and critic in his own right. He is also a self-described cultural pessimist, who argues in his 2024 collection of essays, Desire and Fate, that the rise of woke ideas in blue cosmopolitan America heralds the decline of Western culture. 

In our wide ranging conversation – subscribe to Blue City Blues on Patreon to listen to the full episode – we discuss with Rieff why he fits neither on the political left or the political right, and why he has such antipathy to wokeness. Rieff tells us that woke is the cultural handmaiden to late stage capitalism, providing a moral fig leaf that acts as a legitimization mechanism for neoliberal institutions, as he further argues that it medicalizes grievance and prioritizes emotional safety and identity over political economy and universalist humanist claims. 

As we delve farther into David’s critique of wokeness, and what he describes as its censorious safetyism, he suggests that his father’s great insight about the rise of culture of the therapeutic has been superseded by what he calls a rising culture of the traumatic. And he says he sees wokeness ultimately as a form of kitsch, one that presents a grave risk to the Western tradition of culture and art.   

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

OUTSIDE SOURCES: 

David Rieff, Desire and Fate, Columbia University Press (2024).

A recent profile of David Rieff referenced in the episode: David Klion, "Woke Obsessions," The Ideas Journal, Jan. 22, 2026