Alex Vitale's City of Disorder argues that underregulated, publicly subsidized capitalist growth in cities facilitated job loss in manufacturing, expansion in poorly paid service industries, and the shredding of the social welfare state. A consequence has been a destabilized and angry middle class, and an explosion in marginality: homelessness, panhandling, petty and not-so-petty crime, and deterioration of urban neighborhoods and public services. Conservatives such as New York's former Mayor Rudolph Guiliani seized upon public anger fueled by personal anxiety and neighborhood decline and successfully blamed urban liberals and “extreme” and “irresponsible” minority leaders who demand increased public funding (requiring higher taxes) for their constituents. Urban liberalism had no solution for these mounting problems and was replaced by a conservative neoliberalism (in both political parties) calling for lower taxes, reduced social spending, more subsidies for business, and tough-love for the poor. The old liberalism can be faulted for lax control of big business leading to decimation of jobs and tax revenue in cities, yet the new neoliberalism worsens the problem by destroying the social safety net needed to prevent neighborhood deterioration and calls for police repression of marginal groups.

Vitale has little difficulty finding evidence for his argument in New York City. He traces increased corporate subsidies there concurrent with cuts in social welfare. He shows urban liberals like former Mayor David Dinkins shifting to neoliberal rhetoric and policies: spending more on graffiti removal than on the Division for Youth Services working with at-risk youth. He traces “quality of life” rhetoric in mayoral discourse increasingly used as a rationale for stepped-up antipoor policies.

This is an appealing book that makes sense of what has been a profound shift in urban politics and policies since the 1960s. Vitale combines a structural critique of the economy with trends in public policy and shows their effects on physical space in neighborhoods. He then shows how neighborhood decline played out in public discourse and then in urban politics. This is a notable accomplishment and makes the book interesting reading. Still, there are times when City of Disorder skips over important observations to assert, repeatedly, the importance of political responses to marginality in shaping current urban politics.

For example, the author describes the Guiliani versus Dinkins's campaigns as centered on issues of marginality. He suggests that traditional racism, directed against all blacks, has been replaced by popular acceptance of racial diversity but less tolerance of poverty and marginality—a more class-based prejudice. Yet it is a stretch to characterize the Dinkins–Guiliani contention that way. Marginality, or let us say class dynamics, did not replace popular racism. Rather, race was the medium through which class dynamics were popularly understood. As a segment of the black population became upper middle class and politically disassociated from the demands of the black majority (think of Harold Ford, Jr.), and as a majority of white working people became economically insecure, a revised race discourse emerged to explain these dynamics. The race problem was not with the responsible, conservative, successful, blacks but with the preponderance of irresponsible black leaders and their liberal white allies who refuse to crack down on the unacceptable behavior of the black poor. This new narrative did not overturn traditional racism but revised and refined it. It was precisely the compatibility of the new and old narratives that allowed conservatives such amazing success in New York, despite their raiding of the city's treasury to support some of the richest people on earth. Racial prejudice was essential to the political defense of the wealthy and to conservatism more generally in the United States, not to hide class dynamics but to justify them.

We see these same dynamics with Barack Obama. He campaigned for president as a responsible black, going out of his way to publicly distance himself from traditional black liberals (Jesse Jackson), not to mention black militants (Jeremiah Wright). Black voters supported Obama anyway, recognizing (correctly) that he had to keep his distance from the black community in order to garner enough white votes to win office. Still, blacks expected Obama to deliver material benefits after the election. He is now in a difficult position, needing to materially help blacks (and Latinos) while appearing to be tough with blacks and Latinos—especially the “immigrants.” Health-care giants have not hesitated to finance conservatives, arguing that reining in corporate trusts in health care is a trick for robbing hard-working Americans (read, whites) to reward the uninsured (minorities) who voted for Obama. Getting to unified class movements will mean navigating through these racial waters; there is no dry path.

Organizing Urban America, by Heidi J. Swarts, is a detailed two-city study of progressive faith-based community-based movements, such as the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO), and Gamaliel, with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Swarts makes prescient observations and inferences from her case studies and literature review, but she does not integrate them into a theoretical argument about community organizing generally. She does argue that community-based Christian organizations (CBCOs) have innovated the practice of community organizing along cultural lines, while ACORN has innovated the community organizing practice of politics.

Swarts observes that CBCOs, being church based, have diverse constituencies engaged in worship. CBCOs must somehow appeal to these diverse churchgoers across lines of race and class, as well as liberal and conservative political persuasions. They must find ways to integrate their often instrumental goals, public focus, and participatory aims with the spiritual orientation and private and personal character of much church activity. CBCOs developed training regimens and organizational processes stressing member relationships, as well as other strategies, to manage these tensions. The intense local requirements of this kind of movement building tends to steer CBCOs away from broad issue campaigns or national policy work. An interesting exception, that we learn too little about, is Gamaliel, which recruited academic and policy experts to help develop its regional and national policy agenda.

ACORN is, in many ways, a study in contrast to the faith-based groups. ACORN spends little time building collective identity among its members. It works organizers hard, pays them little, and runs through them quickly. Member training is secondary to achieving campaign wins. Local chapters do little research and have slim capacity to initiate broad policy suggestions to their national office. Campaigns, therefore, tend to be created at the national level and then organized from the top down to the locals. The author likens ACORN recruitment techniques to corporate marketing “sales”; it is a numbers game. That said, the book notes many successful ACORN policy wins. ACORN has also been much more influential in politics than CBCOs.

Although the book looked in depth at ACORN and CBCOs only in St. Louis and San Jose, it shows patterns than explain ACORN's vulnerabilities and recent demise. Longtime national leaders at ACORN were accused of absconding large amounts of the organization's money. Local chapters of ACORN apparently knew little about the finances of the national office. Given the book's description of ACORN's revolving staff and member base and the top-down nature of decision making, it seems plausible that top leaders could operate with little scrutiny from below. Even more damaging for ACORN, two right-wing activists posing undercover as a pimp and a prostitute videotaped an ACORN social worker advising the undercover people to provide misleading information on government forms in order to secure benefits. The videotapes were headline news on national television, leading to an overwhelming congressional vote to cut off all federal funding for ACORN.

The book left me with a host of questions I wish the author had engaged. One set is historical. Why is it that in the decades when capitalism became more centralized (in terms of wealth distribution and power) and global in reach, community-based organizations became increasingly fragmented, focused on parochial issues, unable to foresee the implications of larger economic trends or organize against them? Why is it that elites were able to develop a comprehensive worldview justifying their increased power, called neoliberalism, while community and labor organizations were unable to innovate much beyond Saul Alinsky's grab bag of populist organizing techniques? How does the growth of mainly white-led community organizations (such as ACORN, and some CBCOs), operating in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods, connect with the decline (and repression) of radical minority social movements in the 1960s and 1970s? Does the less controversial, relatively conservative parochialism of community groups in recent decades have something to do with their fear of repression, or defunding from foundations and government? If so, than their localism and emphasis on “concretes” over systems analysis and a critique of capitalist development and the integrity of democratic processes is not an innocent consequence of an emphasis on relationship building or devotion to Alinsky. Does the avoidance of systems critique have something to do with the lack of interest these groups seem to have with collaborating with one another, or with collaborating with other declining poor people's organizations, such as labor unions and civil rights organizations? Does the frequent avoidance of race noted by the author contributes to CBCO's inability—never explored in these terms in the book—to develop an American (U.S.) class analysis, one that connects culture, class, and the predominantly racially segregated life experiences of most low-income people?

Both books, taken together, describe a coherent right-wing dominating discourse and making political inroads in cities—many majority-minority and Democratic. This is an achievement well worth noting and analyzing. They both show a largely reactive, fragmented, and disoriented liberal Left. In this context, Obama's successful presidential campaign was extraordinary and revealing. The energy and desire for change unleashed by the campaign showed that community organizations, unions, and other progressive organizations have not kept pace with the widely felt desire of Americans for a new direction in the country. The two books also explain the current dilemmas of the Obama administration: There is no coherent liberal-left narrative available to justify substantive policy reforms in the economy or in urban affairs. And, there is no coordinated community or labor movement capable of supporting Obama's originally bold attempts to reform health care, labor laws, and cities. They show that the roots of the political problem are not in Washington but in our cities.