At the time of this writing, six months have passed since Donald Trump’s populist grab of what many assumed, going into the 2016 election, was a natural Democratic constituency: white working-class voters. Since November, pundits, pollsters, and scholars have puzzled over Trump’s win in places like Macomb County, Michigan, which voted for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012. Some attribute Trump’s victories in places like Macomb County to his attacks on free trade and promises to promote job growth in declining blue-collar industries. Others emphasize his bromides against corrupt elites in the Washington “swamp”; his allegations that immigrants pose threats to American citizens; and the thinly veiled racism of his attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters, Muslim citizens, and Mexicans and Mexican Americans. There is likely truth to each of these explanations. But in the months after the election, they were sometimes proffered in an ad hoc manner: just-so stories told to make sense of an electoral surprise.

Both books under review help contextualize white working-class support for Trump, and both do so in two important ways. First, they look historically at the Democratic Party’s turn away from labor and its embrace of free-market ideology. Second, they devote careful attention to the relationship between national and urban/local politics, exploring the ways in which neoliberalization plays out on the ground, including how it affects working-class voters.

The focus of Lily Geismer’s Don’t Blame Us is the Route 128 corridor outside Boston. Comprised of affluent, predominantly white suburbs like Lexington, Newton, and Brookline, this area is populated by highly educated knowledge-workers, who tend to view themselves as exceptional in the sense of different from the New Right suburbanites who are often blamed for the growing inequality in America’s metropolitan regions. The book’s title is a reference to the “Don’t Blame Me, I’m From Massachusetts” bumper stickers that circulated after the presidential election of 1972: the year Massachusetts was the only state whose electoral votes went to George McGovern.

Geismer analyzes a series of liberal movements in suburban Boston, beginning in the decade leading up to Richard Nixon’s election: fair-housing activism, which, by the early 1960s, produced the most extensive state-level fair-housing legislation in the United States; local support for the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, Boston’s voluntary, state-funded school desegregation program; the environmentalist movement, which emphasized preserving open space through state- and federally funded programs that supported local conservation efforts; and grassroots antiwar activism centered on opposition to the Vietnam War. What all these movements had in common was that they did not require significant financial sacrifice from wealthy, white suburbanites. They did not require substantial increases to local tax rates, for example; they did not threaten to erode suburban property values; and they did not challenge the underlying structural inequalities that produce and maintain privilege for white suburban liberals.

On Geismer’s telling, 1972 was a pivotal year for Democratic Party politics. That year’s Democratic Convention was the first after the party reformed its procedures for selecting delegates, a change adopted in response to concerns about the marginalization of women, young people, and black voters. The party implemented quotas that mandated minimal levels of representation for members of these underrepresented groups. In so doing, it tilted the balance of power away from organized labor. Just three years later, Michael Dukakis began his first term as Massachusetts governor. He would go on, in the 1980s, to preside over the so-called Massachusetts Miracle, focusing on government stimulation of private-sector growth, tax breaks for businesses, welfare-to-work programs, and other staples of what would become the American neoliberal public policy agenda. Geismer argues compellingly that, like the Massachusetts liberal more generally, Dukakis was neither exceptional nor out of step with other New Democrats. In the author’s words (p. 279), “The narrative of the Massachusetts liberal has widely obscured that the real transformation of the Democratic Party and national politics has not been a geographic shift away from the Northeast and toward the Sunbelt but rather a power shift away from urban ethnics and labor unions to suburban knowledge professionals and high-tech corporations.”

Don’t Blame Us is a persuasive account of the limits of the liberalism of New Democrats, one that complicates our understanding of the role that American suburbs play in postwar electoral politics. If the book has a flaw, it is an ironic one, given the author’s critique of neoliberal individualism: its evaluative argument, which centers on suburbanites’ actions, attitudes, and consciousness, is highly individualistic. To cite one example, in her discussion of Proposition 2½, the Massachusetts ballot initiative that capped property taxes at 2.5%, Geismer underscores that even those along Route 128 who opposed the measure tended to do so for self-interested reasons. “The president of the Newton PTA,” she writes, “stressed that defeat of the proposition would ‘preserve the educational system which has made Newton a desirable place to live.’” She continues: “[R]arely did [Route 128] suburbanites . . . discuss the ways in which Proposition 2½ might affect children in Boston’s public schools” (p.264).

The failure to take differently positioned “others” into account when making political decisions is a common theme throughout the book, which takes as one of its aims to counter the imperative in its title. No doubt, there is plenty of blame to go around. But if the central story the book tells is about the fracturing of the New Deal electoral coalition beginning in the early 1970s, then the most important political question is not whether individuals take into account the good of their fellow citizens when they act politically. Instead, it is how the Left might forge new electoral coalitions: coalitions that, assuming self-interested political action, nevertheless cross class, race, and place-based divides.

Much like Don’t Blame Us, Timothy Weaver’s Blazing the Neoliberal Trail analyzes the postwar Left’s adoption of approaches to address urban problems that overlook, and often exacerbate, structural inequality. Weaver’s focus is enterprise zones (EZs): state-designated urban areas where supply-side policies like tax breaks and regulatory relief are introduced with a view to incentivizing private investment. Conceived in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s, EZs grew increasingly popular over the course of the 1980s, notwithstanding empirical evidence that they were relatively ineffective at grappling with unemployment, poverty, and the other problems they purported to address. Why? The author’s claim is that “the triumph and institutionalization of neoliberal ideas” (p. 66) accounts for the widespread support for EZs, not just among Republicans and Conservatives but also among Democrats and members of the British Labor Party.

At the heart of Blazing the Neoliberal Trail are case studies of EZs in Philadelphia and in London’s Docklands. Weaver characterizes the Philadelphia case as an example of “neoliberalism by default.” The options open to local actors were highly constrained by federal policies that subsidized capital flight to the suburbs and the Sunbelt, and by dramatic reductions in state and federal aid to cities starting in the late 1970s. By the early 1990s, Philadelphia was in the throes of a structurally induced fiscal crisis. Moody’s downgraded its bond rating to speculative (“junk bond”) status, and the state legislature responded by establishing the Philadelphia Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority (PICA) to oversee the city’s finances. Philadelphia went on to privatize many city services, to pass a five-year plan that significantly reduced wages and benefits to unions, and to win designation as a federal empowerment zone (Bill Clinton’s 1990s variation on the EZ). Downtown Philadelphia eventually rebounded to become, in Weaver’s words, a “playground for the wealthy” (p. 240), while the city’s most vulnerable continued to suffer from increased unemployment and poverty.

In contrast with the Philadelphia case, the London Docklands case is an instance of what Weaver calls “neoliberalism by design.” In the UK, political power is highly centralized; British cities, unlike their American counterparts, have little political autonomy. Hence in the Docklands, national elites were able to transfer land ownership to a quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organization, the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), to which they granted both planning power and the authority contract with developers. The LDDC aggressively pursued private-sector investment, producing outcomes that mirrored those in Philadelphia: extensive commercial and residential real estate development that benefited business interests and affluent consumers, at the expense of labor and the poor.

Weaver’s case studies are detailed and informative. They are the principal strength of his book. But his theoretical claim about “the independent role of ideas” (p. 15) is less than fully persuasive. Weaver argues that the ideas articulated by early advocates of enterprise zones were the principal cause of the outcomes in Philadelphia and in London: that ideas and ideology, more so than interests and power, shaped the relevant policy outcomes. In his words, “[I]deas led the way” (p. 10). The evidence he offers in support of this claim is that prior to the adoption of EZ legislation, corporate interests did not lobby for its passage. Instead, think tanks, ideologically committed public officials, and, in the US case, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) promoted the zones. Of course, since ALEC’s membership consists of both state legislators and representatives of private corporations, its role is not evidence of the absence of corporate power in EZ legislation. But more importantly, even in those cases in which political actors do make decisions that benefit capital absent direct involvement by corporations, corporate power can still play a role, via what Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (“Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56 [December 1962]: 947–52) call “the law of anticipated reactions.”

In other words, the fact that private corporations were not always involved in promoting EZ legislation early on is not evidence that their interests held no sway. To the contrary, the convergence of liberals and conservatives on this pro-capitalist legislation during just the period when the Labor and Democratic Parties turned their backs on the working class likely signals the significance of the postwar electoral power shift that is documented in both books under review.

What do Don’t Blame Us and Blazing the Neoliberal Trail tell readers about left and liberal electoral politics in the twenty-first century? Neoliberal ideology notwithstanding, these books demonstrate that political parties ignore their working-class constituencies at their peril. Voters in places like Macomb County, Michigan, suffer from policies that entrench and exacerbate structural inequality. And when voters suffer, they become vulnerable to the populism of a candidate like Trump.