In Blue-Collar Conservatism, Timothy Lombardo analyses the politics of blue-collar white ethnic Philadelphians. For Lombardo, racial upheavals of the mid-twentieth century were central to the rise of a blue-collar conservatism that cherished law and order while selectively rejecting welfare liberalism (p. 3). The book uses the career of Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia's law-and-order mayor, as the embodiment of and a lens for understanding the political ideas, language and policies that circulated in the city's white working-class communities.

Throughout the book, Lombardo maintains a delicate balance. He consistently reminds readers that racism underpinned much of white blue-collar Philadelphians’ politics, but at the same time he demonstrates that reducing hundreds of thousands of people to simple racists is to work in caricature. ‘The eventual blue-collar embrace of conservative figures like Frank Rizzo’, as Lombardo puts it, ‘was the result not only of resentment and fear, but also of careful engagement with the politics of the urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s’ (p. 5). Yes, race played a significant role in blue-collar politics, but so too did economic security, cultural identity and a marginalized political position in the larger urban order.

In less-skilled hands, such arguments could devolve into excuse-making or even a defence of reprehensible politics, but Lombardo captures Philadelphia's politics in a supple, sophisticated way. Many white Philadelphians, he argues, genuinely thought they were ‘color-blind’, believing they could determine who ‘deserved’ more public resources, access to housing and better schools. To Philadelphians who held this view, some people – mostly white, but not always – worked hard, played by the rules and accepted their place in society. They did not protest against the old ways that, for example, allowed Girard College to discriminate against African Americans. They believed that certain people had ‘earned’ their place on the city's construction sites. Others, however, lacked toughness, dedication, tenacity. These Philadelphians – almost all African American – wanted to get ahead without hard work, take handouts from the government. Lombardo strongly and astutely calls out the wellsprings of this jaundiced politics. ‘Their color blindness was the ultimate luxury of their white privilege’, he writes. ‘They were the products of segregated environments that allowed them to mask their social privilege behind blue-collar identity politics and their veneer of color-blind values like toughness and hard work.’ White privilege was so intractable because it ‘masqueraded as identity’ (p. 244).

Blue-collar white Philadelphians, holding such a firm commitment to a racialized worldview of who was right and wrong, deserving and shiftless, came to see liberal reformers as out of touch, if not a threat. For black Philadelphians, however, city charter reform, urban development and fair employment laws offered at best piecemeal approaches to systemic problems. They chafed at continued discrimination in the city's schools, workplaces and housing market. They protested at the school board, on job sites and in white neighbourhoods. For blue-collar whites, these protests and liberal attempts to ameliorate African American inequality were a threat to their racial status and economic security. They found their champion in Frank Rizzo. Rizzo, who rose in the city's police force to become commissioner and then mayor, spoke of his colour blindness, but acted ‘as a crusading savior of the city [for] those that conflated the rise of black militancy with the liberals they blamed for endangering their traditions and institutions’ (p. 138). Rizzo, in short, took it as his mission to ‘defend’ white neighbourhoods, while claiming he was just looking out for ordinary Philadelphians. He initiated a ‘police riot’ against black students at the board of education in 1967 as a means of preserving law and order when, in his view, liberals were too weak to do so (p. 103). He infamously erected ‘Rizzo Means Business’ billboards when he ran for mayor as a way to claim he would protect white neighbourhoods and their interests while not so subtly reminding Philadelphians of his background as a tough cop who took on soft liberals and black protestors. Rizzo pitched himself for decades as the defender of the marginalized white working class, and he was loved for doing so.

Lombardo's deft analysis of this white blue-collar politics makes a significant contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century American history. In Lombardo's sure hands, white Philadelphians are treated as complex people, men and women with understandable concerns about economic status, neighbourhood deterioration and political marginalization. But Lombardo never lets them off the hook. Underpinning all of their concerns is a worldview that was often racist and almost always refused to recognize the nature of white privilege in American society. Frank Rizzo did not invent these sentiments. But he knew how to capitalize on them for political gain. As Lombardo points out in the Epilogue of Blue-Collar Conservatism, politicians since Rizzo have continued to brew a toxic mix of economic fear, political alienation and racial resentment. Even the occasional president has tried his hand at it.