SUBURBAN LIBERALS ABANDON WORKERS

Lily Geismer, Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("This book counters [the] conventional narratives of exceptionalism and decline by examining the liberal residents who lived and worked along the high-tech corridor of the Route 128 highway outside Boston. Dispelling the widely held view that the rise of the New Right and the Reagan revolution led to the demise of liberalism, Don't Blame Us demonstrates the reorientation of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party away from their roots in the labor union halls of northern cities, and toward white-collar suburbanites in the postindustrial metropolitan periphery. The individualist, meritocratic, suburban-centered priorities of liberal, knowledge-oriented professionals embody the rise of postwar metropolitan growth, inequality, and economic restructuring, and contributed directly to the transformation of liberalism itself. The stories of the political activism by residents in the Route 128 area link these larger processes to local politics, reinforcing the key role of the suburbs in shaping party politics, public policy, and structural and racial inequality. The grassroots mobilization for the liberal causes of civil rights, environmentalism, peace, and feminism simultaneously challenges the scholarly assessments that have focus primarily on the reactionary, republican, and Sunbelt-centered dimensions of suburban politics. Connecting political culture and activism in the Boston suburbs to larger national political developments, Don't Blame Us shows that liberal did not prioritize 'posteconomic issues' such as race, gender, foreign policy, and environmentalism, and become less responsive to the economy and workers in the 1970s and 1980s. Rather. in supporting these issues, liberalism and the national Democratic Party increasingly came to reflect the materialist concerns of suburban knowledge workers reather than autoworkers." Id. at 1. In short, seeing the suburban-red against the urban-blue.).