On Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the the Democratic Party and Timothy Weaver, Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom
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…