Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The argument of this book is that the future of the Democratic Party lies not in embracing the leftist politics of Bernie Sanders but in doubling down on liberal identity politics and catering to people who are the same race and/or gender—black and female (ideally both)—as the author, Zerlina Maxwell, an oppressed SiriusXM executive and high-level 2016 Clinton campaign staffer. We're told that the reason the Democratic Party did not win the presidency in 2016 is because it did not motivate black women to go to the polls, and the person to blame for this abject outreach failure is somehow neither Hillary Clinton (i.e., the nominee, you may remember) nor Zerlina Maxwell (Clinton's director of progressive media), but Bernie Sanders. That's why the book opens with an anecdote about her entering the lion's den at Politicon, where she was booed by the unwashed masses of privileged white male millenial Bernie Bros—people who are very privileged and probably not even employed as executives in large corporations, so who are they to voice their opinions about things? The book doesn't really address the contradiction between the author's view and the reality that young people like me (i.e., the future of the party) overwhelmingly prefer Bernie Sanders, which is something that Matt Yglesias pointed out in a 2016 Vox article titled "Bernie Sanders is (still) the future of the Democratic Party," and that the political science professor David Faris also pointed out in a recent book titled "The Kids Are All Left: How Young Voters Will Unite America." In fact, Maxwell generally doesn't really seem to seriously engage with arguments others have made about any of the issues she talks about. When she writes about her views on identity politics, she contrasts her own views with those of Francis Fukuyama, whom she cites as someone whose views are totally misguided, implying that he just doesn't get marginalized groups and that's why he doesn't understand identity politics, and it leaves you wondering whether she... incorrectly believes that Fukuyama is a white guy's name? (It's a Japanese surname, which is to say that he's Asian, i.e., a racial minority in the United States. To my knowledge, Francis Fukuyama is not white.) I just think her arguments aren't really well supported at all. She seems to argue that simply expanding the welfare state is somehow white identity politics. She can't resist speculating that most of the Bernie supporters who are impolite to her on social media may be Russian bots, apparently not realizing that, if this were true, it would mean that toxic white privilege is not the reason her interactions on social media are unpleasant and her whole chapter on Bernie Bros is basically meaningless. She also never acknowledges the fact that polls consistently showed Bernie beating basically everyone else with LGBT voters (only Warren came close), Hispanic voters (including me and all the Hispanic people I know in real life, perhaps in part because I got them interested in Bernie if they weren't already), etc., which means she's being dishonest about where the enthusiasm for Bernie comes from. She says, without evidence, that Bernie voters must be misogynists because whatever poll she was looking at (she doesn't cite it or even mention the name of the polling organization she got the data from) indicated that their preferred second choice was Biden and not Warren. This wasn't actually true according to any of the Morning Consult polls I remember reading, but even if it were, this is a ridiculous argument. She assumes Bernie supporters were just this hivemind of white male millennials who must have the same opinions about everything when, in reality, we were a pretty diverse group drawn to Bernie for various different reasons. My understanding is that many of the voters who were on the fence between Bernie and Biden were working class types, not really Warren's base. Biden was also one of the most popular candidates for much of the primary season (indeed, he ended up winning it), so it probably shouldn't be that surprising if, at some point, the candidate who ended up being the most popular among the overall Democratic primary electorate was also the second most popular among the set of people for whom Bernie was number one. Bernie supporters also had many reasons to sour on Warren over the course of the primary, including the fact that she embraced the help of an extremely well-funded SuperPAC (Resist PAC) at the last minute so that her campaign could hobble along through Super Tuesday. It's also telling that, in a book about how the Democratic Party needs to emphasize representational politics even more than it currently does, the author mentions Kamala Harris more than thirty times but never mentions Tulsi Gabbard or Andrew Yang even once. Is Asian representation not important? She also casts Bernie as this random old white dude, and the fact that he's Jewish and could've been the first Jewish president doesn't seem to count for anything in her view. She only mentions Pete Buttigieg to criticize him for being unpopular with people of color (even though Warren polled at roughly the same level, if not slightly below Pete, with PoC voters) and for being audaciously privileged, which gets me thinking that all this emphasis on representational politics is insincere. I can't help but wonder if she believes that, if a gay person is a white male, they are automatically more privileged than Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, etc. I personally didn't really like Pete at all (even though I'm supposed to be ecstatic about the possibility that someone who is in the same minority group as me could be president), but the author's opinion seems hypocritical here. The only thing I like about this book is that it talks up some people I like, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who endorsed Bernie Sanders and NOT Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren, by the way, although I don't believe this is ever mentioned in the book). That isn't really a good reason to give this book more than the number of stars it deserves though (i.e., the lowest number possible). Also, the author aligns herself with Hillary Clinton, who "amplified the historic nature of her glass-ceiling-shattering candidacy," yet the author also approvingly namedrops Angela Davis for her views on intersectionality, even though Davis is a very cool Marxist who is explicitly opposed to Clinton's bourgeois feminism. How can you stan Clinton and Davis at the same time? It's all kinda confusing, probably because #VoteLikeBlackWomen (which is essentially the message of this book) is neither a coherent political ideology nor a useful guiding principle.