The Democratic Party ignores this wake-up call to become more relevant and inclusive at its peril.
An insider’s analysis of what the Democratic Party must do to win as white voters become the minority in the U.S. in the next 25 years.
“White Americans have had over a three-hundred-year head start in this country, so it’s time for everyone else to catch up,” writes MSNBC political analyst Maxwell in a clear message to the Democratic establishment. “And the starting line is the ballot box.” With white people expected to be a minority of voters by 2045, the author argues that Democrats must engage those constituencies who will have the numbers, and therefore the power, to shape the future. As the Democratic electorate becomes “younger, increasingly female, and incredibly diverse,” the future of the party does not “look like a seventy-year-old white man.” Maxwell, a 2016 campaign staffer for Hillary Clinton and a field organizer for President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, warns that Democrats cannot gain traction by continuing to prop up candidates who don’t understand privilege and the country’s historical racial divide. With solid statistics to back her up, she asserts that “the 2020 election is not about the 77,744 white votes that won Donald Trump the electoral college” and whom Democrats are fixated on courting. Rather, the key to victory is the 4.4 million people who voted for Obama in 2012 but didn’t vote in 2016; “a third of those people were black voters.” How does Maxwell know that directly engaging these disengaged voters and focusing on their needs is a winning strategy? Because Obama did it, twice. With a style that is as infectious as it is cogent and accessible, the author outlines and defends her recommendations and strategies so thoroughly that the only possible dissent is a willful disregard for the future of not just the Democratic Party, but the future of all but the most privileged Americans.
The Democratic Party ignores this wake-up call to become more relevant and inclusive at its peril.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-306-87361-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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