Intro

In early June 2020, Christina Gessler and Zerlina Maxwell met remotely to discuss Maxwell’s soon-to-be-released book. This episode is an encore presentation of that discussion. As we watch the race to the 2024 United States presidential election, we revisit this conversation from four years ago to reconsider lessons learned and those ignored in the race to the 2020 presidential election.

Today’s book is: The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide (Legacy Lit, 2020), by Zerlina Maxwell, which examines the past and present problems of the Left. After working on presidential campaigns for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Maxwell gained first-hand knowledge of what liberals have and have not been doing right over the past few elections. Ultimately, these errors worked in President Donald Trump's favor in 2016; he ran a campaign on white identity politics, successfully tapping into white male angst and resistance. In 2020, after the Democratic Party's most historically diverse pool of presidential candidates dwindled down to Joe Biden, once again an older white man, Maxwell asked: what now, liberals? Fueled by Maxwell's trademark wit and candor, The End of White Politics dismantles the problems of the Left, challenging everyone from young "Bernie Bros" to power players in the "Billionaire Boys' Club." Whether tackling the white privilege that enabled Mayor Pete Buttigieg's presidential run, the controversial #HashtagActivism of the Millennial generation, the massive individual donations that sway politicians toward maintaining the status quo of income inequality, or the lingering racism that debilitated some Democratic presidential contenders and cut their promising campaigns short, Maxwell pulls no punches in her critique. Underlying all of these individual issues, Maxwell argues, is the "liberal-minded" party's struggle to engage women and communities of color, and its preoccupation with catering to the white, male working class that threatens to be its most lethal shortfall.

Our guest is: Zerlina Maxwell, the host of Mornings with Zerlina on Sirius XM, and the Director of Progressive Programming for SiriusXM. She was the Director of Progressive Media for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and acted as a campaign spokesperson for the Presidential Debates. She writes for a variety of national media outlets, is a frequent college campus speaker, and is the author of The End Of White Politics: How To Heal Our Liberal Divide. She has a law degree from Rutgers Law School Newark and a B.A. in International Relations from Tufts University.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

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