Customer Reviews

The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington

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Excellent writers are like great chefs; you don't really need to know what they're writing/cooking to know you're in for a treat. In this case, we've got David Sirota riffing (and reporting) on how a bunch of "disconnected and atomized" rage is "frothing" in America.

Whether it's anti-illegal-immigrant vigilantes, frustrated high-tech workers, "blue chip revolutionaries," "Uprising Television" (or radio or blogs), netroots activists, the anti-tax movement or the anti-anti-tax movement, there certainly appear to be a lot of pissed off people out there in America today. Just look at polls that show 80%+ of people who feel the country's headed in the wrong direction. Look at the huge turnout in this year's presidential primaries -- particularly on the Democratic side -- and the upsurge in political energy being shown by people around the country. Look at the anger at the President, at the Congress, at many of our institutions.

The question is, does all this add up to a "populist uprising?" Even David Sirota is skeptical, but he certainly sees the potential for such an uprising, and apparently so does a nervous corporate American and insider political establishment. In the end, I'm not sure that Sirota has completely proved his thesis, that "the disparate pieces of this uprising are all part of one enraged backlash." However, after reading his well-written, well-researched, informative, and entertaining book, I'm far less likely to write off that thesis as a definite possibility in coming years.

Well-written, better than "Hostile Takeover." You can tell now by reading this book that Sirota has more confidence in his writing style and isn't afraid to pepper his stories with a very human narrator, something that's important in titles like this where readers are given a very close-up look at a particular institution. The book is extremely informative (I had never even heard of "Third-Party Fusion" before reading this book, and now I want to know how I can bring it to Wisconsin!), and the intimate glimpses inside Washington and everywhere else shows readers various sides of issues that we don't normally see in the corporate press. I'm actually quite surprised to see another reviewer attack Sirota because of his chapter on the Minutemen on the border. I thought the chapter was actually quite fair, maybe TOO fair given how many of the people he meets seem to be struggling to hide their racism, but that's just one opinion. Either way, it's an intimate glimpse into a movement, just like every other chapter, and every chapter offers something we can learn from.

The Populist Uprising has a long and rich history in this country, and in his new book noted author David Sirota demonstrates that this movement is alive and well (on both the Left and the Right) is alive and well. Sirota is a wonderful political writer who possesses that rare knack of being able to clearly outline his position without a lot of jargon that so plagues other political authors. Love him or hate him, Sirota has a lot to say, and this is one book that should be read by everyone.

David Sirota is a writer full of insight and grace. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and received a rare transfusion of hope. He helps sort out the wheat from the chaff, the real progressives from the corporatists. Because of this, corporatist minions are popping up and entering their reviews to drag his ratings down. Sirota is a wordsmith who can apply the insights of Drew Westen and provide a how-to manual for communicating with the public.

David Sirota has toured the country in pursuit of'The Uprising', an upwelling of anger at the destructive power of corporations in American political life. On the plus side, Sirota (currently a Montana resident, apparently) travels far from the coasts that dominate middle-class liberals' imagination. Sirota seems most comfortable with what I would describe as 'insider/outsiders', people with views outside of the centrism dominant among the punditocracy, but who have created some sort of establishment beachhead. Thus he finds a governor in Montana willing to confront the anti-tax pseudo-uprising with hardball tactics of his own. He praises the 'fusion-party' Working Families Party in New York State, who are increasingly a force statewide. He praises three Senators, Bernie Sanders (the 'socialist' from Vermont), Ohio's Sherrod Brown, and Montana's Jim Tester, who disregard the advice that the best strategy for Democrats is to act like polite Republicans. He admires shareholder activists who attempt to force Exxon Mobil to confront global warming. He is fascinated by Lou Dobbs 'mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore' routine. He is critical of the antiwar movement: United for Peace and Justice is portrayed as hopelessly 'outsider' in its protest-oriented strategy, while Americans Against Escalation in Iraq is too insidery, perhaps merely cynically adhering to an 'anti-war' rhetoric to score points for Democrats. The Minutemen, the militia which 'guards' the US border (i.e. harassing immigrants) are portrayed as nostalgic for their time in Vietnam, and somewhat as closeted racists (really?). Bloggers, and those trying to organize high tech workers also earn chapters. Throughout, Sirota draws inspiration from the writings of Saul Alinsky, who urged activists to be pragmatic and approach the world as it is, not as they wish it to be.

I didn't like this book too much, and not only because Sirota's efforts at humor often grated. More substantively, the case that these disparate phenomena constitute an anti-corporate uprising is weak. The chapters on Lou Dobbs and the Minutemen are particularly odd. He has to prod pretty hard to get the Minutemen to offer much anti-big money rhetoric (and while he seems clear that they are small business people, he laments, in Tom Frank style, that 'working class' whites are diverted from their natural class allies). And he is much too generous to Lou Dobbs, who is a racist creep. I tuned in to Lou Dobbs last night to see what I was missing. We were told that Sarah Palin was picked on unfairly for being an 'independent'. Viewers were urged to call in to congress to stop Obama's stimulus. This is an anti-corporate uprising?

Although the book has many chapters, as outlined above, it is as striking for what it leaves out as for what is included. Citywide coalitions organized by the Industrial Areas Foundation (ironically inspired by Saul Alinsky) to fight for living wages, are nowhere to be seen. Nor are the immigrant protests of 2006, which constituted the largest protest wave the US has seen in decades, included. Underlying these exclusions is the belief that 'real' politics in the US is the provenance of white people. When a blogger makes the indisputable observation that an ever declining proportion of Americans are familiar with small town life, Sirotta dismisses this as 'bourgeois'.

The chapter on the anti-war movement is marred by poor journalism. Sirota doesn't bother to actually talk to any of the leaders of UFPJ, who could have clarified some of his many misperceptions (that they do nothing but protest, that they don't care about the image they project, that they are the same as Naderites and ANSWER). He doesn't talk to anyone from ANSWER, either. I'm sure many in the anti-war movement who have denounced UFPJ for being too close to the Democratic Party would be amused to hear his descriptions of them as thoroughly outside that structure. This sloppiness speaks to a general 'leftphobia' on Sirotta's part. Like many liberals, he probably believes that any association with an anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist left will hopelessly taint his project. And so he focuses on Lou Dobbs, rather than the far more interesting Democracy Now!, which, with no corporate network backing, has developed a very considerable following (arguably in the ballpark of Lou himself). I think trying to build an uprising by ignoring people of color and the left is doomed. The uprisings of the thirties and the sixties had genuine lefts as central components. And the struggles of people of color were the driving force behind the latter. In any case, the smattering of tax proposals, shareholder activism and modest electoral successes described by Sirota doesn't constitute an uprising. If it does come, people with his sort of exclusionary mentality will have to be pushed out of the way.

"There's something happening here,

What it is, ain't exactly clear....

Stop, children, what's that sound?

Everybody look what's going down..."

Dave Sirota's wild ride through the world of contemporary American activism should have have, as background music, the Buffalo Springfield anthem "For What It's Worth". Seriously: play the music, then get back to this review!

Some have faulted this book for not being a well-organized technical manual for political action, nor an encyclopedic and boring analysis of a political movement. That misses the point; this book is not a Grand Theory of Everything, but a bunch of observations making a point based on facts, not theory: Just about everybody in America is mad as hell, doesn't wanna take it anymore, and does not have a realistic hope of making a difference.

So we turn to unrealistic hopes, usually consisting of finding an enemy at which to make ineffectual gestures. This keeps everybody happy: rightwingers and leftwingers can attack each other, and those who profit from the collapse of our American freedoms and economy go on their merry way.

Sirota's fact-based analysis suggests a solution, but it's painful. We need some sort of Multi-Step program starting with accepting that we've screwed up in the implementation of our deepest, most sincerely-held political beliefs. Our fun and angry finger-waving has NEVER worked; there is no substitute for the sober work of organizing and pushing through reforms such as Fusion Voting.

The people on which Sirota reports may be stuck in stage of Denial and Anger; they his lack of reverence for their hobbyhorses must be maddening. On Amazon, a leader of Minuteman group he visited wrote a hugely angry review, but I wouldd think the people who should really be p.o.'d are the members of the Permanent Protest Party (the stilt-walkers, puppeteers, tie-dyed T-shirt vendors and whatnot that clutter every protest and have had no success since the Civil Rights Movement ... in whose parades, Sirota is too polite to observe, there were no puppets or stilt-walkers.) This book may have been run through the shredder at MoveOn.org as well.

But, just as a true friend tells you the truth you don't want to hear, Sirota tells his friends others alike some stuff we really need to know. His succinct deconstruction of the futility of mass parades rings very true; the largest antiwar demonstration in history didn't even slow down the 2003 invasion of Iraq, whereas the relentless organizing and personal networking of some recent political campaigns have succeeded. (It is striking that this book came out *before* the Obama campaign won by reaching out to every community; not winning every community but making a sincere try. Take the lesson!)

The task before us is large; the road is not clear but the first steps are obvious: Enjoy the book, then go talk to a wingnut. You have something in common!

Lately, I've been hearing and seeing David Sirota everywhere, on NPR radio shows, on [...] and elsewhere, criticizing President Obama for failing to deliver the kind of radical economic policies he had hoped for. For more on his views, I turned to this book.

Sirota contends that millions of Americans are full of rage at an economic system that is blatantly unjust, delivering the vast bulk of its rewards to a few at the top. So far, I'm with him -- and I give him credit because he appears to have seen this anger building much earlier than most other analysts. But he then takes his argument a step further. This anger, though unfocused, disconnected and atomized, has laid the groundwork for a new radical political reform movement that will produce fundamental change -- an uprising.

Sirota travels around the country, visiting different outposts of the "uprising" -- but fails to make his arguments stick.

More likely, the rage will cool as soon as the economy begins to recover and things will continue much as before. There is no uprising and there will not be one.

Sirota establishes his "gonzo" credentials right from the first sentence: "I'm pretty sure I'm still at the Riviera Hotel here in Vegas. I know this not because I can see through the blurry haze of my hangover or think past this pounding headache or feel anything other than the sharp pain of dehydration in my stomach, but because I can still smell the cigarette smoke embedded in the wallpaper."

What's remarkable about this is not only the fact that the words "I" or "my" appear seven times in one short paragraph but that the whole description is both unevocative and irrelevant to the book. Sirota is no Hunter S. Thompson, although he perhaps wishes he was. (I guess the decision to begin the book drunk in Vegas should be taken as a clear 'hommage'.) But Sirota cannot match Thompson's self-destructive contempt for authority. He's is more of a policy wonk: we see him in committee meetings and TV studios and at conventions. Most of all, Thompson would never have written a sentence like this discussing politics in Montana (page 18): "It is a carefully calibrated meme recognizing Montana as one of America's boiling cauldons of subjugation psychology..."

There is some merit and interest to this book. But it's marred by too much of the author's ego and reporting that does not go sufficiently deep. If Sirota sees something or hears something, it goes into the book. If not, not. That's fine for a travelogue but not for a work of series political analysis.

While I enjoyed David Sirota's most recent work "The Uprising." It often left me feeling incensed at our government's inclination to the status quo and then feeling relieved that there are still individuals working within our government who recognize and work for the greater good of the American people. "The Uprising" reads like a first person account or David Sirota's experience with each group. At the same time, this book fails to tie together the various uprisings it describes, common themes and methodology that works or does not work. It requires the reader to search and reread passages for this message. Very little is done to summarize all that has been read or build a conclusive point. If the book's design is a call to action for change its messages is as disorganized as the anti-war protest described in his book.

It starts out great, the chapter on "The Thrilla in Montana" was a joy to read. Then the book seems to slide, and about half way through I gave up. I just couldn't stay interested. The author, somewhere about halfway through the third chapter, loses sight of what the book title suggests the book is about. Maybe I am being dismissive, but with so many books on modern politics it takes a great book to get a good review from me. This isn't that book.

A title such as "The Populists are Restless" would have been more fitting.

But, of course, the hope is that overstating the situation with the use of of the words "Uprising" and "Revolt" more books will be sold.