 When David Sirota's second book, The Uprising, hit the shelves last month, I used my editorial discretion to move his plug for it off the front page. Sirota's blog entry was nothing more than a straight forward unpaid advertisement. It was a collection of blurb reviews, a sales pitch, and some links to where one could order a copy online. I have always respected Sirota's drive and mission, but I didn't want the site to just be an outlet for people to cash in on a book deal. It wasn't what the site was about.
I stand by that choice, but having now read the book it is obvious that Sirota's observations have mapped out what, in my opinion, this website should be about. Without any hesitation (and in fact with some urgency) I recommend that you should buy this book in time to be armed with questions for his store appearances next week in Ft. Collins, Boulder, and Denver.
The book is a necessary read for anyone who wants to understand the direction of the next decade of American politics, and in particular for those who want to understand the coming shift of the political internet.
After the jump, I'll go into much greater detail while quietly biting every hand that feeds me along the way. |
| Don't get too excited about the title, ignore the subtitle, and do not waste time waiting for him to prove his thesis. Shed all the packaging designed to speed it's climb up the best seller lists. Get down into the core of it and appreciate the window he opens on the machinations of official Washington and listen in on the very different conversations happening everywhere else. With 'The Uprising', Sirota invites us into the lairs of 'the Players', 'The Protest Industry', and all others who ignite the fires or draw on the energy of a growing bi-partisan discontent.
Still stumbling now and then with flawed proofreading and uneven editing, Sirota has grown considerably since he penned 'Hostile Takeover'. What flaws there are, are eclipsed by a mathematical inevitability; this is a book that needed to be written, and it is a book that only Sirota could. He has the needed experience, context, and a blend of clear eyed observation of the world around him and an apparent blindness to his place in it. His gifts and failings make him uniquely able to expose the system's inner workings without being tripped up by his own part in it. Like most beltway insiders, he appears to believe he is the one common man at the cocktail party. He was abrupt and brutal the day I equated him to the other cable show pundits with whom he so often shares a camera, and in this book I discerned no irony as he spoke of the egos of the DC set while he recounted the indignity of wearing an ID badge of inferior status while visiting important congressional friends. But despite his privileged displeasure, he still appears to claim more in common with the blue collar workers of New York than his fellow professional power brokers on Capitol Hill.
And perhaps he is right.
Sirota, like his former mentor Bernie Sanders, never gives in to the temptation to put words into the mouths of middle America. It is a common conceit of Beltway careerists to imagine that the circular conversations of the aristocracy represent the 'normal' views of 'regular folks'. To his credit, Sirota moves freely outside of that bubble and, with pitch perfect acuity, hears the voice of an America more concerned with economic reality than electoral gamesmanship.
He finds that voice on both sides of the traditional spectrum, and measures the challenges not on the dimension that separates the Democrats from the Republicans, but on an axis that runs from populist to corporatist. In a series of explorations he visits the far Right minutemen as they patrol the Mexican border, tech industry unionists as they try to organize the white collar Pacific Northwest, and he meets with shareholder activists as they try to realign the direction of Exxon-Mobil. He relates each story with descriptions laced with constant Generation-X pop-culture references, and pays frequent homage to 1930's radical Saul Alinsky. While finding everywhere common frustration, and a certain willingness to blame various outsiders, Sirota reports from a tangled set of battlefronts with both good and bad news.
The bad news is that corporations hold every current lever, and we live in a system designed to guide populist energy down narrow partisan channels. The good news is that the Uprising is showing early signs of self-organization, and there is reason to believe it may soon shape itself into an actual movement.
By now, if Sirota stumbles across this review, I imagine that he is fuming at the obtuseness of my personal slights and at my presumption. I am poorly placed to criticize his work at all, as I am new to a landscape that he has spent years charting. If I have offended him, it is unfortunate because in the coming months I hope he will serve as a guide to help reveal SquareState as a vehicle for that growing movement. Electing more Democrats has long been the mantra of the Left leaning netroots, but after November I believe, like many others do, that electing better Democrats will be a new focus.
Currently what funding there is for the Colorado political web is reserved for a class of partisans that Sirota terms 'the Players'. It is an institutionally sourced funding, distributed through a very top-down control structure. Those that steer it, measure the success of their operations by 'media hits'. A Washington formulated agenda gets pushed down to the grassroots with the hope that the rank and file will organize and agitate sufficiently to draw the attention of the corporate mass media. Pay attention to what Sirota says about Chris Matthews and David Broder, because he is spot on when he says that the discussions of the Sunday morning celebrities defines what is real to a class of people that, not at all self-consciously, refer to themselves as elites. Elites set the parameters of acceptable policy choices through the intermediary of an incestuously small group of media outlets. The corporate Right pushes their message directly through their television and radio outlets, and the corporate Left leverages the new online media to move their own message through a longer route downward and then back upwards.
It is the work of the smartest political minds I know, and there is nothing wrong with it. It is based in the pragmatic reality of how the system actually works, and it is a highly effective means. It is also at the service of an exclusively partisan electoral game. Everything feeds the horse race of elections. It is not my intention to say that there is anything wrong with winning elections. If you can never do that you should consider staying home. It is a goal worthy of our money and our energy, but while money, energy, and the occasional attention of the mass media are the great carrots of the grassroots, we wield no stick if we fear to get deeply involved in divisive primaries or are reluctant to push back when the Players' partisan goals conflict with our ideology.
On the Federal level the institutions are too entrenched and the partisan stakes may be too high for ideological purity. Those elections are for broad coalitions, not for narrow laundry lists of make or break issues. The choice between Obama and McCain, Udall and Schaffer, are too stark and cover so much ground that I am happy to leave them in the hands of the Players, or to invite the persuasive, large-scale methods of the "Protest Industry" which can bring the pressure of mass demonstrations and media sponsor boycotts to indirectly move policy makers. At the State level, however, there is a real opportunity to organize and take direct action on more narrow policy decisions affecting populist economics, social justice, and progressive governance.
There are already some fantastic online organizations moving forward the political conversations needed to impact the mass media and get more Democrats elected. Moving the ideological window may require community generated State level blogs like SquareState. It is not a movement that can be directed from the top down, but together we have an opportunity to build it from the ground up, and with 'The Uprising' Sirota has given us a guide to understanding what it is that we are witnessing and creating.
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