David Sirota is a progressive commentator and syndicated columnist whose new book, The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington, traverses a wide spectrum of US populist political activity. Sirota spent months interviewing people across the country involved in a variety of grassroots initiatives. He includes chapters on antiwar protests and lobbying in Washington, D.C., shareholder activism for economic justice, CNN superstar Lou Dobbs, the xenophobic alpha male phenomenon near the US-Mexico border called the Minutemen, and other newsworthy beats.
Although he invokes the book's title multiple times in every chapter, Sirota admits that there is no common political thread that binds these various groupings aside from a general distrust of Washington elites. He writes, "The activism and energy frothing today is disconnected and atomized. The only commonality behind it all is rage."
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| Sirota follows the trail blazed by Hunter S. Thompson (and more recently tromped by the gonzo specialist's successor at Rolling Stone, Matt Tabbai) by opening his political travelogue with a post-blogger convention hangover. Like Thompson and Tabbai, Sirota doesn't hesitate to hold anyone he encounters up to ridicule, especially members of his own profession.
Although the casual tone occasionally gets a bit sloppy (and a reliance on references to TV and pop movies makes me yearn for Thompson's wider range of cultural markers), Sirota's unpretentious wiseass voice is a welcome change from the droning of pompous, self-satisfied mainstream commentators. Given his work in various political campaigns and as an aide to Bernie Sanders, the first member of the US Senate self-identified as a socialist, Sirota also brings experience in the trenches to his reporting.
Some of the book's best passages involve irritation with "people who are known to almost no one out in the country at large, but who are considered influential celebrities inside the Beltway because they appear on … obscure chat programs, from C-SPAN's Washington Journal, to Fox News' Special Report, to MSNBC'S Hardball." Sirota notes dryly, "D.C.'s peculiar media obsession, of course, has very little to do with influencing votes out in the country and almost everything to do with narcissism."
Sirota rightly attributes a good deal of blame for the tragic 2003 invasion of Iraq to the role of the US corporate media. "Washington's self-absorbed fetishization of tiny-audience television shows might be funny," he writes, "except that the Iraq War was largely started because of this obsession." He adds that the "drumbeat [of] media-hungry bloggers, columnists, and think tank scholars … helped create the now-infamous Iraq War echo chamber that made the historically unprecedented concept of 'preemptive war' seem utterly mainstream inside the Beltway."
He calls these cheerleaders for war "the 101st Keyboard Brigade," noting, "almost all of them had avoided military service themselves, but valiantly demanded that other people's teenage kids be sent off to the Iraqi shooting gallery."
Sirota argues that since the late 1960s, the effectiveness of large demonstrations for progressive change has been diminished by the pervasive influence of television and paid campaign ads in shaping public perception. He bemoans the media's tendency to focus on the most outrageous antiwar activists and complains that most groups in what he calls "the protest industry" overlook the self-marginalizing aspect of freak show tendencies in large antiwar marches.
He is even more critical of media-focused Washington nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that employ "Astroturf" substitutes for grassroots organizing. Sirota takes apart the modus operandi of a coalition of such groups, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), and finds them to be politically over-cautious, joined at the hip with Democratic Party consultants and prone to invest in obscenely expensive ad campaigns.
One of the key organizations in the coalition is MoveOn.org, which Sirota points out was "originally birthed to defend the Establishment [during the Monica Lewinsky scandal] -- not to change it." MoveOn demonstrates that legacy in its frequent reflexively pro-Democrat stances that shy away from criticizing anyone but Republicans on support for the war. The AAEI tack of criticizing the conduct of the war implies that with more civility among elites and more-effective management of the military, future wars will be just fine. As an example of where that logic leads, Sirota quotes Democratic Representative Lincoln Davis of Tennessee, who told reporters, "If we become the antiwar party, that's not beneficial to Democrats in 2008." Davis argued in support of "the war that we fight wisely, the ones that we engage in wisely."
Sirota further points out (as Ohio representative and former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich argued until he was blue in the face) that Democrats in Congress could have shut down war funding by exercising their power of the purse, rather than engaging in middle of the road equivocation and passing nonbinding resolutions.
At one point Bernie Sanders tells Sirota: "If there's a lesson of the Howard Dean campaign, it is that the younger generation's definition of 'progressive' is anyone who rips aside the other side. Dean was a moderate, yet he became the progressive candidate for president because people get off on stridency.… People know we have a moron in the White House, and that's about it. And if that's the only thing people know, if that's the only thing people get organized around, then we're in for some real trouble."
The book's insights into how US politicians manage to evade popular will on questions like corporate accountability and the Iraq war, and how citizens can keep politicians' feet to the fire, make it an especially important resource. As Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other leading Democrats offer platitudes and avoid specifics of how many troops they would leave in Iraq, being armed with such analysis seems especially necessary.
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