Of all the political books I heard was going to be published this year, I looked forward most to reading and reviewing David Sirota’s book, The Uprising. If you have read the other posts in this blog, you will notice that I deal a lot with anti-Establishment politics, specifically the Independent movement and various reform efforts like Instant Runoff Voting, the National Popular Vote, Fusion Voting, etc. This blog was created on the premise of the System being broken for ordinary people in American society and that many people are clamoring to get it fixed. Sirota’s book plays nicely into that theme and I looked forward to the treatment an investigative and political reporter will give to this subject.

Sirota takes the reader on an utterly fascinating whirlwind tour of the various populist uprisings that are happening nationwide mostly obscured from the radar of mainstream public consciousness. He first introduces us to the legislative battles over tax laws on the state level between establishment Republicans and insurgent Progressive Democrats in Montana. He then switches over to the main players in the nationwide anti-Iraq war movement. The first group he lumps together under the umbrella of the “Protest Industry”: Code Pink, ANSWER, Cindy Sheehan, followers of Ralph Nader, followers of Lyndon Larouche, Socialists, etc. and their ilk. Those groups that have rejected participation in traditional party politics as a strategy for activism and focus primarily on protests and marches. The other group he calls The Players: MoveOn and Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI)–a coalition of mostly DC-based advocacy groups pooling their resources together. The Players play a partisan, insider, Washington D.C. game where their main tactics are PR campaigns concentrated against Republicans who advocate for the Iraq war (but curiously, avoid similar attacks on pro-war Democrats).

Sirota then takes us to New York State to visit the Working Families Party, a third party that has successfully used the strategy of “fusion” to become a major player in New York State politics. Fusion refers to the electoral strategy–once widespread early in American history but now only legal in a handful of states–where one party, if it chooses, can list the candidates of another party in its ballot line, and all the votes will be counted together. After New York, Sirota returns to his professional roots in Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (he was a former Capitol Hill press secretary) and visits three senators who rode uprisings in their home states to electoral office in the Senate: Bernard Sanders of Vermont, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Jon Tester of Montana.

From D.C., it was back to New York City to visit the offices of CNN and an interview with fiery Populist television personality Lou Dobbs. Sirota then takes us to California on a patrol along the U.S.-Mexican border with the infamous Minuteman Civil Defense Corps where he explores the darker, more xenophobic edge of the uprising. From California, he heads to the Pacific Northwest to speak with the head of Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (Washtech), an organization seeking to unionize white-collar, technology workers. In the next chapter, he tags along with a group of shareholder activists seeking to pressure oil and energy giant ExxonMobil to invest in renewable energy and to curb its greenhouse gas emissions at a shareholders meeting in Dallas, Texas. He concludes the book with a chapter devoted to the Netroots–Internet-based activists–at the second YearlyKos convention being held in Chicago in 2007.

Overall I found Sirota’s book to be highly informative, insightful, and a hell of a kick-ass, in-depth treatment of the various Populist uprisings in the U.S. The Uprising is a highly-charged, fascinating ride into the motivations of the various people and movements who are “mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore.”

Despite my generally positive impressions, however, I have a few minor quibbles to pick:

• Missing from the book is an in-depth discussion of the phenomenon of large numbers of Americans self-identifying as political independents in recent years. I am intensely curious what Sirota thinks of this phenomenon, and the possibilities for a political uprising spearheaded by political independents. Most of all, I am curious what Sirota thinks of the efforts of the only entity (so far) that I know of that overtly appeals to and is attempting to organize political independents nationwide–the Committee for a Unified Independent Party or CUIP.
• Also missing are structural political reform efforts which are gaining traction nationwide such as Instant Runoff Voting and the National Popular Vote by organizations like FairVote.
• Another widespread uprising he missed is the burgeoning Revolutionary Christianity movement which is the topic of Zack Exley’s blog, “Revolution in Jesusland.”
• He seemed to give a very shallow and dismissive treatment to the elements of what he calls the “Protest Industry.” Say what you will about how groups like ANSWER, Code Pink, Socialists are, because of their own lack of coherence and focus, remain fringe groups in American politics. But these people were the only ones who were willing to protest against the Iraq War from the very beginning and were willing to mass organize for it-something mainstream politicians, advocacy groups, and average people did not do and have not done. I would have liked to have seen a more in-depth treatment of these so-called fringe groups.
• Aside from the Minutemen, I would have liked to have seen Sirota focus on more uprisings from the Right. For example, would he consider Ward Connerly’s state-by-state campaign to overturn affirmative action as an example of a conservative uprising?

Maybe a sequel is in order-perhaps a blog or a web site-a “Field Guide to the Uprising” similar in scope to Zack Exley’s field guide to Revolutionary Christians in Revolution in Jesusland.

Overall, the Liberal Arts Dude gives David Sirota four out of five stars for The Uprising. He’ll get the full five if he follows up with a web site or blog that follows my suggestion of a Field Guide to the Uprising. He is making a presentation on his book in Washington, D.C. on June 5 at the National Education Association. I will be present in that meeting and hopefully I will get him to sign my copy of the book and personally slip my Field Guide to the Uprising idea to him.