"The Uprising" by David Sirota: My take on it

First of all it was a good read!  At 72 I have been reading about politics for a long time.  Sirota's book was a breath of fresh air for it has been a while since I have seen anything that takes what I learned during the Vietnam era and carries that spirit forward to the very different milleau of today's strange politics.  That may sound strange to some the younger members of our group and it may sound pretentious to my contemporaries.  I'm speaking now as one of the people we called "the walking wounded" half with respect and half with derision as we let our own young juices drive us during that phase of American politics.  What do we old codgers have to offer now?  Had we done our job better we would not be in the mess we are in now.  It certainly is not because we did not try.  So why are we here?  What did we learn?  How did we fail? And what does it have to do with Sirota's book?  Come and look below the break and I'll explain.

What I like most about Sirota's narrative is his sense of balance.  He says some very interesting things about electoral politics yet he clearly does not see electoral politics as the thing above all things in a society as needing change as badly and as urgently as ours does.  His willingness to consider many options and to neither push nor condemn any of them tells me that he is searching for answers.   That's a search we all need to participate in and his book can help us.  He puts it this way in the first chapter. Re: High school chemistry , he asks us to consider the gaseous state of matter and the fact that under enough pressure, gasses liguify and then solidify.  He then says:

These laws of matter are also the laws of society.  We typically exist in a gaseous state.  We are all leading our own lives, bouncing around from place to place, watching our sitcoms, working at our cunicles, interacting briefly with each other between doing our own thing.  But we change when enough negative economic and political pressure starts hammering on us - we start to get organized.

 That sounds like what I experienced in the mid 1960s.  It was not "fun" to take time from things that we were doing, but we felt the growing pressure.  We organized and we fought some hard fights.  We came in about here:

A Southern racism spurred the civil rights movement.  And today's oppressive class war that Buffet describes is generating an uprising of its own.  

Whether it is shareholders running resolutions against corporate boards, third parties shattering the two party duopoly, legislators kicking down lobbyists in state capitals, bloggers orchestrating primary challenges to entrenched lawmakers, or armed, enraged suburbanites forming vigilante boards at our southern border, this uprising is not even close to unified.  It exists in a liquid phase- a mushy, amorphous state between anarchy and a solid- between chaos and organization.

 Spending time here interacting with the Kossacks one can taste some of this.  Clearly Sirota has benefitted from that.  Yet his narrative takes us beyond these exchanges and this is good, for having been here a while now, I find that more is needed as well.  Here's how he describes his narrative:

And as we traverse the country ideologically and geographically, we'll see how the disparate pieces of this uprising are all part of one enraged backlash- a backlash against the hostile takeover of our government by Big Money interests, the status quo of extreme wealth inequality, the daily reminders of rampant profiteering, and the widespread sense of political disenfranchisement.

This is a populist uprising- and that word populist will come up a lot during this adventure.  The term is not simply defined by any given issue position.  It is instead a "politics that champions issues that have  a broad base of popular support but receive short shrift from the political elite," as the Atlantic Monthly's  Ross Douthat says.  "This explains why you can't have left-populists and right-populists," he adds.  And it explains why today's uprising is both a left and right phenomenon.

 Think about that idea in the context of a message we have been hearing again and again about all of us being in this together and the need for an end to the politics of diviside and conquer.  Does it ring any bells?  Then something to remember.  Something that we just began to taste the bitter bile of during the anti-Vietnam War/Civil rights era.

To be sure , uprisings in American history have had only limited success in becoming real movements.  The ones forged in the superheated foundary of economic inequality and war usually get killed off- sometimes with election laws, sometimes with incarceration, and still other times with bullets.

 We had a kind of thermometer for our effectiveness in the '60s and '70s.  If they were ignoring you you were probably spinning your wheels, no matter how "active" you thought you were.  When you began to have a meaningful effect, it was going to get dangerous.  They play for keeps and do not fight fair.  Too dramatic?  Not if you really understand the history of this country.  Sirota mentions the Populist Party, Debs, Huey Long, Martin Luther King, Jr. and I could list a lot of others who paid far too much to try to set things straight in American political history.  Sirota tells us:

Today's uprising faces its own form of opposition from the politicians, pundits, and business executives who make up this nation's ruling class.  There may be less physical brutality, but the stridency from the Establishment is just as pronounced- and the the tactics may be more effective in their sophistication.

 I'll probably write a few more diaries on this book as I see reason to point to specific chapters, for it is a narrative rich in its diverse approaches to a set problems no one seems to have anything near a clear answer to.  We need answers badly.  Sirota points us toward those answers.  We have an awful lot of hard work to do if we are at all serious about changing this country.  The path from our rather fluid state to some sort of solid movement is one which we have yet to discover.  Our political system alone will not provide that path.  We need some creative solutions and we need them soon.