In 2008, I published a book with a straightforward premise: the upcoming era of American politics would be defined by a competition between the Left and Right to harness the working class’s intensifying rage in a society being pillaged by corporate interests.
It was the twilight of the George W. Bush era, and the country was beginning its nosedive into recession and turmoil, but hope and change seemed just over the horizon. I predicted that with elements of both political parties in a warrior stance, simmering conflicts over deindustrialization, financialization, and neoliberalism would soon explode and realign politics, birthing some American version of either social democracy or authoritarianism.
The sixteen years since The Uprising was released have delivered much of the tumult I imagined. It has been a period of unrest, chaos, and flip-flopping control of government — and yet, amid all that volatility, the decline persisted. Whether medical bankruptcies, foreclosures, lower lifespans, spikes in prices, mountains of paperwork, or endless junk fees attached to everything — life in America just kept getting more difficult, annoying, inhumane, painful, and seemingly impossible.
In the political arena, there was a sensation of change, but in real life, there was more of the same.
Donald Trump’s 2016 win was a reaction to the dissonance — a pressure cooker that finally exploded — but still possibly just a weird anomaly. For shell-shocked liberals, the end of his first term felt like the conclusion of a roller-coaster ride, a reversion to a mean, and proof that the competition to harness the discontent had finally been won on the center left.
But as Trump surges and Democrats teeter in this blazing summer of discontent, it’s the…
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Auteur: David Sirota
