UPDATE @ 11AM: David will be on The Colbert Report tonight. Watch it.

Those of you familiar with the internets and reality know all about David Sirota and his liberal left ways with the truth. He’s renowned as a journalist and has led the fight to bring the reality-based community into the mainstream. And he has a great new book that’s hitting shelves across the country.

THE UPRISING: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street & Washington is what could only be called a masterful look at the force shaping American politics today. David spent a year traveling the country documenting the new populist revolt on the Right and Left and this book is his powerful examination of what’s taking place.

A bit of what David digs up in the book:

• Where superdelegates come from: Sirota traces the history of superdelegates, showing how they were originally created by the Democratic Party’s entrenched establishment to thwart inconvenient challenges from outsiders and how they could now play a pivotal role in the upcoming election—crushing today’s populist uprising.
• Conflicts of interest at the heart of the antiwar movement: Sirota reveals that the antiwar movement, which enjoys widespread public support, has cynically hired the same Democratic Party operatives who also have been employed to protect pro-war Democratic politicians.
• Stealth efforts to unionize the white-collar world: Embedding himself with a scrappy union trying to organize workers at some of the biggest tech companies in the world, Sirota shows how these white-collar companies, while fronting a progressive image, are actually among the most harshly antilabor employers in America.
• America’s most powerful third party: Most people think third parties are gadflies, but in New York—one of the biggest states in the nation—a third party is changing the political topography in unexpected ways, pushing around the legislature and upending the status quo, and making real gains for its populist agenda.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone writes, “The Uprising should be read by anyone who wants to understand exactly how the ordinary person has been sold out by the political system.” and Publishers Weekly says, “Sirota chronicles how ordinary citizens on the right and the left are marshaling their frustrations with the government into uprisings across the country and analyzes the effectiveness and longevity of their efforts.”

He’ll be in Kentucky in June for readings and public appearances and you need to make sure you show up. Make plans today.

Details:

• Cincinnati on June 24 – 7:00 P.M. @ Joseph-Beth Booksellers
• Louisville on June 25 – 7:00 P.M. @ Carmichael’s on Frankfort Ave

The Louisville event is a Q&A/book signing sponsored by the Kentucky Society of Professional Journalists and Change for Kentucky. 2720 Frankfort Avenue, Louisville. Be there.

Read a great question and answer session with David after the jump…

Do you see the populist revolt at work in the heated primary campaigns of Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama?Absolutely. You’ve seen it most distinctly on three issues: 1) Immigration—the flap about whether to give undocumented workers drivers licenses pitted Clinton and Obama against the Right’s populist uprising. 2) NAFTA—the back-and-forth between Clinton and Obama over the North American Free Trade Agreement was each candidate attempting to champion blue-collar populism in advance of the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries. 3) The War—the competition to show who is more antiwar is fundamentally a competition to win over the antiwar movement within the Democratic Party. More broadly, the entire Democratic primary has been about the resurgence of populism. First you had a purely populist candidate—John Edwards—pushing the candidates to embrace the uprising. Now, after he dropped out, you had the remaining two candidates seeing a political opportunity in being the champion of populism.

Much more than simply a look at traditional liberal causes such as the antiwar movement, THE UPRISING examines the growing public unrest among both Republicans and Democrats. What similarities did you witness in the conservative and liberal uprisings?

Rank-and-file citizens on both the Right and Left are reacting to a feeling of helplessness brought on by increasingly global forces—global wars, global terrorism, and global economics, to name the three big ones. The difference between the Right and Left is more about what the uprising should champion as a bulwark against these global forces, rather than what is considered a big problem. Put another way, both the Right and Left are reacting to the same stimuli—the difference is in how they are reacting. These similarities, however, are the basis for a new kind of movement—one that may unify both sides around similar economic, cultural, and class themes. The political candidates of either party who realize these shifting tectonics are the ones who will be able to best capitalize on them in the electoral arena.

With rising health-care costs, more and more reports of a forthcoming recession, and stagnating wages, what role does the economy play in the public’s anger? Will people on both sides of the spectrum meet in their revolt against the status quo?

The economy is the driving force in all of this. When people fear for their jobs, their income, and the economic security of their families, populism rises. We’ve seen that become a Left-leaning populism during the Progressive Era and then during the Great Depression. We’ve also seen it become a Right-leaning populism during the recession of the early 1980s and the subsequent Reagan backlash. Whether the two sides can fuse is hard to say. There is certainly ample evidence that it is possible. Figures like Lou Dobbs, who I spend time with in the book, has in some ways bridged the Left and Right sides of the uprising with his simultaneous Left-leaning critique of corporate power and Right-leaning attacks on illegal immigrants. Similarly, a figure like Mike Huckabee made a vigorous run for the Republican nomination for president simultaneously championing Left-leaning economic populism and Right-leaning cultural populism.

What will it take for the uprising to overtake the politicians, pundits, and business executives who oppose these movements and refuse to take them seriously?

In a word, results. What takes social phenomena from chaos and sporadic engagements into uprisings and ultimately into full-fledged movements are concrete successes. As The Uprising shows, these successes are now becoming more frequent, whether they are shareholder resolutions, third-party victories, vigorous primary challenges to incumbents, or state legislative victories.

You spent a year traveling the country witnessing firsthand the forms that this uprising has taken. Where has it been most successful?

The most successful wings of the uprising have been those that have been least concerned with Establishment praise and most concerned with definable achievements. In Montana, for instance, Democratic legislators managed to fight off the Right’s regressive tax onslaught in a state that has played home to the antitax movement for the better part of two decades. In New York, the Working Families Party has leveraged the state’s esoteric ballot rules to force Democrats to crack down on the wealthy in one of the wealthiest states in America. And the group of clergypeople who are quietly waging their shareholder fights on global warming have managed to bring behemoth companies like ExxonMobil to the bargaining table. These are the real successes far away from the national media spotlight that are quite literally changing politics and society for the long haul.

Where has it been least successful?

The biggest disappointments for the uprising have been in places that many media-obsessed onlookers expected the most progress: Congress and the fight to end the war. We have been trained for decades that the only political fights that matter are those for public offices in Washington, D.C. —whether the presidency or the U.S. Congress. But as my journey through the U.S. Senate in The Uprising shows, the Senate is rigged to prevent change. As Ohio senator Sherrod Brown told me, the Congress is the last place that change comes to. Many have seen it the other way—they think that uprisings start in the Congress, and so when Democrats took over the Congress in 2006 and then (predictably) didn’t produce many results, many people were very surprised. They shouldn’t have been. This is related to why the antiwar movement has been such a disappointment. Most of the resources of the antiwar movement has been channeled into operations in Washington, D.C., rather than into grassroots politics. Even the “grassroots” organizations like Moveon.org have played a Washington game, not really appreciating the basic history of successful uprisings and how Washington is the last place to force change—not the first.

You have been called everything from “intense, driven, and obsessive” by Richard Wolffe at Newsweek to a “populist rabble- rouser” by Tobin Harshaw at the New York Times. What role do you see yourself playing in the fight against Establishment politics?

I see myself as a truth-teller and an agitator—a truth-teller, in that I’m not afraid to call out corruption and insiderism, even if it is coming from those operating under the veneer of the Democratic Party or “progressive” label I believe in. For too many, politics is about staying friends with everyone, and having everyone like you. I’m willing to make enemies if it means telling the truth. That’s probably part of what makes me an agitator. I believe that, all things being equal, the more ferment and change there is, the better. The status quo is the enemy right now—and impulses to change the status quo and to fight political inertia are ripe with potential, whether those impulses originate from the Right or the Left.

Is there potential for the uprising to gain real traction and have a voice in the 2008 presidential election?

Yes, and it already has done this in both the Democratic and Republican primaries. In the Democratic primaries, the candidates are literally fighting for the uprising mantle—that is, they are fighting to prove who is more committed to the populist uprising. This is, of course, political opportunism—but that’s fine. If all politicians are weather vanes, then those who see their opportunity in pointing in the right direction are all an uprising or a social movement can ask for. In the Republican primary, Mike Huckabee represented the most crystal-clear voice for the populist uprising—and came very close to becoming the party’s nominee. All of this proves the uprising is gaining in intensity.

At the end of the book, you have a vision of what it would be like if all the disparate movements come together armed with the tools that each has crafted in their particular fight. Do you think that it is possible for a real movement to affect much- needed change?

I am an eternal optimist. Though that, of course, makes me perpetually disappointed, it is also a sentiment rooted in historical fact. Every generation has faced down very serious challenges, and every generation has experienced the rise of very powerful movements. We are now at a historical moment where the last generation’s movement—the conservative movement—has died. There is a vacuum. Rather than seeing this moment as the end of movements, history teaches that these vacuums are the time of uprisings— and the time when uprisings are forged into real movements. Populism, as the polls show, is that uprising, and it can become a real cohesive movement, especially if the elite in Washington and the Establishment on Wall Street continues to ignore the rest of us.