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 Bush era, and the country was beginning its nose-dive 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 16 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 life spans, 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 shellshocked 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 2020 election that seems more like the anomaly — a last rest stop on a wild Natural Born Killers-style jaunt. 2024 feels like the final destination in a journey bookended by two iconic roadside billboards: the “HOPE” poster featuring Barack Obama’s cool gaze, and now the photograph of a bloodied Donald Trump defiantly calling his armies to battle.
