Rebellion in America: Citizen Uprisings, the News Media, and the Politics of Plutocracy

For the past fifteen years, when I tell someone that I study social movements, one of the most common responses is, ‘‘Well, you sure have a lot to write about.’’ With its substantive breadth, Anthony DiMaggio’s book Rebellion in America: Citizen Uprisings, the News Media, and the Politics of Plutocracy is an excellent reminder of the truth behind this sentiment. Covering a wide range of movements loosely related to the persistence of plutocracy in American society, DiMaggio argues that these contemporary social movements are motivated by a sense of economic injustice and social identity and that progressive change is driven by social movements rather than politicians or political parties. DiMaggio’s book is organized around five ‘‘movements’’: The Tea Party, The Economic Justice movement (including the Wisconsin uprising, Occupy, and the Fight for 15), pre2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM, with the responses to the murders of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray treated as separate campaigns), the Populist Party campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, and the Anti-Trump uprising (including the Women’s March, #MeToo, and several eventspecific campaigns) that followed his election. Each campaign gets a well-organized chapter that typically starts with a brief description of the social problem, followed by a history of the campaign, an analysis of the media coverage and public opinion, and a summary of the policy or social outcomes. The author takes a mixed-method approach, triangulating across participant observation of the Tea Party, Wisconsin protests, and anti-Trump protests, content analysis of media coverage, and regression analysis of public opinion (pp. 11–12). The content analysis focuses on the relative positivity of media coverage for the campaigns and the issues they care about. The author identifies issues that are nominally positive or negative for the movement and reports the portion of local and national articles that discuss those issues. For example, if a paper reported that Scott Walker was attacking collective bargaining, it would be coded as positive; but if the article stated that Walker was concerned about budget deficits, it would be coded as negative. These are not mutually exclusive (and not treated as such), and some categories lack variability, but they do offer subtle insights into the difference in the scale of coverage as well as how media coverage was largely positive for some movements (Madison) while more ‘‘balanced’’ in its coverage of others (BLM and Occupy). DiMaggio also conducts binomial and ordered logit regression analyses of demographic differences in public opinion (largely from Pew Research Center) on the movements or campaignrelated issues. While these models often seem overfitted (with 201 variables and separate indicators for Blacks, Black men, and poor Black men, for example), the results largely operate predictably (White conservatives support the Tea Party, Black people support BLM, etc.). There are some interesting points of variability where poor people of color supported unions, higher wages, and the ACA, but not the Economic Justice movements in Wisconsin and Occupy. This book succeeds in several areas. It draws on an incredible number of newspapers, blogs, and online news articles to holistically recount the campaigns of at least ten movements across six chapters. While the sheer number of movements and issues means that none of these chapters offers much depth, the succinct summaries for such a breadth of movements will be useful for scholars interested in refreshing their knowledge of the major movements of the early twenty-first century. The book’s theoretical focus on the role social movements play as moral entrepreneurs highlights how vital a healthy social movement sector is for generating new ideas and pushing our political system in more progressive directions. Yet the book has several limitations as well. First, there does not seem to be a cohesive 334 Reviews