I think it was the British comedian Alexei Sayle who used to do this routine riffing off of Tracy Chapman's song about revolution. He'd play it for awhile, and then stop it suddenly right when Tracy was singing "there's a revolution coming." And he'd shout, in a very uppercrust accent, "No, there's not!"

I thought about that when I read David's post, but he's the guy that's been going around with his ears close to the ground, and he's got very acute hearing for this kind of thing. So if says something is percolating, I believe him.

Lord knows people have great reasons to be very unsatisfied with the status quo, and I don't just mean the current state of affairs. It's not just that we're mired in war, our benighted markets are failing (think recession, income distribution, financial meltdown, underpricing environmental damage), and so on. It's that the status quo offers no clear way out.

Though uprisings are by definition grass rootsy, at some point, government solutions are invoked, and this is what I'd like to comment on in this post. To telegraph the punchline: a key challenge facing progressives interested in real change is fixing government failures.

Think back to your own involvement in movements. Over the years, I've agitated for union rights, animal rights, immigrant rights, gun control, voting rights, abortion rights, and so on. In every single case, we were advocating for government intervention.

I was younger then, and I basically thought that if our movement was successful, government could pass a law that would fix things. Now, I know it's not that simple.

David is obviously writing about bottom-up uprisings, in many cases, movements that are a reaction to government failure. But in my experience, these groups eventually are demanding that the government alter its policies. So we've got to think on both bottom-up and top-down tracks.

And the problem for the top-down track is that government is in big trouble. I'm speaking at the federal level, but let's not get too romantic about local cases. I haven't seen much evidence that Albany works that much better than DC.

There are lots of reasons for this, but certainly one of the main ones is that if you elect people who explicitly prophesize that government is the problem, they will fulfill that prophecy with a vengeance. And yes, they'll enrich their cronies along the way.

The problem cuts deep into the agencies. Do you have any idea what the Labor Department has been doing, or not doing, over the past eight years? It is truly, deeply scary. They've been failing to enforce basic labor standards regarding wages, overtime, worker classifications, and safety and health rules? What about the Justice Department; EPA, Consumer Safety? The depth of dysfunction is astounding, and it's going to take years to repair.

David reminds us that our country was founded partly on "the right of the people to alter or abolish" destructive government. I'm in the "alter" camp, and I'd like to hear someone with David's insights and movement experience hold forth on what it's going to take to get there. What steps ought we be taking now that will ultimately give progressive uprisings a public conduit through which their goals can be achieved?