The UK's Prospect Magazine published my long read on the Political Revolution of 2016. Includes stories from the frontline of the Trump, Brexit and Sanders revolutions (plus a sprinkling of historical perspective and a dash of status-quo-baiting). If you read just one thing I've written, make it this.
Taster below:
Last year was Year One of the west’s political revolution—our 1989... After the Berlin Wall came down, western cosmopolitans and technocrats raced to claim victory. Yet beneath the euphoria of the New World Order, our own contradictions were festering—stagnant wages, gaping inequality and a feeling that most people had no real control over their lives. Another quarter of a century passed before the other shoe finally dropped. Only in 2016 did citizens in the west finally become agents of revolutionary change—for better or for worse.
The rules of politics have been upended, in no small part, by new communication technologies. Liberals who resent the Brexit vote and the election of President Donald Trump point the finger at social media, seeing in it an echo chamber that entrenched false ideas. I understand their growing alarm about how costly and sophisticated data analytics enable some plutocrats to buy influence from the shadows. But I am resolute that technology’s power to connect citizens, transform access to information and move them to action will ultimately prove to be an instrument of enlightenment and positive change...
Much as I wish this moment had arrived differently, I saw it coming long before the last 18 months, during which I’ve spent time behind the scenes with winning insurgent campaigns from Brexit to the US and beyond. After dedicating the first years of this century to work around Middle East peace, democracy and Europe’s doomed Constitutional Convention, I came to see that our whole way of doing politics was broken. A growing band of us started harnessing technology to reconnect people with power. I had the privilege to work on campaigns engaging tens of millions of people around the world. I helped to build the global civic activism online network Avaaz, co-founded the British campaigning community 38 Degrees and led the global growth of Change.org...
Increasingly, the new networks of politics are moving money as well as hearts and minds. My main work today is as co-founder of Crowdpac—the open platform that helps citizens to crowdfund campaigns that rival the power of big donors and their Political Action Committees. I am from the left, but another Crowdpac co-founder is Steve Hilton. We disagree on much, but share the belief that our democracies must be overhauled...
In the last year or two, for all their differences, Trump, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and the Brexiteers each achieved the apparently impossible. All of them were carried to unexpected heights by new movements, which harnessed technology to unleash pent-up reservoirs of energy—even if their leaders did not fully understand them. These insurgents are not a flash in the pan. Trump and Brexit are shredding the fabric of the western order... It has never been more urgent to grasp how and why the “outsiders” are winning.
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