There will not be democracy in Egypt, Libya or Wisconisin in the coming weeks but the protests are a push back that will have an impact in the long run.
Only in hindsight does politics happen all at once. In realtime it feels like continual skirmishes between the haves and have-nots. Where the haves are continually winning.
Yet it is these confrontations in the streets and in the media that re-define the future political landscape. It is the new force (young, poor, oppressed) butting heads with the established regime (old, rich, priviledged) - as in the middle east; or it is two divergent views of the same establishment trying to re-vitalize a stagnant politic - as in Wisconsin.
In this way politics is a macro-cosm on how methodological ambles it's way through adaptation. Two or more opposing forces that cause an ebb and flow until and eventual compromise is reached. A compromise that is not necessarily agreed to by anyone but that happens in order to keep a equilibrium.
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I currently reading the Best Technology Writing 2010 and ran across a blog posting from Clay Shirky that does a good job at describing the methodology amble currently in the newspaper industry:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases... No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
