On the topic of what actually leads to political change towards more freedom and justice for non-elites, I love this passage from James C. Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism:
As Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward have convincingly shown for the Great Depression in the United States, protests by unemployed and workers in the 1930s, and the civil rights movement, what success the movements enjoyed was at their most disruptive, most confrontational, least organized, and least hierarchical. It was the effort to stem the contagion of a spreading, noninstitutionalized challenge to the existing order that prompted concessions. There were no leaders to negotiate a deal with, no one who could promise to get people off the streets in return for concessions. Mass defiance, precisely because it threatens the institutional order, gives rise to organizations that try to channel that defiance into the flow of normal politics, where it can be contained. (xviii)
Don’t hold your breath waiting for someone embedded in government to disrupt the status quo. That’s what protest movements are for.
