Dr. Jack Goldstone

I don't like it, but I can absolutely see how and why we're in a revolutionary moment here in the USA.

I don't think that's fair to say.

What I do think it is, is that the internet is a kind of weak substitute for face-to-face networks and organizations.

so that people used to organize for revolutions through neighborhoods, through local clubs, through professional associations.

People were willing to take risks for other people that they knew or that they knew shared the same interests.

If you connect to other people on the internet,

It's not quite the same.

It's not as easy to get the emotional attachment to make sacrifices on behalf of a kind of faceless but very loud crowd of people whose posts that you read.

And so what we've seen is building a revolutionary coalition is harder because people are more dispersed into lots of different little internet or cable TV, little silos where they cluster with people like themselves.

So we'll see how that goes.

And in order for a revolution to work, you need a coalition that bridges different groups of people.

Now, sometimes the internet can bring a few thousand or even tens of thousands of people together to protest or riot.

But if the government is strong, that's usually easily put down.

So if you want to build the kind of movement that Martin Luther King built during the civil rights movement, that takes years of organizing and building local lieutenants and building local affiliates and all of that.

That's kind of what parties, the major political parties used to do that.

Unions were very powerful nationwide organizations to bring groups of people face to face and deal with the hardships of strikes and contribute to supporting each other.

With the internet, we have lots of people shouting, lots of people cheering, but not kind of broad, diverse coalitions of people that join a cause.

In a sense, Trump has been successful building a coalition.

He has working class people.

He has evangelical Christians.