Political Change Is the Last Step, Not the First

We tell the story of political change backwards. A constitution is signed, a regime falls, a franchise is extended, and we date the change to that day and credit it to the people in the room. Then we go looking for the causes, and we find speeches, pamphlets, and a few remarkable individuals.

I think the order is the reverse. Political change is the culmination of a change in understanding that has already happened, and of a change in the means of communication that let it happen. The signing is the last step. By the time it occurs, the work is done.

The Declaration as a Receipt

Take the American Declaration of Independence. It reads as a founding document, and it is treated as the origin of something. But read its argument: governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, people hold rights that no ruler grants, and a government that fails its purpose may be replaced.

Not one of those ideas was new in 1776. They had been argued in print for a century, translated, pirated, read aloud in taverns and coffee houses, and absorbed by a literate population that had, for the first time in history, cheap access to argument. The Declaration is not the source of the Enlightenment. It is the Enlightenment's receipt. It records that a sufficient number of people had already changed their minds about what a government is for, and that they could now coordinate on that belief.

What made the coordination possible was not the eloquence of the text. It was the printing press, the postal roads, and the newspapers. A population that can read the same argument in the same week can act together in a way no earlier population could. The political act followed the communicative capacity, and could not have preceded it.

The Pattern Repeats

Once you see the order in that case, it appears everywhere.

The abolition of slavery in Britain followed decades of pamphlets, petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures, and a public that had learned, through print, what the trade involved. The Act was passed when the understanding was general enough that Parliament could no longer stand against it, not before.

The extension of the vote to women followed a long period in which women were visibly doing the things that the argument against their voting said they could not do, and in which that visibility was carried by newspapers and photographs into every household. The law changed when the belief it encoded had already collapsed.

The fall of the eastern European regimes in 1989 followed a decade of radio, cassette tapes, photocopiers, and finally television across borders, all of which made it common knowledge that the official picture was false. The regimes did not fall because someone gave a speech. They fell because everyone already knew, and knew that everyone knew.

Why We Get the Order Wrong

Two reasons, both familiar.

We remember events, not processes, and a signing is an event. A slow shift in what a population believes has no date and no photograph, so it is not the thing we file the change under. I have written about this bias before, under the heading of the great-man account of history: we mistake the index for the cause.

And the people in the room have every reason to encourage the error. If political change is authored by leaders, then leaders are essential, and the institutions that produce leaders are essential. If political change is the culmination of what a population already understands, the leader is closer to a clerk, and the institution is a formality. Nobody who benefits from the first account has an incentive to spread the second.

What Follows

If the order is culmination, not origin, then the levers are not where we usually pull.

Campaigning for a specific political change before the understanding is general is mostly wasted. The law will not hold, or it will be reversed, or it will be passed and ignored. The effort belongs earlier, in the two things that actually move: what people understand, and how freely they can communicate that understanding to one another.

Whoever controls the means of communication controls the rate of political change, which is why every regime that fears change reaches first for the press, the schools, and now the network. They understand the order correctly. It is the reformers who often do not, and who keep trying to sign the receipt before the purchase has been made.

It also means the present is unusually interesting. The means of communication have changed more in the last thirty years than in the previous three hundred. If the pattern holds, a political culmination is owed, and the only open question is what understanding it will turn out to be the culmination of.