It’s the middle class. If you’re wondering why there’s so much unrest in the world today, with demonstrations and/or popular uprisings in Turkey, Brazil, and Egypt (and here!), look no further:
The theme that connects recent events in Turkey and Brazil to each other, as well as to the 2011 Arab Spring and continuing protests in China, is the rise of a new global middle class. Everywhere it has emerged, a modern middle class causes political ferment, but only rarely has it been able, on its own, to bring about lasting political change. Nothing we have seen lately in the streets of Istanbul or Rio de Janeiro suggests that these cases will be an exception.
In Turkey and Brazil, as in Tunisia and Egypt before them, political protest has been led not by the poor but by young people with higher-than-average levels of education and income. They are technology-savvy and use social media like Facebook and Twitter to broadcast information and organize demonstrations. Even when they live in countries that hold regular democratic elections, they feel alienated from the ruling political elite.
Nearly every successful revolution has been an out-group of elites throwing out the in-group of elites. That was the case in our revolution, the French Revolution, the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, and the Russian Revolution of 1917. The peasants tend not to rebel. When they do it’s because they’re starving and once they’re not starving they stop rebelling. They’re much more basic and don’t give a damn about the underlying systems.
When is our middle class going to rebel?