I read BDI's post about the italian elections and I thought I wanted to make a couple of comments as a post, not just in the comments section.
What is happening in Italy is revolutionary: it is the first time in world history that a revolutionary political force is born from the internet and goes straight to power.
Beppe Grillo is a comedian, he is an equivalent to George Carlin in the US, but there is where the analogy ends.
What this man has done, in the last 5 years is to use his blog (btw the most read blog on the planet) to build a community of volunteers and citizens that want to reform their country by entering personally the italian Congress and government.
Imagine an America where the citizens stops delegating power to the Obamas, the Bushes, the Clintons, and tell them all: "GO HOME!", peacefully, but please, go home. And then the citizens enter the institutions, instead of the politicians, and they take the power and start to change the laws and everything that does not work as it should, to serve finally the citizens, not the private interests of the big corporations or the Pentagon.
The reason why this political movement had so much success, drawing 800,000 people to the last meeting in Place San Giovanni in Rome (and 150,000 on Live streaming on YouTube), and many other thousands in each of the 77 meetings in various italian cities, it's because of the great communicator's abilities of Beppe Grillo.
That is why Occupy Wall Street and all the other movements don't stand a chance to change the world: because they do not have a great leader that can talk to the masses and convey efficiently the message.
So the lesson for all the various democratic and revolutionary movements out there, in America, or In Europe, what they have to learn from Beppe Grillo and his 5 Stars Movement, is to get a leader that can talk to the masses.
You could change America, if you had a guy like Beppe Grillo.
The other lesson to learn from this historical event is that it has made clear that the networking power of the internet can create a critical mass of consensus between people that can throw down the existing consolidated political powers.
Italy is playing the role of incubator for a model of future advanced democracy, the Internet Democracy, where citizens dump the middle-men (the useless, always corrupted politicians) and take personally charge of the res-publica and then decide themselves the laws, discussing them on forums and then voting via email or sms txt.
Some people in Bruxelles, Berlin and Washington are probably not going to sleep very well following the italian election results on Tuesday, this stuff could spread fast globally, arab spring-style…
