The world's elite leaders face a new reality

Excerpts from brief, insightful essay in the New York Times:

Across the globe, this was a year when people took to the streets, often overthrowing their leaders in the process. That was true in the Arab world, in Russia, in India, in Western Europe, in the United States and even in China...

The first surprise was the strength and near universality of the public discontent... The unifying complaint is crony capitalism... the notion that the rules of the economic game are rigged to benefit the elites at the expense of the middle class has had remarkable resonance this year around the world and across the political spectrum...

The second surprise was how easy it has become to transform mass dissatisfaction into mass protest... the communications revolution, ranging from satellite television to Twitter to camera phones, has made it easier than ever before to organize protests and to keep them going once they start...

Inside the citadel of the state, by contrast, 2011 was a veritable annus horribilus. That was especially true for some pretty vile dictators. But even in democracies, government didn’t seem to work very well. Political paralysis was a routine complaint in the world’s richest democracy, and in its biggest democracy...

[T]he technological tools that made protesting so much easier... may have made governing tougher — informed and empowered individuals are probably harder to boss around than ignorant, isolated ones...

[M]ost of today’s troubled market democracies don’t need a revolution to sweep away their cronies. What they do need is a new version of capitalism, designed for the 21st century. That is what the world’s protesters, in their different ways, are all asking for. Here’s hoping that 2012 provides some politicians with some answers.

More at the link; the author is Chrystia Freeland, global editor-at-large at Reuters.