You’re correct in your cyclical assumptions about human governmental experiments.

If you look at it you’ll see relative periods of stability which are shattered by sudden changes in how governance takes place. They also happen to be periods of relatively sudden technological change.

The introduction of what we know as democracy occurred in Athens during such a period, largely driven by the Greeks themselves, borrowed by the Romans who picked up on what the Greeks did and improved the living daylights out of it.

Rome itself changed to a tyranny under the successors to Augustus, no democrat himself, as the Empire expanded and stabalized.

It all fell apart when Rome did, in the west, and the period we call the “Dark Ages” when tyranny returned with a vengeance.

Fast forward to the Renaissance and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in England. Another period of rapid technological change came about along with the pressure from the House of Commons to take power from the monarchy and the Lords. Along came a nutbar King named George III and the American Revolution which the Commons, by and large was sympathetic to but couldn’t overturn the Lords or the nutbar King, who ignored it and financed German mercenaries to fight in America when the Commons turned off the financial tap.

The US Congress and the British Parliamentary system which reformed itself into it’s current form by the the 1860s or so, have served as the model of democracy in action ever since.

Now we’re in a period of rapid tech change again and, guess what?, the forces of what historians call reaction are screaming and yelling that the sky is about to fall. These forces, being the creatures of the previous stable period and getting filthy rich from it, grab control of government and create things like ACTA which serve no purpose but to ensure the reactionaries continue to reap the largest part of the economic pie.

Eventually the attempts to freeze or control tech change fail, as they did first in England and America fail during industrialization then in Europe and eventually globally.

Not without, I ought to point out, a lot of bloodshed along the way. (See Franco-Prussian War, the U.S. Civil War).

The other thing is that these periods of stability/revolution are becoming shorter and shorter though out history and I rather suspect it will be much shorter this time out.

What’s the change now? The ability of the “masses”, “commoners” or “mob” to communicate freely.

What made the American Revolution successful was the ability of the colonists of the time to print pamphlets, for example, that set our their grievances and solutions. Americans knew this and ensured that it could continue by making a (very healthy) fetish of a free press and free speech.

It’s against this background where there are pockets of freedom which aren’t going to go away easily that the forces of reaction (in the historical rather than political sense) will find impossible to control.

This time around, I suspect, it’s going to be the ability of the “masses” to get around reactionary forces like those behind ACTA by communicating using the Internet as the tool. For example the ability to penetrate the great firewall of China or the more moronic notions going on in that “democracy” we call Australia.

This time, I pray, without the ocean of bloodshed required to unseat the reactionaries (in the historical sense again) the printing press and the industrial revolution needed to get them unseated.

It’s about power, folks. Real, imagined or desired by the sponsors of ACTA. And don’t look to current political parties to resolve that without revolution within their structures or their near complete collapse. They sold their souls long ago.