Slow, incremental change has become a relic of the past. Today's shifts come fast and big. They are what Darrell West calls megachanges, in which dramatic disruptions in trends and policies occur on a regular basis. West says that we should alter our expectations about the speed and magnitude of political and social change.
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Facing the age of megachange, the old order must learn to adapt-or suffer upheaval.
Today's shifts come fast and big-what Darrell West calls megachanges: dramatic disruptions in trends and policies that occur on a regular basis.
Domestically, we see megachange at work in the new attitudes toward same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization, Trumpism, and border security. Globally,
we have seen the extraordinary rise and then collapse of the Arab Spring, the growing influence of non-state actors, the spread of ISIS-fomented terrorism, the surprising Brexit vote, and the fracturing of once-stable
international alliances.
Long-held assumptions have been shattered, and the proliferation of unexpected events is confounding experts in the United States and around the
globe. Many of the social and political institutions that used to anchor domestic and international politics have grown weak or are in need of dramatic reform. Extremism in one part of the world can reverberate far
from the original source.
What to do? West says that we should alter our expectations about the speed and magnitude of political and social change. We also need to recognize that
many of our current governing processes are geared to slow deliberation and promote incremental change, not large-scale transformation. With megachange
becoming the new normal, our domestic and global institutions require updates so we can cope with the massive economic, political, and social tidal waves of change.
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