The Revolt of the Masses Electorates are casting a global no-confidence vote in their leaderships.

09-02-2009 • WSJ

When the political world arrives at the point where even the Japanese rise up to toss a party from office after almost 54 years in power, it's time to see something's happening here, Mr. Jones. The ever-entertaining Karl Marx described a society's least politically engaged people as the lumpen proletariat. Well, it's beginning to look as if the globe's lumpen proletariat has decided they've had about enough of the lumpen bureaucratariat. It could be a revolution under way, though not the one predicted by the boys at the barricades. To Mr. Marx, the lumpen proletariat (often slurred into a single word, lumpenproletariat) was the most marginalized, hopeless, faceless swath of the underclass. Were he alive at this moment, it is not beyond imagining that Karl would have joined the charge against what has become a lumpen bureaucratariat—the permanent, often faceless overclass of gerrymandered politicians, bureaucrats for life and the public unions and special i