For all the other depressing lessons it taught Americans, the Tea Party hysteria made on thing especially clear: There are large segments of America that believe the government is gaining too much control. The opposite is true, of course. Technological innovation has given us a decentralized media, which can be a good thing and sometimes bad. The power has shifted, and it’s not going back. From John Kerry’s comments reported by CSNews’ Terence P. Jeffrey:

“‘Ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators, and that was complicated further by this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year.

‘It makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest,’ said [John] Kerry, ‘and that is complicated by a rise of sectarianism and religious extremism that is prepared to employ violent means to impose on other people a way of thinking and a way of living that is completely contrary to everything the United States of America has ever stood for. So we need to keep in mind what our goals are and how complicated this world is that we’re operating in.'”