Politics & Power Quote by Jeremy Rifkin

Speed is the point, and power is the subtext. Rifkin isn’t admiring “electronic media” as some neutral force for enlightenment; he’s describing it as an accelerant that can take an idea from niche to unavoidable before institutions have time to smother it. The repetition of “very, very quickly” against “years and years and years” sets up a deliberate contrast: media can compress attention, but politics still requires the slow, human work of relationships, trust, and coordination.

There’s a strategist’s candor here. “Lay the groundwork” is movement language, but in Rifkin’s mouth it also reads like project management: stakeholder meetings, coalition-building, message discipline. He positions activism as infrastructure, not spontaneity. The line also reframes “political response” as something engineered rather than discovered, hinting at a tension modern democracies rarely admit out loud: that outcomes often belong to the groups who prepare longest, not necessarily the groups with the best arguments.

The European reference matters. Rifkin is invoking a continent where transnational activism and regulatory politics have historically had a clearer runway than in the U.S., then nodding to replication “here,” suggesting a playbook export: seed the idea, build the network, ride the media wave when it crests. It’s a snapshot of late-20th/early-21st century advocacy logic, when mass media (and later digital networks) didn’t replace organizing so much as reward the organizers who were already in position to convert visibility into policy.