If you want to understand what’s going on in American politics, look around the world. Whether we Americans like it or not, American exceptionalism is and always has been a myth. The country is subject to the same forces that shape the world.   It is just that, throughout out our history, geography, economics and wealth have protected us.

No more. Technology has overcome geography. Financial crises that begin in Thailand end up destroying our real estate markets. The Occupy Wall Street movement and the occupation of public lands in Oregon are echoes of the Arab Spring. The nation is wealthy, but not as wealthy as it was when, in the mid-20^th century, much of the nonwestern world lived in relatively desperate conditions. Now, the wealth in Asia and the Middle East rivals that in the west.

Global politics has changed. The wave of change that began with the fall of the Berlin wall now manifests itself around the world as the far right and the far left challenge politics as usual.

We saw this in the Spanish election of 2015.   For decades, Spain was the poster child of democratic transitions.   It seemed to prove that a nation could escape the oppression of a Francoist right wing dictatorship and transform into a modern, liberal polity. Of course, it helped that Spain was located on the western frontier of the European Union. Spain wanted access to Europe’s markets and vice versa.

It is easy to transform peacefully amidst wealth.

But, 40 years after Franco’s death, Spain experienced an electoral earthquake. New, populist parties on the right and the left arose and destroyed the center-right Popular Party and the Center-Left Socialists. Podemos (“we can”) challenged the Socialists’ antiquated notions of European welfare and the Citizens’ Party expressed impatience with the Center-Right’s inability to challenge the increasingly antiquated Socialists. So, the young rose up on the right and the left and challenged the comfortable centrist status quo that their political parents and grandparents had created.

In the United States, we feel the repercussions of this same impatience with politics as usual. Trump is succeeding because his many GOP rivals will not yield in favor of a stronger, party organization that has lacked a coherent ideology since Ronald Reagan challenged the Soviet Union. The GOP rivals are playing a dangerous game of chicken in which, it is clear, no one is likely to swerve.  The most likely result will  be a brokered convention.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders embodies the anger of the Occupy Movement and the youth who have no loyalty to the Democratic Party status quo. Sanders’ undoing will be that he must challenge the Clinton political machine. Whereas Trump can play a cautious game in which he seeks only to ensure a brokered political convention (a virtual certainty as long as he has double-digit rivals), Bernie must look to defeat Hillary Clinton one-on-one. That is unlikely to happen so long as she has Bill Clinton campaigning for her.

What will come of this election? It will not be the revolution that Bernie Sanders seeks. But, we can expect that the GOP will seize this opportunity to reform its nomination process and the political party structure. Presidential candidates must endure a lengthy, expensive nomination process that was designed in response to Richard Nixon’s campaigns. Reacting to his reliance on great sums of money and insider politics, the Democrats opened up their presidential primaries to let the people chose their nominee. The process as designed to ensure that virtually anyone could run for president and win.

As we see in 2016, anyone can and does run. “Anyone” was supposed to be a peanut farmer from Georgia who is able to challenge the political party establishment by taking principled stands and running as an outsider. As we see in 2016 (and saw in 2012), “Anyone” includes the wealthy as well as the commoners. The result is a GOP that has not had a coherent, central ideology (try to triangulate Sarah Palin, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump) and a Democratic Party that is torn between a weakened, wishy-washy middle and an angry populist left wing.

The reforms of the 1970s have begotten unbeatable, gerrymandered incumbents, skyrocketing election costs, political parties with no ideological core, and presidential candidates who struggle to govern alongside an entrenched Congress. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump may not be the ideal presidential candidates for their parties or the United States. But, they manifest the deep-seeded discontent that the people have for their political system. Sanders may not win. The best Trump can hope for is to force a brokered convention at which he will not win.

The result  will  be a move towards stronger, more ideologically coherent political parties that guard their  nominations from pillaging by outsiders such as Trump and Palin.   We will not return to the smoke-filled rooms of yore.  But, not  just  anyone  will be able to hijack the nomination process and leave the people with a choice among candidates that really represent neither political party.

The 2016 election will go down in history as a watershed election that brought the political revolutions from across the globe into U.S. Politics.  It’s impact will be felt far into the 21st century.