A screengrab of the message the author receives when trying to view or follow Wikileaks on Twitter. Was I on the blacklist because of my stated opinion that the only governments WikiLeaks cared to "open" were Western democracies? Meanwhile, authoritarian and kleptocratic governments like China's, Iran's and Russia's - the ones that might jail their own Julian Assanges - well, they got a free pass. The final straw may have come after emails linked to Vladimir Putin's aide were hacked and I asked on Twitter if WikiLeaks wouldn't publish those emails, too. But that tweet is history – and so is the US election. African-Americans are left wondering if the slow progress of the last 150 years will end with the election of a man backed by the Klan and its sympathisers. Ditto Jews the world over, watching the Klan's hipster nephews, the so-called 'alt-right', gather to make straight-arm Hitler salutes in a Washington ballroom. Muslims in America are worried about being rounded up. People fear for their physical safety.

Clinton campaign chief John Podesta had thousands of his emails hacked. Credit:AP What role did Assange play in the election of this abnormal candidate? More precisely, how was it ever OK for Assange to pound away at Hillary Clinton's reputation and that of the Democrats with data hacked by an enemy government? How was it okay for WikiLeaks, in plain sight, to advance the fortunes of one American candidate over another? Protests against Donald Trump during the campaign. Credit:AP Many WikiLeaks supporters who need to ask themselves these hard questions won't. That's because for many in the tech community, their beliefs run in a decidedly libertarian direction.

Meanwhile, much of the public, so distrustful of power - of any power - see the need, as one colleague of mine put it, "to wreck the system so it could be started over." Hillary Clinton: the target of WikiLeaks. Politics, to them, is like technology. Reforming a system of government with its checks and balances and limits on power is like wiping a laptop's hard drive and reformatting it. Except it's not. Democracies thrive with strong institutions, which rely on a culture of accountability and trust. A strong democratic culture encourages them to reform when that is clearly necessary.

But today, democracy is being undermined by regimes with a keen grasp of technology's potential for sowing confusion, division and disorder in systems that rely on trust and public faith. Assange did the work of one of those regimes. With Trump's election, dystopian forces have been unleashed in what is, for better or worse, still the world's most influential democracy. This isn't theory. This is reality. It's Americans on the street angry and fearful for what comes next. Soon there will be anti-democratic forces in the White House. And this matters for democracies everywhere. Here in Australia. In the US. In France. In Germany. These systems depend on a mainstream politics geared toward the centre, grounded in realistic compromise and openness. Not constant revolutions but incremental and sustained change.