The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

by Martin Gurri

The public, if anything, is more alienated and angry at authority than I supposed.

Rough, ungainly characters, devoid of institutional loyalties, tramp impatiently in the wings. In the US, Hungary, and the Philippines, they have gained power and strut on center stage.

I identified, roughly, the forces driving the tempest forward—but I failed to reckon the speed with which it was advancing. It was a significant omission. In a few short years, the political landscape has been transformed into a bedlam of irreconcilable factions.

The current elite class, having lost its monopoly over information, has been stripped, probably forever, of the authorizing magic of legitimacy. The industrial model of democracy is dysfunctional and discredited.

Trump is a lying piece of shit.

Trump is a hoodlum, readily evident upon reading The Making Of Donald Trump.

He called White Supremacists “very fine people.”

Koch brothers installed him by rigging the election so as to advance the agenda of the far-right rich.

Donald Trump is a peacock among the dull buzzards of American politics. The one discernible theme of his life has been the will to stand out: to attract all eyes in the room by being the loudest, most colorful, most aggressively intrusive person there. He has clearly succeeded to an astonishing degree.

Trump almost certainly benefited from these attacks. He was able, with some justice, to portray journalists as members in good standing in the club of entitled and out-of-touch elites. The public’s trust in the news stood at an all-time low—by the fall of 2016, it had fallen to 19 percent.28 Trump had the luxury of campaigning against an unloved institution that was providing him with prodigious levels of free (if negative) publicity. When he hurled insults at Megyn Kelly of Fox News, his crowds roared with approval.

His instincts, too, run counter to the temper of the times. He’s a centralizer in a centrifugal age, for example. He has said that he aspires to a “Jupiterian” presidency—actually to increase the distance between power and the public.45 He chose Versailles Palace, rococo backdrop to the Sun King, for his first important speech. While the Olympian style may have served Charles de Gaulle well, it is unlikely to be taken seriously on Twitter or Facebook. Macron is clearly tempted by the crown of the decaying empire: that is, by the ambition to become the next Angela Merkel. That way, it seems to me, lies perdition.

have entered a time of extraordinary pessimism concerning the competence, even the legitimacy, of representative democracy. Lamentations of the most extreme kind pour out on a daily basis—here, to offer a random sample, is Henry Giroux’s take on the “failures of American democracy” under Trump: A dystopian ideology, a kind of nostalgic yearning for older authoritarian relations of power, now shapes and legitimates a mode of governance that generates obscene levels of inequality, expands the ranks of corrupt legislators, places white supremacists and zealous ideologues in positions of power, threatens to jail its opponents, and sanctions an expanding network of state violence both at home and abroad.46 This is how the global elite