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

by Martin Gurri

he lacked the manic “singularity” of high modernism, and his proposed solution, the stimulus, was a grab-bag of activities needing over 1,000 pages to describe, costing nearly $800 billion, but somehow, after all that, generating very little drama. The president never followed up on the premise of a new start for the nation, never engaged in epic combat against the dead hand of history. His mode of governing was wordy, tactical, splintered among many objectives. He wanted every deserving cause to get a donation.

The aims of democratic government have shifted, even if the language of politics has yet to catch up. High modernist government was an austere prophet, demanding the destruction of the muddled present to make room for the perfect future. Late modernist government is more like a kindly uncle, passing out chocolate chip cookies to his favorite nieces and nephews. He doesn’t wish to transform them.

If high modernism in power was an engine of perfection, late modernism has become a happiness machine.

Are you happy that you are mad? Are you angry at not winning the way you want?

Elected officials know perfectly well that the public is on the move, and are terrified of the consequences. Their chief ambition is to persuade us that they feel our pain, are on our side, have given a little money to our favorite cause, if only we, the public, allow them to last out their terms in peace.

Interventionism has substituted a thousand tactics for a single bold strategy. Programs seem scarcely intelligible in terms of their stated purposes, and, like the stimulus, need to be legislated at exhausting length.

The effect of this secular trend has been to engage the legitimacy of elected governments across the entire surface of society, but to do so thinly and ineffectively, like oil on water.

If political power has become the guarantor of happiness, then politicians must take the blame for the tragic dimension of human life.

Failure, I repeat, is a function of government claims and public expectations.

My analysis of this complex set of relations arrives at a different place: high modernist claims exceeded government’s capacity for effective action. Late modernist dithering can be explained more economically by political necessity than by elaborate conspiracy theories. In both cases, failure ensued with apparent inevitability. The obvious question to pose is whether it was, in fact, inevitable:

At some point around the turn of the new millennium, elites lost control of information, and power arrangements began to flip. Assured of the public’s wrath, elected governments have acted, or failed to act, motivated by a terror of consequences. Legitimacy was equated with the deflection of blame, and the aim of governing became to exhibit a lack of culpability.

Ormerod has found no obvious connection between the results of actions in a complex environment and their stated intentions. That holds true for you and me, for corporations like Apple and Google, and for the Federal government. Most things fail, because our species tends to think in terms of narrowly defined problems, and usually pays little attention to the most important feature of these problems: the wider context in which they are embedded. When we think we are solving the problem, we are in fact disrupting the context. Most consequences will then be unintended.

Morality and politics should begin where Ormerod concludes: with the possible.

Ormerod compared the failure rates of companies with the extinction rates for species: “The precise mathematical relationship which describes the link between the frequency and size of the extinction of companies,” he wrote, “. . . is virtually identical to that which describes the extinction of biological species in the fossil record. Only the timescales differ.”39 Consider the implications. Companies intend to survive, indeed to thrive, and act on those intentions. They research the market environment, draft strategic plans, seek to maximize their advantages and minimize their weaknesses. Yet, ultimately, their failure rate is “virtually identical” to the random pattern of animal extinction.

The difference is that failing companies go out of business and are replaced by new companies, while government accumulates failure, making it, systemically, much more fragile.

In Britain, where excellent statistics have been kept from the Victorian era onward, the size of the public sector as a proportion of the economy has doubled since 1946, compared to the period 1870–1938. Yet the difference in the average unemployment rate before and after the expansion of government was statistically negligible.

“Whatever benefits may have arisen from this massive increase in the role of the state, reducing unemployment, the primary cause of poverty, has not been one of them,” Ormerod concluded.

You would expect that as governments grew in wealth and reach, the crime rate would decline, but in fact the opposite occurred. Between 1960 and 1980, the US crime rate tripled. Today, after strict enforcement of “three strikes and out” laws and the accumulation of an all-time high prison population, the crime rate remains double what it was in the years following World War II.

Actors within a complex system—even expert actors, armed with doctorates and reams of scientific research, and wielding the awesome power of the state—were blind to the perturbations caused by their actions.

If it isn’t within our power to ordain the future, an irresistible temptation will be felt by political actors to confuse progress with the negation and condemnation of the present.

Barack Obama, I believe, represented a new and disconcerting development in democratic politics: the conquest of the Center by the Border, and the rise of the sectarian temper to the highest positions of power.

He divorced his political personality from his official position, a paradox best explained as a desperate response to severe external pressures. His personal success made it likely that he will have imitators.

Yet the public remained as before: unsubdued, unquiet, unhappy. It could erupt at any moment, as it did in 2010.

Nothing is secret and nothing is sacred, so the hierarchies some time ago lost their heroic ambitions and now they have lost their nerve. They doubt their own authority, and they have good reason to do so.

The public opposes, but does not propose. So in the second decade of the new millennium, political arguments resemble a distorted echo of the French Revolution or Victorian England: we still quarrel in terms of left and right, conservative and liberal, even while the old landscape has been swept clean and the relevance of these venerable labels has become uncertain.

Virtually none of those who rail against the established order belong to the economically downtrodden or the politically oppressed: rather, they are middle class, well educated, mostly affluent. So part of my story must be an attempt to understand how such persons can arrive at political views that, if taken seriously, would entail their own destruction.

The word “progress” itself has become impolite, an embarrassment. Nobody has a clue which way that lies.

Radicalism, which once aimed to transform society, now more modestly (but, it may be, more successfully) labored to browbeat democratic governments into acknowledging an endless string of failures in need of correction. “To be radical,” Rosanvallon affirms, “is to point the finger of blame every day; it is to twist a knife in each of society’s wounds. It is not to aim a cannon at the citadel of power in preparation for a final assault.”

The mortal riddle posed by the nihilist is that he’s a child of privilege. He’s healthy, fit, long-lived, university-educated, articulate, fashionably attired, widely traveled, well-informed. He lives in his own place or at worst in his parents’ home, never in a cave. He probably has a good job and he certainly has money in his pocket. In sum, he’s the pampered poster boy of a system that labors desperately to make him happy, yet his feelings about his life, his country, democracy—the system—seethe with a virulent unhappiness.

Like the character in the cartoon, the nihilist hates the knotty branch on which he sits, and conceives the idea that it should be sawed off.

José Ortega y Gasset, a fellow Spaniard, once discerned a “radical ingratitude” in the type of modern person he called “mass man” and portrayed as the spoiled child of history. Mass man is heir to a long and brilliant past. The good things in life in the world he was born into—security, freedom, wealth, vacations to warm places—are in fact the outcome of a specific historical process, but mass man doesn’t see it that way. Newly risen to education and prosperity, he imagines himself liberated from the past, and has grown hostile to it as to any limiting factor. The good things in life have always been there. They

The old industrial world is passing away. This mode of organizing humanity, so brilliantly successful for a century and a half, has been overwhelmed by too much information, too much contradiction. The elites who manage the system no longer believe in a way forward. Stuck in the muck, they strive simply to endure: après moi le deluge.

Drill down into the networks that have enabled the public to confound authority, and you soon arrive at what I would call the personal sphere. This is the circle of everyday life, experienced directly, in all its local specificity.

The public, I mean to say, has been fully complicit in the failure of government. And the question of alternatives must extend beyond the formal organization of democracy to our expectations of what democratic government can deliver.

“telescopic philanthropy”—the trampling of the personal sphere for the sake of a heroic illusion.

I can align my expectations with reality or with utopian illusions. Nothing is settled. The power to decide is mine (yours, ours).

I will conduct my life with humility, according to trial and error, rather than double-down on error and expect power to deliver success.

My thesis describes a world in which, as a result of changes in information technology, two structural forces are found in permanent collision: the public, organized in networks, and government (authority), organized hierarchically.

The overall effect has been constant political turbulence. Everywhere the status quo is attacked and under stress—yet nowhere has the revolt of the public crystallized into a completed revolution.

A first-level effect can be seen in the character of the public. Opposition to governments and policies has been self-organized rather than controlled, conducted by amateurs rather than professionals, and outcome-oriented, usually against, rather than ideological.

I’d also expect representative democracy, as a system, to come under increasing challenge when desired outcomes fail to materialize.

Government today is slow to respond, afraid to advance, unwilling to yield. In democratic countries, it is habitually drawn into promising outcomes which it has no clue how to deliver. The public’s conquest of the information sphere has left rulers dazed and confused.

I would expect democratic governments to intervene ever more thinly and erratically over the surface of society, to give the appearance of doing something, of being in charge. More broadly, I’d expect politicians and governments in democratic countries to promise more while risking less.

Additional higher-level effects include a progressive loss of inhibition by the public in its attacks on authority, the rise of anti-establishment political groups, and the possibility, lurking in the shadows, of the nihilist and his fever dream of annihilation. I would therefore expect ever more frequent calls for the overthrow of government and the abolition of the system.

Finally: in the political environment described by my thesis, government must make it a priority to defend itself against the public.

I would expect the Chinese regime, for example, to be far more concerned with surveillance and control of the Chinese public than with foreign adventures—and to court risk overseas primarily to manipulate domestic opinion.

The overall effect of the null hypothesis is a political environment safely entrenched within the processes of the industrial age. Government actions and policies are sheathed with authority and persuasiveness, while government failures implicate specific politicians or parties but never the system as a whole. You should expect, under such conditions, for political life to be characterized by continuity rather than disruption. Protests occur, but they target specific rather than systemic issues.

A first-level effect is the nature of the opposition: it’s loyal rather than radical, shares many basic assumptions with those in power, and sits comfortably inside the political system. If this is true, Republicans and Democrats, Tories and Labor, will take turns running the government, and the public will accept the monotony in the manner of a dull but tolerably successful marriage.

History could well be driven by negation rather than contradiction. It could ride on the nihilistic rejection of the established order, regardless of alternatives or consequences.

It is almost certain that the population is Christianizing at a rapid rate—but actual numbers aren’t available.

What is one to make of such a fantastic outpouring of pessimism? I would note, first of all, that it’s largely elite-driven. Millions share the sentiment—but the elites own the institutional microphones, and make the loud noise.