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

by Martin Gurri

Yet the greater paradox is that 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.

Rodrigo Duterte

Syriza

Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini’s Northern League—the

Catalonia was never a nation, but the Catalans, having caught the bug of identity and negation, were in revolt against history, and wished to smash through its consequences in the present order of things.

referendum again went the separatists’ way.

elected democratically. Democracy, in Spain, had become an accomplice to the disintegration of national politics and of the nation-state.

Brexit.

“In 1,000 years, I would never have believed that the British people would vote for this,” exclaimed a baffled Labour MP.39 Such radical disconnection from the public, even more than immigration or terror, helped explain the revolt from below implicit in the Brexit vote.

The England of the pub and the football field had struck a blow at the Britain of the institutions. On Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, “Leave” activists had outnumbered, out-posted, and out-energized their opponents.

As the outcomes of democracy turned increasingly against the elites, the elites with equal intensity worried about the failure of democracy.

This is how the global elite class and many others interpret what I have called the revolt of the public: as the death of democracy and a descent into authoritarian darkness.

The connection between political turmoil and the new information landscape is now broadly understood, but the issue is often framed in terms of social media opening the gates to destructive or undesirable opinions.

The corollary to democratic despair has been an almost mystical faith in the effectiveness of foreign dictators.

Western intellectuals who despair of democracy: they dream of an enlightened despot with the power to end the current political and informational chaos.

Putin

belongs to a class that I would call dictatorships of repudiation:

The common thread is a rhetoric of defiance and renewal. The dictator is transformed from a murderous predator into a solitary hero struggling against overwhelming odds. The villain confronting him is some hodgepodge of globalized malevolence, with the US typically pulling the strings.

Putin, al-Sisi, and their kind

aim to slay the dragon of national decadence and bring to an end this unhappy age. To some extent, therefore, they can tap into the explosive political energies released by the revolt of the public: by the rage and despair over the way things stand felt by ordinary people in Russia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Their struggle is the public’s, at least in this sense: the repudiation of the status quo and the desire to abolish it by fair means or foul.

Though aligned with the public’s mood, the dictatorship of repudiation is best understood as a series of national episodes, lacking the ideological coherence to transform itself into a serious rival to liberal democracy.

Authoritarianism exaggerates precisely those elite behaviors that the public is rebelling against—and it can’t repudiate itself.

So, I don’t see authoritarian rulers prospering under current conditions. The 2010s bear little resemblance to the 1930s. That is the explicit answer to the “abroad” part of my question. Xi Jinping may flex China’s muscle in Asia, but he knows that war will unleash domestic passions that could blow apart his precariously balanced regime. Vladimir Putin may play great power games on the edges of his rickety empire, but he’s no more likely than Spain to invade Europe. China and Russia don’t pretend to be rival models to democracy: they are, in fact, old-fashioned industrial-age hierarchies intent on looting their own people.

Authoritarianism appears to be advancing because so many elite voices in democratic nations say so. Democracy looks to be dying in darkness for the same reason. The source of despondency is that elite disaster, the election of Trump:

If Russia and Putin were the hidden hand that delivered the impossible Trump to power, the Nazis, in the fevered mind of the elites, represented the monstrous outcome of this manipulation.

largely elite-driven.

Democracy from that perspective means rule by the best. Authoritarianism looks like a barbarian invasion.

A second observation is that we had heard all this before. Trump was Hitler before he was inaugurated. From the first, the call was for a resistance on the model of Nazi-occupied France. Charlottesville and similar incidents, for the elites, were a confirmation, not a revelation: Trump, barbarian in the White House, has merely lived up to expectations.

I don’t see how, on the evidence, a case can be made that the United States is stumbling towards authoritarian rule.

As I look over the world’s democratic nations, I find little support for the thesis that their governments are becoming more violent or authoritarian. Among the old democracies at least, the opposite is closer to the truth.

Democratic governments are terrified of the public’s unhappiness. They understand the crushing existential burden placed by the public on mere politics, and the likelihood of failure, and the certainty that failure will be digitally magnified. Their behavior is the...

A mass movement like fascism would be difficult to sustain in the age of social media.

The peril to democracy under present conditions of information isn’t any of these things: it’s the spread of nihilism in the public and the demoralization of an elite class that has lost any claim to authority.

Charlottesville

abdication of the authorities.

the 20-year-old who plowed his car into the crowd at Charlottesville wasn’t acting on orders from his führer or from anyone else. He acted on an impulse: the urge to kill and destroy. Rather than chase after Nazis or other phantoms of history, those concerned with the future of democracy should fix their attention on that young man: on the nihilist who believes, with passionate intensity, that destruction and slaughter are by themselves a form of progress.

The nihilist impulse—the wish to smash down whatever stands—was to a considerable extent responsible for Donald Trump.

The answer will depend entirely on whether you are observing the administration’s behavior or parsing the president’s rhetoric. A year in, it’s fairly clear that the actions and policies of the Trump administration are little different from, say, what a Ted Cruz or even a Jeb Bush administration would have implemented.

Trump has mastered the nihilist style of the web.

the most significant factor separating him from the pack. His opponents speak in jargon and clichés. He speaks in rant. He attacks, insults, condemns, doubles down on misstatements, never takes a step back, never apologizes.

Politicians swept into office by the anti-establishment flood face an immediate dilemma. Once in government, they can continue to smash away at the institutions—but this will damage the economy and consequently their popularity. Alternatively, they can move to the mainstream and compromise with the elites—but this will demolish their credibility and alienate their base of support.

The bizarre schizoid style of the Trump administration becomes intelligible as an attempt to escape this dilemma.

Donald Trump is a master of the game. His unbridled language mobilizes his anti-elite followers, even as his policies appeal to more “conventional” Republicans and conservatives.

To retain his base, he must provoke his opposition into a frenzy of loathing. Ordinary Americans, inevitably, have come to regard the president as the sum of all his rants. For our confused and demoralized elites, who have no clue about the game being played, Donald Trump looks something like the Beast of the Apocalypse, a sign of chaotic end-times.

The predicament confronting liberal democracy, however, isn’t a resurrected Hitlerism or a manipulative Putinism. It isn’t even Trumpism, except as a sort of thermometer reading. The trouble is in us: in our readiness to generalize from the web levels of hostility and aggression inconsistent with the legitimacy of any political system. By embracing Trump in significant numbers, I mean to say, the public has signaled that it is willing to impose the untrammeled relations of social media on the fragile forms of American democracy.