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

by Martin Gurri

In principle no less than in fact, this mutable entity could not be identified with the people.

Yet the claim has proved irresistible to those who wish to challenge an established gover...

The “Occupy” groups in the US, with tiny numbers on the street compared to Egypt’s protesters, still claimed to represent the “99 percent” against the predations of the elite.

The industrial age was Taylorist to the core.

The ordinary person, so hopelessly parochial through all of history, got flattened into the masses:

Intoxicated by the successes of industrial organization, the founders of mass movements, and their admirers and imitators, sought to reduce political action to pure mechanics.

Movement members were disciplined with military rigor.

the masses displaced the sovereign people.

The new public, in fact, closely corresponds to the old masses, now escaped from Taylorist control and returning, in vital communities, to its particular interests and tastes.

In the 85 years following the publication of Lippmann’s The Phantom Public, mass movements were defeated in war and outcompeted economically and at the ballot box.

On a somewhat different time-scale, the great hierarchies around which liberal democracy had been organized during the industrial age also began a process of disintegration.

Political machines

pa...

A similar loss of authority, as we will see, undermined government, business, and the scientific establishment.

authority drained away from once-powerful hierarchies toward informal, spontaneous groups.

Our age is characterized by a radical shift along this spectrum: from a public that was almost entirely reactive, to one that is hyper-active and ultra-intrusive. This was made possible by a proliferation of choices.

As more structural options became available to ordinary people, the latter began a migration back to their original interests, and the institutions which had once hemmed their behavior lost the power to do so.

TV viewers became YouTube posters.

identical. The public, we know, is composed of private persons welded together by a shared point of reference: what Lippmann called an interest in an affair, which can mean a love of computer games or a political disposition.

Members of the public tend to be dispersed, and typically influence events from a distance only,

A crowd, on the contrary, is always manifest, and capable of great physical destructiveness and ferocity.

On occasion—think

the crowd has attained a powerful symbolic importance, with an influence far beyond its numbers or even its moment in history. It is then turned into a form of communication.

If the public can be said to re-create the crowd into a form of communication, it is equally true that such a crowd, once convincingly expressed, will create its own public.

A fateful example of this type of two-way influence took place in June 1979, when Pope John Paul II travelled to communist Poland,

In the new millenium, the public returned with a vengeance, and its command of the information sphere permitted much greater intimacy with the crowd than had been structurally possible before.

For the first time in history, public opinion could fuse, moment by moment, with the actions of the crowd.

What has changed, then, is the public’s distrust for authority—and its increased power, in the age of the Fifth Wave, to translate that distrust into action.

Henri Rosanvallon, one of the few interesting political analysts today, has written of the “rise of the society of distrust.”1 The public, in a complex society, must depend on specialists, experts, and intermediaries such as political representatives, organized institutionally and hierarchically. When the experts fail, the public can only appeal to other experts, often from the same failed institution. The process has resembled a mutual protection pact among the elites. Failure typically gets blamed on insufficient support: the CIA, for example, demanded and received a bigger budget after 9/11. An exasperated public has countered by notching up the vehemence of criticism and the frequency of its interventions. At times, in some places, the public has abandoned all hope in modern society and lapsed into a permanent state of negation and protest.

At some moment of 2011, the script went awry. Toxic levels of distrust sickened democratic politics. People began to mobilize for “real democracy,” and denied that their elected representatives represented them. They were citizens of liberal democracies, but they demanded something different. They wanted radical change: and the great mystery, casting a shadow beyond 2011, was what this change away from current democratic practices might look like.

Social and political arrangements tend to accumulate noise. The internal and external forces holding them together inevitably shift in ways that drive the system ever farther out from equilibrium. Such pressures work silently and invisibly, beneath the surface. They are cumulative, slow to take effect. But when change comes, it is sudden and dramatic. Pushed beyond disequilibrium to turbulence, the system disintegrates and must be reconstituted on a different basis.

I believe 2011 marked the moment when the public first equalized the asymmetry in power with government. It did so by deploying digital tools to mobilize opinion and organize massive street protests. I also believe 2011 first exposed the gulf of distrust between the public and elected governments in many democratic countries. Liberal democracy itself came under attack.

a fundamental predicament of life under the Fifth Wave: the question of nihilism.

People of the web mobilized in awkward tandem with people of the left. The one provided a persuasive message, the other experience with street protests.

Some form of this riddle confronted the public during every collision with authority in the turbulent year 2011. What next? What structures will replace the old, despised institutions? How should society be reorganized? In every case no satisfactory answer was given. Given the public’s sectarian temper, none might have been possible.

Every step toward an ideology or program meant the embrace of something old, something hierarchical, something unequal and corrupt.

from ground level,

the revolts of 2011 can be explained by the colossal failure of Spain’s ruling institutions. The second perspective will be the bird’s eye view of history—and it will show that the revolt of the indignados was propelled by a self-destructive contempt for the world which had created the young rebels.

The two perspectives, I fear, are not mutually exclusive, and may well be complementary. It is perfectly possible for the elites to lapse into paralysis while the public staggers...

“euro zone”

the government’s loss of authority over fiscal issues which previously had been settled by political means, and the increased distance between the Spanish public and those who determined monetary policy.

The protesters were correct to charge the two major parties with espousing identical principles and similar policies.

one mind on democracy, capitalism, the welfare state, the euro, and the EU.

In a hindsight clouded with failure and distrust, this looked like collusion, even corruption.

Recall Douglas and Wildavsky’s observation about the Center hierarchy: it is often surprised. Modern governments can keep an eye on a thousand moving parts, but they can’t predict discontinuity. They can’t comprehend phase change. When the crisis arrives, they are slow to grasp its dimensions. When the effects become palpable, they reflexively reach for the crude tools they have at their disposal, whether or not these will improve the situation. In essence, governments can throw money at unwanted change, or they can hurl bombs and policemen.

there was no trust. There were only continued assertions of competence on one side, and increased economic pain and hopelessness on the other.

Distrust poisoned the public’s perception of politics and politicians. The digital platforms favored by the young lent themselves to conspiracy theories. It was natural to believe the worst.

The Spanish elites and the institutions they inhabited had never made much of a case for themselves beyond prosperity...

Under the conditions of the Fifth Wave, the human consequences of their failure couldn’t be swept discreetly under the rug.

Out of hopelessness, digitally expressed, a public had crystallized that was interested in the affair of abolishing the whole system. The “key message” of the protesters, wrote Manuel Castells, a student of the movement and a participant in it, “was a rejection of the entire political and economic institutions that determine people’s lives.”14 This meant nothing less than the elimination of representative democracy and capitalism. If these idols of the modern world could be overturned, society would be purged of exploitation and distrust, and the individual would once again be free to determine his own existence. So the indignados believed.