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

by Martin Gurri

A central question for the view from above—by which I mean, from the Olympus of history—is whether these beliefs were grounded in reality. Analytically, this is probably impossible to discover.

compared to what?

If the indignados somehow managed to destroy the system they so deeply despised, they will have extinguished themselves and their movement by eliminating the conditions that made both possible. This is not a riddle or a paradox, but a political pathology frequently encountered in the wake of the Fifth Wave.

the question of nihilism.

the will to destruction, including self-destruction, for its own sake. I mean, specifically, the negation of democracy and capitalism, with a frivolous disregard for the consequences.

in the protests of 2011.20 The people taking to the streets were the golden youth of Israel. That was the view from above and the view at ground level. Yet, like the indignados, they wished to cut away at their own roots. They wanted to be other than they were.

What Israel’s mutinous youth really wanted was this. They wanted the government to make things right. They wanted it to legislate a meaningful life for them in an egalitarian, fraternal, and, of course, affordable society. They had no plans to achieve this, or even a definition of what it meant, but it didn’t matter. That, too, was the government’s job—to listen to the politicized crowd, “the people” who demanded social justice, then somehow make it so.

The demonstrators weren’t prepared to declare victory on any terms.

It has proved impossible for the multiple revolts of 2011 to move beyond negation and reach an accommodation with reality.

I found strong demographic and behavioral affinities between Occupy Wall Street participants and the public that took to the streets in Egypt, Spain, and Israel. They were the same people, in different countries: young, middle class, university educated—and, in the case of OWS, predominantly white. Sectarian ideals propelled them to politics. All repudiated, in principle, the need for leaders, programs, and top-down organizations.

Two: To a remarkable extent, the Occupiers lived virtually. They organized on the web so they could occupy a physical space, and they occupied a physical space so they could talk about it online.

Three: Like their brethren in Spain and Israel, the OWS protesters were energized primarily by the force of their repudiations. They made no demands, but they felt free to accuse.

The romance of condemnation, in my judgment, has become the most conspicuous feature of President Obama’s mode of governance.

Among my concerns in writing this book has been the fate of democracy in the indecisive conflict between the public and authority. From this perspective, OWS’s numbers may have been small, but the message was consequential. It helped tip American politics at the highest level toward pure negation and distrust, eroding the legitimacy of democratic institutions. For this reason alone the Occupy protests belong with the bigger revolts in my investigation of phase change.

We have heard this sentiment before, the hope—the expectation—that hierarchy would be decontaminated by making it subservient to the sect.

The government was to become an instrument of sectarian virtue.

They wanted history to abolish history, hierarchy to eliminate hierarchy, government to bring down the temple of authority.

The disproportion between such systematic injustices and the proposed actions—the “process” I cited above, a cursory exhortation to “assert your power”—reflects a form of logic which should be familiar to us by now.

Revolution, in 2011, meant denunciation. Actual change was left for someone else.

The Occupiers didn’t deal in alternatives, but most of the standing political and social arrangements propping up their world they wished to sweep away.

a phase change in 2011: that is, of a great strategic reversal favoring the public, which now commanded the heights of information and communication.

there was insufficient resilience in both trained staff and technology, to review, capture, and download the vast volume of open source data which needed to be processed.38 The words could have been written by a mandarin in the ruling hierarchies of Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, or Israel.

They seethed with repressed outrage. That someone “intent on causing disruption” should out-communicate and outsmart the authorities was a violation of the natural order: a trampling of the sanctities. The information tsunami had swept away the power of the British government and the London police.

Hatred of the police was one of the shared points of reference which fused the rabble in the street into a true public. The police stood for a structure of authority they wished would vanish from the earth. Otherwise, they were empty of politics or ideology.

Belief that political power could switch off the information sphere was shown to be more than an aging dictator’s hallucination. It was a persistent delusion of the Center.

The young disturbers of the peace in Tottenham and Oxford Circus loathed authority and behaved accordingly. Properly considered, their actions were also in harmony with the worldview of the political protesters—more so, in fact, than the actions of the protesters had been. Disorders turned violent only in Britain because the rioters alone, in their actions, pushed the negations of 2011 to their logical conclusion.

The British rioters acted as if the government, the police, and the law lacked legitimacy.

At a certain point, the mandates of Center and hierarchy appear to matter more than democracy or authoritarianism: that was the complaint of the protesters in democratic countries. But, equally, there is a point at which negation and repudiation by the public must pose the question of nihilism.

the impulse was to abolish history entirely, and open up a future purified of cause and effect.

They disdained specifics—ideology, policy—but excelled at lengthy menus of accusations.

But the hypothesis I presented in this chapter was not that the public in 2011 had the interest or the capacity to replace current institutions of authority. It had neither. Sectarian to the core, the public would have felt corrupted by the thought of assuming the functions of the Center. The phase change concerned, at the most obvious level, a new capacity to mobilize large numbers of the public and so to command the attention of all political players, from government leaders to the media to ordinary voters. This was a new thing under the sun, and it became possible only in the altered landscape of the Fifth Wave.

The consequence wasn’t revolution but the threat of perpetual turbulence. The authorities felt, and still feel, their incapacity keenly. Governments are aware that the public could swarm into the political arena at any moment, organizing at the speed of light, hurling anathemas of repudiation. Political elites in democratic countries have become thoroughly demoralized. Whether this was deserved or not is a separate question, to be examined in the next two chapters. But the crisis of confidence among established politicians has precluded the possibility of bold action, of democratic reform.

The rise of Beppe Grillo had nothing to do with reform or radical change, but meant the humiliation and demoralization of the established order.

That was the most profound consequence of 2011: sowing the seeds of distrust in the democratic process. You can condemn politicians only for so long before you must reject the legitimacy of the system that produced them. The protests of 2011 openly took that step, and a considerable segment of the electorate applauded. Like money and marriage, legitimacy exists objectively because vast numbers of the public agree, subjectively, that it does exist. If enough people change their minds, the authorizing magic is lost.

The street protests of 2011, while ostensibly political, were part of a global assault on the guardians of authority across every domain of human activity. The protesters stood in the same relation to government that bloggers and social media did to newspapers, YouTube to television, Napster to the recording industry, massive online courses to universities, Amazon to shopping malls, the open science movement to the scientific establishment. From the commanding heights of the information sphere, the public sought in each case to break a monopoly held by an accredited elite.

Current structures of authority are a legacy of the industrial age.

These institutions have been subjected to a Taylorist process of rationalization: they are, without exception, top-down, specialized, professionalized, prone to pseudo-scientific rituals and jargon.

Most people in authority today came to their positions in that happy time. On moral as well as intellectual grounds, they dismiss the outsider out of hand.

Of course, the ferocity of this response can be explained in part by a fear of losing access to power and money.

Even in purely practical terms, persuasion has always trumped compulsion or bribery.

These propositions should be considered truisms, but they are not. Not by the public, which, as we have seen, assumes that every failure of authority must be explained by a collusion of money with power.

And not by many analysts, who embrace some version of the old Marxist concept of “false consciousness”—the idea that the public can be persuaded to heed authority against its own best interests.

The crisis of authority hollowing out existing institutions didn’t arise because these institutions prostituted themselves to power or money. That was an explanation after the fact—one that happened to be believed by much of the public and many experts. The fact that needed to be explained, however, was failure: the painfully visible gap between the institutions’ claims of competence and their actual performance. The gap, I maintain, was a function of the limits of human knowledge. It had always been there. What changed was the public’s awareness of it.

Today failure happens out in the open, in public, where everyone can see. With the arrival of the global information sphere,

Since 1919, in sum, the practice of science migrated from the sectarian Border, where Einstein clearly originated, to a Center dominated by large, bureaucratic institutions.

paralleled that of government, the news industry, and the other institutions of the industrial age. All claimed monopolies over information to justify an assertion of unquestioned authority.

It might be expected that an unruly public would eventually take on such a pillar of the established order: and that has been the case. Amateurs have swarmed into the precincts of science along many fronts.

hierarchy of climatology, caught en famille. The scientists sounded vain, petty, intolerant, obsessed with media coverage, and abusive to outsiders. They often appeared clueless when it came to their own data sets and computer programs.

since the group largely controlled peer review for their field, and a consuming subject of the emails was how to keep dissenting voices out of the journals and the media, the claim rested on a circular logic. The supposedly anonymous review process, it was apparent, had become something of a cozy club in climatology.

believe the public judged science more severely than the scientific institutions judged themselves.