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

by Martin Gurri

A similar historical trajectory described every wealthy democratic country, including the US. The public sector grew enormously, while long-term unemployment rates remained unaffected.

the efforts of democratic governments to prevent or reduce or punish crime appeared largely disconnected from actual crime rates.

parallel disconnect existed with regard to poverty, income inequality, and geographical segregation along class, ethnic, or religious lines.

No matter what strategy or technology was applied, the future continued to hide behind a veil of uncertainty. Prophecy and control were illusions.

our view of the world which is emerging is one in which it is either very difficult or even impossible to predict the consequences of decisions in any meaningful sense. We may intend to achieve a particular outcome, but the complexity of the world, even in apparently simple situations, appears to be so great that it is not within our power to ordain the future.

This description of reality makes a hash of many modern assumptions: that science and technology can penetrate the future, for instance. Or that given enough information, any problem can be solved. Or that social relations can be rationalized according to some visionary principle. If Ormerod is right, most democratic contests today are fought over phantom issues, and democratic politicians, to get elected, must promise to deliver impossibilities.

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. That has already transpired with the sectarian public. From Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, the public has rejected the legitimacy of the status quo while refusing to get involved in spelling out an alternative.

A preference for negation as a political style

President Obama,

Democratic rulers, for purely historical reasons, are condemned to propose ambitious projects and assert extravagant claims of competence: that’s the way the game is played. But the game of democracy is now at war with reality. The result has been persistent failure. There is a democrat’s dilemma that is no less perilous than the dictator’s. Politicians must promise the impossible to get elected. Elected officials must avoid meaningful action at all costs.

In JFK’s time, the public and the elites averted their gaze from the emperor’s nakedness. In contrast, we paraded the failures of President Bush in Iraq and President Obama with the stimulus in the manner of defeated chieftains at a Roman triumph. Democratic life, as I write these lines, has been reduced to the exhibition and contemplation of the emperor’s naughty bits.

the 2010 mid-term elections. At this critical juncture, the president took the measure of the changed landscape and adjusted his ambitions accordingly. Whether by plan, or, as I think more likely, by temperament, he resumed the posture of a righteous outsider calling out a corrupt establishment. He distanced himself rhetorically from the power of his office, from the Center, and abandoned the claims of competence and heroic projects that had led his administration to failure and defeat.

He had risen on a tidal wave of hostility against authority, and he had been smashed down when he, in turn, was perceived to be the authority. The public was angry and disgusted with government. Henceforth he would be the voice of that anger and disgust. The veteran community organizer would embrace and reinforce the public’s distrust of the established order.

The president was now a denouncer rather than a fixer of problems. He had described a destructive trend, but refused to make any claims of competence over it. The purpose of the exercise seemed to be to align him with the public’s anger on this issue, as he perceived it.

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.

According to Douglas and Wildavsky, the Border identified itself as the negation of the Center. The sectarian temperament was formed in alienation from the inequality and corruption of hierarchy. By this logic, the rule of the sectarian Border must mean the self-negation of government: the alienation of power from itself. To govern at the heart of this contradiction has been the essence of the Obama style.

Condemnation served to prove the president’s good faith, and to rally the public—not, indeed, behind the institutions of the Federal government or the democratic process, but behind his administration and his person. Legitimacy adhered to qualities intrinsic to Barack Obama, sectarian prophet, the president who was going to be fighting side by side with the public every step of the way.

As for democracy, its value was made contingent on specific outcomes. A process that allowed women’s rights to be trampled and businessmen to promote inequality could not in good conscience be tolerated. Thus the election of Barack Obama made democracy legitimate, rather than the other way around. His defeat could only have been the result of conspiracy by secretive forces, and would have justified the public’s flooding the streets in indignado-style protests.

But representative democracy, as it actually exists, is a procedural business. Either it tolerates pluralistic outcomes, or it will degenerate into chaos or coronations. More to the point, the president demanded outcomes that—to paraphrase Ormerod—were not within the power of government to ordain.

The accusatory style of government must be understood as a pathological development, a deformation, brought about by the underground struggle between the public and authority.

After the defeat of 2010, the president decided on a strategy that placed the public’s chosen weapon against authority—negation—at the center of government. He divorced his political personality from his official position,

Yet the public remained as before: unsubdued, unquiet, unhappy. It could erupt at any moment, as it did in 2010. President Obama was able to mimic the public’s voice, but he was not its chosen instrument: he’s riding a tiger, and must constantly sharpen his rhetorical attacks to avoid having it turn against him. This can only intensify the public’s corrosive distrust of the political system. When that distrust is validated by the highest elected officials, outright rejection of democracy becomes a defensible position, to be invoked at the next, inevitable, failure of government.

This great strategic reversal has produced few alternatives to the ideas and ideologies that dominated the industrial age. The public rides on new technologies and platforms, but as users rather than makers: it is uninterested in leveraging technical innovation to formulate its own ideology, programs, or plans.

negation, invoked from every corner and without relief, has driven the democratic process to the edge of nihilism—the belief that the status quo is so abhorrent that destruction will be a form of progress.

If the industrial-age hierarchies of contemporary democracy are suffering a crisis of authority, if the public is on the move and expecting impossibilities, then, all things equal, the system will continue to bleed away legitimacy—and there will be those who argue it should be put out of its misery.

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.

To the public in revolt, however, the ideal of democracy could not be reconciled with the top-down control that characterized the standing institutions of representative democracy.

The established order had failed, persistently, but there was no talk of alternatives, no pressure for reform, no faith—as I’ll have occasion to note—in revolution. The crisis of authority was a crisis of democracy. The public’s assault on the institutions was often an assault on the democratic process.

Elected officials were routinely described as tyrannical by insurgents from the right.

To insurgents from the left, elected government was plainly a tool of the corporations.

Across the world, support for democracy was ebbing:

Elites in the old democracies manifested a certain irritation with their decadent politics, coupled with open admiration for authoritarian methods that “worked.”

Tom Friedman,

While elites longed for a political system that worked, the public, for its part, perceived a politics submissive to hierarchy, corrupted by the will to power. The public had no love for Chinese-style autocracy, and, given its mutinous temper, scarcely distinguished between authoritarian and representative institutions. Democracy, from this perspective, appeared like another structure of control.

there are no serious political actors today who believe in the reality, much less the desirability, of revolution. In consequence, radical and democratic politics, which shared the same utopian end-point, have lost their directional coherence.

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.

A vast structural collision—pre-eminently, the revolt of the public against authority—has left democratic governments burdened with failure, democratic politics far removed from reality, and democratic programs drained of creative energy, and thus of hope. At this point, the nihilist makes his appearance.

the nihilist, while essentially at war with himself, will happily bring down the entire edifice of democracy as part of his suicide pact. He has taken radicalism to its logical extreme. He doesn’t mean to conquer power or replace it with some new deal, only to obliterate the institutions that stand in his way: “fuck the feds.”

He thinks his rulers are liars and cheats,

he’s extremely well connected,

Homo informaticus run amok.

fantastically well-informed about those few odd topics that obsess him, and he produces a torrent of hard-core negations posted about the world around him.

Being connected, the nihilist is networked. He can link to others just as destructive as himself, and bring them together in a flash of real-time mayhem.

Yet he’s not a professional agitator, as he surely would have been in the last century. He’s a private person, an amateur in politics moving among other amateurs. Nihilism, in him, isn’t a full-time job—it’s a latent condition. It erupts on a case–by-case basis.

The government could fix everything and solve our problems if it tried—for all his alienation, the nihilist is convinced of that, and the most persuasive evidence he has of government corruption is that life keeps getting worse.

The mortal riddle posed by the nihilist is that he’s a child of privilege.

obdurate, a declaration of war on cause and effect.

radical ingratitude describes the feeling that makes the nihilist tick. His political and economic expectations are commensurate with his personal fantasies and desires, and the latter are boundless. He expects perfection. He insists on utopia.

Every encounter with the human condition, every social imperfection and government failure, triggers the urge to demolish. Fortified by the conviction that he deserves more, he feels unconquerably righteous in his ingratitude—a feeling sometimes validated by late modernist governments bent on the promotion of universal happiness.

the bundle of destructive impulses I have called the nihilist represents a latent tendency in the public in revolt. Potentially, he is a multitude. Under certain conditions, he could be you.