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

by Martin Gurri

By far the most consequential higher-level effect has been the near-fatal hemorrhage of legitimacy from established institutions.

In all cases, I believe, the feeble pulse of the institutions can be traced to the unforgiving trauma inflicted by the public.

I would look for entities external to government, such as corporations and NGOs, to absorb many of the functions traditionally assigned to the brain-dead institutions. Government could begin to unbundle.

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.

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 same would apply to our own Federal government.

In democracies, elected officials will be tempted to gain favor by distancing themselves from the democratic process. I would expect a number of would-be Barack Obama imitators, who seek to rule by disdain of power, and to head systems they profess to abhor.

Books that interpret events sooner or later will be falsified by events: you just hope it’s later.

Events in Ukraine have repeated the patterns of the revolt of the public under the conditions of the Fifth Wave.

like their precursors of 2011, the Ukrainian insurgents wished to be rid of the political status quo without having much of an idea about what to put in its place.

Euromaidan wasn’t a coup, as Yanukovich alleged. It was a sectarian revolt. Participants aspired to purity in democratic ideals, but were unwilling to invest their energies on the messy details of democratic government.

Venezuela

Thailand

Prizing desired political outcomes over mere democratic procedures follows naturally from the public’s disdain of established institutions.

Turkey,

Erdogan stood in the same relation to the public as that of Thailand. It kept winning elections and losing legitimacy, in this case because of a destructiv...

He had tamed Turkish mass media, and it plainly seemed to him unnatural, a trampling of the sanctities, that the public should continue ...

Under the perilous conditions of the Fifth Wave, governments cling more than they rule.

Al-Sisi aspired to the presidency, and his fate will provide a powerful signal with regard to the claims I have made in this book. If he can repress his way into a stable and long-lasting dynasty in the mode of Nasser and Mubarak, my analysis will be falsified.

Fukuyama, a Hegelian, argued that Western democracy had run out of “contradictions”: that is, of ideological alternatives. That was true in 1989 and remains true today. Fukuyama’s mistake was to infer that the absence of contradictions meant the end of history. There was another possibility he failed to consider. 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. That would not be without precedent. The Roman Empire wasn’t overthrown by something called “feudalism”—it collapsed of its own dead weight, to the astonishment of friend and foe alike.

The centuries after the calamity lacked ideological form. Similarly, a history built on negation would be formless and nameless: a shadowy moment, however long, between one true age and another.

The end of the Cold War, in which Fukuyama discerned the millennial triumph of democracy, appears in hindsight to have been the high-water mark for the prestige and legitimacy of this system. Once the external pressure applied by communism was removed, democratic countries lost their internal cohesion, and began the slow descent into negation. The failures of high modernism became painfully evident, when detached from the epic canvas of a life-and-death struggle. The industrial mode of organization, with its militaristic respect for rank, had placed democratic government at a great distance from the governed. Lacking a shared enemy and the urgency of a war footing, public and authority discovered they stood on the opposite sides of many questions. Then the Fifth Wave swept over the political landscape, giving voi...

complex systems often look indestructible just before they collapse.

European democracy, by comparison, does not look indestructible: it has the feel of an established religion, to which everyone belongs by force of habit, but which few, in their hearts, believe in any longer.

Since 2008, in the US, elections every two years have repudiated the previous choice. We saw much the same in France. Britain, Spain, and Italy have each flipped from left to right or back the other way within the last few years.

The public’s mood swings are driven by failures of government, not hope for change. Each failure bleeds legitimacy from the system, erodes faith in the machinery of democracy, and paves the way for the opposite extreme.

Democracy lacks true rivals today as an ideal and an ideology. Fukuyama was indeed half right. But there is a decadence in certain historical moments, an entropy of systems, propelled by an internal dynamic, that makes no demands for alternative ideals or structures before the onset of disintegration. At some point, failure becomes final.

The failure of democracy plays no part in the null hypothesis, but becomes a possibility in ...

A rebellious public, sectarian in temper and utopian in expectations, collides everywhere with institutions that rule by default and blunder, it seems, by habit. Industrial hierarchies are no longer able to govern successfully in a world swept to the horizon by a tsunami of information. An egalitarian public is unwilling to assume responsibility under any terms. The muddled half-steps and compromis...

Today, everyone’s a nihilist. President Trump is a nihilist, many times over:

Since electoral calamity overtook the elites in 2016, shouting your loss of faith in democracy from the rooftops has become fashionable.

with one important exception—that

On the whole, the thesis I put forward in 2014 has held up pretty robustly.

The great unraveling of the institutions has proceeded faster, further, and deeper than I imagined possible in 2014.

exception

I failed to reckon the speed with which it was advancing. It was a significant omission.

In a few short years, the political landscape has been transformed into a bedlam of irreconcilable factions. Violent and profane language is routinely used that would have been unthinkable in 2014. Vital communities of interest constituted and empowered by the web have degenerated into online mobs and war-bands that exist purely to attack. The nihilist, killer of innocents, has materialized among us over and over again.

The fate of democracy, I believe, is inextricably bound to the fate of the elites in democratic nations. The current elite class, having lost its monopoly over information, has been stripped, probably forever, of the authorizing magic of legitimacy. The industrial model of democracy is dysfunctional and discredited. That is the current predicament. Every step forward must start there.

How can this be reversed? A more precise phrasing would be: How are legitimate elites selected in a democratic society?

Among those viscerally hostile to Trump—above all the elites and the institutions, but also Democrats and the left generally, and some conservative intellectuals—his election was received as a moral and political impossibility, a malevolent absurdity that could only be explained in terms of lies and conspiracies, whose legitimacy must be rejected and “resisted,” without compromise, at all costs.

No one felt the slightest need to come to terms with this impossible man.

The why of Trump’s election is simple enough. A candidate that innocent of qualifications and political direction can be elected only as a gesture of supreme repudiation, by the electorate, of the governing class.

He is the visible effect, not the cause, of the public’s surly and mutinous mood.

Trump has been for this public what the objet trouvé was for the modern artist: a found instrument, a club near to hand with which to smash at the established order.

The right level of analysis on Trump isn’t Trump at all, but the public that endowed him with a radical direction and temper, and the decadent institutions that proved too weak to stand in his way.

The US public, like the public everywhere, is engaged in a long migration away from the structures of representative democracy to more sectarian arrangements. The public craves meaning and identity. From its perspective, late modern society, including government, exists to frustrate this desire. Caught in the collision between extraordinary personal expectations and feeble but intrusive political institutions, the nation-state, here and elsewhere, is splintering into sociopolitical shards that grow less intelligible to one another by the moment. To a Hillary Clinton, peering down from the heights of a very steep pyramid, the distant mass of Trump supporters could only look like “a basket of deplorables.” Otherwise they were impossible to explain.

In somewhat slower motion than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is unbundling into dozens of political war-bands, each driven by the hunger for meaning and identity, all focused with monomaniacal intensity on a particular cause: feminism, the environment, anti-capitalism, pro-immigration, or racial or sexual grievance. The schism has been veiled by the generalized loathing of all things Trump: but I find it hard to envision a national party thriving on tribalism and wars of identity.

In 1980, 1990, even 2000, Trump’s bizarre trajectory would have been not just impossible but politically suicidal. What has changed?

The information balance of power has changed, of course. A generation ago, the public could exist only as a passive audience. Information was dispensed on the industrial model: top down and one to many.

great institutions in every domain of human activity began to bleed authority—a process that, as we have seen, in now approaching the terminal stage for many of them. That is my thesis for the revolt of the public. My claim here is that it applies in spades to every phase of the 2016 presidential contest, and helps explain how the outlandish Trump could trample so easily over once-authoritative institutions on his way to victory.

Well-known personalities in both print and broadcast media colluded with the Clinton campaign to maximize the chances of Trump’s defeat,