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

by Martin Gurri

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.