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

by Martin Gurri

Current structures of authority are a legacy of the industrial age. The public, when it needs answers, turns to institutions rather than to charismatic individuals. 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. To enter such a precinct of authority requires a long and costly accreditation process—years of academic education and apprenticeship. Many are called, few are chosen. The elect believe themselves to be unquestioned masters of their special domain—and so they were for many years. From the middle of the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth centuries, the public lacked the means to question, much less contradict, authoritative judgments derived from monopolies of information.

The pressure generated by public expectation of specific outcomes has complicated the conduct of honest science. Much has been claimed for the scientific method, but the only method to which all scientists subscribe is the peer review process. It too has been under strain. Peer review presupposes the existence of independent-minded experts who evaluate manageable data sets. Often, in the age of the Fifth Wave, neither condition applies. Scientists today work in teams, and the subject matter can be so specialized that only a handful of individuals will be able to understand and review the literature. Authors and reviewers can trade places in a chummy circle of mutual admiration and protection. In extreme cases, this constriction of knowledge leads to what one analyst has called “research cartels,” which actively stifle minority or unorthodox views.5

On April 6, 2009, the ancient Italian city of L’Aquila suffered a devastating earthquake. L’Aquila’s buildings, old and new, collapsed like matchsticks, leaving more than 300 dead and over 65,000 homeless. In the aftermath, the Italian public’s fury turned against the scientists of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks—an institution whose unfortunate name was felt to be the opposite of its performance. Prosecutors indicted seven Commission members for manslaughter, charging that they had provided “inexact, incomplete, and contradictory information” about the risk of a killer earthquake.21> In October 2012, the seven men were convicted, sentenced to six years in prison, and fined over $10 million.

My argument was this: the deep conflict between the public and authority is not merely political but total. No established institution has been forgiven, not even science, once the most revered. In the context of Italy, the prosecution of the Risk Commission scientists must be viewed as part of a larger revolt against the elites, which was to produce, in 2013, electoral victories for a political party from nowhere, the Five Star movement.

The public, in command of the information sphere, has found corruption everywhere at the Center, and has wielded its new persuasive power to attack the legitimacy of every authoritative institution. The criminalization of scientific error was just one clash in this war of the worlds.

The failure of the elites in 2008 took place before the bewildered eyes of the public. A feeling of betrayal, of having been lied to, thus compounded the general fearfulness about the future. Of course, the public had connived in the impossible expectations heaped on the expert-bureaucrats. The public assumed that someone would be in control, demanded that the institutions of prosperity function smoothly, but left the dirty details to the machinations of the Center. Few complained during the fat years, but when the crack-up came, an unconquerable sectarianism shielded the public from any sense of responsibility, and allowed it to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the people in authority.

Half the firms listed on the Fortune 500 in 1999 had dropped out by 2009.60 According to Richard Foster, the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has declined from 67 years in the 1920s to 15 years today.61

But capitalism, as a whole, has made more productive use of the failure of its parts than most institutions under assault by the public. To borrow Taleb’s terminology, capitalism appears to be “antifragile”: it “regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.”66 This has allowed the system to prosper despite the horrors of 2008, while, not unrelatedly, bestowing on the consumer a multitude of new technologies and products.

Liberal democracy has been the chief mechanism for mediating such internal flaws. The question of nihilism, now inextricably tangled with the crisis of authority, will be answered in terms which either affirm or negate the legitimacy of the democratic process. As I move to consider the effect of the crisis on government, this remains, for me, the most consequential and least noticed imponderable of our moment in time.

There’s an old saying that victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan

From the perspective of the reflexive negations of our own times, it seems surprising how completely the news media bought into the president’s terms. No member of the White House press corps mocked the fiction of non-intervention. No secret documents were published in the press exposing the depth of CIA involvement in the Cuba operation. Few if any media voices were raised to object that the secrecy blackout was politically self-serving.

After 2010, not a single major program pushed by the president became law.

In less turbulent times, the Tea Party might have been expected to build on its surprising victory and challenge for control of the government—for example, in the presidential elections of 2012. Just the opposite occurred. Once President Obama’s political agenda had been checkmated, the movement began to lose cohesion and force. It was a revolt of the sectarian Border, motivated by the negation of the Center, and lacked positive proposals around which believers could rally and move forward after that negation had been achieved.

JFK, whose troubles were clear and self-inflicted, found his popularity on the rise. The public rallied to a floundering president. In the case of President Obama, failure was, at the time, as much a matter of opinion as of reality, yet he faced a revolt of the public which wiped out his governing majorities in Congress. The answer to what changed between 1961 and 2009 would fill a much fatter book than this one. In a sense, everything changed. I am less concerned with this trajectory than with providing some connective tissue to my theme: the revolt of the public and the crisis of authority, developments very much tangled up in President Obama’s difficulties but not at all in President Kennedy’s.

Recall that the protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square comprised many ideals and opinions, but all were united in hostility to the Mubarak regime. The Occupiers, anarchists and liberals, stood against an economic system which favored the “one percent.” The Tea Partiers, who could be libertarians or religious conservatives, jointly opposed Big Government, exemplified by the stimulus and health care laws. Advocating a positive program would have shattered these groups: participants felt energized by what they opposed, but were murky and divided about what they stood for. In fact, when circumstances demanded that they spell out an alternative to the status quo, all three movements faltered and splintered.

What James C. Scott has called the twentieth century’s “high modernist” approach to government routinely gambled on colossal projects designed to bring perfection to the social order.22

High modernism suited the hierarchies of the industrial age. In politics, this was true for dictators and elected presidents, left and right. The appeal was structural. Everything cascaded from the top down. Only the elites possessed the technical and scientific training to rationalize society. The public at that time was still considered a formless mass—carrier of the imperfections which it was the ambition of government to eliminate forever. The ruling elites wished to raise this human mass closer to their own higher state of being. Their ambitions were altruistic. Their intentions were pure. If they were ruthless in their means—these included, at different times, forced relocation, intrusive surveillance, even incarceration and death—it was because they believed, with an unwavering conviction, in the justice of their cause.

All of us, public and elites, live under the historic shadow of governments that sought to re-create the human condition.

The Dodd-Frank bill that tightened regulation of the US financial system in 2009 covered 848 pages. For comparison, it took 31 pages in 1913 to establish the Federal Reserve, 37 to wrap up the Social Security Act of 1935.

The itch for microcosmic social adjustments is not an American invention. The democracies of Europe surrendered to it first, and with far more conviction. The European Union’s proposed constitution of 2004, for example, contained 400 articles (the US constitution has seven) and 855 pages, in which every conceivable strand of right-thinking opinion was awarded a chocolate chip cookie.

Ormerod’s assessment: “The urge to intervene, to be seen to be doing something, has reached epidemic proportions.”

Modern governments have many achievements to their credit. They have built superhighways and helped to eradicate smallpox and polio. But they have promised many more things—nothing less than the good life—and they have asked for increasing control over wealth and power to get there.

Every expert is surrounded by a horde of amateurs eager to pounce on every mistake and mock every unsuccessful prediction or policy. Every CRU has its hacker, every Mubarak his Wael Ghonim, every Barack Obama his Tea Party. Nothing is secret and nothing is sacred, so the hierarchies some time ago lost their heroic ambitions and now they have lost their nerve. They doubt their own authority, and they have good reason to do so.

To advocates of radical change—and this came to include the public in revolt—the death of revolution resembled a blow to the head. They, too, lost their strategic vision, became disoriented, blind to the big picture. Absent the goal-line of revolution, radicals found themselves able to mobilize only on a “case-by-case” basis, against some immediately felt injustice.18 Rather than defeat or overthrow the government, they sought to control its actions toward the specific case that engaged their energies. And they did so by pure force of negation.

“To be radical,” Rosanvallon affirms, “is to point the finger of blame every day; it is to twist a knife in each of society’s wounds. It is not to aim a cannon at the citadel of power in preparation for a final assault.”19 Thus the itch for condemnation, and disdain of positive programs, that have shaped the behavior of the sectarian public.

He thinks his rulers are liars and cheats, and he fills the web with angry rants on the subject. He can do that because he’s extremely well connected, in the current sense of that word. He’s Homo informaticus run amok. At the high end of his communications skills, he might be a hacker in Anonymous, vandalizing Sony’s corporate database. At the low end, he could be a young rioter coordinating a looting expedition on his messaging service. The nihilist comes to life through his digital devices.

The nihilist benefits prodigiously from the system he would like to smash. He’s not marginalized—not a street person, not a forsaken soul, not a persecuted minority. He stands in a very different relation to the established order than did, say, an industrial worker in Victorian England or a Catholic in Communist Poland.

The mortal riddle posed by the nihilist is that he’s a child of privilege. He’s healthy, fit, long-lived, university-educated, articulate, fashionably attired, widely traveled, well-informed. He lives in his own place or at worst in his parents’ home, never in a cave. He probably has a good job and he certainly has money in his pocket. In sum, he’s the pampered poster boy of a system that labors desperately to make him happy, yet his feelings about his life, his country, democracy—the system—seethe with a virulent unhappiness.

So here we have a privileged class in revolt against itself. Here we have the beneficiaries of democracy loathing democracy and clamoring for its demise, even without an alternative in sight.

I mean an institution that clings to life and still wields power, but has been bled dry of legitimacy. It has no true authority or prestige in the eyes of the public, and it survives by a precarious combination of inertia and the public’s unwillingness to produce an alternative. It exists by default. That, for example, is the condition of mainstream political parties in the old democracies—Republican and Democrat, Tory and Labor, Socialist and Gaullist, Christian Democrat and Social Democrat. Even their names have been bled dry of meaning. They exist by default.

Since each story purports to explain a shifting human reality, it must rely on institutional gatekeepers who interpret messy events according to tidy plot lines. That has been the business of Christian bishops and White House press secretaries: to impose the justifying story on the chaos of events. But we have seen that the evolution of technology hasn’t been kind to mediators. The public’s conquest of the information sphere has meant the overthrow of the gatekeepers—often accompanied by the collapse of the stories which imbued their institutions with authority and prestige.

spouse, children, friends, career, faith. Government and high politics fill in the background. To imagine they can ordain or legislate happiness at this level is a modern illusion.

That was the structural destiny of the industrial age. Nothing else was really possible. The public was offered a narrow band of choices—Republican or Democrat, Chevy or Ford—unless it wished to opt out of the system and all its benefits. Today the polarities have been reversed. The public has options: that is the single defining feature of the Fifth Wave. The public has options, and everywhere has cashed them in to pull the elites down and lower the height of the political pyramid. Ordinary people have turned the tables on the standardizing bureaucracies, and now insist that their tastes and interests be imposed on the larger system. They demand personalized service. They crave latte without milk—not just from Starbucks, but from their government.

The failure of government isn’t a failure of democracy, but a consequence of the heroic claims of modern government, and of the constantly frustrated expectations these claims have aroused.

I note that the present trajectory is heading mostly in the opposite direction. The public wishes to impose the personal on the political, in the same manner that it has imposed a personalized mode of doing business on capitalism. Here’s a contradiction: for all its disdain of politicians, the public has often behaved as if happiness were indeed a gift bestowed by presidents. The apocalyptic anger of the Occupiers and the indignados was the dark side of a muddled utopian vision that demanded the impossible from authority. Even the Tea Partiers, for all their libertarianism, assumed that the legitimate role of political power was to “protect” the pursuit of happiness.

Presidents can’t handle the economy. They have no clue how to do it. The experts who advise them rarely have what N. N. Taleb has called “skin in the game”: they pay no penalty when they are wrong, as they were, catastrophically, in 2008, and immediately again, with the stimulus, in 2009.

When it comes to economic questions, politicians should be rewarded for the modesty of their claims rather than the heroic ambition of their rhetoric.

“you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data.”

The public, if anything, is more alienated and angry at authority than I supposed. The elites, forever astonished by events, oscillate between panic and moral outrage. The institutions that hold up the status quo are falling to pieces around them. Rough, ungainly characters, devoid of institutional loyalties, tramp impatiently in the wings. In the US, Hungary, and the Philippines, they have gained power and strut on center stage.

Elected officials in democratic nations seek to curry favor with the public by distancing themselves from the democratic process. Donald Trump achieves this with his tweets. France’s Emmanuel Macron has dreamed out loud of an Olympian presidency. Less stable democracies have lurched, in plain daylight, toward authoritarianism. Venezuela and Turkey, while retaining the forms of liberalism, have become virtual dictatorships.

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.

I bring up this weird story to jog our memories: the conflict that gave us Trump isn’t uniquely American. The forces at play are global and secular.

This is how the global elite class and many others interpret what I have called the revolt of the public: as the death of democracy and a descent into authoritarian darkness.

but the issue is often framed in terms of social media opening the gates to destructive or undesirable opinions. “It’s the (democracy-poisoning) golden age of free speech,” states an article on social media by Zeynep Tufekci.

Reality is about bad choices.

China’s elites are riding a tiger and know it. Whatever the future brings to this antiquated power structure, it is no more likely than North Korea or Cuba to provide the escape route from liberal democracy in the twenty-first century.

In analyzing Putin’s progress, I confess that I’m at a loss on how to proceed. My perception of the reality behind both the man and his country differs radically from the accepted wisdom and much scholarly thinking. The shadow, it seems to me, is wholly out of proportion to the object. The Russian economy is roughly equivalent to Spain’s. GDP per capita has declined in parallel with the oil market, and in 2016 was ranked right below the Caribbean island of Grenada. The Russian population peaked around 1990 and has lost five million since, the result of low birth rates, high abortion rates, and zero immigration. Life expectancy for males compares unfavorably with Rwanda. In a “Putin exodus,” many of Russia’s most talented people have left the country.

Authoritarianism appears to be advancing because so many elite voices in democratic nations say so. Democracy looks to be dying in darkness for the same reason. The source of despondency is that elite disaster, the election of Trump: