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

by Martin Gurri

We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. . . . Above all else, we must remember this truth: no matter our color, creed, religion, or political party, we are all Americans first.

Rather than chase after Nazis or other phantoms of history, those concerned with the future of democracy should fix their attention on that young man: on the nihilist who believes, with passionate intensity, that destruction and slaughter are by themselves a form of progress.

But dictators don’t deal in tweets. Trump is in the style of our moment: a man from nowhere, with no stake in the system, ignorant of history, incurious about our political habits and traditions, but happy to bash and to break old and precious things in exchange for a little attention.

The question was never asked why people would believe fake news over the real stuff.

Trump was asked what surprised him most about becoming president. “The fact that you never changed your coverage,” he replied, ever attentive to media attention.

But the news as an institution in a very real sense has ceased to exist. The media elites, like elites everywhere, are driven by a fever dream of undoing the outcome of the 2016 election. They desperately want the status quo before Trump back, and they are willing to bash away, Trump-like, at their own standards and even the democratic process in pursuit of that aim.

An analysis of online media election coverage by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center suggests the opposite: “Although fake news—fabricated and verifiable false reporting—was a phenomenon during the election, it had a minor effect on the media ecosystem of the presidential election according to our findings.”95

If a lie is significant, it will circulate until it reaches witnesses and experts who will denounce it, because they know the truth. If a lie is insignificant, no one will denounce it; but it won’t circulate. Every example of a lie on the internet, actually, is an example of the disclosure of this lie.104

In one May 2016 survey, 6 percent of Trump supporters said they liked him personally, and only 43 percent agreed with his political positions. These voters were driven largely by hostility to Hillary Clinton.106

At least the president is held accountable for his 2,000 falsehoods. The elites dwell in their own fragment of truth yet seem blissfully unaware. They tell us Trump is Hitler. They explain that their defeat is a conspiracy of lies. They insist that the world can be returned to what it was before November 2016. Most damaging, they are as willing as Trump to demolish the historical reality of their own institutions. An acting attorney general can refuse to implement a presidential executive order, for example. The head of a consumer agency can deny the chief executive’s authority to appoint her successor. A minor foreign service official can resign with a very public letter directing the secretary of state to “stop the bleeding” or “follow me out the door.”110