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

by Martin Gurri

never occurred to the Gascon peasant that he shared many attributes in common with a professor of law in the Sorbonne. It never occurred to the professor, either. Each looked on the other as on a different species of humanity.

The masses functioned as the anti-public. More precisely: the masses impersonated the public for the benefit of the hierarchy, while stripping it of all spontaneity and repudiating its authentic interests.

The masses had buried alive the public, so it seemed, and with it the prospects for a democratic future.

The old public had been reactive because, structurally, it could be nothing else. TV viewers in the 1950s, for example, could only react as consumers to three channels, by either watching or tuning them out. For obvious structural reasons, members of that public were unable to develop their own TV programs.

Our age is characterized by a radical shift along this spectrum: from a public that was almost entirely reactive, to one that is hyper-active and ultra-intrusive.

In the new millenium, the public returned with a vengeance, and its command of the information sphere permitted much greater intimacy with the crowd than had been structurally possible before.

My story—I repeat—concerns the tectonic collision between a public which will not rule and institutions of authority progressively less able to do so. My misgiving is that democracy will be ground to pieces under the stress. An immense psychological distance separates the two sides, even as they come together in conflict. This gulf is filled with dark matter: distrust.

The elites who control the institutions have never really trusted the public, which they considered animalistic and prone to bouts of destructiveness.

Sound familiar…?

A glimpse at any American airport today will confirm that this horror of the top for the bottom has, if anything, grown more intense.

At some moment of 2011, the script went awry. Toxic levels of distrust sickened democratic politics.

it will show that the revolt of the indignados was propelled by a self-destructive contempt for the world which had created the young rebels.

It is perfectly possible for the elites to lapse into paralysis while the public staggers into nihilism. Indeed, this could be our future.

We know the indignados, along with millions of Spaniards, felt cheated of their expectations to the point of outrage and revolt. Were they justified? The answer depends, in part, on what is possible for a modern government to achieve, the kinds of activities it can perform competently.

But our answer also depends on the government’s claims of competence over whole domains of activity—whether such claims are sincere and true, wishful thinking but false, or purely fraudulent.

Money in Spain was controlled by shadowy experts in Frankfurt. This destroyed the sense of trust needed in case the economy went bad—which it did, in a big way, after 2008.

The system could work only if the elites at all levels broadly agreed on the direction of governance, and a large enough segment of the public could be persuaded that the system worked to its benefit.

The tacit assumption of the elites was that they had left far behind the basic questions of war and peace, wealth and poverty, and now confronted the task of lifting the country to a higher ethical plane.

When the effects become palpable, they reflexively reach for the crude tools they have at their disposal, whether or not these will improve the situation. In essence, governments can throw money at unwanted change, or they can hurl bombs and policemen.

I don’t believe it would be an exercise in phrase-making to say that liberal democracy and capitalism created the class out of which the indignados and their protest emerged. For all their deeply-felt sense of grievance, the protesters were well read, highly educated, mobile, affluent enough to have access to laptops and cell phones,

They were a privileged generation, which, when confronted with an existential challenge, chose to cut and tear at their own roots.

The goal of social justice—supposedly the North Star of the uprising—appeared to be as foggy a notion to them as to their media admirers.

This was a revolt of middle class hipsters, not of the downtrodden. Daphni Leef, for one, had been born into a well-to-do family, and partook of the generic leftist attitudes favored by the artistic community to which she belonged.

In the negation of their world and of themselves lay the beating heart of the revolt.

Although they liked to play at revolution—a mock guillotine went up in the tent compound—they imagined the future in terms of the past, and asked for nothing more radical than a return of the welfare state.

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the zeal for “patricide” among this group was directly proportional to its loss of earning power.

The Egyptian public had endured 30 years of Hosni Mubarak. The indignados at Puerta del Sol had suffered a loss of future prospects because of the severity of the economic crisis. In Israel, the public’s existential challenge to the established order came because Leef had found it unendurable to lengthen her commute.

It’s worth noting that anarchism is by far the most sectarian movement on the left, with an ideological predilection for individualism and self-expression. The difference between a young anarchist and a young disillusioned liberal was not likely to be noticed by either.

Like their brethren in Spain and Israel, the OWS protesters were energized primarily by the force of their repudiations.

They spread the notion that the top 1 percent of Americans tyrannized the bottom 99—and that they, a handful of white, middle-class youngsters, represented the vast American public, the people, in revolt.

The romance of condemnation, in my judgment, has become the most conspicuous feature of President Obama’s mode of governance.

We have heard this sentiment before, the hope—the expectation—that hierarchy would be decontaminated by making it subservient to the sect.

The government was not to be overthrown. The government was to become an instrument of sectarian virtue.

They wanted history to abolish history, hierarchy to eliminate hierarchy, government to bring down the temple of authority.

Revolution, in 2011, meant denunciation. Actual change was left for someone else.

there was insufficient resilience in both trained staff and technology, to review, capture, and download the vast volume of open source data which needed to be processed.

While this fell short of suggesting that happy Britons in shopping malls be televised during public disorders, the spirit of the thing was the same.

Belief that political power could switch off the information sphere was shown to be more than an aging dictator’s hallucination. It was a persistent delusion of the Center.

Disorders turned violent only in Britain because the rioters alone, in their actions, pushed the negations of 2011 to their logical conclusion.

The rules of the democratic game are a trick, a ruse to conceal the oppression of women by men, of people of color by whites, of the bottom 99 by the top one percent. If that truly described life under capitalistic representative democracy, what would be a rational response?

The lust for righteous mayhem, in good movie fashion, was untroubled by doubt.

The disconnection between their words and their actions, between their understanding of effects and their indifference to causes, can be explained by this trait.

The masters and regulators of finance had placed large foolish bets, but when the bottom fell out in 2008 it was the public, not them, who paid the losses.

the rebels’ expectations of modern government were at once fantastical in their scope and vaporous in definition. They ascribed magical or, I venture to say, divine qualities to cumbersome, all-too-human bureaucracies.

A life spent in search of unbearable things will be necessarily destructive of the legitimacy of most standing institutions and social arrangements, including those which created and sustained the destroyers.

That was the most profound consequence of 2011: sowing the seeds of distrust in the democratic process.

legitimacy exists objectively because vast numbers of the public agree, subjectively, that it does exist. If enough people change their minds, the authorizing magic is lost.

From the commanding heights of the information sphere, the public sought in each case to break a monopoly held by an accredited elite.

they have been, historically, the only actors in the social drama, with the public relegated to the audience, able only to weep or applaud.

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.

Their reflexive loathing of the amateur trespasser inspired Hoder’s 19½-year sentence and the mutual annihilation lawsuits against Shawn Fanning and Napster.