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

by Martin Gurri

The utopian ambition of governments from the industrial age, which sought to perfect the social order, hangs ridiculously, like an outsized suit of armor, on their feebler, latter-day heirs. Yet the quixotic pose has been maintained. The fiction of extraordinary ambition and mastery has persisted, without irony, in our political language.

I have treated the limitation of government as a function of the limits of human knowledge, not of ideological preference,

It wasn’t always this way. Scroll back 50 years, and you come to an American government still able to tap into a seemingly inexhaustible pool of public sympathy and trust, even in the face of failure.

the dissonance between what was condemned and what was proposed.

The seductive appeal of the Tea Party movement, like that of the Occupiers who were to follow, was the joy of negation, of bringing down the roof on the temple of political authority.

The Center, Douglas and Wildavsky wrote, is easily surprised. It finds it hard to fathom why anyone would question its decisions.

If the Republican Party or the Koch brothers could really play Pied Piper to the libertarian masses, why on earth had they waited to do so until after the presidential elections?

The two groups had nothing in common except their negations: for a time, at least, that was enough.

Both feared the great institutions of power and money yet disdained to organize or appoint their own leaders. Both believed themselves to be the last outpost of civic virtue in a landscape of moral and political desolation. Between libertarian and anarchist, it may be, the distance can be reduced to a quarrel about private property.

Once President Obama’s political agenda had been checkmated, the movement began to lose cohesion and force.

Barack Obama ran for the presidency as a righteous voice from the Border, rising up against a failed, unprincipled Center represented by Hilary Clinton within his own party and by President Bush as the retiring Republican incumbent.

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.

The radical disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality of government was apparent to anyone with eyes to see, and, amplified by the information sphere, was itself a major vector for the contagion of distrust.

The enemy was history, mother of superstition and disorder. The hero was the expert-bureaucrat, who could wipe the slate clean. We

Under authoritarian governments, the zeal to make the world anew inflicted horrors on the public. Dozens of millions of human beings died in Soviet collectivization and the Great Leap Forward.

The wars waged by the Federal government against social conditions have ended with the enemy standing more or less where he was before hostilities began.

The profound disconnect between talk and action gives the game away.

High modernist government was an austere prophet, demanding the destruction of the muddled present to make room for the perfect future. Late modernist government is more like a kindly uncle, passing out chocolate chip cookies to his favorite nieces and nephews. He doesn’t wish to transform them. He just wants them to be happy—most particularly, with him.

It feels bound to intervene anywhere it has identified groups that were somehow victimized, disabled, troubled, below average, offended, uncomfortable—actually or potentially unhappy. Its actions are the political equivalent of handing out a chocolate chip cookie: government today desperately wishes to be seen doing something, anything, to help, and be recognized for its good intentions.

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 urge to intervene, to be seen to be doing something, has reached epidemic proportions.”

Political intervention, though a gesture of appeasement to the public, has compounded the distrust it aimed to nullify.

The late modernist urge to intervene, with its aimless meandering, has been interpreted by the public as either tyranny or corruption—never, somehow, as the ineffectual pose of a kindly uncle. Yet government interventions have chased public grievances.

Brasilia was built. I have been there: it’s a creepy place.

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.

If the answer is yes, then we must ask more pointed questions about the competence and good faith of democratic governments. If the answer is no, however, we face an even more disturbing possibility: that democratic politics are fought over issues that democratic governments have no power to resolve.

Most things fail, because our species tends to think in terms of narrowly defined problems, and usually pays little attention to the most important feature of these problems: the wider context in which they are embedded. When we think we are solving the problem, we are in fact disrupting the context. Most consequences will then be unintended.

Morality and politics should begin where Ormerod concludes: with the possible.

The difference is that failing companies go out of business and are replaced by new companies, while government accumulates failure, making it, systemically, much more fragile.

If Ormerod is right, most democratic contests today are fought over phantom issues, and democratic politicians, to get elected, must promise to deliver impossibilities.

There is a democrat’s dilemma that is no less perilous than the dictator’s. Politicians must promise the impossible to get elected. Elected officials must avoid meaningful action at all costs.

I find it difficult to imagine another president, in any historical period, drawing such an unrelentingly dark portrait of the United States.

The president was now a denouncer rather than a fixer of problems. He had described a destructive trend, but refused to make any claims of competence over it.

Although the highest political authority in the land, he had won two presidential elections by his rhetorical separation from all authority.

A satire in the liberal New Yorker hammered at the same point: “President Obama used his radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has ‘played no role whatsoever’ in the US government over the past four years,” it deadpanned.

Thus the election of Barack Obama made democracy legitimate, rather than the other way around. His defeat could only have been the result of conspiracy by secretive forces, and would have justified the public’s flooding the streets in indignado-style protests.

When that distrust is validated by the highest elected officials, outright rejection of democracy becomes a defensible position, to be invoked at the next, inevitable, failure of government.

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.

The economy, for example, was universally believed to be getting worse, but the conversation among the elites and the public alike fixated on the symptoms of decline, on persistent unemployment, on inequality, lack of mobility, the outrageous salaries of CEOs, rather than on policy changes that might turn the situation around.

Our government had broken through its constitutional restraints, seized power over everything from our financial markets to our home loans, and aimed to go even farther, seeking control over things as large as our health-care system, and as small as the menus in school cafeterias.

Elites in the old democracies manifested a certain irritation with their decadent politics, coupled with open admiration for authoritarian methods that “worked.”

Thus the itch for condemnation, and disdain of positive programs, that have shaped the behavior of the sectarian public.

Hopelessness, however realistic, drives prophets to the wilderness, to feed on locusts and wild honey and dream of a messiah.

A vast structural collision—pre-eminently, the revolt of the public against authority—has left democratic governments burdened with failure, democratic politics far removed from reality, and democratic programs drained of creative energy, and thus of hope. At this point, the nihilist makes his appearance.

The elites who manage the system no longer believe in a way forward. Stuck in the muck, they strive simply to endure: après moi le deluge.

High modernist government, for example, told a story about perfecting social relations by the application of power and science. On this basis, it razed entire neighborhoods, without much protest, to make room for housing projects like Cabrini Green.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . .

If modern government, for all its wealth and power, can’t ordain the future of complex systems, what difference can it possibly make whether we, in our smallness, embrace one side or the other, choose this rather than that?

The intelligent reader will at once understand this to be another question entirely: in what social and political environment could personal choices make a difference?

Only the highest reaches of government, therefore, have the capacity to choose the path ahead. The rest of us belong to the inert masses. These assumptions were always undemocratic in spirit, but, more importantly, they have been falsified by the experience of the last 50 years. Heroic top-down initiatives have failed, habitually and in their own terms.