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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Martin Gurri
Read between
June 27 - July 24, 2021
Government, in high modernist mode, imposed a bargain on the silent masses: surrender your personal sphere in exchange for social perfection.
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.
When it comes to economic questions, politicians should be rewarded for the modesty of their claims rather than the heroic ambition of their rhetoric.
What I should not do is pour a corrosive stream of rejection and negation on a democratic system that has struggled, and mostly failed, to meet my impossible demands and expectations.
The output of government would be crowd-sourced and thus sanity-checked. This won’t happen. Hierarchy is too stubborn a structure. The self-interest of the top and the disinterest in wielding power of the sectarian bottom makes it almost certain that the current structures will endure.
Government’s awkward attempts to embrace digital technology provide the most revealing examples of its incapacity. According to a December 2011 study, some 56 federal agencies owned 1,489 “.gov” domains—but 400 of these domains redirected the user to another government site, 265 didn’t work, and 20 were “under development.”
In reality, we have seen, the failure of government has been systemic. It has followed the pattern of Greek tragedy, in which excessive pride, or hubris, brings the hero to ruin. Modern government believed it could conquer uncertainty and ordain the future. It couldn’t: and when it tried, it failed.
The tragic flaw wasn’t incompetence with regard to technology. It was the illusion of control—preeminently, the inherent urge of hierarchy to control information.
Networked government, I said, is today a utopian ideal: open government, in my judgment, remains a possibility.
The current incentives for opaqueness would be replaced by a need for persuasiveness. Bureaucracy would behold itself through the cold eyes of the public. That alone might be transformative.
I feel certain that, to the extent government stands aloof from the global information sphere, to that exact degree the information sphere, in the form of Tea Party-like revolts and Wikileaks-style revelations, will burst back, uninvited and destructive, into the precincts of power.
The point isn’t to pull the public up to the top of the pyramid in some sort of king-for-a-day “e-government” exercise, but to push the output of the elites to the personal sphere, where the public lives and makes decisions.
I will conduct my life with humility, according to trial and error, rather than double-down on error and expect power to deliver success.
Government will be demystified, as nature was after the scientific revolution. This will temper the public’s expectations of the outcome.
Once that fact is admitted, the loss of magical powers might well be compensated by a gain in legitimacy.
The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age.
explode the myth of command and control—thus aligning the public’s expectations with reality.
In democracies, elected officials will be tempted to gain favor by distancing themselves from the democratic process. I would expect a number of would-be Barack Obama imitators, who seek to rule by disdain of power, and to head systems they profess to abhor.
He was, I noted, the elected president, but his removal was considered by the insurgents to be a victory for democracy. For them it was the outcome, not the process, that counted.
Like so many other nations, Ukraine seemed frozen in a world-historical midnight between the old order and radical change.
Ukraine is an invertebrate country: it lacks strong institutions, a true Center. The Yanukovich government functioned in the manner of a mafia family.
They succeeded only in their negation. Euromaidan wasn’t a coup, as Yanukovich alleged. It was a sectarian revolt. Participants aspired to purity in democratic ideals, but were unwilling to invest their energies on the messy details of democratic government. They left Ukraine as they found it, at the mercy of events. The new prime minister, a leading voice at Maidan, submitted to EU-mandated economic reforms with a despair bordering on nihilism. “We are a team of people with a suicide wish—welcome to hell,” he said.8 His words were remarkable for their honesty.
Fukuyama’s mistake was to infer that the absence of contradictions meant the end of history. There was another possibility he failed to consider. History could well be driven by negation rather than contradiction. It could ride on the nihilistic rejection of the established order, regardless of alternatives or consequences.
Once the external pressure applied by communism was removed, democratic countries lost their internal cohesion, and began the slow descent into negation. The failures of high modernism became painfully evident, when detached from the epic canvas of a life-and-death struggle.
In France, for example, three successive presidential elections reversed the previous mandate, but the difference was imperceptible, and the common denominator was failure.
the democratic process is in peril of self-negation. The public’s mood swings are driven by failures of government, not hope for change. Each failure bleeds legitimacy from the system, erodes faith in the machinery of democracy, and paves the way for the opposite extreme.
A rebellious public, sectarian in temper and utopian in expectations, collides everywhere with institutions that rule by default and blunder,
Elected officials in democratic nations seek to curry favor with the public by distancing themselves from the democratic process.
The nation as a graveyard: remarkable imagery from an occupant of the White House.
Every day was doomsday for democracy. No one felt the slightest need to come to terms with this impossible man.
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.
So that is the why of Donald Trump. He was the chosen instrument of an insurgent public, and no established centers of power stood in his way.
People from nowhere, free of institutional entanglements, pushed the elites out of the strategic heights of the information sphere. Almost immediately, great institutions in every domain of human activity began to bleed authority—a
The one discernible theme of his life has been the will to stand out: to attract all eyes in the room by being the loudest, most colorful, most aggressively intrusive person there.
amid newspaper bankruptcies and many more TV news channels, every news provider approaches a story from the perspective of existential desperation. Trump understood the hunger, and knew how to feed the beast.
The party stood firmly against the European Union, the euro, austere budgets, debt payments, capitalism, the Germans, the banks, “the rich, the markets, the super-rich, the top 10 percent.”31 Syriza had promised what Greek voters wanted: the impossible. Reality intervened.
The promise of radical change had devolved into stasis.
piecing together a government out of splinters of enraged opinion.
Given the thunderous pro-Europe chorus of establishment voices, the vote against—like the Trump vote in the US—became a matter of because rather than despite.
The England of the pub and the football field had struck a blow at the Britain of the institutions.
whether it is possible to combine the tremendous political energies released by the public with the purpose and permanence of the institutions.
Macron is clearly tempted by the crown of the decaying empire:
If taming social media is the fix to the present predicament, shouldn’t North Korea or Cuba be our models for the future? I ask that rhetorically—and with a smile.
The common thread is a rhetoric of defiance and renewal. The dictator is transformed from a murderous predator into a solitary hero struggling against overwhelming odds.
For Putin, the enemy is the alliance of the United States and the European democracies. This cabal aims at nothing less than the “disintegration and dismemberment” of Russia.
He feels the need to explain why Russia was once a superpower, and is one no longer. The specter of decadence and disintegration, of lost glory and greatness, has come to haunt politics in nations far less troubled than Russia:
Putin, al-Sisi, and their kind believe, probably sincerely, that they are engaged in a war to the death against an established order dominated by foreign elites. They aim to slay the dragon of national decadence and bring to an end this unhappy age.
Their struggle is the public’s, at least in this sense: the repudiation of the status quo and the desire to abolish it by fair means or foul.
The dictator takes up the burden of hierarchy in modern government. He will be expected to solve social and economic “problems” that he has no clue how to address, and to bring happiness to a hyper-informed and contentious public. Failure can be blamed on the enemy for only so long.
China and Russia don’t pretend to be rival models to democracy: they are, in fact, old-fashioned industrial-age hierarchies intent on looting their own people.
