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

by Martin Gurri

If Russia and Putin were the hidden hand that delivered the impossible Trump to power, the Nazis, in the fevered mind of the elites, represented the monstrous outcome of this manipulation.

it isn’t hard to imagine those who have managed and personified our ruling institutions for so long as projecting the threat onto the system. Democracy from that perspective means rule by the best. Authoritarianism looks like a barbarian invasion.

cranking up the decibels of a gigantic chorus of gloom.

I won’t pre-judge the matter, other than to note that, as a path to dictatorship, “Vladimir Putin put me here” makes for a very strange choice.

They understand the crushing existential burden placed by the public on mere politics, and the likelihood of failure, and the certainty that failure will be digitally magnified. Their behavior is the opposite of authoritarian. It’s a drift to dysfunction: to paralysis.

[T]he City of Charlottesville protected neither free expression nor public safety on August 12.

Here was the crisis of authority, writ small. The space abandoned by the democratic elites was immediately occupied by sectarian war-bands.

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.

This is American politics portrayed as the last circle of hell: treachery by the people, from the people, against the people. Taken literally, it would mean that not a single pillar of our institutions deserves to be left standing.

It’s a zero-sum struggle for attention that rewards the most immoderate voices—and,

Politically, it’s a high-wire act without a net. Trump was never a popular candidate. He’s not a popular president. To retain his base, he must provoke his opposition into a frenzy of loathing.

“the act of undermining democratic institutions by abusing them in front of braying mobs is not modern at all. It is what aspiring dictators have always done.”

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 trouble is in us: in our readiness to generalize from the web levels of hostility and aggression inconsistent with the legitimacy of any political system.

For all the sound and fury about fake news, not a shred of evidence exists that they influenced the election outcome.

The main difference between “pre-truth” and the present, they insist, is that the other side is now bringing up the subject.

Every example of a lie on the internet, actually, is an example of the disclosure of this lie.

When does the elephant listen to reason? The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs.

Nobody feels affection or admiration for the elites. The public has no desire to please them: it strives, rather, to knock the elites off their high perches into the dust.

The notion that facts descend on us from a pure Platonic sphere, untainted by interpretive frames, has a powerful hold on the modern imagination. The CIA insists that it delivers intelligence, never policy, for example.

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.

Truth, for the elites, has come to mean that democracy will die in darkness unless the elected president is somehow overthrown.

Once that door is open, strange things start to happen. The very liberal news media has glamorized neo-Nazis and racialists by lavishing attention on them wholly disproportionate to their numbers, making creepy marginal characters seem like important actors in US politics.

As we fly ever farther apart, we can only hear each other when we scream.

In nearly every instance of provocation and violence, officials at every level, elected and appointed, have chosen to play the part of silent observers.

Millions were uprooted, loosening a red-rimmed tide of desperate migrations and terror, not just regionally, but on the democratic world.

They craved pure, authentic lives, and looked forward to an age of innocence once the stain of the past had been washed clean in blood.

In February 2015, minions of the Islamic Caliphate entered Mosul Museum and smashed the statuary there. The act seemed to horrify Western elites far more than any massacre.

The lesson was simple. Since the seventh century, the human race has been entangled in lawlessness and moral chaos. The implicit solution was equally simple. ISIS didn’t mean to change history but to end it.

jackhammer their way to utopia.

The repudiation of history—in effect, of our present reality and hence of ourselves—is among the most powerful motives propelling the revolt of the public. It’s the shortest route to nihilism

They chose barbarism over boredom, becoming actors in the apocalyptic drama instead of software programmers back home.

To have any hope of reversing this trend, the elites must counter negation with a positive vision—a shared adventure—that includes and persuades the public.

The industrial model of liberal democracy isn’t particularly democratic in structure. It’s a steep hierarchy that operates in broadcast mode only.

as elite fear and loathing of the public has increased, so has the craving for distance and isolation.

The voter in the flesh was clearly perceived by this group as an alien and frightening brute. His very existence was deplorable. The shock of Election Day followed naturally from such distortions of distance.

Their political projects seek to restore distance rather than authority. Their hope is to silence the public, not persuade it. Hillary Clinton ran for president on a promise to keep the deplorables in their place. Angela Merkel clings to office to suppress the secret Nazi inside every German voter. Europe’s hate speech laws ban conversations that are offensive to the elites.

The elites, like Icarus, appear content to glide above the masses until it’s too late to avoid a crash.

The outsiders have now climbed to their high perches and interact with the public mostly through multiple layers of insiders below them. The distance stays the same.

The negation of the nation-state must mean either anarchy or devolution to the city-state.

Already urban and media elites, old apostles of centralization, have rediscovered the virtues of federalism and states’ rights.

Since we dwell in separate valleys of culture and politics, runs the argument, we should empower these to the fullest extent consistent with national unity.

We can get a sense of how this works by looking to Italy, where in 2016 the newly-elected mayor of Rome, a member of the Five Star Movement, killed the city’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics. The enraged mandarin at the head of the national Olympic committee called the decision “demagogic and populist.”140 He lives in a city of palaces and hierarchies—the mayor, in the Rome of trash removal and sewage disposal.

Once government goes digital, it becomes possible to alter its structure, even to redirect its purpose. As imagined by the Pirate Party of Iceland, government can evolve into more of a transactional platform—part Facebook page, part Amazon marketplace—and less of an all-knowing solver of problems.

The distance to the bottom has protected the elites from their own inertia and decadence.

The deplorables, to everyone’s surprise, kept outvoting their betters.

The great motive power of the revolt isn’t economic resentment but outrage over distance and failure.

reasons are never given, questions are never answered, and in this way begins the long, foul rant that is our moment in history.

Liberal democracy predates the industrial world and is now struggling to survive it. It must shake off many of the forms and the rhetoric of the past 150 years in the manner of a snake shaking off its skin, and for the same reason: in order to grow.

the re-formation of liberal democracy, and the recovery of truth, must wait on the emergence of a legitimate elite class.