--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781732265141" library_document_id: "65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e" source_sha256: "5ce4681f6925ec280ef79b11332d97c771babda12c7d1e05c6466d18ecbcc424" pdf_physical_page_count: 412 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 310 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e?start=310&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=310&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=300&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=320&limit=10" --- # The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=310 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED I am interested in only one aspect of this episode. The insurgents in Thailand, once again, were not the poor but the urban elites and the educated middle class. Their cause wasn’t social revolution but the abolition of the political status quo. Candidates representing this group had regularly failed to win a majority in national elections. The response has been a rejection of the electoral process. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=311 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Protesters pressed for a “people’s council” to take charge of the government, untainted by the vote. Composition of the “council” was left undefined, but its purpose was clear enough. It was expected to deliver what democracy could not: the liquidation of the ruling party and negation of the established order. A leader of the opposition insisted that the street protests would continue until the “regime is wiped out.” 15 He was speaking about an elected government. Prizing desired political outcomes over mere democratic procedures follows naturally from the public’s disdain of established institutions. In Turkey, the government of our old friend Recep Tayyip Erdogan stood in the same relation to the public as that of Thailand. It kept winning elections and losing legitimacy, in this case because of a destructive relationship with the information sphere. Erdogan was outraged by what he called the “curse” of social media. He had tamed Turkish mass media, and it plainly seemed to him unnatural, a trampling of the sanctities, that the public should continue to communicate without his permission. But the public did communicate, on Twitter and YouTube and elsewhere, and Erdogan, for all his illusions of control, became its target. On February 25, 2014, a recorded telephone call was leaked to YouTube, purporting to show Erdogan instructing one of his sons to “take out” money from a safe in Erdogan’s home and “dissolve it” ahead of a corruption investigation. 16 Additional calls were posted—less incriminating but still unflattering to the prime minister. Erdogan’s reaction was what you would expect from an official ensconced at the top of the hierarchy. He labeled the call to his son a “fabrication,” brushed off the rest, and concentrated his energy on punishing the offending media, primarily YouTube and Twitter. The scandal, for him, wasn’t what he had said in the apparent recordings, but the insult to his dignity and the collusion of social media in that act. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=312 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Erdogan became entangled in a legal and political war against social media. He swore to “eradicate” Twitter, and blocked the platform, as well as YouTube, in Turkey. Users easily circumvented the censorship, with the help of instructions from Twitter that the company had previously posted for Venezuelans during a ban imposed by the Maduro government. To the West, the Turkish government, once a model of freedom in the Muslim world, now appeared to be “one of the world’s most determined internet censors.” Within Turkey itself, Erdogan and his party continued to win elections handily, but street protests were gathering momentum: more than 100,000 turned out in Istanbul on March 12, summoned, inevitably, on Twitter. 18 May 1 street confrontations led The Economist to wonder whether Turkey was headed for “another summer of unrest.” 19 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=313 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED The answer was unknowable before the fact. However, if the world described by my thesis has any connection to reality, I would expect Erdogan’s actions to be guided primarily by the need to survive politically. Under the perilous conditions of the Fifth Wave, governments cling more than they rule. In Egypt, Defense Minister al-Sisi and the military, having overthrown an elected government in the name of the people, mostly gave up the pretense of legality in the following months. They concentrated instead on the repression of political opponents. Hundreds of Muslim Brothers have been sentenced to death, leading al-Sisi to boast that the Brotherhood was “finished.” 20 Like Erdogan’s threat to eradicate Twitter, this bit of rhetoric, with its high modernist bravado, said more about the military regime’s delusions than about its capabilities. The people of the web who had organized the anti-Mubarak protests found themselves under severe pressure from the new regime. Blogger Alaa Abd El Fatah was slapped around in his home then arrested by “20 men—some of whom were masked and carrying heavy arms.” 21 Ahmed Maher, Wael Ghonim’s 2011 partner and the guiding spirit behind the April 6 Movement Facebook group, was also detained. Ghonim himself had left the country, stating that “Egypt no longer welcomes those who are like me.” 22 To all appearances, matters stood exactly where they had been before January 25, 2011. Under the surface, everything was different. Homo informaticus had broken the mystique of authority in Egypt. There was no going back—no return to the passive obedience of the illiterate, parochial villager. The public knew it, and the regime knew it as well. It was the rationale behind the persecution of online activists. Al-Sisi aspired to the presidency, and his fate will provide a powerful signal with regard to the claims I have made in this book. If he can repress his way into a stable and long-lasting dynasty in the mode of Nasser and Mubarak, my analysis will be falsified. This isn’t an impossible outcome. The future—just ask my old professor—is unknown. But as I observe, from afar, recent events in Egypt—and in Ukraine, Venezuela, Thailand, Turkey—I confess to many misgivings about the future of democracy, far fewer doubts about the restlessness of the public or the crisis of authority. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=314 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED THE OLD DEMOCRACIES AND THE NEW STRUCTURE OF INFORMATION I wish to conclude with the old democracies: Europe and the United States. After the end of World War II, the material success of these countries lifted the prestige of their system of government to the heights. Capitalism and the industrial revolution were invented here, and scientific management too—the apparent ability to become rich beyond the dreams of previous generations because of brilliant top-down planning. The digital world was born here: the tsunami of information could be said to originate in that unstable seismic region south and east of San Francisco Bay. The ideals of equality, of the people as sovereign, of the public as more than a rabble, were also strongest here, part of the domestic political DNA. The twentieth century saw the rise of mass movements dedicated to the destruction of liberal democracy. Each, in turn, was defeated to the point of extinction. With the fall of communism and implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, no alternative system was left to oppose the democracies. They had triumphed with a completeness rarely seen in history. As early as 1989, Francis Fukuyama, in his famous essay “The End of History?”, could speculate about a world wholly dominated by the democratic ideology: What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, of the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run. 23 Following the horrors of 9/11, Fukuyama and his ideas were derided as triumphalist nonsense. But he was only half wrong. Fukuyama, a Hegelian, argued that Western democracy had run out of “contradictions”: that is, of ideological alternatives. That was true in 1989 and remains true today. Fukuyama’s mistake was to infer that the absence of contradictions meant the end of history. There was another possibility he failed to consider. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=315 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 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. That would not be without precedent. The Roman Empire wasn’t overthrown by something called “feudalism”—it collapsed of its own dead weight, to the astonishment of friend and foe alike. The centuries after the calamity lacked ideological form. Similarly, a history built on negation would be formless and nameless: a shadowy moment, however long, between one true age and another. The end of the Cold War, in which Fukuyama discerned the millennial triumph of democracy, appears in hindsight to have been the high-water mark for the prestige and legitimacy of this system. 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. The industrial mode of organization, with its militaristic respect for rank, had placed democratic government at a great distance from the governed. Lacking a shared enemy and the urgency of a war footing, public and authority discovered they stood on the opposite sides of many questions. Then the Fifth Wave swept over the political landscape, giving voice and image and persuasive power to the insistent negations of the public. The result, if my analysis has any validity, has been the bleeding out of legitimacy and living death of many democratic institutions. Recent events in Europe fit into this pattern. In France, for example, three successive presidential elections reversed the previous mandate, but the difference was imperceptible, and the common denominator was failure. Less than a year after the election to the presidency of socialist François Hollande, protests had erupted over his economic and tax policies, while Hollande himself reached record lows in popularity. 24 In March 2014, the socialists suffered a disastrous defeat in local elections. Hollande dismissed his prime minister. Another mandate appeared headed for reversal. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=316 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED The impotence of the established parties turned a sectarian public toward political groups less inhibited in their condemnation of the system. From the left, insurgent parties like Syriza in Greece and the Five Star movement in Italy increased their share of the vote by attacking capitalism and politics as usual. Insurgent parties of the right, dubbed by The Economist “Europe’s Tea Parties,” were also making dramatic progress at the polls. 25 Their negations ranged from the anti-immigrant and anti-EU disposition of France’s National Front and Britain’s Independence Party, to the openly neo-Nazi rhetoric of the Golden Dawn faction in Greece. The sickness of European democracy was demonstrable and generally acknowledged by the Europeans themselves. The virulence of the malady seemed less clear. Part of the difficulty is that complex systems often look indestructible just before they collapse. That was true of the Soviet Union and the Mubarak regime, for example. European democracy, by comparison, does not look indestructible: it has the feel of an established religion, to which everyone belongs by force of habit, but which few, in their hearts, believe in any longer. Idle to speculate what it would take to sweep it aside. It is always useful to remember history, however: not so long ago, Europe was the world’s leading exporter of anti-democratic ideologies and movements. \*\*\* The theme of recent American politics was once again failure: specifically, the inauspicious rollout of the new health care program and President Obama’s efforts to recover from the consequences. I have already noted the botched delivery of the health insurance website. Here is Clay Shirky’s take on the planning process followed by the government to develop the \$400 million site: The management question, when trying anything new, is “When does reality trump planning?” For the officials overseeing Healthcare.gov, the answer was “Never.” Every time there was a chance to create some sort of public experimentation, or even just some clarity about its methods and goals, the imperative was to deny the opposition anything to criticize. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=317 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED At the time, this probably seemed like a way of avoiding early failures. But the project’s managers weren’t avoiding those failures. They were saving them up. 26 President Obama responded to critics with his uniquely dialectical style of rhetoric. On the one hand, he seemed to accept responsibility, and to offer an apology of sorts. “We fumbled the rollout on this healthcare law,” he said. “I completely get how upsetting this can be for a lot of Americans.” That was Barack Obama, the president, speaking. But Obama the sectarian prophet, with his detachment from government and disdain of its works, was also to be heard from: “I was not informed directly that the website would not be working . . . I don’t think I’m stupid enough to be going around saying this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.” “The federal government does a lot of things well. One of the things it does not do well,” the president noted, “is information technology procurement.” 27 Barack Obama’s political gift lay in the condemnation of wrongs. As he wrestled with malfunctioning features of the health care law, the president grew visibly uncomfortable with having to advocate a positive program. “. . . What most people I hope also recognize,” he complained, “is that when you try to do something big like make our health care system better that there’re going to be problems along the way, even if ultimately what you’re doing is going to make a lot of people better off.” 28 Once enrollment in the new program climbed to eight million, the president asserted: “the repeal debate is and should be over.” 29 This was a remarkable statement, in equal parts sectarian certitude and Center blindness. Like Hosni Mubarak with the internet and the British authorities after the London riots, President Obama appeared to be searching for the off switch that would silence a quarrelsome public. He was unlikely to find it. The health care program remained unpopular. Not surprisingly, the Republican Party was expected to exploit the issue for the midterm elections. The burden of positive government would not soon be removed from the president’s shoulders. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=318 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED President Obama’s recent difficulties continued a pattern of bipolar reversals of fortune that characterized democratic politics in the age of the Fifth Wave. Since 2008, in the US, elections every two years have repudiated the previous choice. We saw much the same in France. Britain, Spain, and Italy have each flipped from left to right or back the other way within the last few years. With the possible exception of Italy, whose young prime minister has been called the country’s “last chance,” the electorates in these countries felt a corrosive distrust of the current crowd in power. 30 Let me submit, as my parting word, a warning to the skeptic: 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. Democracy lacks true rivals today as an ideal and an ideology. Fukuyama was indeed half right. But there is a decadence in certain historical moments, an entropy of systems, propelled by an internal dynamic, that makes no demands for alternative ideals or structures before the onset of disintegration. At some point, failure becomes final. The failure of democracy plays no part in the null hypothesis, but becomes a possibility in the framework of my thesis. A rebellious public, sectarian in temper and utopian in expectations, collides everywhere with institutions that rule by default and blunder, it seems, by habit. Industrial hierarchies are no longer able to govern successfully in a world swept to the horizon by a tsunami of information. An egalitarian public is unwilling assume responsibility under any terms. The muddled half-steps and compromises necessary to democracy may become untenable under the pressure applied by these irreconcilable forces. Democracy isn’t doomed. As an analyst, I have rejected prophecy and destiny as tools of the trade. I see the future with no greater clarity than you, reader. But processes at play today, right now, if continued, could well lead to the crumbling of what has always been a fragile system of government. Strange to say, this possibility never gets discussed explicitly—only in indirections about China or about shutting down some policy debate. I wrote this book, in part, to invite the discussion. I did so in the manner of a man who notices a fire blazing in a corner of a locked room: I don’t want to start a panic, only some sane talk among the occupants about how best to put the thing out. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=319 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED CHAPTER NOTES 1 From Frank Talker, at http://weirdwhites.blogspot.com/ 2 Mustafa Nayem, “Uprising in Ukraine: How It All Began,” Open Society Foundations, April 4, 2014, http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/uprising-ukraine-how-it-all-began 3 Timoty Snyder, “Ukraine: The Haze of Propaganda,” New York Review ofBooks, March 1, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/01/ukraine-haze-propaganda/ 4 Ibid. 5 Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Ukraine has not experienced a genuine revolution, merely a change of elites,” The Guardian, February 28, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/28/ukraine-genuine-revolutiontackle-corruption 6 Oleh Kotsyuba, “Ukraine’s Battle for Europe,” New York Times, November 29, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/opinion/ukraines-battle-for-europe.html?\_r=0 7 Nayem, “Uprising in Ukraine. 8 Michael Bociurkiw, “Can Ukraine’s ‘political kamikazes’ rescue the country from collapse?”, CNN, February 27, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/27/opinion/ukraine-new-government/ 9 “Police clash in Venezuela with anti-government protesters,” BBC, March 20, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-26676806, and William Neuman, “In Venezuela, Protest Ranks Grow Broader,” New York Times, February 24, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/world/americas/in-venezuela-middle-class-joins-protests.html?\_r=0 10 Loreta Chao, “Twitter, Other Apps Disrupted in Venezuela,” Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303775504579397430033153284 11 See “Hercon: El 53.7% de venezolanos considera que vive en dictadura (gobierno raspado),” La Patilla, May 19, 2014, http://www.lapatilla.com/site/2014/03/30/hercon-el-53-7-de-venezolanos-considera-quevive-en-dictadura-gobierno-raspado/ 12 See “55% of Venezuelans think Maduro’s gov’t is no longer democratic,” El Universal, March 31, 2014, http://english.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/140331/55-of-venezuelans-think-maduros-govt-is-nolonger-democratic 13 Neuman, “In Venezuela, Protest Ranks Grow Broader.” 14 From posted tweet, https://twitter.com/JorgeJelipe/status/442434719721209857 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=320&limit=10)