--- 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: 330 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e?start=330&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=330&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=320&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=340&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=330 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED For the Republican Party, in brief, the Bush campaign was a dance of the dead, and Trump’s triumph became a moment of revelation and acceptance: more of a burial than a revolt. The Democratic Party has endured an equally fatal loss of authority. Barack Obama in 2008 crushed a true establishment—fronted, as it happened, by Hillary Clinton. For eight years, Obama and his immediate circle felt no debt and little allegiance to the party organization. 18 In the 2016 Democratic primaries, more than 40 percent of the vote, and all the militant passion, went to Bernie Sanders —an old, white, dull, socialist Independent. Many of his supporters saw Clinton and other mainstream Democrats as cogs in a system they despised. In somewhat slower motion than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is unbundling into dozens of political war-bands, each driven by the hunger for meaning and identity, all focused with monomaniacal intensity on a particular cause: feminism, the environment, anti-capitalism, pro-immigration, or racial or sexual grievance. The schism has been veiled by the generalized loathing of all things Trump: but I find it hard to envision a national party thriving on tribalism and wars of identity. 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. The somewhat different question of how this transpired now needs to be posed. In 1980, 1990, even 2000, Trump’s bizarre trajectory would have been not just impossible but politically suicidal. What has changed? The information balance of power has changed, of course. A generation ago, the public could exist only as a passive audience. Information was dispensed on the industrial model: top down and one to many. That was the great age of the daily newspaper and famous anchormen on the model of Walter Cronkite. The advent of digital platforms, in a sense, created the public. 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 process that, as we have seen, in now approaching the terminal stage for many of them. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=331 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED That is my thesis for the revolt of the public. My claim here is that it applies in spades to every phase of the 2016 presidential contest, and helps explain how the outlandish Trump could trample so easily over once-authoritative institutions on his way to victory. He was lucky in his moment. When, like the phantom at the feast, he materialized at the head of the Republican pack, he was met by an institutional vacuum and an informational chaos. There can be no question that Trump’s online campaign “overwhelmingly outperformed” Clinton’s. “Clinton’s coverage was focused on scandals, while Trump’s coverage focused on his core issues,” concludes a study by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. 19 Evidence from the same source demonstrates convincingly the increased ability of new conservative digital media, led by Breitbart, to influence the tone of the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Trump’s own fixation with Twitter, both as candidate and president, is unusual and significant enough to merit an extended look. In another context, I intend to provide that. Here, however, I wish to focus on that labyrinth of contradictions that is Trump’s relationship with the mainstream news media. The facts are uncontroversial. Trump spent far less money on advertising than Clinton or his Republican opponents, yet he received a vastly greater volume of media coverage. 20 The news business seemed strangely obsessed with this strange man, and lavished on him what may have been unprecedented levels of attention. The question is why. The answer will be apparent to anyone with eyes to see. Donald Trump is a peacock among the dull buzzards of American politics. 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. He has clearly succeeded to an astonishing degree. The data on media attention speaks to a world-class talent for self-promotion. 21 Again, there can be no question that this allowed Trump to separate himself from his competitors in the Republican primaries. He appeared to be a very important person. Everyone on TV was talking about him. 22 Who could say the same about Ted Cruz? ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=332 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Media people pumped the helium that elevated Donald Trump’s balloon, and they did so from naked self-interest. He represented high ratings and improved subscription numbers. Until the turn of the new millennium, the news media had controlled the information agenda. They could decide, on the basis of some elite standard, how much attention you deserved. In a fractured information environment, swept by massive waves of signal and noise, 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. 23 Paradoxically, the traditional news media felt uniformly hostile toward Trump, to the extent of abandoning its vaunted claim to objectivity. “If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, your reporting is going to reflect that,” stated a front-page article in the New York Times. 24 CNN also felt comfortable using the word “dangerous” to characterize Trump statements. 25 Examples of journalists lining up in opposition to Trump during the elections can be multiplied at will—and it wasn’t just a question of open criticism. Wellknown personalities in both print and broadcast media colluded with the Clinton campaign to maximize the chances of Trump’s defeat, as was revealed in a hack of her campaign manager’s emails. 26 Indeed, the most damaging revelations against Trump weren’t dug up by Democratic Party operatives, but leaked by NBC News to the Washington Post. 27 Yet the greater paradox is that Trump almost certainly benefited from these attacks. He was able, with some justice, to portray journalists as members in good standing in the club of entitled and out-of-touch elites. The public’s trust in the news stood at an all-time low—by the fall of 2016, it had fallen to 19 percent. 28 Trump had the luxury of campaigning against an unloved institution that was providing him with prodigious levels of free (if negative) publicity. When he hurled insults at Megyn Kelly of Fox News, his crowds roared with approval. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=333 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED In the nineties, Thomas Patterson observed that the power to select presidential candidates had passed, effectively, from the parties to the mass media. 29 That time is over. The year 2016 showed many venerable institutions to be bare ruins of what they once were. The news business featured prominently in the wreckage. The information agenda could no longer be controlled by a handful of news organizations in chummy interaction with a few Washington grandees. Like so much else, the agenda was now a crazy quilt—a battleground. Donald Trump, novice at politics, abominated by the elites, could win a presidential election in part because he read and navigated this fractured information landscape far more intelligently than the competition. \*\*\* In that improbable year of 2016, Filipino voters raised to the presidency a populist that by comparison made Donald Trump sound like an etiquette book. Rodrigo Duterte bragged to the media that, as mayor of Manila, he had roamed the streets at night and personally shot drug dealers to death. So the new president of the Philippines was either a confessed murderer or, as now seems likely, a pathological liar. I bring up this weird story to jog our memories: the conflict that gave us Trump isn’t uniquely American. The forces at play are global and secular. In Europe, a series of electoral shocks have battered the European Union and many individual states. This predicament has been labeled a “crisis of democracy”—defined by one commentator as “a gap between elites and voters.” 30 For many right-thinking Europeans, however, democracy seemed to be negating itself. Since this subject is central to my concerns, I want to reflect for a moment on the troubles of European democracy. The place to start is with election results and their consequences. In the January 2015 Greek general elections, a motley coalition of communists and anti-globalists came to power, grouped in a party called Syriza and headed by Alexis Tsipras, who at 40 was the country’s youngest prime minister in the modern era. Syriza had existed only since 2004, but in 2015 it won, and won big, chiefly on a platform of negation and repudiation. The party stood firmly against the European Union, the euro, austere budgets, debt payments, capitalism, the ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=334 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 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. By September 2015, the cranks and unrepentant radicals had been weeded out of the government. Greece remained in the EU, kept the euro, put up with austerity, and bowed respectfully to capitalists, the Germans, and the banks. The promise of radical change had devolved into stasis. Under the youthful communist Tsipras, conditions for the Greek public were similar to what they had been under his middle-aged conservative predecessor. Not surprisingly, support for the populist experiment Syriza represented has collapsed, while Tsipras’s ratings have “nosedived.” 32 In February 2014, after a parliamentary maneuver, Matteo Renzi, 39, became prime minister of Italy—the youngest man ever to hold that position. He belonged to the mainstream center-left Democratic Party, but came to national politics as an outsider, having been mayor of Florence. His mandate was to tear down Italy’s immobile political system from within. Because of his character and mission, the young redeemer became known as il rottamatore—demolition man. Renzi was free of any taint of corruption, and took the title seriously. “I’m cleaning up the swamp,” he proclaimed in June 2015, curiously anticipating Trump. 33 Renzi, like Tsipras, meant to be the negation of the status quo. A tangle of institutional interests hampered his movements: in Italy, the rules of the game aren’t designed to foster reform. Renzi, the demolition man, staked his political life on changing the rules. He insisted that the central government needed greater authority, and called a constitutional referendum for December 2016 as a first step in this direction. The elite class swung in a body behind the young prime minister. Constitutional reform received the universal support of the traditional parties and of print and broadcast media, and enjoyed far more money spent on advertisement. But anti-establishment groups like Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini’s Northern League—the forces of populism—dominated social media. 34 An alienated public distrusted the motives behind centralization. The vote against reform surpassed 60 percent, and a few days later Renzi was gone. It was, wrote one dismayed observer, “the fall of Rome. . . . The status quo has ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=335 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED In reality the status quo had suffered a pivotal defeat. In March 2018, Renzi’s Social Democrats were crushed at the polls, while populist parties received a clear majority of the vote. Italian democracy, which had proved incapable of reforming Italy’s political corruption and paralysis, now faced the task of piecing together a government out of splinters of enraged opinion. Success would leave “the eurozone’s third largest economy in the hands of economic populists with critical views of the EU.” 36 For Spain, the general elections of December 2015 marked the transition from a two-party system to a fragmented and chaotic political environment. The ruling conservatives, though still the largest party, lost 64 seats and their majority in the Cortes. The reasons for the setback were many, but together added up to a mood of stark rejection by the electorate. The socialists suffered their worst showing ever. Podemos, a party that embraced the anarchist ideals of the 2011 indignado street revolt and hadn’t existed in the previous election, came in third. No party could summon a majority to form a government. After ten months of paralysis, new elections were called in January 2016. This time the conservatives performed somewhat better, but the weak minority government that emerged has been stuck in a holding pattern. All the while, in the autonomous region of Catalonia, a series of local votes favored groups that sought to break away from Spain. Catalonia was never a nation, but the Catalans, having caught the bug of identity and negation, were in revolt against history, and wished to smash through its consequences in the present order of things. In October 2017, a referendum again went the separatists’ way. Local authorities declared independence. The Spanish government was compelled to send in the police, take over Catalonia’s affairs, and throw the rebel leaders in prison. All of the latter had been elected democratically. Democracy, in Spain, had become an accomplice to the disintegration of national politics and of the nation-state. And then there was Brexit. The British vote to leave the European Union was a textbook example of democracy delivering a perplexing outcome—and of the public on a rampage. The referendum had been called by David Cameron, Conservative prime minister, to fulfill a campaign promise. Cameron himself, however, strongly opposed the exit initiative, as did the Labour and Social Democratic opposition, the respectable news media, the archbishop of Canterbury, and a long line of foreign heads of state starting with Barack Obama. 37 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. Caught in the grip of a glacial political order, ruled by elites who offered few alternatives, the British public opted to break some crockery. That was in May of the difficult year 2016. To this day, great uncertainty hangs over what happens next. won.” 35 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=336 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Britain—the “United Kingdom”—is an interesting country. As the sharp old class differences have abated, all other differences have been magnified. The official ideology of British institutions is multiculturalism, the glorification of diversity. How much this has contributed to the fragmentation of national identity would be a worthwhile topic of research. Ethnic and religious minorities remain unreconciled. The Muslim population in particular has produced perpetrators of domestic terror and Islamic State atrocities—recall the grim video images of “Jihadi John,” beheader to the Caliphate, with his thick London accent. 38 The Brexit vote in a sense was aimed at Jihadi John and his kind. Whether this was driven by love of country and its civic traditions or by racism and xenophobia very much depends on where you stand. Although opinion polls had shown a tight contest, elites in Britain and Europe were utterly shocked by the outcome of the referendum. “In 1,000 years, I would never have believed that the British people would vote for this,” exclaimed a baffled Labour MP. 39 Such radical disconnection from the public, even more than immigration or terror, helped explain the revolt from below implicit in the Brexit vote. Afterwards, the mass media portrayed pro-Brexit voters regretting their foolish impulse, or asking, in confusion, what the EU actually was. 40 But it was the elites who clung to a virginal ignorance about their alienation from the public: next time, they were certain to be surprised again. The England of the pub and the football field had struck a blow at the Britain of the institutions. On Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, “Leave” activists had outnumbered, out-posted, and out-energized their opponents. 41 The almost willful blindness to this strategy of revolt cost David Cameron his job. His successor, Theresa May, had been against Brexit until she was for it. May proved as inept as Cameron at reading the public’s mood. Under the slogan of “Strong and Stable,” she called for early elections in June 2017. The voters delivered a hung parliament, and May began her second term at the head of a weak, unstable minority government. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=337 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED In parallel, the Border used the triumph of Brexit to resume its conflict against the Center. Scotland is governed by a party committed to leaving Britain much as Britain is now committed to leaving Europe. The Scottish prime minister insists that her region will remain in the EU, and has promised a new referendum on exiting the UK. The fate of Europe, like that of Britain, is slipping from the grasp of a purblind political class. The higher meaning of Brexit may be as an indicator of a great secular reversal. Globally, institutions have entered a moment of decadence and disintegration—and the EU has been singularly afflicted. Like the old Holy Roman Empire, it lacks a true center and a shared reason for being. Nationalists and separatists, anarchists and populists, all tear at bonds held together mostly by inertia. The question, “On what principle must we stay?” receives at best a muddled answer. Democracy now favors the public, and the public, at every level of social and political life, seems to want out. \* \* \* In the 2017 electoral victories of Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, many perceived a decisive reversal of this trend toward secession. The Center was said to have conquered, and preserved the order, in the two largest EU nations. After Trump’s election, desperate elites had crowned Merkel the new “leader of the free world.” 42 Macron inspired the same exaggerated enthusiasm—a cover of The Economist showed him literally walking on water. 43 The two champions, having won at the game of democracy, were expected to rescue the house of Europe from destruction. I think this is a misreading of the facts of the case. Stated bluntly, the September 2017 German elections were a disaster for the political status quo. The two “major” parties together barely notched 50 percent of the vote. Merkel’s coalition sank to 33 percent, losing 65 seats. The opposition SPD was dealt the worst defeat in its long, proud history. The rest of the Bundestag was divided among irreconcilable cats and dogs. Four months after the elections, a majority for a new government had yet to be found. If Germany hasn’t quite reached Spanish levels of political fragmentation, it’s headed there. Merkel, dowager empress, looks on the ruin of her dreams and works. She can still stitch a government together, but she has lost control, and is at the mercy of events. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=338 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED The situation with Emmanuel Macron is more ambivalent. If Merkel represents the tired old regime, and Trump the upsurge of chaotic new forces, Macron seeks to straddle the gulf between. His rise to the presidency was as wild and improbable, in a French context, as Trump’s. His party, En Marche, was invented scarcely a year before Election Day. His voters and activists were ordinary people swept into politics for the first time. There hovers in Macron’s language a vision of a society that was once glorious and can be so again: he favors words like “confidence” and “rediscover.” In this, too, he comes closer in spirit than has been acknowledged to Trump’s call to “make America great again.” Two great questions confront him. The first is whether it is possible to combine the tremendous political energies released by the public with the purpose and permanence of the institutions. The answer is unknown. No one has tried the experiment. The second question is whether Macron has the skill and experience to pull the trick off, if we grant that it is possible. The answer is again uncertain, but the recent track record of political prodigies in Europe isn’t encouraging. As youngest president of the Fifth Republic, Macron stands in the same unfortunate line of descent with Tsipras and Renzi. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=339 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Economist Finding Trump in Shakespeare What next for Brexit? House prices: a story of Canadian excess Europe's saviour? PE/MInoAoTCeHArPVnnA.WNrNew' W.CoMwSNAs 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=340&limit=10)