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title: "The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium"
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# The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
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On an evening in June 2015, at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a young man stood up from a Bible studies meeting, pulled out a pistol, and began shooting. Nine of the thirteen persons present were murdered, including the pastor, an 87-year-old choir member, and a state senator. All of the dead were black. The killer, 21, was white and called himself a “white nationalist,” but was unknown to his victims. While bringing down death on people at prayer he is reported to have said, “I have to do it . . . and you have to go.” 115
In the early hours of a morning in June 2016, a young man entered the Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and began firing a semi-automatic weapon methodically into the patrons crowded there. Within a few minutes 49 persons had been murdered and 58 injured, some very seriously. The killer, 29, was an American of Afghan descent, unknown to his victims. In a call to a police dispatcher he “swore his allegiance” to ISIS, the Islamist sect that had recently conquered a large swath of territory in Iraq and Syria. He had been “triggered” into mass slaughter, the shooter said, by US bombing raids against ISIS. 116
On a night of October 2016, during the last act of the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, shots rang out from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Hotel overlooking the festivities. Ten minutes later, 58 concert-goers had been murdered and hundreds lay wounded. The killer was 64, retired, well off, and utterly disconnected from the people on whom he inflicted such suffering before committing suicide. He gave no reason for the atrocity, and none has been identified to this day.
I believe there’s a relationship between our fractured reality and the rise of the nihilist—persons and groups that consider destruction and mass murder to be a form of progress. The nihilist lurks in a broken sliver of truth that is impossible to debate or refute. There, he experiences absolute grievance and the absolute negation of the system, the repudiation of everything that stands and of everyone he encounters. Not just politics but all of humanity, he holds, must be purified and made new. As the last righteous person, the nihilist aims to bring this about in the blood of random strangers. He acts out the violence that so many others perpetrate verbally and virtually on the web: he is, in that sense, the avenging angel of post-truth, and the rant made flesh.
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Even as democratically elected officials watch their authority dissipate in a fog of uncertainty, the nihilist commits his crimes with absolute conviction. The assurance of being compelled—“triggered”—protects him from any sense of responsibility. In the midst of death and carnage, he feels innocent as a lamb. Guilt for his crimes must fall on the social order: he is merely an instrument of justice. “I have to do it . . . and you have to go.” Osama bin Laden, a precursor of the type, chortled and giggled in an infamous video as he related the story of the death of thousands on 9/11.
The true nihilist today is more earnest. He disgorges manifestos and judgments by the ton. “Unfortunately . . . I am in a great hurry,” wrote the Charleston shooter, “and some of my best thoughts, actually most of them have to be left out and lost forever.” 117 He survived to spew out another manifesto in prison. These documents are mawkish and abstract, a rhetoric disconnected in tone, logic, and sense of proportion from the violence, yet bearing an uncanny resemblance to the reflexive negations of the public. In the nihilist’s bloodstained vision of the world we discern a familiar landscape. His clamors de profundis recall our everyday repudiations. Somehow, large numbers of citizens have come to believe, like him, that the system has failed, and the social order must be smashed. A case can be made that the president of the United States is among them. The nihilist, that righteous monster, appears to be a reasonably faithful likeness of us, in a more advanced state of moral decomposition.
The blind impulse to destroy became a nation-state with the advent of the Islamic Caliphate in 2014. A vast chunk of land, with a population of millions, was partitioned out of Iraq and Syria, to be ruled by a sect that exalted death. “I swear we are a people who love drinking blood,” boasted a Palestinian adherent of ISIS on video. “We came to slaughter you.” 118 That promise was overfulfilled. The abominations perpetrated by ISIS matched the worst horrors of the twentieth century. Victims were beheaded, crucified, burned alive in cages. Slavery was revived. Captive women were made into sex slaves and drowned if they refused the part. Untold hundreds of thousands were indeed slaughtered. Millions were uprooted, loosening a red-rimmed tide of desperate migrations and terror, not just regionally, but on the democratic world.
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Yet the perpetrators—mostly young, male, and media-savvy—perceived themselves as the restorers of virginity in human relations. 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. More than the Syrian and Iraqi military, or the West, their enemy was history. Here is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, caliph of the Caliphate, on the subject:
Indeed the Muslims were defeated after the fall of their caliphate. Then their state ceased to exist, so the disbelievers were able to weaken and humiliate the Muslims, dominate them in every region, plunder their wealth and resources, and rob them of their rights. They accomplished this by attacking and occupying their lands, placing their treacherous agents in power to rule the Muslims with an iron fist, and spreading dazzling and deceptive slogans such as: civilization, peace, co-existence, freedom, democracy, secularism, baathism, nationalism, and patriotism . . . 119
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. French president François Hollande called it “barbaric”—an attack on “people, history, memories, culture.” 120 That was precisely the strategic objective. As it does with its beheadings, ISIS made a show of the destruction. In a five-minute video, posted online, burly bearded men huff and puff and pull the ancient idols down, taking sledgehammers and jackhammers to the fallen figures. The frenzy is at times shown in slow motion, to romantic effect. This is vandalism as political theater, performed for the edification of the world. 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.
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Viewers of the video, in brief, were being invited to jackhammer their way to utopia.
Although followers of ISIS speak in an opaque theological jargon, there’s nothing peculiarly Muslim or religious about yearning to escape the coils of history. We have stumbled across this theme before. Catalans imagine that the past has robbed them of nationhood. Vladimir Putin dreams of rescuing Russia out of the dead carcass of the Soviet Union. Donald Trump has condemned our “American carnage.” The right-wing populist government of Poland has made it illegal to bring up the subject of Polish collaboration with Nazi war crimes. The left-leaning city fathers of Seattle, Washington, have transmuted Columbus Day into “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
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 and the logical justification for the death cult. In the turgid manifesto of one prolific lone killer, the word “history” recurs 510 times, like a ritual curse. 122
The ISIS message resonated with thousands from Western countries who flocked to join the Caliphate. Many knew just a few words of Arabic. A significant minority was of non-Muslim origin. 123 They chose barbarism over boredom, becoming actors in the apocalyptic drama instead of software programmers back home.
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Brutal sectarians could carve out a nation-state because the US and its allies had abandoned the region. Demoralized by failure in Iraq, the Western elites came to believe that intervention in the Middle East only made a bad situation worse. They embraced paralysis as the best policy. The result was Charlottesville on a continental scale. As the powers representing order and democracy withdrew to safety, the forces of chaos and violence moved in. The last US troops departed the area in December 2011. They left behind, President Obama maintained, a “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq.” 124 But in June 2014 ISIS fighters routed the Iraqi army at Mosul and swept onward. The Caliphate was proclaimed a short time later.
Given the terrible consequences, there is much blame to apportion—but that is not my purpose here. The point of this particular story is that paralysis isn’t irreversible. Faced with the grim reality of a terrorist nation-state, the US and many European democracies were stirred to action. The elites awoke to the truth of the situation, and behaved appropriately. President Obama, for all his distrust of interventionism, returned US forces to Iraq in November 2014 as part of a coordinated effort aimed at ISIS. President Trump, who has also scoffed at foreign adventures, accelerated this process. In July 2017, ISIS was pushed out of Mosul. In October, it was defeated in Raqqa, a place of symbolic religious importance to the sect. The Islamic Caliphate, once the size of Great Britain, is now broken and on the run. The caliph, al-Baghdadi, has gone so deep underground that no one is sure whether he’s alive or dead.
This is a success story. The ruling elites shouldered rather than evaded their responsibility. The real-life outcome was more or less what was intended. The democracies acted vigorously and triumphed. The carriers of nihilism were crushed. Good news may be hard to decipher in a post-truth era: but here is food for thought.
Much speculation and hand-wringing have been poured out on the public for its mutiny against the established order. But the public, all along, has insisted that the revolt is about the elites. That, at least, is my judgment. It was elite failure in the context of the Fifth Wave of information that set the wheel of change to turning: and it’s with elite choices, including the possibility of reforming industrial-style democracy, that I would like to conclude my story.
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THE FATE OF THE INDUSTRIAL ELITES AND THE UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
In a 2009 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Harvey Weinstein, powerful film producer, made the following claim about his institution: “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion. We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe.” 126 Weinstein, whose personal worth was in the hundreds of millions, could best be described as an elite of the elites: friend of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, generous contributor to the Democratic Party and progressive causes, maker and breaker of movie stars. The day after
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Donald Trump’s inauguration, Weinstein joined a Women’s March held in Sundance, Utah, to protest the new president’s sexist views.
But in October 2017, the New York Times and the New Yorker reported that Weinstein had sexually assaulted or harassed dozens of women, including famous actresses, over a span of decades. Some of the incidents were violent physical attacks. Others betrayed bizarre and perverse behavior. All were committed with impunity, as the victims were afraid to speak out against such a ruthless and well-connected potentate, and Weinstein’s institution, the film industry, turned its moral compass in some other direction. The media revelations broke the silence. As a growing number of women went public with grotesque stories of impropriety, Weinstein’s place in the Hollywood hierarchy tottered. He was fired from his own company on October 8.
The well-deserved fall of Harvey Weinstein sparked one of the most remarkable episodes in the annals of any elite class. Suddenly, women began to speak out on the past predations of powerful men. Many of the accused were household names, high-flyers in politics, the news media, and, of course, the entertainment industry. Most were tainted beyond repair or forced out of public life. A Republican candidate for the Senate in Alabama, though heavily favored, was defeated after reports surfaced of sexual misconduct. He was a flag-bearer for the religious right, but he stood accused of soliciting sex from an under-age girl. Sexual scandal drove a Democratic senator from Minnesota to resign. He was said to be a “committed feminist,” but he had been photographed groping a woman’s breasts, so he had little choice but to go. Several members of the House announced their departure after reports were published of their misbehavior. A well-known morning news show host for NBC News was removed from his job for sexual misconduct. The White House correspondent for the New York Times was “suspended” while allegations of harassment were looked into.
As was the case with Weinstein, most of the men involved had been protected by their institutions. They were examples of structural corruption. The fall, when it came, implicated much more than flawed individuals.
I bring up this sordid tale for a reason.
The recovery of truth requires the restoration of trusted authority. At the moment, that is nowhere in sight. The question before us is whether the current elite class can ever resume that function. The crisis of authority, currently at the stage of paralysis, will otherwise continue to warp and fracture the top-down model of liberal democracy long managed by this class.
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Can the industrial elites find redemption? The defeat of ISIS demonstrates that when elites act with confidence in a cause that is shared across partisan and social lines, they can easily scatter the barbarian war-bands. Modern government still holds unparalleled power and wealth at its disposal. Liberal democracy remains unchallenged as a system. Elite authority today is threatened not by any specific movement or group but by the relentless intensity of the public’s negations: a stance that is reflexively anti-government, anti-system, and sometimes anti-democracy. The mood is driven by a near-universal perception of failure at the top. ISIS, after all, needed to be confronted in large part because of a long string of policy disasters and evasions of the truth touching Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the Syrian civil war.
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. Politicians must tell a story about the world that stirs the imagination of voters. The people at the top must raise the public’s understanding to a higher plane. In the attempt, however, they will collide head-on with the social imperatives of the system they represent. The industrial model of liberal democracy isn’t particularly democratic in structure. It’s a steep hierarchy that operates in broadcast mode only. The distance between top and bottom is very great. The chasm of distrust will be difficult to bridge. And as elite fear and loathing of the public has increased, so has the craving for distance and isolation.
Elites today have no idea how to speak to the public or what to say to it. They have shown little interest in trying. The hyper-educated individuals who ran the Clinton campaign were utterly indifferent to public opinion: they believed in big data. An algorithm nicknamed “Ada” delivered “simulations” of opinion to the campaign staff. 127 Ada was the public as elites wish it would be: safe, clean, and speaking only when spoken to. 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.
The men flushed out by the sexual scandals of the past year measured their success in terms of distance. They leveraged their exceptional talents to transcend the rules by which ordinary people are judged. Great institutions protected and indulged them. Physical contact with the public was ritualized to advantage. Other elites flattered them constantly. You became, in your own eyes, a superb humanitarian. You were a role model to those beneath you. You could be a rapist but also a moral compass to the nation.
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Because of the heights to which they had risen, these men felt invulnerable—and they weren’t far off the mark.
The elites that govern democratic nations have shown zero interest in leaping over the chasm to reach the public. In fact, they seem headed in the opposite direction. The crisis of democracy, viewed from the top, implicates a digital information landscape that brings the public with its destructive urges into terrifying proximity. The response has been a kind of political claustrophobia— regularly triggered, for example, by Donald Trump’s blatherings on Twitter. 128 The frenzy over fake news is part of this pathology. It has pushed Facebook and Google to design opaque filtering algorithms—a small step, it may be, toward converting the information sphere into Ada, the mechanical doll that tells only happy news. 129
The industrial elites, I mean to say, have lashed their fate to that of the battered model in which they have thrived. 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. Our own federal government spends millions in extreme security and policing measures to keep the public a safe distance away.
I can’t predict whether top-down democracy will endure: but the momentum of events over the past decade and more is pushing the democratic world in a specific direction. First, the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age are toppling—the political parties, as we have seen, are in a state of dissolution, and even chunks of the nation-state are splintering off. The times favor fragmentation, if not disintegration. Second, the present elite class has disqualified itself from reforming the system. It has no interest in taking on the job, and would have no clue how to proceed if it tried. The elites, like Icarus, appear content to glide above the masses until it’s too late to avoid a crash.
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Lastly, the question of political distance has become decisive in the many-sided brawl over the established order. The democratic principle of access to the people in power is at war with the industrial age ideal of rule by remote, disinterested experts: and our representative system is too broken to mediate a settlement. Secular trends at present promote the reduction of distance. Secret depravity, in consequence, has become open scandal. The walls are closing in on the tainted keepers of the status quo—and the possible consequences, I think, are significant enough to bear a bit of speculation.
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The conquest of political distance must deal with hard structural reality. Rage, populism, and tweeting at odd hours amount to little more than a stylistic posture. In the end, the pyramid must be flattened. Donald Trump, archetype populist, chose a cabinet of relative “outsiders” instead of the usual establishment types. 130 This will change nothing in the perception of distance. 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. Every failure of government, therefore, will continue to be compounded by an alienated and unforgiving public.
With regard to President Trump, I doubt that flattening federal institutions was ever a thought in his head. This is a man who strives for bigness in politics, and loves to name towers after himself.
The 2016 elections may prove a pivotal moment on this front, nonetheless. The fractured nature of our political life became impossible to ignore. Shocked elites began to speak of the “Divided States of America.” 131 In that spirit, Democratic state and city governments proclaimed their defiance of the electoral outcome. “We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers, and we’re ready to fight,” announced California’s Jerry Brown. 132 Before the election, Brown had joked that he would “build a wall around California” if Trump won. 133 By October 2017, he seemed to a progressive admirer to have erected a “parallel universe to Donald Trump’s America” in his state. 134 On immigration, taxes, the environment, and many other issues, Brown staked out positions that were diametrically opposed to the federal government. He even conducted a breakaway foreign policy, choosing a visit to the Vatican to dismiss the president’s importance to global climate policy-making: “The Trump factor,” he said, “is small, very small indeed.” 135
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