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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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Trump’s mandates from on high must collide with Brown’s wall in California, a state Hillary Clinton won by three million votes. The immediate result has been conflict—a mirror-image version of the guerrilla war waged by Republican governors against the Obama administration. To cite just one example: Brown has signed a bill that exempts state law enforcement from assisting federal immigration agencies. The Trump administration, with much pomp and noise, has taken the state of California to court over the matter. 136 The clash is another instance of the crack-up of authority into mutually hostile fragments— ultimately, into paralysis.
Yet mapped to the larger quarrel of the public with the elites, this partisan tussle looks to be pregnant with practical and ideological possibilities.
In an age of partial truths and enraged political war-bands, big national “solutions” imposed from above by the federal government are likely to ignite fierce repudiation, if not revolt. That was the case with Barack Obama’s stimulus and health care legislation. Opposition gave rise to the Tea Party, which demolished the Obama coalition in the 2010 midterms. That has also been the case with Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” policies, many of which have been checked or overturned by the likes of Jerry Brown. Distance, that toxic cloud over contemporary politics, is perceived by the public to emanate from a specific address on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. Large majorities of Americans, before and after the 2016 election, have identified “big government” as the top threat to the nation. 137
If the federal government is now an agent of division and polarization, state and local government, as well as certain private entities, can become rallying points of community. 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. Andrew Cuomo, governor of New
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York, declared shortly after the election that New Yorkers held moral and political principles that were “fundamentally different” from Trump’s vision of America: “We respect all people in the state of New York.” Cuomo went on:
It’s the very core of what we believe and who we are. But it’s not just what we say, we passed laws that reflect it, and we will continue to do so, no matter what happens nationally. We won’t allow a federal government that attacks immigrants to do so in our state. 138
The case has been made that people of the left and the right can preserve their peculiar values—Cuomo’s “what we believe and who we are”—by embracing something called “localism.” 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. 139 In one possible future, all democratic countries will be Switzerland.
The pieces of the unbundling nation-state will have flatter hierarchies and a greatly reduced distance between the public and power. That’s a simple matter of numbers. The public will push harder against local magistrates who are closer at hand, and local interests will loom larger in national decisions. 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.
The rise of local power would make it feasible to digitize government on the model of Estonia, something that, for many reasons, lies beyond the reach of gargantuan-sized national bureaucracies. Estonia’s population is just over a million. Its model applies to US cities and counties, and maybe the smaller states. Still, the redesign of modern life being attempted in this small Baltic nation has the potential to scale globally:
E-Estonia is the most ambitious project in technological statecraft today, for it includes all members of the government, and it alters citizens’ daily lives. The normal services that government is involved in—legislation, voting, education, justice, healthcare, banking, taxes, policing, and so on—have been digitally linked across one platform, wiring up the nation. 141
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If the experiment succeeds, government activity and information will be flattened to the level of the web—that is, of everyday life. Our personal and official identities would then begin a process of synchronization to a degree scarcely conceivable since “the masses” entered history near the end of the nineteenth century.
From these speculative heights, we can glimpse more sweeping changes. 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. Political expectations would be drastically adjusted. So would the relationship of information and power, reversing, at last, the pathological imbalances of the Fifth Wave. Direct democracy, in the form of referendums, would be invoked regularly, to good ends and bad.
To ask why these changes aren’t happening is to circle back to the beginning of the conversation. The people at the top are unable and unwilling to reform or adapt. The distance to the bottom has protected the elites from their own inertia and decadence. If, as the evidence suggests, that distance is rapidly decreasing, then an entire ruling class, and a familiar mode of dealing with and talking about politics and the uses of power, face the possibility of extinction.
Let’s consider how this may come to pass.
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The revolt of the public will not necessarily usher in an authoritarian age. It does not necessarily foster populism. It is not necessarily destructive of liberal democracy. The revolt of the public, as I envision the thing, is a technologydriven churning of new people and classes, a proliferation and confusion of message and noise, utopian hopes and nihilistic rage, globalization and disintegration, taking place in the unbearable personal proximity of the web and at a fatal distance from political power. Every structure of order is threatened— yes. Nihilism at the level of whole societies, in the style of ISIS, is a possible outcome. But no particular system is favored or disadvantaged—and nothing is ordained.
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Many aspects of human welfare have flourished in tandem with the revolt of the public. Over the last generation, in Asia, hundreds of millions have made the extraordinary leap out of ancestral poverty to the digital lifestyle. Except for a few retrograde nations like Russia, standards of living have risen everywhere. Between 2000 and 2015, global life expectancy went up by five years. In Africa, the increase was 9.4 years. 142 The same technology that has disrupted social and political relations also connects, informs, and entertains billions of individuals and families. Twenty-eight years after the initial release of the World Wide Web, the online population was estimated at between three and four billion. The number of mobile phone users approached five billion. Half the world’s population was literally on the move: in 2017, four billion persons took an airplane flight to some far destination.
The economy, often portrayed as faltering and unequal, and thus a main determinant of political instability, has in fact performed tolerably well. While the crisis of 2008 dealt an incalculable blow to the system, it was followed by years of slow but steady growth, then a strong surge forward. For the democratic nations of North America and Europe, 2017 turned out to be a boom year. The EU experienced its strongest growth in a decade. Unemployment was high but rapidly declining and closing in on pre-2008 levels. 144 Germany, for all its struggles to form a government, remained a powerhouse, with an unemployment rate under 4 percent. The Spanish economy, whose collapse in 2008 shattered the country’s political consensus, by 2017 had rebounded to pre-crisis levels of prosperity. 145 Even Italy, which had seen its economy flatline for two decades, was on the move again. For the bulk of the EU population, life in material terms was sweet.
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sustained for seven years. Unemployment has reached a 17-year low. Even laggard sectors like manufacturing are prospering and hiring. Despite the incessant talk about inequality, the benefits of the boom have spread deep and wide. The biggest decline in unemployment has been among those with the least education, for example. Adult men and women had identical unemployment rates in 2017: 3.7 146 percent. Black and Hispanic unemployment have fallen to historic lows. Old-fashioned American ingenuity has reinvented the oil and natural gas extraction industry, moderating energy costs for all.
Attempts to explain the revolt of the public in terms of economic distress would seem to contradict this large body of data. Such explanations have proliferated anyhow. The dominant story holds that “globalism’s losers”—shorthand for socioeconomically backward people, most of them white and male—have declared war on progress while demanding a return to some imagined past. This is Hillary Clinton’s theory of the 2016 election. In March 2018, Clinton observed that her voters had come from places that were “optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward,” whereas Trump had appealed to those who “didn’t like blacks getting their rights . . . don’t like women getting jobs . . . don’t want to see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are.” 147 Here was the hidden meaning of “making America great again.” In a different context, this accounted for little England’s divorce from Europe. The deplorables, to everyone’s surprise, kept outvoting their betters.
I find evidence in support of the economic explanation to be rather thin on the ground. There is, among the public, a complete lack of trust in the ability of government and the political class to manage the economy. The perception of elite failure clearly extends to the economic domain. But this, I believe, is part of a much more pervasive crisis of authority—and a far wider horizon of failure. White working-class voters put Donald Trump over the top in a few key states— but he won booming Texas and Florida by larger margins than rust-belt Pennsylvania. One in-depth analysis of Trump voters found them more likely to be “fiscal conservatives” or “free marketeers” than the regressive types suggested by Clinton. 148 Another detailed analysis showed that “affluent Republicans” provided Trump’s core support in the primaries, while “about twothirds” of his voters in the presidential election “came from the better-off half of the economy.” 149
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Brexit voters defied predictions of economic disaster, and, on one account, were not disproportionately male, working class, or poor. 150 In Italy’s 2018 general elections, the rich North backed one populist party, the poor South another. Filipinos who elected the outrageous Rodrigo Duterte were concerned with crime and corruption rather than economic issues. 151 It’s difficult to discover a correlation here, much less a cause.
So I come to the abiding paradox that defines our predicament. An affluent, well-educated, hyper-connected public is in revolt against the system that has bestowed all of this bounty upon it. The great motive power of the revolt isn’t economic resentment but outrage over distance and failure. Everyday life is increasingly digital and networked. From dating to hailing a cab, most social and commercial transactions occur at the speed of light. This mode of life incessantly collides with the lumbering hierarchies we have inherited from the industrial age. Modern government, above all, is institutionally unable to grasp that it has lost its monopoly over political reality. It behaves as if imposture and depravity will never be found out: but under the digital dispensation, everything is found out. The public is accustomed to proximity but finds the exercise of power removed an impossible distance away: reasons are never given, questions are never answered, and in this way begins the long, foul rant that is our moment in history.
The immediate target of revolt is an elite class that has failed persistently, on its own terms. The elites once were wrapped in the mantle of authority and delivered grandiose national projects, but now the public knows them too well, and they can only mutter and stammer, demoralized. They loathe the public for their humiliation. Politicians have lost faith in the idea of service, or the common interest, or the promotion of some universal cause or ideology: they exist, in office, merely to survive, or more accurately to be seen surviving, to suck up the attention of mass and social media. It has come to pass that presidents are chosen from the casts of reality TV shows. Political actors more and more resemble the real actors in Hollywood, whose company they keep and whose perverse predilections they seem to share.
Under the watchword of resistance, the elites are leading a massive reaction of the institutions against electoral results dictated by the public: populism. The counter-attack has been relentless and along multiple fronts. If the elites win their bet, then democracy, at last, will be truly up for grabs, even in the full light of day. If the elites are defeated, however, the inevitable question is what, exactly, this will mean.
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