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# The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
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We cannot, then, think of public opinion as a conserving or creating force directing society to clearly conceived ends, making deliberately toward socialism or away from it, toward nationalism or empire, a league of nations or any other doctrinal goal. 5
Programmatic goals, we have seen, are the business of the Center, and will be rejected by a public which has clung to Border ideals from Lippmann’s day to our own.
What broke Lippmann’s heart was the assumption that the people of political philosophy must exist in political reality. He knew that the public was the only candidate available for the job, and, as an astute observer of events, he felt keenly the disproportion between his hopes and the truth. The ideal of the “sovereign and omnicompetent citizen” was unattainable. The public was born of expediency among private citizens who shared an interest—civic or selfish— in an affair, and would be aligned differently, or simply vanish, phantom-like, on other issues. In principle no less than in fact, this mutable entity could not be identified with the people.
Yet the claim has proved irresistible to those who wish to challenge an established government or political system. This has been true not just for manipulative institutions like the Egyptian military, but for the public itself. The “Occupy” groups in the US, with tiny numbers on the street compared to Egypt’s protesters, still claimed to represent the “99 percent” against the predations of the elite.
To assume the robe and crown of the sovereign is an intoxicating experience, I imagine, but the effect has been to devalue the democratic process, and the end result, given the mutable nature of the public, can only be chaos. As I write these words, large crowds of Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood supporters are rallying in the streets of Egypt. They believe that they embody the will of the Egyptian people. The military, exasperated, have called for giant counter-demonstrations to combat “terrorism.” The last act of this drama is nowhere in sight: when everyone is king, power must be divorced from legitimacy.
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THE PUBLIC IS NOT THE MASSES, BUT WAS ONCE BURIED ALIVE UNDER THEM
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, whose title I cribbed for this book, once noted that in pre-industrial society ordinary people lived “dispersed.” The rules which defined them were local and particular to class, religion, sex, age, and profession. 6 In Spain, as late as the 1930s, country women wore shawls and only city women were allowed hats. Punishment of transgressors was swift and harsh, but the reality was that few thought to transgress. It never occurred to the Gascon peasant that he shared many attributes in common with a professor of law in the Sorbonne. It never occurred to the professor, either. Each looked on the other as on a different species of humanity.
These narrow enclaves for the mind were swept away in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Education raised the intellectual, and technology the material reach of the ordinary person. The triumphant ideology of the time, liberal democracy, preached the universal equality of man and citizen. No differences in worth or conduct existed, it turned out, between Christian and Jew, man and woman, peasant and professor. The crooked timber of humanity was planed into a generalized, universal form.
Whether this transfiguration took place because it suited the economic pressures of the age, I am not qualified to say. But industry needed mass labor for production and a mass market for consumption. By “mass labor” I mean a generalized pool of workers equally trainable to the highest pitch of efficiency. Forging and deploying such a mass became the goal of “scientific management” and its great apostle, Frederick Winslow Taylor. With time and motion studies in hand, the scientific manager could program his workers’ every move as if they were a single instrument—a human machine.
The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work. 7
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The system was top-down, intrusive, and impersonal, but it became orthodoxy in the industrialized world, and it caught the attention of influential persons. Henry Ford and Lenin were Taylorists, each in his way. Both believed in an infallible vanguard commanding a mass of undifferentiated humanity.
The industrial age was Taylorist to the core. The ordinary person, so hopelessly parochial through all of history, got flattened into the masses: better educated, more affluent and mobile, and organized into gigantic hierarchies for every domain of activity. The masses functioned as the anti-public. More precisely: the masses impersonated the public for the benefit of the hierarchy, while stripping it of all spontaneity and repudiating its authentic interests. In the marketplace, for example, the mass consumer was created by stripping away all particularities and recognizing only certain universal needs and tastes: those satisfied by mass production.
In politics, the Taylorist organizing principle reached an extreme with the mass movements whose prestige crested just before World War II—laborists, anarchists, syndicalists, fascists, socialists, national socialists, communists. Here in the US, political machines—wonderful phrase—controlled much of the electorate. National parties were only slightly less skewed. The selection of presidential candidates by party elders invited as much democratic participation as a papal conclave. The Democratic and Republican masses could only say yes or no on election day, or abstain from voting. Often they were bullied or bribed into going along with leadership decisions.
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movements, and their admirers and imitators, sought to reduce political action to pure mechanics. This was true right and left, and regardless of the actual content of the movement’s ideology. The latter was usually a hash of pseudo-science, in any case: racial Darwinism for the Nazis, for example, or “scientific materialism” for Marxist-Leninists. What mattered was control of the masses. Movement members were disciplined with military rigor. The leadership, in turn, maneuvered the political machine toward a new conception of power, in which the whole of society was absorbed into the movement and the masses displaced the sovereign people.
There was no question of pursuing a personal interest in an affair under such a scheme: no space for a free-standing public. When we come across despairing words about a “phantom public” which “cannot find itself,” we should recall that this was the political landscape confronting Lippmann and Dewey. The two men knew that in an earlier time the public had shown a muscular independence. The public of the eighteenth century had been composed of networks of persons with knowledge of science and the arts, connected virtually, by correspondence. They called themselves, informally, the Republic of Letters, and their labors proved almost indecently fruitful: they helped popularize the scientific revolution, articulated the principles of liberal democracy, and inspired political revolutions in America and France.
In Dewey’s “age of the machine,” that assertive public appeared as extinct as the fashion for powdered wigs. The masses had buried alive the public, so it seemed, and with it the prospects for a democratic future.
Here I want to break the historical narrative, and fast-forward to the present. Anyone paying attention will have noticed surprising similarities between the periwigged citizens of the Republic of Letters and our own networked public. Both were largely virtual, informal, spontaneous, networked rather than hierarchical, open to quality rather than accreditation. And it’s true: they resembled each other more than they did the intervening masses of the industrial age. Whether this resemblance is an optical illusion or reflects some underlying causal link is a worthy subject for study and reflection—but it isn’t part of my story.
I’m more interested in considering the one significant difference between the two: the Republic of Letters, in the end, was an elite club, an intellectual
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Olympus far removed from the sight of Ortega’s particularized humanity. Whereas the networked public today is composed of ordinary persons. It spends more time on images of cute cats and pornography than on revolution or political philosophy. The new public, in fact, closely corresponds to the old masses, now escaped from Taylorist control and returning, in vital communities, to its particular interests and tastes.
So questions immediately arise: how did this strange escape occur? By what historical acrobatics did the machine-like masses, so totally in the grip of elites with scientific pretensions, emerge as the anti-authority public of today? Why were Lippmann and Dewey—brilliant men—so wrong about the future?
I don’t know how such questions can be answered with any confidence. Like the present and the future, the past is a tangle of complex interactions, each pregnant with possibilities. Causes are everywhere, and can be cherry-picked at will. The fall of European communism in 1989–1991, for example, has been ascribed by different analysts to causes internal or external to the system, political or economic or even military in nature. Each explanation is true to some extent. The problem is that we can’t run different versions of history, controlling for each factor. We have only the single instance on which to build our theories. Fascination with one cause at the expense of another often reveals more about the analyst than the event.
The best way to proceed is by sticking close to the facts. And fortunately the facts are not controversial. In the 85 years following the publication of Lippmann’s The Phantom Public, mass movements were defeated in war and outcompeted economically and at the ballot box. They lost their hold on ordinary persons. By the time the Soviet Union went out of business in 1991, the mass movement, in the eyes of its potential followers, had become a dead relic from a forgotten time. Desiccated specimens which clung to places like Cuba and North Korea served as illustrations of its utter failure.
On a somewhat different time-scale, the great hierarchies around which liberal democracy had been organized during the industrial age also began a process of disintegration. Political machines were torn apart by reformers. The parties lost much of their authority, including the ability to dictate presidential candidates. Not surprisingly, their membership began to defect to more rewarding arrangements, such as participation in advocacy groups. A similar loss of authority, as we will see, undermined government, business, and the scientific establishment. The decline, so far, has been less disastrous than that of the mass movement, but in both cases authority drained away from once-powerful hierarchies toward informal, spontaneous groups.
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My hypothesis with regard to the public and its miraculous resurrection from burial by the masses is this. Every public must behave in both an active and reactive manner, but the proportion of each at any period of history depends entirely on the structural options available. The eighteenth-century public was minute but highly active. The public in the industrial age was immense but bullied into a reactive posture. The masses absorbed the hundreds of millions of ordinary persons who entered history in the nineteenth century, and placed them under the command of structures which allowed few authentic decisions, few real choices of opinion and action.
But the public never disappeared under the weight of the masses. That is a crucial claim of my hypothesis. The public never became an inert prop on the social and political stage. Public opinion retreated to a reactive mode, but it remained a factor, it always mattered—even to Nazi Germany, which invested heavily in a persuasion and propaganda apparatus. The same was true for all mass movements and the regimes which sprang from them. They were obsessively concerned with shaping public opinion—more so, by far, than the liberal democracies.
Propaganda was the totalitarian’s admission that his power wasn’t total. Unlike democratic politicians, leaders of mass movements lacked feedback mechanisms: they had no idea what the masses were thinking, and could only hope to inject the desired opinions directly into the brains of their followers. Call it Taylorism for the soul.
But the masses could fail to oblige. The public, with its peculiar interests and opinions, still lived in them. It was not inert. And the power to react made it dangerous to autocrats. East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1980 saw the public cash in the ultimate choice: life-and-death revolutions against communist regimes. By 1989, all the propaganda in the world couldn’t save those regimes from being swept away. By 1991, the mother ship—the Soviet Union and its communist party—had foundered.
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The old public had been reactive because, structurally, it could be nothing else. TV viewers in the 1950s, for example, could only react as consumers to three channels, by either watching or tuning them out. For obvious structural reasons, members of that public were unable to develop their own TV programs. They couldn’t act. The same held true in politics, even in democracies—where, I have already noted, political machines and powerful parties reduced the structural options open to the public to a very few. The same was true of the industrial economy: mass producers invented a mass public with tastes that matched what was actually produced. And the same was true in information and communication, which saw a caste of mediators, under the motto “All the news that’s fit to print,” arbitrarily control the content available to ordinary persons.
Our age is characterized by a radical shift along this spectrum: from a public that was almost entirely reactive, to one that is hyper-active and ultra-intrusive. This was made possible by a proliferation of choices. The process resembled the radical strategic reversal described in my fable of Homo informaticus. As more structural options became available to ordinary people, the latter began a migration back to their original interests, and the institutions which had once hemmed their behavior lost the power to do so.
TV viewers became YouTube posters. Movement and party members morphed into advocates for personally meaningful causes, often grouped around virtual meeting-places such as the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page. In business, design took priority over production, and personalization emerged as the grand ideal for design. In information, technological innovation released an astronomical number of capabilities for use and abuse by ordinary persons, reconstituting the new public and enabling its assault on the temples of authority.
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4.3 Injecting a blond worldview: Nazi poster
This last development can help explain why Lippmann and Dewey got the future wrong: like every other person on planet Earth, they failed to foresee the advent of a personalized information technology.
That industrial organizations espoused Taylorist ideals and worked to convert the public into masses is, I think, beyond dispute. My hypothesis about the reemergence of the public can be summarized briefly. First, the public never disappeared behind the embrace of the masses or the control of hierarchical organizations. The public endured, though forced into a reactive mode by the stripping away of its structural options. Second, a combination of geopolitical developments and technological innovation opened an immense frontier of choices and capabilities to the public, which awakened from its reactive slumber and began to act. The public as actor immediately collided with the old institutions, and these, accustomed to control, reacted with anger and incomprehension, sometimes tottered, and not infrequently fell to pieces.
I mean to say that the new public has been the turbulent edge of the Fifth Wave. To the extent that it has intruded on events, established institutions have gone into crisis and faced the threat of dissolution.
THE PUBLIC IS NOT THE CROWD, BUT THE TWO ARE IN A RELATIONSHIP (IT’S COMPLICATED)
In this book, I have described the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt as the triumph of the public over authoritarian regimes. If you possess a literal cast of mind, however, you might arrive at a different interpretation. You would note that it was the crowds which brought down the Ben Ali and Mubarak governments— crowds never more than a small fraction of the population of the two countries. Since the public has not been shown to be identical to the crowd, you, in your literalness, could reasonably wonder why the former has been given so much credit for what the latter achieved.
The relationship between the public and the crowd is not transparent. Though closely associated with one another, the two are never identical. The public, we know, is composed of private persons welded together by a shared point of reference: what Lippmann called an interest in an affair, which can mean a love of computer games or a political disposition. Members of the public tend to be dispersed, and typically influence events from a distance only, by means of “soft” persuasion: by voicing and communicating an opinion.
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