The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

A crowd, on the contrary, is always manifest, and capable of great physical destructiveness and ferocity. It is a form of action which submerges the desires of many individuals under a single rough-hewn will. In direct democracies like ancient Athens, it could be said to represent the will of the sovereign people. Everywhere else, the crowd can represent nothing but itself. Yet the persons who integrate a crowd invariably make larger claims of identity: with political crowds, such claims often reflect the more emotive aspects of the public’s agenda. A crowd can thus perceive itself, and be perceived by others, as the public in the flesh, “the people” or “the proletariat” or “the community” in action.

On occasion—think of the civil rights march on Washington or the storming of the Bastille—the crowd has attained a powerful symbolic importance, with an influence far beyond its numbers or even its moment in history. It is then turned into a form of communication.

The public mediates the transformation of the crowd into a symbolic force. It can seize on a event, like demonstrations in Istanbul against the demolition of a park, then mobilize its organs of opinion on behalf of the demonstrators, in the process adding sentiment and meaning that may not have been present in the actual event. Used in this manner, the crowd becomes an instrument to communicate public opinion. But the crowd itself can also crystallize into a new focus of interest, toward which the public gravitates in ever larger numbers—that is in fact what transpired in Turkey, where the protests quickly spread beyond Istanbul and turned into a political uprising.

If the public can be said to re-create the crowd into a form of communication, it is equally true that such a crowd, once convincingly expressed, will create its own public.

A fateful example of this type of two-way influence took place in June 1979, when Pope John Paul II travelled to communist Poland, his native land. At every step of the pope’s nine-day journey immense crowds gathered—and the crowd by its sheer size communicated a transcendent truth to the scattered members of

the anti-communist opposition.

I was there, along with friends from the resistance, at the Tenth Anniversary Stadium. We, and a million others. For the first time, I saw a sea of people, with my own eyes. We understood then, we and our kind—the “outcasts” and “instigators” of the nation—that we were not alone, that we had a purpose, that it was not over, and that no one had broken us, the Polish people, down. ⁹

Here we encounter the demonstration effect at its most vivid and powerful. Individuals may have joined the crowd attending the pope from political, religious, or patriotic feelings, or for many other private motives. It didn’t matter. To the opposition, the crowd was literally a revelation—a flash of selfawareness which merged the identity of a small community of interest into a far larger public than it had imagined possible. With perfect sincerity, a handful of dissidents assumed the mantle of “us, the Polish people,” and turned the pope’s crowd into a persuasive argument against the communist regime. Many, inside Poland and out, accepted this interpretation. After 30 years of rule, the communist grip on Eastern Europe appeared to be suprisingly precarious.

The history of the public’s love affair with the crowd, with its impassioned rendevouz and heartbreaking abandonments, is a tale that has not yet been told. Here, however, my concern is only to note that, like the free-standing public, the spontaneous crowd almost disappeared in the age of the masses. It was reduced to an appendage of hierarchical organizations—mostly political parties and labor unions, but on occasion less established groups agitating for prohibition or civil rights.

The organization scripted the crowd with Taylorist care. This was done in the first instance by providing it with slogans, placards, and appropriate settings, but also symbolically, by proclaiming an event’s meaning before it occurred. Such events were mere tests of strength for the organizations involved: industrial era facsimiles of true public opinion.

The alienation of the public climaxed with the advent of the mass movement, whose primary function was to put a well-disciplined crowd on the street, often in military uniform and to violent ends. In Weimar Germany, for example, the police force was pushed aside while communist and Nazi “masses” murdered one another in street battles. On conquering power, these groups deployed the masses in splendid rituals to communicate their superiority over rival doctrines. Thus Hitler’s rallies at Nuremberg and Stalin’s May Day parades. Fossilized remnants of this system can be observed today: Cuba’s Castro regime on festive occasions still herds the masses to bask in their approval, and organizes “rejectionist” crowds to harass the opposition.

The mass movement buried alive the public and deprived the crowd of all spontaneous life and independence of purpose. Everything was scripted, and the scripts appeared insincere almost by design—a tendency that attained a pathological intensity in North Korea, where the masses were made to perform acrobatic tricks usually reserved for the circus. The shock caused by the joyous papal crowds in Poland owed much to the contrast with the official ones.

In the new millenium, the public returned with a vengeance, and its command of the information sphere permitted much greater intimacy with the crowd than had been structurally possible before. The public could invite itself to a protest on Facebook, comment from the streets on Twitter, and reflect on the larger meaning of the event on blogs, Tumblr, Reddit, and other open platforms. For the first time in history, public opinion could fuse, moment by moment, with the actions of the crowd. Such intimacy with the public enabled the crowd to escape predictable scripts and communicate itself directly to the world by posting cell phone videos on the web, endowing the contagion of revolt with the speed of light. This in turn transformed the street into a domain of political uncertainty frightening to all forms of authority.

The unpredictability of the crowd mirrored the public’s networked structure and sectarian temper. We discern in both the invertebrate profile of Shirky’s “selfassembled” groups: no leader, no hierarchy, no program, only a shared interest in an affair to bring the public to life and push out the crowd to the street. To authoritarian rulers like Hosni Mubarak and Syria’s Bashar Assad, the millennial crowd represented a terrifying new thing under the sun. Repression in the past aimed to cripple rival mass movements, like the Muslim Brotherhood in both Egypt and Syria. If it succeeded at this task, the regime owned the street.

Now the crowd spontaneously self-assembled. This could take whimsical form, as with the “flash mobs” which have engaged in bizarre behavior to show a disrespect of established authority. But it could reflect serious political planning, conducted virtually and adjusted moment by moment on the streets: “spontaneity” in such cases meant regime surprise caused by technological blindness. No wonder the first instinct of authoritarians has been to turn back the clock to simpler times—shutting down the web in Egypt, switching off the electric grid in Syrian cities, like Daraa, which were strongholds of the opposition.

Access to the global information sphere amplified the reach and impact of the demonstration effects resulting from crowd action. Members of the public could still experience the crowd as a personal revelation, an impossibility made real— particularly in Arab countries which had not seen protests of any size for two generations. Wael Ghonim’s reaction after reaching Tahrir Square on January 25 echoed the wonder and exaltation of the Polish activists watching the throngs around John Paul II.

The scene at Tahrir was one of the most enthralling I had ever seen. Enormous numbers of protesters—thousands, if not tens of thousands —covered most of the ground space in the square. This was when I realized Jan25 had succeeded. It would be marked as a historic day for Egypt’s opposition movement. ¹¹

But the January 25 protests had been inspired in large part by the success of the Tunisian crowds in chasing Ben Ali from power. Images of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation had reached Egypt as well as Tunisia. His death was mourned by the public in both countries. Members of the Tunisian crowd had documented their existence with the use of cell phone videos. In Tunisia, these videos could not be posted directly to the web, but Al Jazeera obtained and broadcast them into Egypt and the rest of the world—and by this path they entered the web, where they could be searched and viewed at will. Here was the information sphere at work.

The Tahrir crowd in turn assumed a heroic dimension for the Arab revolts which began in 2011. Caught in a crossfire between irreconcilable political antagonisms, Egyptians today speak with longing of the “Tahrir spirit.” The crowd, for a moment, transcended the fractiousness of the public. Incidents like the failed camel charge by Mubarak supporters achieved a kind of viral fame. Al Jazeera streamed live from Tahrir Square around the clock. The broadcaster made no effort to conceal its sympathy for the crowd. Other international newscasters, while less blatant, also portrayed the Tahrir crowd as the hero of the story.

The whole world followed the fortunes of the Tahrir crowd as if it were an epic adventure. Demonstration effects, as always, are tough to show conclusively, but the chronology of the Arab uprisings is suggestive. Ben Ali fled Tunisia on January 14, 2011. The Tahrir crowd first gathered on January 25, and persuaded Mubarak to resign on February 11. Large-scale protests followed in other countries: Yemen (February 3), Bahrain (February 14), Libya (February 15), and Syria (March 16).

No sane analyst would insist on a straight line of causation between the crowd in Tahrir and protests in other Arab countries. Human affairs aren’t like billiard balls or the orbits of the planets. I have said this before. But demonstration effects, while indirect, can be very powerful. Newscasters and web videos glamorized the Tahrir crowd to people whose background and political circumstances were not too different from those of the Egyptian protesters. The watching public in Yemen and Syria strongly identified with the crowd in Egypt: the love affair could now be conducted at long distance and across borders. The revolts that erupted within weeks of each other could hardly have been unaffected by these feelings, or by a knowledge of each other.

In the worldwide political collision between the new public and established authority, the image of the crowd has assumed a decisive importance. A willingness to face down power, even to die, in front of cell phone cameras, has equalized the asymmetry of this conflict to a surprising extent. A government can respond with old-fashioned brute force, as it did in Syria, but at the cost of tearing to shreds the social contract and becoming a global pariah. Every beating and every shooting will be recorded on video and displayed to the world. Every young man killed will rise again on the information sphere, transformed, in the manner of Mohamed Bouazizi and Khaled Said, into a potent argument for revolt.

If the demonstration effects of Tunisia and Tahrir helped inspire the Arab uprisings, the heroic image of the Arab crowd stirred those in the West interested in the affair of political change. They sought to repeat the drama of Tahrir in a democratic setting. The vector of contagion was the information sphere, the weapon of choice was the crowd: the resulting convulsion deserved a catchy name, but given the failure of the global imagination on this point, I will call it, simply, the year 2011.

CHAPTER NOTES

1 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Random House, 2012).

2 Al Jazeera, “Transcript: Egypt’s army statement. Statement of Abdul Fatah Khalil al-Sisi, head of Egyptian Armed Forces, announcing the overthrow of President Morsi,” July 3, 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/07/201373203740167797.html

3 “An Interview With Mohamed ElBaradei, Who Hopes For Reconciliation in Egypt,”Washington Post, August 2, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/an-interview-with-mohamed-elbaradei-who-hopes-forreconciliation-in-egypt/2013/08/02/e409eac0-fab4-11e2-8752-b41d7ed1f685\_story.html. Shortly after this interview was published, ElBaradei resigned to protest the armed forces’ violent repression of the Muslim Brotherhood.

4 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Ohio University Press, 1927).

5 Lippmann, The Phantom Public, 55.

6 José Ortega y Gasset, La rebelion de las masas (Revista de Occidente, 1930), 47.

7 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles ofScientific Management (Public domain book, 1911), 16.

8 Wikipedia Commons.

9 Maciej Lukasiewicz, “History’s Turning Point,” Rzeczpospolita, October 16, 2003, http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/1698.cfm

10 From Reinaldo Escobar’s blog, Desde Aquí, http://www.desdecuba.com/reinaldoescobar

11 Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 184.

12 Photographed by Ramy Raoof.

My story—I repeat—concerns the tectonic collision between a public which will not rule and institutions of authority progressively less able to do so. My misgiving is that democracy will be ground to pieces under the stress. An immense psychological distance separates the two sides, even as they come together in conflict. This gulf is filled with dark matter: distrust.

The elites who control the institutions have never really trusted the public, which they considered animalistic and prone to bouts of destructiveness. In effect, they sought to neuter the public by herding it into a mass and attaching it to established hierarchies. A glimpse at any American airport today will confirm that this horror of the top for the bottom has, if anything, grown more intense.

What has changed, then, is the public’s distrust for authority—and its increased power, in the age of the Fifth Wave, to translate that distrust into action.

Henri Rosanvallon, one of the few interesting political analysts today, has written of the “rise of the society of distrust.” ¹ The public, in a complex society, must depend on specialists, experts, and intermediaries such as political representatives, organized institutionally and hierarchically. When the experts fail, the public can only appeal to other experts, often from the same failed institution. The process has resembled a mutual protection pact among the elites.

PHASE CHANGE 2011

5

Failure typically gets blamed on insufficient support: the CIA, for example, demanded and received a bigger budget after 9/11.

An exasperated public has countered by notching up the vehemence of criticism and the frequency of its interventions. At times, in some places, the public has abandoned all hope in modern society and lapsed into a permanent state of negation and protest.

This chapter is about the year 2011, when distrust reached a tipping point and the public in many countries took to the streets to demand change. First came the Arab uprisings, with a familiar script. Protesters clamoring for freedom confronted dictatorships endeavoring to repress them. The fatal rupture of trust in the Middle East could be explained without stretching the analytic imagination: authoritarians cheat and lie.

By spring, however, the tide of revolt had swamped the liberal democracies— Spain, Israel, the US, Britain, many others. These were relatively open societies, bastions of personal and political freedom, but the public there deeply identified with the Arab protesters and envied their revolutions.

So here is my theme for the chapter. At some moment of 2011, the script went awry. Toxic levels of distrust sickened democratic politics. People began to mobilize for “real democracy,” and denied that their elected representatives represented them. They were citizens of liberal democracies, but they demanded something different. They wanted radical change: and the great mystery, casting a shadow beyond 2011, was what this change away from current democratic practices might look like.

A word on method. Many historians have scoffed at the idea that any year, or any cluster of years, could comprise a meaningful causal unit. I was taught at school that everything flows: the Italian Renaissance, with its love of the classical form, represented a moment in a series of classical rebirths going back to Charlemagne and forward to Franklin Roosevelt’s Lincoln Memorial. History, I was assured, advances in a stately procession, not in leaps and bounds.

When it comes to the behavior of complex systems, I now believe this is flat wrong. Let me explain why.