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

Social and political arrangements tend to accumulate noise. The internal and external forces holding them together inevitably shift in ways that drive the system ever farther out from equilibrium. Such pressures work silently and invisibly, beneath the surface. They are cumulative, slow to take effect. But when change comes, it is sudden and dramatic. Pushed beyond disequilibrium to turbulence, the system disintegrates and must be reconstituted on a different basis.

Thus water is just water interacting with falling temperatures, until abruptly it becomes ice. The Soviet Union was an evil empire and a superpower until suddenly it was neither. Hosni Mubarak was an immovable pharaonic figure, then in two weeks he was gone.

Whether the events of 2011 represented such a dramatic phase change remains uncertain. Not enough time has passed for the consequences to be manifested, much less analyzed. But that is my working hypothesis. I believe 2011 marked the moment when the public first equalized the asymmetry in power with government. It did so by deploying digital tools to mobilize opinion and organize massive street protests. I also believe 2011 first exposed the gulf of distrust between the public and elected governments in many democratic countries. Liberal democracy itself came under attack. Since no alternatives were proposed, the events of 2011 may be said to have launched a fundamental predicament of life under the Fifth Wave: the question of nihilism.

As for the consequences, they bear watching. A complex system can be transformed by a phase change, or it can be annihilated. The view on the far side of the change can look like an embrace of new organizing principles, or like increased disorganization—perpetual turbulence. The state of affairs in Syria and Egypt as I write this suggests that this isn’t a purely theoretical concern.

THE LIMITS OF OUTRAGE, OR THE SOUND OF A SILENT SCREAM

On May 15, 2011, tens of thousands of mostly young demonstrators took to the streets in more than 50 Spanish cities. Their motto: “We are not merchandise in the hands of politicians and bankers.” ² The demonstrations were boisterous but peaceful, and very well organized. Yet they were not associated with the political parties or the labor unions, and they had received little notice from the news media. For this reason alone, they caused an earthquake in Spanish politics. The authorities had been caught by surprise. Spain was a top-down country, and those at the top had no idea what to make of the young demonstrators. They seemed to have come from nowhere.

An inconclusive debate began among the elites about the meaning of it all: whether the crowds in the street were a symptom of political health or sickness.

In the next few days, an “assembly” of Madrid protesters voted to “take” the large plaza called Puerta del Sol—it became their version of Tahrir Square. The move would inspire a rash of “Occupy” movements in the US, Britain, and elsewhere. The Spanish protesters called themselves the “15-M movement,” from the date of the first demonstration, but they were better known as the indignados: the outraged. The label had been borrowed from a pamphlet by a 93- year-old French writer, Stéphane Hessel, whose message to young people was, “It’s time to get angry!”

The protesters sounded more earnest than angry—and they were clever, popularizing a string of witty slogans. The Spanish news media compensated for having initially missed the story by falling in love with the well-spoken indignados.

By June, protests were attracting millions of ordinary citizens. Opinion surveys showed strong levels of support for the movement. This was extraordinary, since the only clear position taken by the indignados was their rejection of Spain’s existing political and economic systems. The youngsters who had come from nowhere wanted social life to start again from nothing.

In reality, of course, they had come very much from somewhere: the internet, a place of mystery to the authorities in Spain as it had been in Egypt. The demonstrations were not spontaneous, but had been planned for months on Facebook. A Facebook group calling itself “Real Democracy Now” had appeared in January, and had been embraced by an odd assortment of bloggers, activists, and online sects with suggestive names like “Youth Without a Future.” Most participants were young professionals or university students. Egypt’s uprising—which they had followed, like the rest of the world, on the global information sphere—served as an inspiration and, in many ways, as a model. The organizers kept a tight focus on the unifying point of reference, the affair they, and so many other Spaniards, were interested in: what they stood against.

Objective conditions in Spain supplied a conspicuous target. After decades of prosperity, the country had been battered by the financial crisis of 2008 and a collapse of the national real estate market. Unemployment was highest in Europe: among the young, it touched 45 percent. Housing was scarce despite the drop in prices. The socialist government, elected for its opposition to the Iraq war and concerned mainly with social issues, seemed out of its depth. Politicians, bankers, experts—all appeared detached from reality. Their solutions entailed more pain for the population. In the distance, Germany and the European Union demanded austerity.

The first demonstrations had been scheduled a week ahead of Spain’s local elections, presumably to influence the vote. The manifesto drafted for that original protest was a marvel of nonpartisan, non-ideological inclusiveness:

We are normal ordinary people. We are like you: people who get up in the morning to study, to work or to look for work, people with family and friends. People who work hard every day to make a living and win a future for those around us.

Some of us consider ourselves more progressive, others more conservative. Some are believers, others not. Some have well-defined ideologies, others consider ourselves apolitical . . . But all of us are worried and outraged by the political, economic, and social landscape we see around us. By the corruption of the politicians, businessmen, bankers . . . 3

The organizers went on to condemn the “political class” for “paying attention only to the dictates of the great economic powers” and forming a “partycratic dictatorship.” The “obsolete and anti-natural current economic model” was blamed for enriching the few while reducing the rest to poverty. In the Manichean scheme of the indignados, democracy and capitalism, as these existed in Spain, were the forces of destruction.

This being the case, you would expect a call for drastic action—if not the guillotine, then prison time for corrupt members of the political and business class. The language of the movement virtually trembled with desire for radical change. But none was proposed. The single positive proposal in the manifesto seemed strangely unequal to the magnitude of the crisis it described. It was brief and stated in the passive voice: “An Ethical Revolution,” it read, “is needed.”

The revolt of the indignados brought together, uneasily, two distinct tendencies animating the events of 2011. All of the protest’s leading spirits belonged to the same demographic as Wael Ghonim and Hoder: young, university educated, and brilliant at navigating the pathways of the information sphere. Lenin would have labeled them the vanguard. We would call them early adopters. Some espoused the culture of the web as well, reconciling a meticulous egalitarianism with the sense that they had become more highly evolved than their opponents. An instinctive rejection of authority, of existing structures, of the past, allowed this group to believe that they had transcended political parties, even ideology: that their revolt rested on a universally accepted standard of justice.

Some of the organizers, however, subscribed to the dizzying array of causes of the contemporary left: in their own words, “anarchists, . . . alter-worldists, feminists, ecologists,” and more. ⁴ The indignados struck an inclusive pose, but it didn’t require much depth of analysis to discern the leftist flavor of the anticapitalist, anti-“system” demonstrations. In the revolutionary jargon emanating from Puerta del Sol, the class struggle and the anti-globalization crusade loomed almost as large as the Arab uprisings. These people possessed “well defined ideologies,” a universalist vision, and a variety of programs for change. They had found an opportunity, in the protests, to smash a despised political order and hatch a revolution.

People of the web mobilized in awkward tandem with people of the left. The one provided a persuasive message, the other experience with street protests. They were united in their loathing of the established order—united also, and with no contradiction, by the sectarian outlook that pervaded their culture and generation to the core.

If, in the laboratory of rebellion, a political movement were stitched up to match perfectly Douglas and Wildavsky’s description of the Border sect, the indignados would lumber forth from the operating table. According to these authors, the sect rejected every form of leadership in favor of a fierce egalitarianism, and condemned, in principle, bureaucracies and programs as the root of all evil. Decisions demanded long debates, and failure to decide, for the sectarian, was less problematic than abdicating responsibility to a leader or politburo.

So it went with the Spanish protesters. They refused to acknowledge leaders, even spokespersons. Instead, each individual was encouraged to speak on his or her own behalf. They met in general assemblies which resembled nothing so much as an internet chat room: there were no moderators, and everyone who wished to speak, on whatever subject, was allowed to do so. Majority votes were considered an abomination of representative democracy. Ideologies and programs were tolerated as personal beliefs, but repudiated as drivers of group action. In this regard at least, the culture of the web overwhelmed the people of the left. ⁵

Damning ideology and party politics attracted many to the protest. Sheer negation, hostility toward the status quo, became the shared point of reference for networks and individuals advocating mutually inconsistent ideals. But after the crowds and the occupations, the point had been made. The logical next step was political change—and for change something more substantial than outrage or witty slogans seemed in order.

Enter the riddle: What now?

Some form of this riddle confronted the public during every collision with authority in the turbulent year 2011. What next? What structures will replace the old, despised institutions? How should society be reorganized? In every case no satisfactory answer was given. Given the public’s sectarian temper, none might have been possible.

A favorite gimmick of the Spanish demonstrators was the “silent scream”: to every man his own internal revolution. The misty “priorities” of the Real Democracy Now organizers also verged on political mutism: “equality, progress, solidarity, free access to culture, ecological sustainability . . .” ⁶ The question of how to stack and pay for these priorities was never broached, and the omission was willful. Every step toward an ideology or program meant the embrace of something old, something hierarchical, something unequal and corrupt. Since the indignados lacked the imagination to articulate a society both universal and sectarian, they vented their thoughts in silence.

With elections came a moment of fatal clarity. The May protests had been timed to coincide with local elections in Spain, but the movement’s approach to the vote was, to put it generously, confused. Fabio Gándara, one of the more articulate Real Democracy Now organizers, stated that he only asked the public to “vote their conscience.” Gándara was a political activist. He must have held strong opinions. He acknowledged he was going to vote, but he refused to say for whom, calling it a “private” decision. ⁷

Others were less timid. They labeled themselves “neither-nor” to denote a repudiation of the electoral process and the “dictatorship” of the political parties. A “Don’t Vote Them In” campaign flourished online, and word spread that a blank ballot was the way to endorse the demonstrators.

In the event, election results appeared wholly disconnected from the protests. The conservative Popular Party won big in May, primarily because of an implosion by the ruling socialists. This trend was exacerbated in the November general elections. The socialists were swept out of office with their lowest vote ever, and the conservatives gained absolute control of parliament. Regional and radical parties increased their vote, but were powerless in the face of an overwhelming conservative dominance. The informal spoiled-ballot campaign lacked any discernible impact.

Spain’s 2011 electoral season thus ended with the annihilation of the established left and the decisive triumph of the right. In the dazzling clarity of a great national reorientation, the indignados, disdainful of leaders, spoke with many minds. Some felt the elections confirmed the hopeless corruption of the system, but remained silent about what could or should be done. Others concluded that true change could only be achieved by going to the people and creating more democratic social structures—a sectarian dream amounting to political abdication.

5.1 A silent scream in Madrid ⁸

The people of the left knew better. They understood the dimensions of the defeat. Their hopes had been blasted by the electorate, and the destruction of the socialists ensured conservative rule, essentially without opposition, for many years.

Contemplating the wreckage, some of them reconsidered the wisdom of neithernor. To write off the socialists as “the same old shit” had been wrong, wrote one regretful indignado: “they may be a shit, we’d have to discuss it, but it isn’t the same shit . . .” ⁹ This was as incisive as the movement’s political analysis got.

On December 19, 2011, less than a month after the parliamentary elections, the last occupiers of Puerta del Sol declared a period of “indefinite active reflection.” They could sense the tide of public opinion flowing away from their cause.

The 15-M is losing participation, we see it in the demonstrations, in assemblies, in the neighborhoods, in activities, in the internet . . . This is the time to stop and ask ourselves some deep questions . . . Have we stopped listening to each other? Are we reproducing the forms of old activism that have been shown to be useless because they exclude so many people? ¹⁰

The sectarian impulse had generated vast crowds, excitement, self-righteous condemnation of Spain’s ruling institutions. Digital networks had become a political force. The legitimacy of representative democracy and capitalism had been damaged. The socialist party, comfortably in office when the demonstrations began, had been gutted. Everything was different, but nothing had changed. Not a single project or policy or idea representing the worldview of the indignados had been put in place. It was time for the occupiers to go home.

THE SOURCES OF OUTRAGE VIEWED FROM BELOW, VIEWED FROM ABOVE

I want to measure the distance between the rhetoric of the indignados and the conditions which were the source of their outrage. To do this, I will peel back a few layers of Spanish political and economic life, and examine these from two perspectives. One is from below, from ground level, the way the young people of the movement experienced their situation. From this place, the revolts of 2011 can be explained by the colossal failure of Spain’s ruling institutions. The second perspective will be the bird’s eye view of history—and it will show that the revolt of the indignados was propelled by a self-destructive contempt for the world which had created the young rebels.

The two perspectives, I fear, are not mutually exclusive, and may well be complementary. It is perfectly possible for the elites to lapse into paralysis while the public staggers into nihilism. Indeed, this could be our future.

The view from below immediately presents us with a fundamental question: what should be the public’s expectations of government? We know the indignados, along with millions of Spaniards, felt cheated of their expectations to the point of outrage and revolt. Were they justified? The answer depends, in part, on what is possible for a modern government to achieve, the kinds of activities it can perform competently. This secondary question, though encrusted with ideological concerns, is to some extent an empirical puzzle: I promise to

give it full attention in Chapter 7.

But our answer also depends on the government’s claims of competence over whole domains of activity—whether such claims are sincere and true, wishful thinking but false, or purely fraudulent. Once the public accepts the claims, an expectation will have been formed, and failure to perform will appear like a breach of the social contract.

If we had examined the Spanish government on the eve of the economic crisis, we would have found it to be, in many ways, typical of the modern Leviathan. It wielded power and requisitioned treasure—just under 30 percent of the country’s wealth in 2007, a moderate figure by global standards. It gathered vast amounts of information. A large bureaucracy, after presumably consulting this information, reallocated both power and treasure though a tangle of obscure, often contradictory programs. As has been true of all national governments, transparency mattered less than the care and feeding of favored constituencies. And as has been generally the case, the government seemed incapable of balancing the books—accumulated debt also stood at 30 percent of GDP in 2007. It was rapidly declining, however. ¹¹

Certain circumstances were unique to Spain. Central authority was squeezed from below by a bevy of “autonomous” regional governments—19 in all, with some, like the Basque country and Catalonia, harboring pretensions to independence. The Spanish government was thus forced to share power and treasure with political entities which were, at best, indifferent to its success, and at worst actively opposed to its rule.

It was also squeezed from above by the monetary and regulatory machinations of the European Union. The EU, in 2008, consisted of 27 countries which had yielded to an administrative superstructure some aspects of their sovereignty. The administration was pure Center hierarchy—bureaucratic, unelected, and largely unaccountable. The powers ceded by the member states were vague and controversial.

The surrender of traditional control over the currency was clear enough, however. In 1999, Spain became part of a “euro zone” with 16 other EU countries. The reasons behind this monetary union need not concern us here. What was important was the government’s loss of authority over fiscal issues which previously had been settled by political means, and the increased distance between the Spanish public and those who determined monetary policy. Money in Spain was controlled by shadowy experts in Frankfurt. This destroyed the sense of trust needed in case the economy went bad—which it did, in a big way, after 2008. Predictably, the EU and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, ranked high in the indignados’ gallery of villains.

Leviathan is a massive but invertebrate monster. Add the separation of authorities normal to a parliamentary democracy, and you have, in the Spanish government, a babble of voices, a muddle of cross purposes, and a multitude of decision centers. The system could work only if the elites at all levels broadly agreed on the direction of governance, and a large enough segment of the public could be persuaded that the system worked to its benefit.

That’s precisely what transpired. The protesters were correct to charge the two major parties with espousing identical principles and similar policies. Socialists and conservatives differed on marginal questions—Middle East policy, social affairs—but were of one mind on democracy, capitalism, the welfare state, the euro, and the EU. In a hindsight clouded with failure and distrust, this looked like collusion, even corruption. At the time, however, it would have been selfevident that, absent such a consensus on policies, the lumbering machinery of the Spanish state would have ground to a halt.

And for many people over many years, the system seemed to work wonderfully well. A 25-year-old in 2011 would be able to remember only peace, relative social tranquility, and endless prosperity before the crisis. The last year of negative growth had been 1993. A majority of Spanish workers enjoyed ironclad security in their jobs. For obvious reasons, this segment of the public embraced with some passion the “two-party, one-system” formula. The substantial minority of workers with little or no job security included young people disproportionately—but like most young people in ordinary times, they were politically unimportant.

Both major parties behaved as if they had solved the riddle of the Sphinx, asserting far-reaching claims of competence over many domains of social life. They were democratic politicians. It was in their nature to take credit for the apparent success of the system. Questions of luck or complexity never entered the political discourse. The Spanish public certainly didn’t raise such questions, or the possibility that the economy might have prospered despite, rather than because of, the politicians. It was a democratic public. It wished to believe the exaggerated claims of the government. There were no serious street protests in the fat years.