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

Between 1996 and 2004, the conservative government invested much of its energies on an ambitious but fruitless foreign policy. Between 2004 and 2008, the socialist government focused primarily on social issues such as gay marriage. A visitor to Spain in 2007 could have watched on TV a government-sponsored commercial showing people literally hugging a tree, and another which featured two women kissing. In May 2006 the socialist party had proposed in Parliament that certain “rights” be granted to four species of great apes. ¹² The tacit assumption of the elites was that they had left far behind the basic questions of war and peace, wealth and poverty, and now confronted the task of lifting the country to a higher ethical plane.

When the economy began to wobble, the government denied the seriousness of the problem. The public agreed. In the elections of March 2008, on the verge of economic catastrophe, the socialist party won a record number of votes and was returned to office with a larger plurality than in 2004.

Recall Douglas and Wildavsky’s observation about the Center hierarchy: it is often surprised. Modern governments can keep an eye on a thousand moving parts, but they can’t predict discontinuity. They can’t comprehend phase change. When the crisis arrives, they are slow to grasp its dimensions. When the effects become palpable, they reflexively reach for the crude tools they have at their disposal, whether or not these will improve the situation. In essence, governments can throw money at unwanted change, or they can hurl bombs and policemen.

Despite later complaints about austerity, the Spanish government threw large amounts of money at the economic crisis. President Jorge Luis Rodriguez Zapatero promised to “pour out the investment capacity” of the state, and he was true to his word. Money was given to promote public works, to the autonomous regions, to the banks. Remarkably, as the economy continued to deteriorate, the government hardened its claims of competence. Zapatero insisted that the crisis had vindicated the importance of government relative to the markets. “Our policy is the correct one,” he said in November 2008. “Citizens and businesses

can maintain a degree of tranquility.” ¹³

To a young person, that must have sounded like fiddling while the future burned. In the twelve months before Zapatero’s statement, unemployment had ballooned by 37 percent. By 2011, total unemployment surpassed 21 percent, with youth unemployment nearing 50 percent. The unprotected class of workers naturally suffered most, but even public employees experienced cuts in pay and benefits. Prospects looked dismal as far as the eye could see.

The question, at ground level, was whether this disaster reflected only incompetence by the elites, or also corruption and criminal negligence. The answer, in large part, depended on the bonds of trust previously established between the public and their rulers: and there was no trust. There were only continued assertions of competence on one side, and increased economic pain and hopelessness on the other. Distrust poisoned the public’s perception of politics and politicians. The digital platforms favored by the young lent themselves to conspiracy theories. It was natural to believe the worst.

The Spanish elites and the institutions they inhabited had never made much of a case for themselves beyond prosperity. They failed on their own terms. In their experience as in that of so many others, authority turned out to be not terribly authoritative. Under the conditions of the Fifth Wave, the human consequences of their failure couldn’t be swept discreetly under the rug. The indignados were born on Facebook, and Twitter globalized their grievances. The economic crisis thus resembled a plane crash, a cataclysm out in the open, more than a problem in economics. The government had nowhere to hide.

The view from below, in Spain, in the troubled year 2011, fixated on the people at the top, on the ruling elites, on their empty claims, on what seemed like the decisive failure of established institutions to deliver on the social contract. Expectations of the good life had crashed and burned. The breach of trust, for many, extended well beyond any one party or policy to a “partycratic dictatorship” stuck in fossilized immobility. The socialists, after all, had been swept away to oblivion, yet the conservatives retained many of the same old policies.

Out of hopelessness, digitally expressed, a public had crystallized that was interested in the affair of abolishing the whole system. The “key message” of the protesters, wrote Manuel Castells, a student of the movement and a participant in it, “was a rejection of the entire political and economic institutions that determine people’s lives.” ¹⁴ This meant nothing less than the elimination of representative democracy and capitalism. If these idols of the modern world could be overturned, society would be purged of exploitation and distrust, and the individual would once again be free to determine his own existence. So the indignados believed.

A central question for the view from above—by which I mean, from the Olympus of history—is whether these beliefs were grounded in reality. Analytically, this is probably impossible to discover. Almost immediately you smack into the problem presented by alternative or experimental histories: there aren’t any. The indignados imagined that, without the “entire political and economic institutions,” they as a group, and the Spanish public as a whole, would be better off. But the question remained: compared to what?

Compared to recent Spanish history, the demands of the indignados sounded strangely out of tune. Take the dismissal of representative democracy. For 40 years, until 1975, Spain was ruled by a military dictatorship. This regime tolerated no dissent, much less public protests. A movement based on street protests and occupations of public places became possible only because of the rights of expression guaranteed by liberal democracy, which the movement wished to do away with. I presume the indignados had no wish to raise Francisco Franco from the grave. But given the alliance between a protesting public and the military in Egypt, forged in opposition to democratic results, this possibility shouldn’t be treated as just a witticism, either.

A similar dissonance applied to economic matters. Spain had been a very poor country within living memory. If “capitalism” meant the economic practices and institutions dominant since the end of the dictatorship, its accomplishments had been remarkable. In 2011, three years into the crisis, per capita GDP was five times what it had been in 1980: around \$32,000 compared to just over \$6,000. By the standard definition of such things, Spain was now a middle class country, no longer a poor one. Percentage of imports to GDP, always a good measure of wealth, had nearly doubled, from 17 percent in 1980 to 31 percent in 2011. The value of the Spanish stock market had jumped from \$91 billion to over \$1 trillion in the same timeframe. In 2012, four years into the crisis, there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the U.S.

The accumulation of wealth had predictably beneficial social effects. Life expectancy increased by seven years between 1980 and 2011, for example. This was due in part to a reduction of the mortality rate for children under five, from 18 per 1,000 in 1980 to only 4 per 1,000 in 2011. Educational enrollment at all levels improved significantly. Internet penetration reached nearly 70 percent in 2011. That year Spain ranked ninth in the world for Facebook penetration, with nearly nine million users. ¹⁵

I don’t believe it would be an exercise in phrase-making to say that liberal democracy and capitalism created the class out of which the indignados and their protest emerged. For all their deeply-felt sense of grievance, the protesters were well read, highly educated, mobile, affluent enough to have access to laptops and cell phones, and extremely adept at mobilizing the online social networks where the movement in fact began. They took democratic protections and freedoms for granted, as they did the air they breathed.

In the view from above, the indignados appeared in revolt against two distinct foes: the political and economic elites in Spain, and the historic forces which had brought them, the protesters, into being. Failure against the elites was probably inevitable, given the sectarian character of the movement. Results on the second front were less clear. Tides of opinion can take time to swell into a crisis of legitimacy: Spanish democracy, or capitalism, or both, may have been fatally shaken by the events of 2011, and now wait only for some political tremor to collapse. There is no way to know until it happens.

But such a victory would be self-defeating. If the indignados somehow managed to destroy the system they so deeply despised, they will have extinguished themselves and their movement by eliminating the conditions that made both possible. This is not a riddle or a paradox, but a political pathology frequently encountered in the wake of the Fifth Wave.

The Spanish protesters’ unwillingness to offer an alternative program to the status quo left them mired in negation. They could only mock, condemn, reject. That was perfectly in harmony with their mode of thinking. The documents they produced showed little historical awareness. Their few positive suggestions were vague and contradictory. It was only with a negation which implicated the awful present but also the dynamic past that the indignados found their true voice.

Pure negation is nothing and leads nowhere. Neither-nor resembles a curse in a fairy-tale because it’s open-ended. Under its spell, a revolutionary can never declare victory, or even glimpse the promised land from a high place. He can only batter away at the established order, until every trace of history has been erased from social life. Then he too, as a child of history, will disappear.

So I pose here, for the first time, in the context of the Spanish street revolts, the question of nihilism. By this word I mean the will to destruction, including selfdestruction, for its own sake. I mean, specifically, the negation of democracy and capitalism, with a frivolous disregard for the consequences. The view from above portrayed the indignados and their movement, in certain moods at least, as a preternatural hybrid of revolutionary aspirations and a societal suicide pact. They were a privileged generation, which, when confronted with an existential challenge, chose to cut and tear at their own roots. And they were not powerless or marginal. They commanded the great persuasive power of the global information sphere, and, according to the polls, they enjoyed considerable support from the general public. Even if they failed to overthrow the system, they could and did undermine its legitimacy—possibly, as I said, to a fatal extent.

The question of nihilism, now posed, will hover like a doleful spirit over the political landscape in 2011.

HOW A TENT CITY IN TEL AVIV BECAME A CIRCUS OF MIDDLE CLASS DISCONTENT

The tent city protests which convulsed Israel in the summer of 2011 bore a strong family resemblance to events in Spain, and, earlier, in Egypt and Tunisia. By now, this should not surprise us. Information generated turbulence. Demonstration effects were at work. On their televisions and laptops, a restless Israeli public had witnessed the power of the multitudes to humble even ruthless dictators. They knew what had been done, and how it had been done.

These eruptions of public discontent resembled one another because all were part of the great underground collision that is my story—and all exemplified the turning of the hinge that is the theme of this chapter.

The Israeli protests began, ostensibly, in Tel Aviv, but really in the same place where the trouble had started in Egypt and Spain: on Facebook. And among the same demographic group: the young, university educated, digitally connected. Daphni Leef, a 25-year-old video editor and film school graduate, played the part of Wael Ghonim—although, I think, with a difference. She was, by most measures, an ordinary person. She led no political party or social organization, had stirred not a ripple as a public figure in her country. She represented herself.

Early in July, Leef had learned that the lease for her Tel Aviv apartment would not be renewed. When it became clear that she could not afford another apartment within the confines of the city, Leef posted an invitation to a Facebook event: pitching tents on fashionable Rothschild Boulevard to protest the cost of housing.

The gesture succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. On July 14, Leef and a few friends spent the night at Rothschild Boulevard. In the following days, student and labor organizations jointed the protest. By July 23, a tent city sprawled between the boulevard’s shops and cafes, and 30,000 persons, chanting the slogan, “The people demand social justice,” marched to the Museum of Art. On the next day, tent cities and demonstrations sprang up in Jerusalem and over a dozen Israeli cities, including the working-class towns of Negev and Holon. As in Egypt and Spain, the dimensions of the protests expanded much faster than the ability of the authorities to make sense of what was transpiring. Two weeks after the first demonstration, more than 300,000 took to the streets—it was said to be the largest protest in the short history of Israel. Marchers in Tel Aviv unfurled a giant banner that read, “Egypt is here!” ¹⁶

The protesters’ message was savagely critical of the market-friendly government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and blandly admiring of themselves: words like “awakening,” “renewal,” and “rebirth” were thrown around by them, in an effort to describe the transcendental change they imagined they had brought about. They were not alone in applauding their actions. Opinion surveys showed remarkable levels of public support for the protests—up to 88 percent in one poll. ¹⁷

The tent city dwellers, though born on the web, quickly became the darlings of the Israeli news media. Sometimes it seemed as if all who could articulate a cause or an idea, in that articulate nation, had projected their hopes on the rebels, as on a blank screen. To read the early coverage and analysis of the “Israeli summer” of 2011 is to wander through a maze of wishful thinking. ¹⁸

The Israeli protesters attracted contradictory political fantasies because of the fuzziness of their definition. This repeated a pattern established in Egypt and Spain. The lack of leaders, programs, and organizational structure was if anything more pronounced. Those who spoke to the media on a regular basis, like Leef, were attractive and clever, but they lacked the power to command or decide, and they quarreled constantly among themselves. The question of whether to negotiate with the government divided the protesters. The goal of social justice—supposedly the North Star of the uprising—appeared to be as foggy a notion to them as to their media admirers.

Nevertheless, they unleashed a prodigious amount of kinetic energy, and for two months turned the very settled Israeli political landscape upside down. To explain this blind surge of pressure—to grasp the relation between events in Israel and my hypothesis of a 2011 phase change—I need to clarify who, exactly, the tent city protesters were, and what, in the end, they really wanted.

The who was plain enough. The protesters received support from the general public, and benefited from the active participation of some working-class elements—but this wasn’t them. They did not represent the Israeli population or its proletariat. Nearly all the organizers and most of the demonstrators came from Tel Aviv’s affluent, secular Ashkenazi families. This was a revolt of middle class hipsters, not of the downtrodden. Daphni Leef, for one, had been born into a well-to-do family, and partook of the generic leftist attitudes favored by the artistic community to which she belonged. She had refused to serve in the military, apparently out of sympathy with the Palestinians. In this, Leef differed from her prototype, the more conventional, politically ambivalent Wael Ghonim.

To judge by the groups which joined the tent protests, the people of the left played a more active part in Israel they had in Spain. In fact, some on the right have dismissed the entire episode as an exercise in manipulation, perpetrated by the leftist parties. This strikes me as unlikely for many reasons—not least that, if Israel’s moribund political left knew how to conjure up enormous crowds, it would have done so long before the summer of 2011. The left failed to insert any organizational strength or programmatic clarity into the protests. If leftists were abundant, the sectarian spirit of the people of the web was a far more powerful influence over the young rebels.

Hence the carefree incoherence of their demands. To give just one example: proposals were floated to eliminate university tuition and increase benefits for the faculty. ¹⁹

Even more than their Spanish counterparts, the young Israelis, as a class, had been engendered by the success of their country’s political and economic system. Israel had managed to avoid the worst of the 2008 crisis. Per capita GDP had climbed to over \$31,000 in 2011 from \$27,600 in 2008. At 5.6 percent, unemployment was not an issue. The majority of the demonstrators either held down jobs or fully expected to do so when they graduated. They were not a youth without a future. By some measures, inequality in Israel had increased, but the protesters’ demographic had been among the beneficiaries of this trend. Educated urbanites stood at the top of the pyramid. Arab Israelis and the ultra-Orthodox, with the highest poverty rates, languished at the bottom, and neither group participated in the protests of 2011. ²⁰

The people taking to the streets were the golden youth of Israel. That was the view from above and the view at ground level. Yet, like the indignados, they wished to cut away at their own roots. They wanted to be other than they were. They felt deeply, as one of them put it, that “Something in Israeli society is lacking; something is wrong with our collective priorities.” That refrain was repeated over and again. Something was missing from their lives. Something was wrong with their country. “This is not about housing,” a young journalist explained. “It is a welcomed attempt at patricide.” ²¹ In the negation of their world and of themselves lay the beating heart of the revolt.

The feeling infused life and urgency into the vague calls for social justice. By this phrase, the protesters meant many things. At the level of the system, it meant a repudiation of the Netanyahu government’s “swinish capitalism” and a reversal of market-oriented policies endorsed, over a decade, by the voters. Since 2001, the Israeli left had been decimated. The venerable Labor Party, which had midwifed the country during the epic years after its foundation, lay fractured and in ruins. The youngsters in Rothschild Boulevard often expressed a longing for the idealism of the old times. Although they liked to play at revolution—a mock guillotine went up in the tent compound—they imagined the future in terms of the past, and asked for nothing more radical than a return of the welfare state.

Social justice also meant fixing the high cost of life in Tel Aviv. Daphni Leef’s grievance had been personal before it became political, but it resonated with large numbers of people of her age and class. The young demanded affordable housing. Students wanted lower tuition. Parents conducted a “stroller protest” against the cost of child care. Doctors went on strike for higher salaries. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the zeal for “patricide” among this group was directly proportional to its loss of earning power.

From the tent city in Rothschild Boulevard came few calls for the elimination of the system, or democracy, or even capitalism of the non-swinish kind. But there were fantastic, almost messianic, expectations placed on the shoulders of modern government.

What Israel’s mutinous youth really wanted was this. They wanted the government to make things right. They wanted it to legislate a meaningful life for them in an egalitarian, fraternal, and, of course, affordable society. They had no plans to achieve this, or even a definition of what it meant, but it didn’t matter. That, too, was the government’s job—to listen to the politicized crowd, “the people” who demanded social justice, then somehow make it so. Israeli citizens, Leef asserted, “understand that we all deserve more; understand that they are allowed to demand more from the government.” ²²

The contradiction between the free-market predilections of Netanyahu’s government and their own haphazard calls for state intervention didn’t trouble them overmuch. They weren’t revolutionaries, but neither did they make a fetish of representative democracy—and, at the height of their popularity, they believed Rothschild Boulevard could dictate terms to Jerusalem. “From now on, the young people will shape the government’s vision,” declared Itzik Shmuli, 31- year-old head of the National Students’ Union and one of Leef’s rivals as media face of the protests. ²³

In the event, the government, though shaken by the magnitude of the revolt, reacted more nimbly than it had done under similar circumstances in Spain. Three weeks after the tent city was first pitched, Netanyahu appointed a committee chaired by economics professor Manuel Trajtenberg, and tasked it with proposing, within a month, specific policy changes to address the grievances behind the protests. In an admission that the mechanisms of representative democracy had failed in this instance, the committee was asked to act as intermediary between the government and “different groups and sectors within the public.” ²⁴ That was code for the tent city people.

The recommendations of the Trajtenberg committee included housing subsidies, tax breaks for low income earners, and tax increases for the wealthy and businesses. These measures went against the grain of the Netanyahu government, but they were approved in October 2011—a small, tentative step toward the welfare state desired by many of the young protesters. The size and volume of the demonstrations had represented a kind of political force majeure, to which the government responded because it felt it had no choice. Whether they were a fig leaf, as the protesters claimed, or sincere compromises, the Trajtenberg-inspired laws would never have received consideration if it hadn’t been for the tent city revolt. In this sense, they represented a triumph for the rebels.

That was not the way they saw it. To people with boundless faith in the powers of government, small bounded steps appeared like craven obstructionism. To those who hoped for personal transformation by means of radical politics, an offer of economic support looked like a bribe—and an insultingly tiny one at that. To a public animated by blanket negations, anything positive, anything specific, was experienced as a threat.

The demonstrators weren’t prepared to declare victory on any terms. That was true of the indignados in Spain, true also, with some local differences, of the crowd in Tahrir Square. It has proved impossible for the multiple revolts of 2011 to move beyond negation and reach an accommodation with reality. In Israel, the group around Daphni Leef refused outright to talk to government negotiators. They remained inflexible in their sectarian virtue. But even those who reached out to the government, like Schmuli and his students’ union, repudiated the outcome.

By then, the protests had passed their high-water mark. The last large demonstration was September 3. On October 3, police dismantled the Rothschild Boulevard tent city. Sporadic demonstrations continued into 2012, but with smaller crowds and diminished media attention. Political energy focused on the general elections called by Netanyahu for January 2013. Two prominent protesters—one of them Schmuli—ran on the Labor Party list and won seats in the Knesset. Their transformation from street revolutionaries to conventional politicians was a sign that the Israeli summer of 2011 had yielded up its soul to the Center.