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

Liberal democracy has been the chief mechanism for mediating such internal flaws. The question of nihilism, now inextricably tangled with the crisis of authority, will be answered in terms which either affirm or negate the legitimacy of the democratic process. As I move to consider the effect of the crisis on government, this remains, for me, the most consequential and least noticed imponderable of our moment in time.

CHAPTER NOTES

1 Anecdotes and quotes on the Einstein-Eddington episode taken from Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster, 2007), 255-267.

2 Wikipedia Commons. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division under the digital ID cph.3b46036

3 From the World Bank Data Catalog website.

4 Both dictators took a personal interest in the development of science. See Richard Over, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004).

5 Henry H. Bauer, “Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels,” Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 643-660 (2004), http://henryhbauer.homestead.com 21stCenturyScience.pdf

6 “Trouble At the Lab,” The Economist, October 17, 2013, http://www.economist.com/news/briefing /21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble

7 The Climategate Emails, John Costella, ed., (The Levoisier Group, March 2010), http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf

12 Ibid., 34.

13 Ibid., 12.

14 Ibid., 144.

18 James Delingpole was the author.

60 Tony Elwin, “The Cost of Culture, a 50% turnover of the Fortune 500,” http://www.tobyelwin.com/ thecost-of-culture-a-50-turnover-of-the-fortune-500/.

61 “Creative Destruction Whips Through Corporate America,” Innosight, Winter 2012, http://www.innosight.com/innovation-resources/strategy-innovation/upload/creative-destruction-whipsthrough-corporate-america\_final2012.pdf

62 Courtesy of Richard Foster.

63 My combined chart.

64 Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics (Pantheon Books, 2005), Kindle location 66.

65 Duncan Watts, Everything Is Obvious, Once You Know the Answer: How Common Sense Fails Us (Crown Business, 2011), Kindle location 3312.

66 Taleb, Antifragile, 8.

67 Ibid., 126.

68 Jeanne Meister, “Job Hopping Is the ‘New Normal’ For Millennials: Three Ways To Prevent a Human
Resource Nightmare,” Forbes, August 14, 2012,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2012/08/14/job-hopping-is-the-new-normal-for-millennials
three-ways-to-prevent-a-human-resource-nightmare/

THE FAILURE OF GOVERNMENT

The previous chapter extended my hypothesis to virtually every domain of human activity and every exercise of authority once considered legitimate. The conflict, I maintain, is everywhere. Particular skirmishes, like Tahrir Square and Climategate, are what philosophers call “epiphenomena,” surface effects rather than causes, the crack and rumble of a dissolving glacier. Underneath these events, and far more consequential, has been the strange reversal in the relationship of the public—ordinary people who are interested in an affair—and the elites.

As I turn my attention back to politics, a number of troublesome questions have yet to be addressed.

Most pressing, in my view, is the evolution of democracy in an atmosphere made toxic with negation and distrust. Even a secure democratic government in prosperous times, like Benjamin Netanyahu’s in 2011, can confront a sudden uprising sparked by a loathing of the status quo. Similar insurgencies swept Barack Obama to office in 2008 and brought the anti-Obama Tea Party to prominence in 2010. Democratic governments have failed, and have been perceived to fail. Their replacements, too, have failed, and have been perceived to fail. Individual political figures have been discredited and discarded, but at some point the entire system must become implicated in failure—the cumbersome machinery of representative democracy will then appear, to those impatient for change, as part of the reason for failure.

Having prepared the ground and made the necessary throat-clearing noises, I begin, in this chapter, an analysis of how democracy has fared within societies of distrust like our own.

The question of the terms of government failure, which I raised in the context of the events of 2011, must now be made explicit. Government can only be said to fail relative to its own claims or the public’s expectations. If democratic governments really have failed with increasing frequency—as I maintain they have—then the balance between claims, expectations, and reality has somehow gotten out of whack. In this, as in so many other matters, I have been struck by the peculiarity of our historical situation. The utopian ambition of governments from the industrial age, which sought to perfect the social order, hangs ridiculously, like an outsized suit of armor, on their feebler, latter-day heirs. Yet the quixotic pose has been maintained. The fiction of extraordinary ambition and mastery has persisted, without irony, in our political language.

The rhetoric of democratic politics seems to have gotten out of whack with the reality of what democratic governments can achieve: and I propose, in the present chapter, to ponder the reasons why. The destructive effects of the Fifth Wave have played a part, but are only one side of the equation. Government found itself in a digital fishbowl, for all the world to see, but what the world saw still hinged, to a considerable extent, on the claims and performance and persuasiveness of government.

I am conscious of entering a landscape haunted by ideological disputes. At the back of many questions regarding political failure stands a larger question about the reach and limit of power. Modern governments have been around for a century and a half, largely pounding away at the same projects: increasing national wealth while keeping down unemployment, for example. We know by now that they fall short of omnipotence. An empirical boundary must exist, therefore, beyond which the application of power becomes self-defeating. Any claims that cross the boundary will proceed, with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, to failure.

Work has been done on the boundary conditions of effective government, but anyone with the slightest awareness of contemporary partisan politics will have no difficulty guessing the fate of this research. It has been drowned out by the din of special pleading.

For what it’s worth, my purposes in this chapter are analytical rather than ideological. I have treated the limitation of government as a function of the limits of human knowledge, not of ideological preference, and in this approach I have stuck close to Paul Ormerod’s brilliantly researched and happily titled book, Why Most Things Fail.

The mystery under analysis is the decline of the great democratic institutions, from the heights of ambition to today’s poster children for Ozymandias’s lament: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

HOW JFK WON BY FAILING WHILE OBAMA SUCCEEDED HIS WAY TO DEFEAT

It wasn’t always this way. Scroll back 50 years, and you come to an American government still able to tap into a seemingly inexhaustible pool of public sympathy and trust, even in the face of failure. So the first question to examine, let me suggest, is how we got here from there.

On April 17, 1961, around 1,400 armed Cuban exiles landed on the southern coast of Cuba, in a place called Bay of Pigs. Their objective was to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro. The exiles had been organized, trained, and supplied by the CIA. The operation had been vetted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and approved by the new president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. Everyone in the world, friend and foe, understood the attack in Cold War terms: as an attempt by the US government to knock out a budding Soviet ally in a country too close for comfort to Florida. A veil of deniability had been provided, but it was threadbare.

Within three days, the anti-Castro exiles had been utterly routed. All were either killed or captured by Cuban government forces. The fantastic theory that the might of a modern government could be overthrown by 1,400 men was falsified. Responsibility for acting on this peculiar notion fell squarely on the US, its government, and, inevitably, its young president.

The Kennedy administration was approaching the 100-day mark by which it had asked to be judged, so the timing of the Bay of Pigs debacle could not have been worse from a political perspective. The president’s youth, so far a source of glamor, risked becoming identified with inexperience. After all, his older predecessor, Eisenhower, had been Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe while Kennedy was serving as a PT boat captain in the Pacific.

The news media did not minimize the magnitude of the defeat. The tone of coverage and commentary conveyed a sense that the moment had become decisive for the new administration. “For the first time in his life, John F. Kennedy has taken a public licking,” wrote James Reston, top columnist for the New York Times. “He has faced illness and even death in his 43 years, but defeat is something new to him, and Cuba was a clumsy and humiliating defeat, which makes it worse . . . How he reacts to it,” Reston concluded, “may very well be more important than how he got into it.” ¹

In private, Kennedy despaired that the incident had cost him any chance at reelection. Publicly, he met with Republican worthies in a show of bipartisanship, and he delivered two statements on the Cuban situation: a nationally broadcast speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 20, and a televised press conference on the following day. More than the bloody facts on the ground in Cuba, those presidential statements shaped US public perception of the Bay of Pigs crisis. It makes for a fascinating analytic exercise to imagine how they would be received today.

In his speech to the newspaper editors, the president denied what everyone knew to be true: that the invasion had been a US show from start to finish. He gave credit to “Cuban patriots” for the attack, and insisted they had secured nothing more substantial than good will from the US government. Having established American non-intervention in the affair, the rest of the president’s speech was a fairly hardline assertion of the right of his administration to intervene, if necessary, in the future, to meet its “primary obligations which are to the security of our Nation.” ²

At the press conference, a journalist asked whether, given the “propaganda lambasting” the country was taking because of the attack on Cuba, it would not be useful “for us to explore with you the real facts behind this, or our motivations.” President Kennedy’s reply seemed aimed at a different question, but became central to the media story that emerged about the Bay of Pigs misadventure and the president’s part in it.

One of the problems of a free society, not met by a dictatorship, is this problem of information . . . There’s an old saying that victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan . . . I have said as much as I feel can usefully be said by me in regard to the events of the past few days. Further statements, detailed discussions, are not to conceal responsibility because I’m the responsible officer of the Government— that is quite obvious—but merely because I do not believe that such a discussion would benefit us during the present difficult situation. ³

It’s important to mark the terms under which JFK expected the discussion of his foreign policy failure to be conducted. First, he denied any American responsibility for the affair. This wasn’t really a question of misleading the press, which already knew the extent of US involvement, but it was a bald untruth— and it closed a door to accountability. He then apparently accepted responsibility for the defeat as the “responsible officer of the Government,” but since officially the US had not participated, it was difficult to say just what the president was taking responsibility for. Finally, when invited to enlarge on the subject of the US government engaging in secret conspiracies, he refused outright, and cited national security reasons for doing so.

From the perspective of the reflexive negations of our own times, it seems surprising how completely the news media bought into the president’s terms. No member of the White House press corps mocked the fiction of non-intervention. No secret documents were published in the press exposing the depth of CIA involvement in the Cuba operation. Few if any media voices were raised to object that the secrecy blackout was politically self-serving.

For the speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the White House had solicited input from two of the lions of journalistic opinion, Walter Lippmann and Joseph Alsop. Their words made it into the delivered text. This type of exchange wasn’t a new practice, but it obviously made media criticism of the administration’s response less likely. In fact, the media as an institution “appeared to rally to Kennedy’s support.” ⁵ Failure was transformed into a positive experience. As Thomas W. Benson observed in Writing JFK, the young president was typically described in the media as learning from defeat, after having assumed responsibility for it. The implication was that Kennedy, though inexperienced, possessed the intellect to master the demands of the presidency, and the strength of character not to shirk responsibility that was his alone. ⁶