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

Because of his untimely death, President Kennedy never stood for reelection, but neither did he suffer the slightest political damage from the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The public in large numbers continued to trust the president. A Gallup poll taken two weeks after the incident gave him an 82 percent approval rate, a 10 percent improvement over the previous poll. “The worse I do, the more popular I get,” Kennedy joked. ⁷ He was probably the last occupant of the White House to be able to say that. The Bay of Pigs and Kennedy’s inexperience in foreign affairs did not materialize as issues in the 1962 mid-term elections, which saw the Democratic Party maintain a lopsided majority in the House and increase its majority in the Senate to around two-thirds of the seats in that chamber. ⁸

Failure at ground level became for JFK a steppingstone to political success. How this was achieved lies beyond the scope of this book. Kennedy had mastered a formidable rhetorical arsenal. He was popular with the press, which worked to protect his reputation during a difficult time. But it is just as persuasive, for me, to say that coming out of World War II, and standing deep in the heart of darkness of the Cold War, the media and the public felt they were on the same side as the president—that his successes and failures were theirs as well. Such loyalty to an institution today would be considered corrupt or motivated by false consciousness.

To recognize how far the ground has shifted in the relationship between elites and the public, we need to fast-forward to an incident with somewhat similar attributes, much closer to the present.

Barack Obama won election to the presidency as the financial system of the United States and the world crumbled to pieces, with brutal economic consequences. The new president, like JFK, was young, popular, eloquent, and relatively inexperienced. The crisis Obama faced was more painful and fundamental to the public than a failed attack on a Caribbean island: but, unlike the Bay of Pigs for JFK, it was not of his making. The catastrophe had taken place on his predecessor’s watch, and political blame flowed entirely in that direction.

In the last chapter I sketched out President Obama’s reading of the crisis and how he expected to surmount it. His was an uncompromising sectarian critique of the Center: corrupt institutions, seduced by false, outmoded theories, had brought calamity down on themselves and the nation. His new administration, Obama believed, was free from the stain of the past. His experts were thus true experts. Their theories were data-driven and up-to-date. We already know where this logic ended: with the stimulus.

In the months after his election, President Obama gave two major speeches on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, as the stimulus package was formally known. One was at George Mason University, on January 9, 2009, before he was inaugurated, and the second before a joint session of Congress on

February 24, after the bill had already been enacted into law. What was remarkable about both speeches, beyond the rhetoric developed by the president in his advocacy of the bill, was the dissonance between what was condemned and what was proposed.

The president’s analysis of the causes of the recession was strategic, farreaching, and coherent. The crisis, President Obama argued at George Mason University, “is largely of our own making”—a moral failure more than an economic downturn. “We have arrived at this point due to an era of profound irresponsibility that stretched from corporate boardrooms to the halls of power in Washington D.C. . . . It’s time to trade old habits for a new spirit of responsibility.” ⁹

But the practical proposals to demonstrate this new spirit, as explained by the president, were all over the place. The stimulus bill was expected to jump-start the economy and “save or create” 3.5 million jobs, but it was also about promoting sustainable energy, repairing infrastructure, reforming our children’s education, improving the competitiveness of the American worker, and delivering better health care to all. At more than 1,000 pages in length, the legislation lacked a guiding thought: its mandates could drift, potentially, toward any corner of social or political life.

Such programmatic fracturing has typified government action under the conditions of the Fifth Wave. The effect on the public has been to engender alarm and suspicion of hidden motives.

Congress enacted the stimulus measure in February 2009, with the vote divided along party lines. It was, on the face of it, a triumph for the president, who had implemented a major piece of his political agenda less than a month after inauguration. White House experts had gone confidently on the record prophesying in detail how the provisions of the bill would reduce unemployment. We know today that they were wrong, and that the stimulus failed on its own terms, but it took time for this fact to become apparent. The Bay of Pigs had been an immediate and undeniable disaster for JFK—by contrast, the stimulus, in February 2009, was a successful if controversial presidential initiative.

Yet the public, which in 1961 rallied to President Kennedy, in 2009 rose in revolt against President Obama and shattered his governing majority in Congress at the 2010 mid-term elections.

The emergence of the Tea Party movement in 2009 anticipated many of the patterns followed by the insurgent groups of 2011. It began online. On the day before the stimulus bill was signed into law, Keli Calender, a 29-year-old Seattle blogger, organized a protest that drew over 100 persons. Before the event, Calendar had posted an ambitious challenge on her blog, Redistributing Knowledge:

Make no mistake, the President will be signing that bill tomorrow, I have no illusions that he will actually listen to us. BUT, maybe, just maybe we can start a movement that will snowball across the nation and get people out of their homes, meeting each other and working together to redirect this country toward its truly radical founding principles of individual liberty and freedom. ¹⁰

The group of local activists that coalesced around Calender’s call for action called itself “Seattle Sons and Daughters of Liberty.”

Two days later, on February 19, an obscure TV business reporter called Rick Santelli broadcast an anti-stimulus rant from the trading floor of the CME Group in Chicago. The thrust of Santelli’s complaint was that the bill promoted “bad behavior” by bailing out irresponsible mortgage borrowers. He left no doubt about the source of the problem: “President Obama, are you listening?” Santelli concluded with an activist message: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing!” ¹¹

Santelli’s cable TV channel, CNBC, had a miniscule audience, but the global information sphere provided amplification: conservative and libertarian bloggers chatted up video of the rant, which immediately went viral on YouTube. The popularity of this pedestrian TV performance should have been a warning that something was in the air. Tea Party protests erupted in at least 40 American cities on February 27. On April 15, 2009—tax day—around 750 protests took place across the US. A “Taxpayer’s March on Washington” on September 12 drew between 75,000 and 300,000 persons, depending on who did the counting. ¹²

After less than a year in office, President Obama confronted a new movement dedicated to frustrating his objectives.

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The Tea Party was a party in name only. Geographically as well as by temperament, these were Border types, people from nowhere constituted into hundreds of local networks, interacting by means of digital platforms like Meetup and Facebook but firmly rejecting any official organization, hierarchy, leadership, and spokespersons. The handful of national groups that helped with planning and funding, like FreedomWorks and Tea Party Express, were never embraced as representative of the movement, and tended to be viewed with suspicion. Alliances among Tea Party networks were described by one author as “tenuous, often arising for a single lobbying effort or political event, then disintegrating.” ¹³

The ideals propelling Tea Partiers into action were wholly sectarian, that is to say, against: against Big Government, high taxation, the deficit, the debt, Washington politics and politicians in general, and President Obama’s legislation, like the stimulus and the health care plan, in particular. This was a revolt against the Center, viewed as tyrannical and self-seeking. The seductive appeal of the Tea Party movement, like that of the Occupiers who were to follow, was the joy of negation, of bringing down the roof on the temple of political authority. Beyond a fundamentalist respect for the Constitution, any positive proposals inspired either lack of interest or fractious disputes.

The Obama administration, the grandees of the Democratic Party, and even the Republican establishment—all objects of the Tea Party’s uninvited attention— reacted to the uprising with surprise and disbelief. That has been true of every collision between the public and authority I have documented in this book. The Center, Douglas and Wildavsky wrote, is easily surprised. It finds it hard to fathom why anyone would question its decisions. In this particular instance, the president and the Democrats were fresh off a decisive victory in the 2008 elections. The most satisfactory explanations, from their perspective, were conspiratorial.

When, in August 2009, Tea Party activists disrupted town hall meetings held by congressmen across the country to discuss the president’s health care legislation,

Democratic Party leaders dismissed the participants as “astroturf”—Republican operators faking a grassroots movement. Once it became clear that mainstream Republicans were more likely to be targets than beneficiaries of Tea Party political activity, an alternative conspiracy theory was put forward: the movement had been “co-opted” by corporate interests, notably the brothers David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries. ¹⁴

There is always some truth to such blanket accusations. Republican candidates no doubt wished to ride the tiger of an anti-Obama revolt. The Koch brothers donated money and organizing muscle to libertarian groups, including some associated with the Tea Party. As hypotheses to account for the sudden eruption of people from nowhere into US political life, however, elaborate conspiratorial notions appeared, at best, insufficient. If the Republican Party or the Koch brothers could really play Pied Piper to the libertarian masses, why on earth had they waited to do so until after the presidential elections? If “co-optation” meant altering the direction of the movement, basic analytic questions about what the change was, and when and how it had occurred, needed to be addressed.

A simpler explanation was that the public was on the move. The Tea Party represented a substantial number of persons interested in a particular affair. This had happened before, in the anti-establishment insurrection that was Barack Obama’s 2008 bid for the presidency, and it was to happen again, in the phase change of 2011 and after. The public was on the move, on this occasion from the right instead of the left. The tectonic collisions that define our age had been resumed. That the institutions were blind to the situation—that they could not perceive a threat in mere amateurs, and needed to concoct elaborate stories that placed other elites in command of events—did not invalidate the reality of what was taking place.

As in every other recent uprising of the public against authority, the rebels of 2009 didn’t belong to the proletariat or the downtrodden, nor were they untutored know-nothings. They came from the affluent middle class. Tea Party shock troops appeared to be somewhat better educated, wealthier, whiter, and older than the average American. If the indignados considered themselves a youth without a future, the Tea Partiers could be described as families afraid for theirs. But by any historical or global comparison, their present was prosperous. ¹⁶

A strong tendency within the movement was libertarian, a reflexively antiauthority attitude embraced by many voters who had been politicized by Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy in 2008. These people were indifferent or hostile to religion, and tolerant, in principle, of what John Stuart Mills called “experiments in living.” Another wing of the movement was occupied by the religious right, which focused on social issues like gay marriage and abortion. The two groups had nothing in common except their negations: for a time, at least, that was enough.

The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have often been paired as ideological mirror images of each other. ¹⁷ I wouldn’t push this parallel beyond its natural limits. The Tea Party was about personal liberty, OWS about social and economic justice. Each, in a sense, was the beast in the other’s nightmare, the living horror their country seemed on the verge of becoming. If a similarity existed, it was found in the sectarian temper that identified the two movements as the work of political amateurs from the Border. Both feared the great institutions of power and money yet disdained to organize or appoint their own leaders. Both believed themselves to be the last outpost of civic virtue in a landscape of moral and political desolation. Between libertarian and anarchist, it may be, the distance can be reduced to a quarrel about private property.

Ideological differences have powerful consequences, and I don’t intend to downplay them. I only observe that ideology, left and right, must now accommodate itself to the deeper struggle—to the crisis of authority and the sectarian character of the public.

Unlike the Occupiers, Tea Party adherents swarmed head-on into electoral politics. Here was a difference that made a difference. And unlike the Five Star movement in Italy, the Tea Partiers did not strike out on their own. Instead, they focused their energies into transforming the Republican Party and making it the vehicle for their ideals. Success was partial, but still remarkable: in the 113th Congress, 48 Republican congressmen and five Senators belonged to the “Tea Party Caucus.” Many governors and state officials were also associated with the movement.

The high-water mark of the insurgency came at the 2010 mid-term elections. To an unusual degree, the Tea Party turned Congressional races into a national referendum on President Obama and his programs: in one survey of voters, 56 percent stated that they had cast their vote either for or against the president. ¹⁸ The approach favored the party with an edge in enthusiasm—in this case, the Republicans, who won big at the federal and state levels. The House flipped from a Democratic to a Republican majority, while in the Senate the Democrats lost five seats and, with that, their filibuster-proof majority.

For Barack Obama, this electoral calamity meant the end of one mode of governing and the beginning of another. His transformation was unique enough to become part of my story: I’ll pick up this thread at the end of the chapter. But any hope by the president to assert strong claims of competence from the Center —any idea that he could emulate FDR and LBJ with big programs aimed at big “problems”—had to be abandoned. Partisan legislative battles devolved to the margins of budget and taxation decisions. After 2010, not a single major program pushed by the president became law.

In less turbulent times, the Tea Party might have been expected to build on its surprising victory and challenge for control of the government—for example, in the presidential elections of 2012. Just the opposite occurred. Once President Obama’s political agenda had been checkmated, the movement began to lose cohesion and force. It was a revolt of the sectarian Border, motivated by the negation of the Center, and lacked positive proposals around which believers could rally and move forward after that negation had been achieved.

I have described failures of government under two administrations, spaced some 50 years apart: the Bay of Pigs for President Kennedy and the stimulus legislation for President Obama. The consequences differed in fundamental ways. JFK, whose troubles were clear and self-inflicted, found his popularity on the rise. The public rallied to a floundering president. In the case of President Obama, failure was, at the time, as much a matter of opinion as of reality, yet he faced a revolt of the public which wiped out his governing majorities in Congress.

The answer to what changed between 1961 and 2009 would fill a much fatter book than this one. In a sense, everything changed. I am less concerned with this trajectory than with providing some connective tissue to my theme: the revolt of the public and the crisis of authority, developments very much tangled up in President Obama’s difficulties but not at all in President Kennedy’s.

For governments to “fail” in the way I have used the word at least two circumstances must be present. Some empirical event must occur which is perceived as a failure. That much is obvious—but not enough. Just as important is a rupture in the relationship between government and the governed. Habits of command and obedience, trust in the competence of higher authority, faith in the stories which justify the elites—all of these relations must be frayed or broken, for failure to bear political consequences.

The presidency from which John F. Kennedy governed was a protected institution. His failure at the Bay of Pigs was blamed by the media on the new president’s youth and inexperience: he had not yet grown into the office. Kennedy’s ambivalent acceptance of responsibility allowed the media to tell a positive story about a young president learning his job. The Bay of Pigs wasn’t a failure. It was an important learning experience. The public embraced the story and supported JFK.

Matters stood quite differently with President Obama. Almost immediately after he began to implement his program, a chasm of distrust opened up between the president and a significant slice of the public. Rather than offer protection, the presidency, as an institution, exposed the incumbent to debilitating levels of suspicion. Obama the candidate had cashed in on this revaluation. As president, he was swiftly punished by it.

Barack Obama ran for the presidency as a righteous voice from the Border, rising up against a failed, unprincipled Center represented by Hilary Clinton within his own party and by President Bush as the retiring Republican incumbent. This made the US presidential elections of 2008 an early instance of the public on the move against the established order. As in all such events I have considered, the public possessed a new strategic advantage: control of the information sphere. The Obama campaign enjoyed unparalleled success telling its story, raising money, and recruiting volunteers online. ¹⁹

But the public in revolt also faced a strategic dilemma: having originated in a political vacuum, it lacked a unifying organization, ideology, program, or plan. The solution, hit upon virtually everywhere that the public has enjoyed political success, was an unrelenting focus on the particular wrong or injustice under assault at the moment. Negation, digitally amplified, has been the glue holding together a multifarious public.

Recall that the protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square comprised many ideals and opinions, but all were united in hostility to the Mubarak regime. The Occupiers, anarchists and liberals, stood against an economic system which favored the “one percent.” The Tea Partiers, who could be libertarians or religious conservatives, jointly opposed Big Government, exemplified by the stimulus and health care laws. Advocating a positive program would have shattered these groups: participants felt energized by what they opposed, but were murky and divided about what they stood for. In fact, when circumstances demanded that they spell out an alternative to the status quo, all three movements faltered and splintered.