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

Much the same happened to President Obama’s public support. He had been a sectarian candidate, vehemently against, earning his political spurs as an opponent of the Iraq war and running for president on a platform of total repudiation of the Bush legacy. His positive program, however, was vague and unformed. A slogan like “Change we can believe in” appealed to many contradictory political opinions. Once he was elected, any program he espoused was bound to alienate a portion of his base. Strong evidence suggests that the Tea Party was nourished by independents defecting from the president’s camp— many of them, I suspect, libertarians who had been disgusted with President Bush but remained suspicious of big government programs. ²⁰

The rupture between President Obama and the Tea Party was prefigured by the decline in the legitimacy of the office of the presidency. Multiple causes drove that decline, not all of them connected to the conflict that is the theme of this book. At some point after the congenial era of JFK, the elites fell out of love with politics and politicians. The news media, pre-eminently, withdrew its protection from democratic institutions, including the presidency, and began to portray elected officials in the guise of inveterate liars. ²¹ For my purposes, it should be enough to say that, by the time the public arrived as a force on the political stage, the presumption of a common purpose that hedged Cold War presidents had dissolved in an acid bath of distrust.

One similarity endured, however. The claims of competence made by the government over which Barack Obama presided were as extraordinary and improbable as those asserted in JFK’s time. Everything had been diminished except the talk. The radical disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality of government was apparent to anyone with eyes to see, and, amplified by the information sphere, was itself a major vector for the contagion of distrust.

HOW BRASILIA AND CABRINI GREEN BECAME DODD-FRANK AND THE EU CONSTITUTION

The claims made by governments today, and possibly even believed by them, were inherited from their predecessors of the industrial age. The same applies to the public’s expectations of government. The public looks past the feeble figures of their actual rulers to the towering ambitions of the industrial age. These ambitions, I note, were almost never realized, but that doesn’t matter. They were impressive and persuasive, they were articulated at a time when government controlled the means of communication, and they have become, without much thought or discussion, the default setting of democratic politics today.

So any attempt to examine the claims of government against the reality of what is possible must necessarily begin with a bit of history.

What James C. Scott has called the twentieth century’s “high modernist” approach to government routinely gambled on colossal projects designed to bring perfection to the social order. ²² Authoritarian examples of such projects were Stalin’s collectivization of Soviet agriculture, Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” for China, and Julius Nyere’s “villagization” of Tanzania. Democratic examples included the building of the city of Brasilia, “urban renewal” housing projects like Chicago’s Cabrini Green, and the various “wars” waged by the US government against poverty, crime, drugs, and cancer.

The purpose in each case was to engineer perfection in social relations by the application of political power. High modernist ideology was a utopian faith: it assumed that rational planning and scientific knowhow, if imposed on a gigantic enough scale, could eradicate the miseries of the human condition, from tyranny and inequality to hunger and disease. The enemy was history, mother of superstition and disorder. The hero was the expert-bureaucrat, who could wipe the slate clean. We have met this character before: Lippmann’s “specially trained man,” magically wielding his “wider system of truth.”

High modernism suited the hierarchies of the industrial age. In politics, this was true for dictators and elected presidents, left and right. The appeal was structural. Everything cascaded from the top down. Only the elites possessed the technical and scientific training to rationalize society. The public at that time was still considered a formless mass—carrier of the imperfections which it was the ambition of government to eliminate forever. The ruling elites wished to raise this human mass closer to their own higher state of being. Their ambitions were altruistic. Their intentions were pure. If they were ruthless in their means—these included, at different times, forced relocation, intrusive surveillance, even incarceration and death—it was because they believed, with an unwavering conviction, in the justice of their cause.

Under the spell of this ideology, governments defined conditions like economic backwardness as “problems,” and focused on some immediate solution with an almost manic intensity. “The clarity of the high-modernist optic is due to its resolute singularity,” Scott wrote. “Its simplifying fiction is that, for any activity or process that comes under its scrutiny, there is only one thing going on.” ²³ The tendency to political gigantism followed naturally from this mindset.

The construction of Brasilia can stand as an example of the stupendous ambition of government in the last century. The project began in 1957 under Juscelino Kubitschek, democratically elected president of Brazil. A new capital would be built out of nothing in the northern wilderness of the country, and by sheer force of rational planning and technology, it would cut, at a single stroke, the knot of poverty and underdevelopment. Vast apartment blocks, laid out in perfect geometric grids, were provided with ideal living spaces, as determined by experts. Fantastically wide highways, devoid of sidewalks, crisscrossed the city. Naturally, the whole design was oriented toward the centers of political power, whose palaces were often isolated by enormous empty spaces. Naturally, only the ruling elites, the politicians and the expert-bureaucrats, were to dwell in this glorious City of Man. But the project meant to transform Brazil into a modern nation and radically improve the lot of ordinary Brazilians. It was utopian in spirit and intent. Building the city, Kubitschek promised, would win Brazilians “fifty years of progress in five.” ²⁴

Brasilia stood for the negation of Brazil: of the real country, with an actual history, with habits and styles evolved from past experience. To achieve perfection, the world had to be made anew. That was the extraordinary claim of high modernist government—handed down, in the form of immoderate rhetoric, to the governments of our own time.

No less extraordinary was the fact that virtually all attempts to enforce this claim met with failure, yet failure never became part of the story. The laborers who built Brasilia, for example, were supposed to leave after their work was done, but instead stayed on, lodged in wholly unplanned, ramshackle housing. Wealthy persons who needed to live near the capital disliked the antiseptic apartment blocks and built irrational mansions around the periphery. By 1980, according to Scott, “75 percent of the population of Brasilia lived in settlements that had never been anticipated,” and this messy, unofficial Brasilia sustained and underwrote the austere modernist capital. ²⁵ The dream of fast-forwarding Brazil’s economy had been forgotten long before.

Under authoritarian governments, the zeal to make the world anew inflicted horrors on the public. Dozens of millions of human beings died in Soviet collectivization and the Great Leap Forward. This story is well known, yet rarely linked to its cause. Nyere’s villagization campaign was a version of Soviet-style collectivization, 30 years after the disastrous failure of the latter should have been apparent. While the tally of victims in Tanzania was somewhat less appalling, the results were essentially the same.

Similarly, Cabrini Green, like most housing projects, has been razed to the ground. The wars waged by the Federal government against social conditions have ended with the enemy standing more or less where he was before hostilities began. The failures of high modernist democracy also are well known, but disconnected from their source. I say here that the connection must be made, if you wish to understand the predicament of representative democracy.

All of us, public and elites, live under the historic shadow of governments that sought to re-create the human condition.

Today, few governments imagine this to be possible or desirable. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the mania to make the world anew has gone out of fashion. But instead of acknowledging that they have awakened from a nightmare of perfectionism, elected governments appear ashamed of their impotence, frustrated by their ineptness. Instead of entering into a new age, political life in democratic countries feels old and late. Politicians shiver under the immense shadow of the past. They sense that the public is divided on the question of high modernism. The indignados and the Occupiers, for example, demanded the abolition of history and the release of human relations from the prison of memory.

To return to my concrete examples: President Kennedy belonged to a different age. The Bay of Pigs was a typically ambitious high modernist project, an attempt to spark the overthrow of an established regime with a few hundred armed men. Typically, too, the project failed, yet failure lacked negative political consequences and never became part of the story.

President Obama, however, is very much a man of our own day: what I propose to call, in this context, late modernism, to capture the prevalent feeling of the times. The political landscape around him has grown flatter. The circle of possibilities has contracted. I have dealt briefly with the path between then and now: whatever the chain of causation, the change itself has been undeniable.

When Barack Obama entered into office, he stood in the shadow of his predecessors. He looked back with envy and nostalgia to FDR, LBJ, even Ronald Reagan. Like all his contemporaries, President Obama imitated the high modernist habit of defining specific conditions as immense problems which demanded equally large solutions. In the recession of 2009, he found the need to make “a clean break from a troubled past, and set a new course for our nation.” ²⁶ President Bush had done much the same after the atrocities of 9/11. Instead of focusing on the group that perpetrated the attack, he declared a global “war on terror.”

Late modernist governments have asserted their claims of competence from the same peak of ambition which launched the high modernist projects. This has placed them in a false and dangerous position. High modernism failed, but it involved governments in actions of monumental proportions, which dazzled elites and public alike by the scope of their objectives. The story told about these projects wasn’t one of failure but of epic activity, high drama, reaching for the stars.

It is too late in the day now for such romance: government has lost the will for heroic effort.

The economic situation of 2009 was framed by President Obama as demanding a clean break from the past and a new course for the country. Yet he lacked the manic “singularity” of high modernism, and his proposed solution, the stimulus, was a grab-bag of activities needing over 1,000 pages to describe, costing nearly \$800 billion, but somehow, after all that, generating very little drama. The president never followed up on the premise of a new start for the nation, never engaged in epic combat against the dead hand of history. His mode of governing was wordy, tactical, splintered among many objectives. He wanted every deserving cause to get a donation. The stimulus never came close to matching the razzle-dazzle of Brasilia or the war on poverty, and it attracted a fierce, determined opposition from the start.

The president pitched his rhetoric on an ambitious high modernist plane, but he directed the actions of his administration with late modernist timidity, constrained, to be sure, by pressure from a restless public. The profound disconnect between talk and action gives the game away. The aims of democratic government have shifted, even if the language of politics has yet to catch up. High modernist government was an austere prophet, demanding the destruction of the muddled present to make room for the perfect future. Late modernist government is more like a kindly uncle, passing out chocolate chip cookies to his favorite nieces and nephews. He doesn’t wish to transform them. He just wants them to be happy—most particularly, with him.

If high modernism in power was an engine of perfection, late modernism has become a happiness machine. It feels bound to intervene anywhere it has identified groups that were somehow victimized, disabled, troubled, below average, offended, uncomfortable—actually or potentially unhappy. Its actions are the political equivalent of handing out a chocolate chip cookie: government today desperately wishes to be seen doing something, anything, to help, and be recognized for its good intentions. There are no boundaries to intervention, but no epic outcomes either. Elected officials know perfectly well that the public is on the move, and are terrified of the consequences. Their chief ambition is to persuade us that they feel our pain, are on our side, have given a little money to our favorite cause, if only we, the public, allow them to last out their terms in peace.

Interventionism has substituted a thousand tactics for a single bold strategy. Programs seem scarcely intelligible in terms of their stated purposes, and, like the stimulus, need to be legislated at exhausting length. President Obama’s signature program, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, sprawled over 900 pages of contradictory minutiae: the word “waiver” appeared 214 times. The Dodd-Frank bill that tightened regulation of the US financial system in 2009 covered 848 pages. For comparison, it took 31 pages in 1913 to establish the Federal Reserve, 37 to wrap up the Social Security Act of 1935.

The itch for microcosmic social adjustments is not an American invention. The democracies of Europe surrendered to it first, and with far more conviction. The European Union’s proposed constitution of 2004, for example, contained 400 articles (the US constitution has seven) and 855 pages, in which every conceivable strand of right-thinking opinion was awarded a chocolate chip cookie.

For Britain, Paul Ormerod compiled a list of the Early Day Motions of

Parliament—a procedural device that allows any MP to seek the government’s support for a pet project.

On a single day chosen at random in 2004, the British government was urged . . . to hold a full inquiry into political opinion polls; give air quality a higher priority; take firm action against ‘disablism’; give a posthumous VC to Lieutenant-Colonel Paddy Mayne; introduce Northern Ireland-wide standards for care and access to arthritis treatments; press for the introduction of regulations to improve safety standards in European holiday resorts; increase the amount of funding to hospices; not bring back the poll tax; ensure that members of the British Diplomatic Corps can work safely in Bangladesh; deal firmly with attacks on NHS staff; propose the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement; set up an independent public inquiry into Gulf War Syndrome; support the Pay Up For Pensions march; invest in the East Coast mainline railway; ban smoking in public; make clear the cost to Oxfordshire County Council of an asylum centre; support small business in legal action against large foreign multinationals; apologize for claiming Iraq had WMDs; amend the finance bill to allow people to invest in films; and, finally, abolish the need to reballot to maintain trade union political funds. ²⁷

Ormerod’s assessment: “The urge to intervene, to be seen to be doing something, has reached epidemic proportions.” ²⁸

The effect of this secular trend has been to engage the legitimacy of elected governments across the entire surface of society, but to do so thinly and ineffectively, like oil on water. From obesity to climate change, nothing is so personal or so cosmic that it can’t be reckoned a failure of government. If political power has become the guarantor of happiness, then politicians must take the blame for the tragic dimension of human life. Democracy, as a system, must be held accountable for every imperfection and anxiety afflicting the electorate. Political intervention, though a gesture of appeasement to the public, has compounded the distrust it aimed to nullify. The stimulus and health care bills energized the revolt of the Tea Party, and the EU constitution, for all its genuflections before accepted opinion, went down in defeat.

Failure, I repeat, is a function of government claims and public expectations. High modernist governments claimed that they could do anything to achieve perfection. Rhetorically, their present-day heirs have taken on this burden too, to which they have added the claim that they can intervene anywhere to promote happiness. The history of these claims in action can best be described as a humbling collision with reality. Failure has been the rule, and the impact of failure has been to bleed legitimacy away from the democratic process.

The public, for its part, has tended to accept government claims at face value. The ambitious rhetoric of the last 100 years has evolved into the natural language of democracy, and the public now takes it for granted that government could solve any problem, change any undesirable condition, if only it tried. The late modernist urge to intervene, with its aimless meandering, has been interpreted by the public as either tyranny or corruption—never, somehow, as the ineffectual pose of a kindly uncle. Yet government interventions have chased public grievances. Ormerod’s endless list of parliamentary claims of competence can find a mirror image in the equally endless expectations of government culled by Manuel Castells from Occupier statements:

. . . controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the militaryindustrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet . . . ²⁹

The public has judged government on government’s own terms, but added bad intentions. My analysis of this complex set of relations arrives at a different place: high modernist claims exceeded government’s capacity for effective action. Late modernist dithering can be explained more economically by political necessity than by elaborate conspiracy theories. In both cases, failure ensued with apparent inevitability. The obvious question to pose is whether it was, in fact, inevitable: and to that question I now turn.

PAUL ORMEROD AND WHY MOST THINGS FAIL

Brasilia was built. I have been there: it’s a creepy place. The failure of Brasilia consisted in the growth of the unplanned city, which swallowed the original, and in the disappointing economic returns. Kubitschek had intoned the magical words, modernization and progress. None of that happened with Brasilia.

Modern governments have many achievements to their credit. They have built superhighways and helped to eradicate smallpox and polio. But they have promised many more things—nothing less than the good life—and they have asked for increasing control over wealth and power to get there. Failure has been a function of extravagant promises and great expectations.

At some point around the turn of the new millennium, elites lost control of information, and power arrangements began to flip. Assured of the public’s wrath, elected governments have acted, or failed to act, motivated by a terror of consequences. Legitimacy was equated with the deflection of blame, and the aim of governing became to exhibit a lack of culpability.

“Instead of seeking to achieve political objectives, people seek certain physical and moral qualities,” writes Henri Rosanvallon. “Transparency, rather than truth or the general interest, has become the paramount virtue in an uncertain world.” ³⁰ Punished whether they moved forward or back, governments have agonized in an endless loop of failure, real and perceived, at many levels, everywhere.

In Greece, birthplace of democracy, what passes for a government was made answerable to a “Troika” of international institutions, following the catastrophic economic failure of 2008. The political system teetered on the edge: the elections of May 2012 benefited radical leftist, communist, and ultra-nationalist parties, left the country deadlocked, and necessitated new elections in June. Trust in government, by one measure, sank to 14 percent in 2013. ³¹

In Spain, three years after the indignados had condemned the failure of the country’s “obsolete and anti-natural economic model,” unemployment stood at 25 percent, and youth unemployment surpassed 50 percent. ³² Seventy-five percent of the public disapproved of President Mariano Rajoy’s handling of the economy—but 85 percent disapproved of the chief opposition leader. ³³ Trust in government fell to 18 percent.