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

Americans of all races. . . . A new study shows that disparities in education, mental health, obesity, absent fathers, isolation from church, isolation from community groups—these gaps are now as much about growing up rich or poor as they are about anything else.

I find it difficult to imagine another president, in any historical period, drawing such an unrelentingly dark portrait of the United States. “The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe.” Clearly, Barack Obama found the country over which he presided to be in the grip of moral and material disintegration. And while this wasn’t the first time he had made similar accusations, the difference in purpose indicated a changed approach to government.

When, in 2008 and 2009, President Obama had charged his immediate predecessors with “profound irresponsibility,” he assumed a posture typical of modern presidents. He spoke as the country’s political prime mover, defining a problem to make the case for his proposed solution: the stimulus. In 2013, there was no solution in sight. The president invoked his “growth agenda” and his “trade agenda,” but these were slogans rather than a plan. A number of existing government programs were praised—including, inevitably, the health care law— but nothing new was proposed.

The president was now a denouncer rather than a fixer of problems. He had described a destructive trend, but refused to make any claims of competence over it. The purpose of the exercise seemed to be to align him with the public’s anger on this issue, as he perceived it.

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The administration’s response to controversy or scandal demonstrated its peculiar relationship to power. In each case, President Obama and his immediate advisors made a show of underlining the vast distance between the president’s chosen identity—Border prophet chastising a sinful society—and the dull machinery of government. A virtuous passivity was imposed over the conventional portrait of the American president as always in command of the situation.

To cite just one example: President Obama was said to have learned on television news about the IRS inspector general’s investigation of that agency for targeting Tea Party groups. His senior staff supposedly had been informed earlier, but had concluded that the matter wasn’t worthy of his attention. A former senior aide blamed the scandal on “some folks down on the bureaucracy,” adding: “Part of being president is there’s so much underneath you because the government is so vast.” ⁴⁷ The president himself asserted that he “certainly didn’t know anything” about the IRS inspector general’s report until it was “leaked to the press.” ⁴⁸

In another politician, that would sound like an artful dodge. With President Obama, if there was a dodge it was altogether on a grander scale. Although the highest political authority in the land, he had won two presidential elections by his rhetorical separation from all authority. He has been a man of negation: a prophet in the wilderness. For the president and his inner circle, the Federal government existed an immense moral distance “underneath” them, and was staffed by grubby bureaucrats who fully deserved the distrust of the public.

We need only recall John F. Kennedy’s “I’m the responsible officer of the Government” to obtain a sense of how forlorn the exercise of political authority has become, under the pressure of a rebellious public.

Barack Obama’s detachment from the levers of power caused consternation among elites generally friendly to his administration, who had mistaken his accusatory rhetoric for the voice of traditional activism. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post chided “Obama, the uninterested president,” complaining that “he wants no control over the actions of his administration.” ⁴⁹ A satire in the liberal New Yorker hammered at the same point: “President Obama used his radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has ‘played no role whatsoever’ in the US government over the past four years,” it deadpanned. ⁵⁰

The implication seemed to be that the president was trying and failing at industrial-age, high modernist politics. If my analysis has come anywhere near the truth, that did not remotely describe the situation. Barack Obama, I believe, represented a new and disconcerting development in democratic politics: the conquest of the Center by the Border, and the rise of the sectarian temper to the

highest positions of power.

It’s important to revisit these terms. According to Douglas and Wildavsky, the Border identified itself as the negation of the Center. The sectarian temperament was formed in alienation from the inequality and corruption of hierarchy. By this logic, the rule of the sectarian Border must mean the self-negation of government: the alienation of power from itself. To govern at the heart of this contradiction has been the essence of the Obama style. Failure was condemned pre-emptively, from the rooftops: failure of the previous political leadership, of outmoded economic theories, of the protection of basic rights, of “community values” and society as a whole. Condemnation served to prove the president’s good faith, and to rally the public—not, indeed, behind the institutions of the Federal government or the democratic process, but behind his administration and his person. Legitimacy adhered to qualities intrinsic to Barack Obama, sectarian prophet, the president who was going to be fighting side by side with the public every step of the way.

As for democracy, its value was made contingent on specific outcomes. A process that allowed women’s rights to be trampled and businessmen to promote inequality could not in good conscience be tolerated. Thus the election of Barack Obama made democracy legitimate, rather than the other way around. His defeat could only have been the result of conspiracy by secretive forces, and would have justified the public’s flooding the streets in indignado-style protests. Something like this speculative scenario had come to pass in Egypt. Against the authoritarian Hosni Mubarak, democracy, for the public, had meant elections. Against the legitimately elected Mohamed Morsi, democracy meant purging the government of the Muslim Brotherhood and its religious mandates.

But representative democracy, as it actually exists, is a procedural business. Either it tolerates pluralistic outcomes, or it will degenerate into chaos or coronations. More to the point, the president demanded outcomes that—to paraphrase Ormerod—were not within the power of government to ordain. Economic inequality, for example, has grown everywhere despite the best intentions of democratic governments. In the US, it increased under the Bush administration but worsened under President Obama’s. The president has managed to detach his own claims of competence from the “problem” of inequality, and thus escaped the democrat’s dilemma, but he did nothing to bridge the gulf between democratic politics and reality.

The accusatory style of government must be understood as a pathological development, a deformation, brought about by the underground struggle between the public and authority. Like all politicians, Barack Obama needed a viable political space from which to maneuver. In his particular case, he was squeezed between the ambitious failures of modern democracy and the predations of a networked public. After the defeat of 2010, the president decided on a strategy that placed the public’s chosen weapon against authority—negation—at the center of government. He divorced his political personality from his official position, a paradox best explained as a desperate response to severe external pressures. His personal success made it likely that he will have imitators.

Yet the public remained as before: unsubdued, unquiet, unhappy. It could erupt at any moment, as it did in 2010. President Obama was able to mimic the public’s voice, but he was not its chosen instrument: he’s riding a tiger, and must constantly sharpen his rhetorical attacks to avoid having it turn against him. This can only intensify the public’s corrosive distrust of the political system. When that distrust is validated by the highest elected officials, outright rejection of democracy becomes a defensible position, to be invoked at the next, inevitable, failure of government.

CHAPTER NOTES

16 See, for example, “Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party Compared,” The Guardian, October 7, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/07/occupy-wall-street-tea-party, and Peter Aldhous, “Occupy vs. Tea Party: What Their Twitter Networks Reveal,” NewScientist, November 17, 2011, http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/11/occupy-vs-tea-party-what-their.html

19 Jacobson, “Obama, Tea Party, 2010 Elections.”

22 Ibid., 347.

23 Ibid., 117–130.

24 Photo by Ben Tavener

25 Scott, Seeing Like State, 128.

29 See Chapter 4 for fuller quote and context.

30 Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 257–9.

31 Anna Manchin, “Trust in Government Sinks to New Low in Southern Europe,” Gallup World, October 30,
2013, http://www.gallup.com/poll/165647/trust-government-sinks-new-low-southern-europe.aspx

32 World Bank Data Catalog website.

33 “Support for Spain’s government grows as graft scandal recedes—poll,” Reuters, October 6, 2013
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/10/06/uk-spain-politics-idUKBRE99503Y20131006

35 “Health Care Law: 74 Percent Rate Their Health Insurance Good or Excellent,” Rasmussen Reports, February 10, 2014, http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public\_content/politics/current\_ events/healthcare/health\_care\_law

37 “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2013,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, October 18,
2013, http://www.people-press.org/2013/10/18/trust-in-government-interactive/

38 Ormerod belongs to a group of thinkers who in the last decade have thrown much light on the boundary conditions of what human beings can and can’t know, predict, or ordain: N. N. Taleb, Duncan Watts, James C. Scott, Philip Tetlock, Nate Silver.

39 Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail, Kindle location 66.

40 Ibid., 38.

41 Ibid., 236.

42 Ibid., 67–68.

43 Ibid., 99.

44 I urge the reader to browse the many job postings for “community organizer” on the web, which add up to a familiar portrait.

45 Melissa McEwan, “President Obama at Planned Parenthood,” Shakesville, April 26, 2013, http://www.shakesville.com/2013/04/president-obama-at-planned-parenthood.html

46 “President Obama on inequality,” Politico, December4, 2013, http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/obama-income- inequality-100662.html

47 The senior aide was David Axelrod, and he can be seen making this statement at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhd6XLbbtIY

48 Wynton Hall, “President Obama on IRS scandal: ‘I certainly did not know anything,’” Breitbart, May 16, 2013, http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/16/Obama-On-IRS-Scandal-I-Certainly-Did-Not-Know-Anything

49 Dana Milbank, “Obama, the uninterested president,” Washington Post, May 14, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-obama-the-uninterested-president/2013/05/14/ da1c982a-bcd7-11e2-9b09-1638acc3942e\_story.html

50 Andy Borowitz, “Obama denies role in government,” The New Yorker, May 18, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2013/05/obama-denies-role-in-government.html

51 Screen shot from video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSAKcKMncfY

NIHILISM AND DEMOCRACY

The grand hierarchies of the industrial age feel themselves to be in decline, and I’m disposed to agree. They evolved to operate on a more docile social structure —one in which far less information circulated far more slowly among far fewer persons. Today a networked public runs wild among the old institutions, and bleeds them of the power to command attention and define the intellectual and political agenda.

Every expert is surrounded by a horde of amateurs eager to pounce on every mistake and mock every unsuccessful prediction or policy. Every CRU has its hacker, every Mubarak his Wael Ghonim, every Barack Obama his Tea Party. Nothing is secret and nothing is sacred, so the hierarchies some time ago lost their heroic ambitions and now they have lost their nerve. They doubt their own authority, and they have good reason to do so.

This great strategic reversal has produced few alternatives to the ideas and ideologies that dominated the industrial age. The public rides on new technologies and platforms, but as users rather than makers: it is uninterested in leveraging technical innovation to formulate its own ideology, programs, or plans. The public opposes, but does not propose. So in the second decade of the new millennium, political arguments resemble a distorted echo of the French Revolution or Victorian England: we still quarrel in terms of left and right, conservative and liberal, even while the old landscape has been swept clean and the relevance of these venerable labels has become uncertain.

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The lack of new alternatives, of a way out, has trapped democratic politics in a perpetual feedback loop of failure and negation. And negation, invoked from every corner and without relief, has driven the democratic process to the edge of nihilism—the belief that the status quo is so abhorrent that destruction will be a form of progress.

I have touched on the question of nihilism before: the time has come to confront it squarely. A dose of social and political nihilism—a suicide wish—becomes inevitable, if you grant the hypotheses I have sought to establish in previous chapters. If the industrial-age hierarchies of contemporary democracy are suffering a crisis of authority, if the public is on the move and expecting impossibilities, then, all things equal, the system will continue to bleed away legitimacy—and there will be those who argue it should be put out of its misery.

One concern is to discover the point at which such a chain of reasoning turns fatal. This is a tough question to parse analytically. “Legitimacy” is a kind of authorizing magic: so far as I know, it’s impossible to quantify. Words may be said that have never been said before. A president, for example, may condemn the political system over which he presides. But the impact is unclear. Opinion polls, which gyrate around dramatic events, can offer measurements of distrust, but only through a glass, darkly.

My intention in this chapter is to tell a story in which nihilism is possible—and possibly about to go viral. A growing chorus of voices now affirms, with passionate conviction, a preference for nothingness—nihil—over the present state of affairs. All you need is ears to hear its negations and condemnations from many corners of the information sphere. Under certain circumstances, let me suggest, this chorus could swell into the public’s mainstream opinion.

Virtually none of those who rail against the established order belong to the economically downtrodden or the politically oppressed: rather, they are middle class, well educated, mostly affluent. So part of my story must be an attempt to understand how such persons can arrive at political views that, if taken seriously, would entail their own destruction.