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

I want to analyze that creature of the shadows, the nihilist, in the environment that made his evolution possible.

FROM DECADENCE TO NOTHINGNESS, STOPPING AT STRANGE PLACES IN BETWEEN

In this late, tired age of democracy, large numbers of people believed that life was getting worse. The climate was changing for the worse—we had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to tell us that every year. “Warming of the weather system is unequivocal,” the IPCC warned in 2013, “and, since 1950, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.” ² The fault lay with us—more particularly, with our economic system: global warming was “anthropogenic,” human-made. Our punishment took the form of extreme weather events like the killer hurricane Sandy, which devastated New

York City in 2013. An environmentalist group claimed to have gathered 280,000 signatures of Sandy “survivors” petitioning the White House for “climate action now.” ³ President Obama agreed to the extent of turning to accusatory mode on the subject. Rising ocean levels had “contributed to the destruction” in New York, he charged, and the cost of extreme weather events could be “measured in lost lives and lost livelihoods, lost homes, lost businesses, hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency services and disaster relief.” ⁴

The economy was getting worse. For liberals, this belief justified continued intervention by the government. For conservatives, it justified attacking the president and his ambitious high modernist rhetoric. For the American public, according to one poll, the decline of the economy was an apparently “intractable judgment,” with only 25 percent dissenting. ⁵

Political life was getting worse. I listed multiple failures of democratic governments in the last chapter. These took place in the open, in full view of the public, and they were difficult to blame on a single person, party, or ideology. Failure seemed to be systemic. Political elites were at once dogmatically partisan and weak. The public, unlike in President Kennedy’s day, was unforgiving. Compared to the “greatest generation,” the present generation had failed its way into a politics of decadence and despair.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Barack Obama, with this keen sectarian taste for condemnation, took it for granted that American life was getting worse in many ways. Whether the question at hand was extreme weather or economic inequality, the president in his statements described a society in moral and material decline. It hadn’t always been thus. Like every thinker—right and left, public and elites—who abominated the present order of things, President Obama looked nostalgically to the righteous past.

. . . during the post-World War II years, the economic ground felt stable and secure for most Americans, and the future looked brighter than the past. And for some, that meant following in your old man’s footsteps at the local plant, and you knew that a blue-collar job would let you buy a home, and a car, maybe a vacation once in a while, health care, a reliable pension. For others, it meant going to college— in some cases, maybe the first in your family going to college. And it meant graduating without taking on loads of debt, and being able to count on advancement through a vibrantjob market.

But the golden age of high modernism was over. In the 1970s, the president explained, “this social contract” had unraveled, and we entered on our own fallen times. ⁶

American politics, and I think democratic politics globally, fretted under the shadow of the heroic past. Great projects had been attempted once, and the result had been stability, security, advancement. Today, conditions were deteriorating along many fronts, but the system appeared unable to generate fixes. The economy, for example, was universally believed to be getting worse, but the conversation among the elites and the public alike fixated on the symptoms of decline, on persistent unemployment, on inequality, lack of mobility, the outrageous salaries of CEOs, rather than on policy changes that might turn the situation around. President Obama had consigned his predecessor’s tax cuts to the dustbin of outmoded theories. His effort to engage in large-scale economic policy, the stimulus, had failed on its own terms. Now there was no debate about a new tax cut or a new stimulus. The political process appeared sterile and exhausted, and the politicians were afraid.

Here was the overarching feeling of our age: that we were the decadent children of a great generation, and that no way back could be found, no exit from the quicksand into which we were sinking, because that quicksand was us. The natural urge to find responsible parties and assign blame was baffled by the immense number of targets. In the US, but also in Britain, France, Spain, and Italy, right and left governments had alternated, with results that could scarcely be teased apart. Ideologies, political parties, elections—the formal choices of democracy all ended, it appeared, in the same failed place.

Under the circumstances, the system bearing the weight of so many imperfections—representative democracy—began to lose its authorizing magic. This could be seen from the top of the pyramid and from below.

From the top: democratic politics had become the guarantor of individual happiness, yet the voters felt viscerally unhappy about their lives, unhappy, too, with politics and politicians in this hour of decay—any number of opinion surveys, in country after country, attested to this fact. ⁷ With growing desperation, democratic governments intervened in individual lives to achieve what they claimed were benevolent ends, yet the electorate saw in these efforts little more than usurpation and corruption. The Tea Party and the Occupiers, polar opposites, both had reacted against a government that intruded on everyone and failed everywhere. The contract that bestowed legitimacy on elected officials was being shredded. The politicians understood this, but labored under the conviction, probably correct, that the voters would punish rhetoric that failed to promise heroic improvements. They could, like President Obama, divorce themselves from their positions, but this would only aggravate the hemorrhage of legitimacy.

From below: a public on the march perceived the institutions of democracy to be indistinguishable from every other hierarchy of the industrial age. Presidents and prime ministers, congresses and parliaments, appeared remote, self-serving, hopelessly bureaucratic at best, debauched by money at worst. The public did not feel represented by their elected representatives, and spoke of them as a class apart. The indignados, who had a way with words, conveyed in their slogans a clear sense of separation from the political class: “You don’t represent us,” “The markets rule and I never elected them,” “We are not anti-system, the system is anti-us.” The negation, even the destruction, of democratic politics, was now detached in the public’s mind from the ideal of democracy.

That ideal still retained some authorizing power. The main indignado faction called itself Real Democracy Now. The Occupiers claimed to stand for the 99 percent, the Tea Partiers for the people against the government. To the public in revolt, however, the ideal of democracy could not be reconciled with the topdown control that characterized the standing institutions of representative democracy.

Some groups, like the Tea Party in the US and the Five Star in Italy, participated in elections, but did so in a spirit of sectarian rejection of the Center. Barack Obama had done the same in 2008. Others, like most indignados, assumed a “neither-nor” attitude, and abstained from voting. In either case, the public, comprised of amateurs, took a simple view of democracy: it was direct. When Wael Ghonim wished to settle a controversial point on his Facebook page, he polled his readers. The Tea Party Patriots’ website followed an identical procedure. The anarchist assemblies of the Occupiers allowed everyone to speak and required general agreement before arriving at a decision.

These were not alternatives to representative democracy. A nation of millions couldn’t be governed by online surveys or anarchist assemblies. The elites, of course, had little interest in reforming the system: they wished to cling to the top of the existing pyramid. The sectarian public, always suspicious of hierarchy, had never believed that new structures would deliver happier results. The established order had failed, persistently, but there was no talk of alternatives, no pressure for reform, no faith—as I’ll have occasion to note—in revolution.

The crisis of authority was a crisis of democracy. The public’s assault on the institutions was often an assault on the democratic process.

Elected officials were routinely described as tyrannical by insurgents from the right. A favorite political conceit used by the Tea Party was the American Revolution, with Barack Obama playing the part of King George. Nobody seriously advocated a violent overthrow, but the metaphor was telling. Like the president, Tea Partiers believed that it hadn’t always been so, but their time horizon for “our nation’s decline” was much longer—“it has taken us a hundred years or so to reach our present state of crisis.” ⁸ According to Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots, the gist of this crisis was the trampling on the rights of Americans by a government voracious for power.

We felt threatened because a government that once existed to protect our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness had become the primary obstacle to the exercise of those rights. Our government had broken through its constitutional restraints, seized power over everything from our financial markets to our home loans, and aimed to go even farther, seeking control over things as large as our health-care system, and as small as the menus in school cafeterias. ⁹

The sense of betrayal evident in these words strangely echoed President Obama’s statements about a “misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington,” and his belief that powerful forces were engaged in an “orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights.” The sectarian temper found different targets from the perspectives of the right and the left, but all agreed on the malevolence of the Center, even when that Center had been endorsed by the voters.

To insurgents from the left, elected government was plainly a tool of the corporations. “The will and goal of the system is the accumulation of money,” explained an indignado manifesto. ¹⁰ The “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City” was even more explicit: “We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments.” ¹¹ A participant at the Puerta del Sol demonstrations in Madrid struggled to convey the enormity of the movement’s negations: “It’s a peaceful extra-parliamentary political explosion aimed against all the system in its totality, national and international, against the bankers, the businessmen, the labor unions, the political parties, the institutions, the communications media.” ¹²

These were words only—but that such words represented a repudiation of democracy by an alienated public I take it to be beyond question. The rhetoric connected to reality. Across the world, support for democracy was ebbing: the scholars who measure such things had little doubt on that score. ¹³ Democracy was disintegrating in Egypt and wobbled on a knife’s edge in Venezuela, Turkey, Greece, and many more countries. Matters stood differently in Western Europe and the US, yet even there, legitimacy and loyalty to the system often appeared contingent on achieving desired outcomes, rather than the will of the voters.

Elites in the old democracies manifested a certain irritation with their decadent politics, coupled with open admiration for authoritarian methods that “worked.” China was the favorite example. Tom Friedman, columnist in the New York Times, wrote in 2009: “There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.” He went on to explain that one-party autocracy had “drawbacks,” but if it “is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.” ¹⁴

Legitimacy, in other words, depended on outcomes: and in democratic America outcomes were a muddle compared to those in authoritarian China. The CEO of General Electric, in a televised interview, seemed to agree with this judgment. Speaking specifically of China, he said, “The one thing that actually works, state-run communism . . . may not be your cup of tea, but their government works.” ¹⁵ The interviewer, Charlie Rose, observed: “They get things done.”

Condemning the “stale political arguments” in Washington, President Obama, in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2014, offered to work with a divided Congress, but pointedly added: “But America does not stand still—and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that’s what I’m going to do.” ¹⁶ A sectarian president seemed to be suggesting that the democratic Center could not get things done.

While elites longed for a political system that worked, the public, for its part, perceived a politics submissive to hierarchy, corrupted by the will to power. The public had no love for Chinese-style autocracy, and, given its mutinous temper, scarcely distinguished between authoritarian and representative institutions. Democracy, from this perspective, appeared like another structure of control.

Henri Rosanvallon has told a persuasive tale to explain how voters fell out of love with a political system that raised them, in theory at least, to the status of sovereign.

Historically, the preferred strategy of democracy has been more democracy, Rosanvallon observed. Progress meant the expansion of the franchise. Marginalized groups—workers, women, racial and religious minorities—could conceive of no greater political conquest than full voting rights. The democratic ideology turned, primordially, on inclusiveness. Implicit in the long struggle for universal suffrage was the promise that, once all the people were inside the system, something magical would happen: the good society. “It would put an end to corruption,” explained Rosanvallon. “It would ensure the triumph of the general interest.” ¹⁷

In fact, inclusion and alienation have progressed in lockstep. Rosanvallon contended this was no paradox—it was cause and effect. Look around: every adult citizen can vote, yet nothing remotely magical has happened. Nothing has changed. Instead, we, the voters, were abandoned to our own imperfect selves, muddling through the necessarily procedural and uninspiring machinery of representative government.

Here was one source of public “disenchantment” with democracy, the pivot, it may be, away from an ideology of inclusiveness toward a society of distrust. But there was a deeper source of discontent, derived from what can only be described as a world-historical trauma.

A generation ago, faith in revolution still provided a standard of progress—a promised land for those who considered themselves radicals. I have touched on this before, from a different perspective. Once upon a time, high modernist governments presumed they could cure the human condition. They could make the world anew. All they needed was a transcendent project, like the collectivization of agriculture or the building of Brasilia. The debate, back then, was whether revolution should be achieved suddenly and violently, in “one great night” that transformed social relations, or gradually and democratically, by means of incremental reforms.

That faith has died. I won’t dwell on the cause of death, but will only state an incontrovertible fact: there are no serious political actors today who believe in the reality, much less the desirability, of revolution. In consequence, radical and democratic politics, which shared the same utopian end-point, have lost their directional coherence. The word “progress” itself has become impolite, an embarrassment. Nobody has a clue which way that lies.

Government’s loss of faith in radical sociopolitical fixes marked the boundary between high modernism and our later, wearier version—experienced, I repeat, as a fall from grace rather than an increase in understanding. The “resolute singularity” of high modernist action was replaced by an irresolute multiplicity of tactical zigzags. The scowl of the prophet gave way to the twitches of the kindly uncle. Such changes were not flattering to the elites on whom they were imposed.

To advocates of radical change—and this came to include the public in revolt— the death of revolution resembled a blow to the head. They, too, lost their strategic vision, became disoriented, blind to the big picture. Absent the goalline of revolution, radicals found themselves able to mobilize only on a “caseby-case” basis, against some immediately felt injustice. ¹⁸ Rather than defeat or overthrow the government, they sought to control its actions toward the specific case that engaged their energies. And they did so by pure force of negation.

Radicalism, which once aimed to transform society, now more modestly (but, it may be, more successfully) labored to browbeat democratic governments into acknowledging an endless string of failures in need of correction. “To be radical,” Rosanvallon affirms, “is to point the finger of blame every day; it is to twist a knife in each of society’s wounds. It is not to aim a cannon at the citadel of power in preparation for a final assault.” ¹⁹ Thus the itch for condemnation, and disdain of positive programs, that have shaped the behavior of the sectarian public.

Revolution, whatever its cost in human life, was an ideal grounded in utopian optimism. Hopelessness, however realistic, drives prophets to the wilderness, to feed on locusts and wild honey and dream of a messiah. Here is Henry Farrell, blogger, academic, social democrat, a sensible thinker, brooding on the sterility of what he calls our “post-democratic” age:

The problem that the center-left now faces is not that it wants to make difficult or unpopular choices. It is that no real choices remain. It is lost in the maze, able neither to reach out to its traditional base (which are largely dying or alienated from it anyway) nor to propose grand new initiatives, the state no longer having the tools to implement them. When the important decisions are all made outside democratic politics, the center-left can only keep going through the ritualistic motions of democracy, all the while praying for an intercession. ²⁰

A system that began by promising perfection had at last delivered nothingness. Governments were powerless, politics were lost in the labyrinth, democracy was a hollow ritual, a falsehood. Nothingness was the only reality, and it presided over nations. To strike at nothingness seemed at least like something: a step forward, an intercession to be prayed for. So we were back to the cinematic nihilism of V for Vendetta: “With enough people, blowing up a building can change the world.” We were back to the real-world nihilism of the London rioters in August 2011: “Bare SHOPS are gonna get smashed up so come get some (free stuff!!!) fuck the feds we will send them back with OUR riot!”

I want to be extremely clear about what I’m suggesting. A vast structural collision—pre-eminently, the revolt of the public against authority—has left democratic governments burdened with failure, democratic politics far removed from reality, and democratic programs drained of creative energy, and thus of hope. At this point, the nihilist makes his appearance. He is not a philosopher with an elaborated ideology, or a political figure leading an organization.