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

Membership in the Nihilist Party cannot be had for love or money. Rather, the nihilist is merely reacting, as all human beings must, to the pressures applied by his environment: which means, in this case, that he is acting to destroy that environment.

If I’m correct with this line of analysis, the nihilist, while essentially at war with himself, will happily bring down the entire edifice of democracy as part of his suicide pact. He has taken radicalism to its logical extreme. He doesn’t mean to conquer power or replace it with some new deal, only to obliterate the institutions that stand in his way: “fuck the feds.” And if this is truly the case, I think it’s worth spending a few moments examining this political mutant, on whom so much of the future seems to hinge.

PORTRAIT OF THE NIHILIST AS THE SUM OF OUR NEGATIONS

What is this uncanny beast, born of the Fifth Wave and now stalking into the uncertain future? After all the talk of public and authority, of network and hierarchy, where—you ask—does he fit in?

Above all, he is seized and animated by a very particular feeling. I will characterize this feeling more explicitly later: here, let me begin by saying that it partakes of alienation. The world of the nihilist does not belong to the nihilist. It belongs to the forces of selfishness and to repulsive people.

He considers his elected government to be a thing apart, and beneath contempt. That is the view from below. George W. Bush told him that the invasion of Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction, but none were found there. Barack Obama explained to him that the stimulus would cap unemployment, but millions more lost their jobs. Jose Luis Zapatero refused even to mention the word “crisis” to him, while economic disaster ravaged Spain. I called these episodes failures of government, but that is not how the nihilist sees them. He thinks his rulers are liars and cheats, and he fills the web with angry rants on the subject.

He can do that because he’s extremely well connected, in the current sense of that word. He’s Homo informaticus run amok. At the high end of his communications skills, he might be a hacker in Anonymous, vandalizing Sony’s corporate database. At the low end, he could be a young rioter coordinating a looting expedition on his messaging service. The nihilist comes to life through his digital devices. Without them he would sink to a condition identical to nothingness: he would be silent. Instead, he is fantastically well-informed about those few odd topics that obsess him, and he produces a torrent of hard-core negations posted about the world around him.

Being connected, the nihilist is networked. He can link to others just as destructive as himself, and bring them together in a flash of real-time mayhem. And there are always others: the nihilist isn’t one but many. He belongs with the public when he’s interested in an affair, as sometimes he is, but his predilections are sectarian to an absolute extreme. He is morbidly, monstrously, against. He imagines he would be happy, if the society in which he lives were wiped out tomorrow.

In politics, this impulse pushes him way beyond rejection or revolt. The nihilist is a political black hole, allowing no light or mass to escape his violent embrace. Yet he’s not a professional agitator, as he surely would have been in the last century. He’s a private person, an amateur in politics moving among other amateurs. Nihilism, in him, isn’t a full-time job—it’s a latent condition. It erupts on a case–by-case basis. The fuse might be lit by some news on his Twitter stream about the war in Afghanistan or the flood of immigrants into his country. Or he might just reach a tipping point in that all-consuming feeling that partakes so much of alienation. Then he becomes what he is: an agent of annihilation.

In the assembly of protesters, his is the loud, irreconcilable voice. In the peaceful demonstration, his is the hand heaving a Molotov cocktail through the shop window. In confrontation with police, he is eager to shed blood. In online forums, he is fertile with ideas to hack, expose, paralyze the institutions that run the world. He is the bomber, the random shooter: a terrorist without a cause.

I could go on. He is possessed by a fuzzy but apocalyptic sense of doom, for example. The world, he holds, is going to rack and ruin. To push it along is the best thing. The government could fix everything and solve our problems if it tried—for all his alienation, the nihilist is convinced of that, and the most persuasive evidence he has of government corruption is that life keeps getting worse.

But enough: I want to get to the heart of the matter. I am arguing here that the nihilist haunts democratic politics like a specter portending disaster, but I don’t believe the most significant factor pertains to what he is, or what he thinks, or even what he has done. The disquieting truth about his emergence is where he comes from. The threat to the future, if there is such, originates in his past.

The nihilist benefits prodigiously from the system he would like to smash. He’s not marginalized—not a street person, not a forsaken soul, not a persecuted minority. He stands in a very different relation to the established order than did, say, an industrial worker in Victorian England or a Catholic in Communist Poland. He’s not a sufferer in any sense, whether relative to historical standards or to the world today. On meeting him, you would not recognize him as someone alien to you. Talking to him, I would not necessarily think that he’s a different type of person from me. In the way such things get reckoned today—statistically, in the gross—he is you and me.

The mortal riddle posed by the nihilist is that he’s a child of privilege. He’s healthy, fit, long-lived, university-educated, articulate, fashionably attired, widely traveled, well-informed. He lives in his own place or at worst in his parents’ home, never in a cave. He probably has a good job and he certainly has money in his pocket. In sum, he’s the pampered poster boy of a system that labors desperately to make him happy, yet his feelings about his life, his country, democracy—the system—seethe with a virulent unhappiness.

Feelings of this sort compelled Daphni Leef to pitch her tent on Rothschild Boulevard to demand the destruction of “swinish capitalism.” She came from an affluent family. She was a film school graduate and held a job as a video editor. Compared to most people anywhere or anytime, hers was a privileged life. Yet she seethed with a sense of injustice because he couldn’t afford her old apartment. She felt the system was fundamentally rapacious, and she would bring it down to shorten her commute. “We all deserve more,” was her one commandment. In the clouded mind of the nihilist, that “more” stretched infinitely toward utopia.

Similar feelings drove the “neither-nor” indignados to turn their backs on representative democracy. Historically, Spain had recently emerged from poverty and military dictatorship, and the current generation, even after the crash of 2008, was the wealthiest, best educated, and socially and politically freest the country had known. Yet those who raised the banner of “neither-nor” seethed with an irreconcilable feeling of grievance: like Leef, they felt they deserved infinitely more, and were willing to tear down a system that had failed to give it to them.

“Our parents are grateful because they’re voting,” said Marta Solanas, 27, referring to older Spaniards’ decades spent under the Franco dictatorship. “We’re the first generation to say that voting is worthless.” ²²

So here we have a privileged class in revolt against itself. Here we have the beneficiaries of democracy loathing democracy and clamoring for its demise, even without an alternative in sight. Like the character in the cartoon, the nihilist hates the knotty branch on which he sits, and conceives the idea that it should be sawed off. Does he know he will plunge to earth and break his neck? Maybe he does know: nihilism is a suicide pact. Or, possibly, does he think he will levitate on the air, defying the laws of gravity? Maybe he does think this way: nihilism is a call for the obliteration of history, and, at its most obdurate, a declaration of war on cause and effect.

I ask you to ponder the words of the young indignada I just cited. She said her parents were grateful for electoral democracy. Her generation was the first to make a virtue of ingratitude. José Ortega y Gasset, a fellow Spaniard, once discerned a “radical ingratitude” in the type of modern person he called “mass man” and portrayed as the spoiled child of history. Mass man is heir to a long and brilliant past. The good things in life in the world he was born into— security, freedom, wealth, vacations to warm places—are in fact the outcome of a specific historical process, but mass man doesn’t see it that way. Newly risen to education and prosperity, he imagines himself liberated from the past, and has grown hostile to it as to any limiting factor. The good things in life have always been there. They seem detached from human effort, including his own, so he takes them as given, part of the natural order, like the air he breathes. Gratitude would be nonsensical. Mass man accepts the gifts of the system as his due, but will tear up that system root and branch, present and past, if the least of his desires is left unfulfilled. ²³

The nihilist is by no means identical to Ortega’s mass man, but both share certain family traits. More accurately than alienation, a radical ingratitude describes the feeling that makes the nihilist tick. His political and economic expectations are commensurate with his personal fantasies and desires, and the latter are boundless. He expects perfection. He insists on utopia. He has, in Ortega’s words, “no experience of his own limits,” at least not as something he should accept in good grace. Every encounter with the human condition, every social imperfection and government failure, triggers the urge to demolish. Fortified by the conviction that he deserves more, he feels unconquerably righteous in his ingratitude—a feeling sometimes validated by late modernist governments bent on the promotion of universal happiness.

All this matters only diagnostically: as a symptom of a sickness of the system. The way I have characterized him, the nihilist looks to be a blurry figure, a parttimer lacking a program or an organization. He might be networked but he is also nameless. The riddle he poses is whether, in any sense, under any combination of events, he could gain enough momentum to damage or wreck the democratic process.

The answer shouldn’t be difficult to arrive at. Follow the thread of this book to one possible conclusion, and you will be there.

The nihilist, it seems to me, isn’t necessarily an alienated individual, a clever “V” figure behind a Guy Fawkes mask, bent on blowing up the status quo. A lone-wolf attacker like Anders Breivik, who killed 77 random persons in Norway because he hated immigrants, is only a glimpse, a warning, of more horrific possibilities. From the evidence of the preceding chapters, it should be clear that the bundle of destructive impulses I have called the nihilist represents a latent tendency in the public in revolt. Potentially, he is a multitude. Under certain conditions, he could be you.

Every public in the story I have told mobilized from a privileged position. That was true materially, politically, morally. None were paupers. None were pariahs. The public was constituted in this condition: it did nothing to achieve it other than appear on the scene. The protesters in Tahrir Square were the sons and daughters of the well-off Egyptian middle class. They were born to privilege. The indignados, offspring of the first generation in Spain to rise out poverty and tyranny, cherished the ambitious expectations of a privileged class. Tea Partiers, Occupiers, protesters in Turkey, Iran, Venezuela, Ukraine—all wielded negation as a birthright. Command of the information sphere, distinguishing feature of our moment, was bestowed on the public by companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Born to privilege, the public must maintain some relationship to the institutions and individuals that raised it out of necessity and bondage. If the past is acknowledged, that relationship must be one of indebtedness. The Romans littered their homes with carved images of illustrious ancestors. But when, as is the case today, the public rejects history and longs to start again from zero, its relationship to the institutions that sustain it will be one of radical ingratitude. Once privilege is felt to be natural, a matter of birth rather than previous effort, the phantom that is the nihilist becomes flesh in the rebellious public—and any failure, any fall from perfection, will ignite a firestorm of discontent.

I called this a latent condition. Latency has been sometimes actualized—this book can be read as a series of variations on that theme. From above, governments have failed habitually, and are doomed to fail while they continue to promise the impossible. The public, from below, has seized on each failure to batter the ruling institutions, on occasion with a nihilistic contempt for the consequences. In between, attempting to mediate the conflict, stand the clumsy mechanisms of representative democracy. The answer to the riddle of the nihilist, I said, wasn’t particularly difficult to arrive at. Those who worry about the future of democracy—and I count myself in that number—have good reason to do so.

ZOMBIE DEMOCRACY, A MASS EXTINCTION HORROR SHOW

The old industrial world is passing away. This mode of organizing humanity, so brilliantly successful for a century and a half, has been overwhelmed by too much information, too much contradiction. The elites who manage the system no longer believe in a way forward. Stuck in the muck, they strive simply to endure: après moi le deluge.

8.3 Oslo, Norway: bombing of the prime minister’s office, July 2011 ²⁴

The nihilist—the public as destroyer of worlds—twists his knife into institutions that often resemble a body without a soul. You can pick examples at random: the daily newspaper, the political party, even modern government. Such institutions retain outwardly imposing structures, but they seem to lack vital signs, and can only stagger, zombie-like, from crisis to crisis.

My concern from the start has been with representative democracy. I worry that it, too, may be passing away. I wonder whether Farrell was right to assume that democratic politics, as practiced today, are also a body without a soul.

By that literary turn of phrase I mean something very specific. I mean an institution that clings to life and still wields power, but has been bled dry of legitimacy. It has no true authority or prestige in the eyes of the public, and it survives by a precarious combination of inertia and the public’s unwillingness to produce an alternative. It exists by default. That, for example, is the condition of mainstream political parties in the old democracies—Republican and Democrat, Tory and Labor, Socialist and Gaullist, Christian Democrat and Social Democrat. Even their names have been bled dry of meaning. They exist by default.

Legitimacy is about information. Compared to the effects on the mind of a police raid or an exploding drone, it’s soft. Once again we confront the idea of power as a game of Rock–Scissors–Paper, except we now possess an interesting data point, manifested, as always, in the guise of a riddle. We know that paper sometimes beats scissors. Wael Ghonim began the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak on a Facebook page. But we don’t yet have an inkling about the process that made this revaluation possible.

So let me tell a story about the stories we tell ourselves—how they explain and justify, how they live and how they perish.

Every great institution is justified by a story. That story connects the institution to higher political ideals and ultimately to the moral order of the world. It persuades ordinary people—you and me—that, if we wish to do the right thing, we should act as the institution requires of us. The story bestows the authorizing magic I have called legitimacy.

High modernist government, for example, told a story about perfecting social relations by the application of power and science. On this basis, it razed entire neighborhoods, without much protest, to make room for housing projects like Cabrini Green. The Federal Reserve, in Alan Greenspan’s time, told a story about mastery over the economy by means of esoteric knowledge. It allowed the institution to argue, persuasively, that a casino atmosphere was the most prudent approach to the money supply.

Such stories aren’t surface gloss. They influence our behavior directly. This is why paper sometimes beats scissors: soft words ignite powerful historical memories, and the public takes to the streets. Political actors, consequently, tend to dispute with one another the ownership of the grand narratives. In his first inaugural address, President Obama made a case for expanded opportunity by appealing repeatedly to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. ²⁵ Yet the Tea Party, we know, made the Constitution central to its argument that the president had trampled on the country’s founding principles. America’s political future looked to be decided by whoever controlled the story of its past: not a particularly unusual or paradoxical situation.

A great catastrophe has overwhelmed many long-standing stories of legitimacy.
They are dying out in droves.

Since each story purports to explain a shifting human reality, it must rely on institutional gatekeepers who interpret messy events according to tidy plot lines. That has been the business of Christian bishops and White House press secretaries: to impose the justifying story on the chaos of events. But we have seen that the evolution of technology hasn’t been kind to mediators. The public’s conquest of the information sphere has meant the overthrow of the gatekeepers —often accompanied by the collapse of the stories which imbued their institutions with authority and prestige.

Consider the case of Abu Ghraib. Perverse digital images from that Baghdad prison made a hash of a carefully articulated US story justifying the invasion of Iraq. Almost immediately, these images spread beyond the reach of any authority, including the US government. In a bizarre juxtaposition of two informational eras, the photos of Abu Ghraib were going viral on the web and garnering obsessive international attention, while the secretary of defense pondered whether to make them officially public.

The Middle East today resembles a graveyard of narratives. In Tunisia and Egypt, aging rulers—like our own secretary of defense—simply didn’t grasp how preposterous their messages sounded in the context of available information. Collapse of the official story in both countries preceded the collapse of the regime: when towering figures stood exposed as clueless pygmies, the end was close at hand.

The region’s counter-narratives have also been swept away by events. Rejection of Israel failed to ensure tranquility or legitimacy for Syria’s Bashar Assad. Al Qaeda’s doctrine that local dictators would never be toppled unless the “far enemy”—the United States—was first terrorized into retreat, has been utterly discredited. Pro-Western or anti-Western, pro-regime or pro-violence, most established ideologies in Arabic-speaking nations are being consumed in a prodigious bonfire of the narratives.

Closer to home, the justifying stories of democracy are coming unraveled. Faith in the magic of universal suffrage has gone up in smoke. Trust that elected officials truly represent the people stands at an all-time low. The myths of revolution, high modernism, and the ability of government to remake the human condition, now appear like childish fairy tales. Not even an advocate of Big Government like Barack Obama could persuade himself of their reality. Late modernist claims that happiness can be calibrated by kindly-uncle interventions have never won the acceptance of a distrustful public. That pillar of top-down democracy, Lippmann’s hero, the expert-bureaucrat, melted down like the Wicked Witch in 2008.

The authority of institutions that surround and support modern democratic government—journalism, academia, science—has been systematically challenged, with disastrous consequences for mediated domains like the news business and the politics of climate change. The conflagration has already engulfed government itself, with its ambitious promises and habitual failures, and it may reach all the way up to the narrative of the all-embracing nation-state, stripping political life to a cold nakedness, as Tony Olcott, citing Marx and the Manifesto, suggests: ²⁶