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

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . .

It is at this point, and to do this work, that the nihilist arrives on the scene.

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To the extent that the institutions of democracy remain lashed to the industrial mode of organization, they risk becoming part of an immense cultural extinction event.

I am compelled to add that the timeline and even the inevitability of this calamity are uncertain. Deep beneath the mass extinction of justifying stories, beneath the failure of government and the living death of democracy, the slowmotion collision of the public against authority, at once cause and consequence of those surface dramas, grinds on. Elites can’t preserve a status quo that the public is unwilling to transform. Turbulence sweeps the landscape but never arrives at the next stage, as if the world-historical clock, the Big Ben of human events, has stopped dead at midnight. That is where we are today. We may be here a long time yet.

So I am also compelled to ask about the degree of yield, of contingency, in this lost hour between our exhausted era and the unformed future. If, as Marxists and Calvinists insist, we are like bugs stuck in the solid amber of history, then the writing of this book has been a pleasant but ultimately pointless exercise. I have no evidence that we are so fated, however, and I have no faith in inevitabilities. Even if I accept that social and political structures constitute a kind of destiny, they are precisely what is at play today.

Otherwise, I may as well shrug my shoulders and say, like John Searle’s determinist at the restaurant: “I think I’ll just sit here and wait to see what I order.”

Grant me, for the sake of argument, that history hasn’t frozen solid—not entirely. What, then, of the conflict between the public and authority? It must erupt out of the depths and become personal. By this I mean that, in a world of contingent outcomes, each of us will be faced with choices, and that our choices will come wrapped in a fatal question.

The choices are the obvious ones of picking sides, of involvement and noninvolvement. The question will relate to the vastness of the system within which the conflict is taking place, and the smallness of each person. If modern government, for all its wealth and power, can’t ordain the future of complex systems, what difference can it possibly make whether we, in our smallness, embrace one side or the other, choose this rather than that?

All the wounded vanity of our decadent age will be rolled up in that one question.

I acknowledge that I have now slipped out of analysis and plunged into the realm of speculation: but here we are. This is how I perceive the situation. The analysis of the preceding chapters has been an attempt to map, however crudely, a new sociopolitical environment that is as unprecedented as it has been unnoticed. But a map is just an instrument. There’s still the matter of getting to the right places —of navigating to the “X” on the map that marks the right relation to this environment for someone, like me, who remains an unreconstructed supporter of representative democracy.

That will be the theme of the next chapter.

CHAPTER NOTES

1 Screen shot of video, http://hellaoccupyoakland.org/occupy-oakland-forum-police-actions/

2 Climate Change 2013, The Physical Science Basis: Summary for Policymakers, Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, 2013,
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/docs/WGIAR5\_SPM\_brochure\_en.pdf

3 Will Wrigley, “Hurricane Sandy Survivors Demand Climate Change Action From Obama,” Huffington Post, February 11, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/11/hurricane-sandy-climatechange\_n\_2664563.htm

4 “Remarks by the President on Climate Change,” The White House, June 25, 2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/25/remarks-president-climate-change

5 “Are Things Getting Better? More Americans Continue to Believe the Economy Is Getting Worse,” YouGov, February 27, 2013, https://today.yougov.com/news/2013/02/27/are-things-getting-better-more-americanscontinue-/

6 “President Obama on Inequality (transcript),” Politico, December 4, 2013, https://www.politico.com /story/2013/12/ obama-income-inequality-100662.html

7 See, for example, “What’s gone wrong with democracy,” The Economist, March 1, 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-most-successful-political-idea-20thcentury-why-has-it-run-trouble-and-what-can-be-do

8 Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin, Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution (Henry Hold and Company, 2012), 6.

9 Ibid., 13.

10 Cabal, ed. Indignados!, Kindle location 36.

11 “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City.”

12 Cabal, ed. Indignados!, Kindle location 449.

13 Joshua Kurlantzick, Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt ofthe Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government (Yale University Press, 2013), 6–31.

14 Thomas Friedman, “Our One-Party Democracy,” New York Times, September 8, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?\_r=3&adxnnl=1&partner= rss&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1342620027-Z4vProSA4/hgcF8nbyrItw&

16 “President Obama’s State of the Union Address,” The White House, January 28, 2014, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/01/28/president-barack-obamas-state-union-address

19 Ibid., 255.

21 Screen shot from video.

25 “President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address,” Washington Post, January 20, 2009, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/01/president-barack-obamas-inaugu.html

This chapter is more speculative and less analytical than the preceding ones. You stand warned. The reason for the change should be apparent. At some point, I needed to cash in my analysis. If the world is as I have described, something follows. Something must be done or changed or cut loose from our previous understanding. Otherwise, I have merely added my camel’s straw to the vast weight of negation crushing democratic politics today.

I began my story with an information tsunami and ended with that rough beast, the nihilist, and with democracy, as actually practiced, staggering into a maze of failure and self-doubt. Now I wish to parse the choices available to the players— the public, the government, you and me—in this turbulent landscape. Ultimately, the question in my mind is whether any combination of choices can chart a path out of the labyrinth, into the open sunlight.

I originally titled the chapter “What Is To Be Done,” which conveyed my intention all too blatantly. Having portrayed a system deformed by relentless but poorly understood forces, I felt obliged to offer a fix. I learned, however, that I’m not comfortable posing as a prophet or even as an advocate. I can think of no reason why you should act on anything I have to say—unless, of course, you were driven by motives and ideals similar to mine in the first place.

CHOICES AND SYSTEMS

9

I won’t pretend to have discovered an escape hatch from our enervated age, and I won’t indulge in idle negation. So I settled on identifying choices. They are to be found in the new landscape. You, reader, must decide on yours. Mine, I will make known.

Some choices lead to chaos, some choices lead to China, but the truly perplexing analytic question is how to tell one from the other in a complex environment. I am persuaded by Paul Ormerod’s argument: even the colossal machinery of modern government has been unable to ordain the future. The crisis of democracy arose from the denial of that fact. We want to build Brasilia over and again, to leap ahead 50 years into a future that is always more rational than the present. At a minimum, we demand that our politicians talk as if they can use the power of government to perfect the human condition, when we have known, since 1991, that they have no notion how to do so.

In the reality interpreted by Ormerod, most things must fail, including ambitious government projects, because the world is too unpredictable and nonlinear. But if that is the case, what difference can a personal choice make? The intelligent reader will at once understand this to be another question entirely: in what social and political environment could personal choices make a difference? The search for an answer is a major thread in this chapter.

The habits of high modernism have led to certain default assumptions: that only the top of the pyramid can impose meaningful social, political, and economic change, for example. Only the highest reaches of government, therefore, have the capacity to choose the path ahead. The rest of us belong to the inert masses. These assumptions were always undemocratic in spirit, but, more importantly, they have been falsified by the experience of the last 50 years. Heroic top-down initiatives have failed, habitually and in their own terms. The masses have awakened to political life in the unruly public, and the tremendous energies released by the Fifth Wave have surged entirely from below. Ideologies justifying hierarchical control over society have faltered, fallen, and begun to go extinct.

The central theme of this book has been the war of the two worlds, high and low, but that has entailed a radical reversal of roles, with amateurs, people from nowhere, swarming up the slopes of the pyramid to trample on the preserves of the chosen few. The simple world of the public, now networked and online, has thoroughly perturbed the complex system administered, for better or worse, by the elites. The question I have is whether the two spheres can be brought into better alignment from the perspective of representative democracy.

Consider this chapter a reflection on how choices, personal and political, can influence the functioning of democracy.

IF STRUCTURE IS DESTINY THEN THE PERSONAL WILL TRUMP THE POLITICAL

Drill down into the networks that have enabled the public to confound authority, and you soon arrive at what I would call the personal sphere. This is the circle of everyday life, experienced directly, in all its local specificity. Here the choices meaningful to an individual get generated: spouse, children, friends, career, faith. Government and high politics fill in the background. To imagine they can ordain or legislate happiness at this level is a modern illusion.

Because the personal sphere is tightly clustered, information seldom strays more than one or two causal links away from action. A friend mentions a job opening in his company, you apply for the position. This is the equivalent of seeing that truck bearing down on you, and using the information to step out of the way. It’s immediately and demonstrably effective. A few longer links to more distant acquaintances, or friends of friends, make possible personal participation in large-scale clusters: the network.

The evolution of Homo informaticus, who, when interested in an affair, deploys digital devices to interact personally with a network of millions, triggered the great phase change in the public’s relationship to political authority.

If the revolt of the public at times has resembled the struggle of the personal against the official and categorical, it is equally true that the industrial age often seemed intent on bulldozing every personal, local, or historical feature out of the landscape. Government in the twentieth century looked into the personal sphere, found it illegible to its purposes, and sought to impose on it symmetry and uniformity.

[T]he modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage. The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations. ¹

In democracies, the impulse to standardize usually led to some version of Brasilia—the geometric city without sidewalks or neighborhoods, built in the wilderness to escape the irrational clutter of the past. Government, in high modernist mode, imposed a bargain on the silent masses: surrender your personal sphere in exchange for social perfection. That adventure has been part of my story. It ended badly, as we know, but the price paid for the failure of government went beyond the big issues I have touched on—inequality, unemployment, and so forth. Choices were sucked out of the personal sphere, where causal links are short and effective. They flew all the way to the top of a very high pyramid, to be absorbed by elites who must contend, at each step, with the nonlinearities and unintended consequences of causation within a complex system.

Vandalism and gang violence at Cabrini Green offered a glimpse into what transpires when personal choices stand blocked by a standardizing logic.

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Only a generation ago, structural necessity dictated that hierarchy must grow steeper, more controlling, more efficient. There were two political parties, two automakers, three TV networks, one newspaper for every city, all functioning with little energy and no input from below. The Taylorist spirit ruled. The top could command the bottom in minute detail. The bottom was a formless, inert mass, activated solely by commands from the top. That was the structural destiny of the industrial age. Nothing else was really possible. The public was offered a narrow band of choices—Republican or Democrat, Chevy or Ford— unless it wished to opt out of the system and all its benefits.

Today the polarities have been reversed. The public has options: that is the single defining feature of the Fifth Wave. The public has options, and everywhere has cashed them in to pull the elites down and lower the height of the political pyramid. Ordinary people have turned the tables on the standardizing bureaucracies, and now insist that their tastes and interests be imposed on the larger system. They demand personalized service. They crave latte without milk —not just from Starbucks, but from their government.

Rulers and ruled find the distance between them tightened until neither can stir without elbowing the other. Daphni Leef, with her commuter’s insurgency, and Barack Obama, with his detachment from institutional power, exemplify a new crowding of the personal into the political. The old, stately pyramid is sagging. Its walls look brittle. The nihilist awaits his hour. This would appear to reflect the structural destiny of our own times.

But destiny comes in the guise of a historic choice. We have options—not just the nihilists among us, but everyone, including those, like me, who have never given up on representative democracy. The options in this case involve an analytical assessment. By an accident of history, our democracy became industrialized and Taylorized. That is its present form, how it appears in the public’s mind. But the tide of history is now moving in the opposite direction. Government as pure hierarchy and authority has lost much of its legitimacy, and is under assault along many fronts.

The analytic question is whether democracy must remain industrialized to endure. Or to put it somewhat differently: whether democracy will suffer or thrive if the steep pyramid of power gets collapsed into a tighter structure. Or to put it personally: whether people like me, uncomplicated defenders of our system of government, are condemned forever to defend the system in its present form, against the predations of history.

Cyber-utopians and cyber-pessimists have debated the importance of new media to democratic activism. Research on the subject remains inconclusive, but I am posing a different kind of question in any case. My question concerns the intrinsic necessity of industrial modes of organization to democratic government, and the intrinsic destructiveness of a public organized in digital networks, riding the tsunami of information.

I don’t see this as an especially tough puzzle. If I set aside, for the moment, the negations and contradictions of the public, the answer emerges from the body of evidence presented in this book. The failure of government isn’t a failure of democracy, but a consequence of the heroic claims of modern government, and of the constantly frustrated expectations these claims have aroused. Industrial organization, with its cult of the expert and top-down interventionism, stands far removed from the democratic spirit, and has proven disastrous to the actual practice of representative democracy. It has failed in its own terms, and has been seen to fail, and it has infected democratic governments with a paralyzing fear of the public and with the despair of decadence.

The nihilist is dangerous in part because he’s right. Zapatero was egregiously mistaken when he imagined that the Spain of 2008 was not in the grip of an economic crisis. President Bush was equally mistaken about Iraq, President Obama about the stimulus. These were very unlike political personalities, espousing very different ideologies, but they were similar in one crucial respect: they believed they could ordain the future. They embodied a system that had lost touch with reality. If democracy is to be judged on their performance, it would be hard not to lapse into negation.

So it comes down to alternatives. The most effective alternative to the steep pyramid of industrialized democracy isn’t direct democracy on the Athenian model or cyber-democracy in the style of Wael Ghonim’s Facebook page. It’s the personal sphere: the place where information and decisions move along the shortest causal links. To the extent that choices are returned to the personal from the political, they can be disposed directly, in the light of local knowledge, as part of an observable series of trial and error. Personal success can be emulated and replicated. Personal failure will not implicate the entire system.

I note that the present trajectory is heading mostly in the opposite direction. The public wishes to impose the personal on the political, in the same manner that it has imposed a personalized mode of doing business on capitalism. Here’s a contradiction: for all its disdain of politicians, the public has often behaved as if happiness were indeed a gift bestowed by presidents. The apocalyptic anger of the Occupiers and the indignados was the dark side of a muddled utopian vision that demanded the impossible from authority. Even the Tea Partiers, for all their libertarianism, assumed that the legitimate role of political power was to “protect” the pursuit of happiness.

The public, I mean to say, has been fully complicit in the failure of government. And the question of alternatives must extend beyond the formal organization of democracy to our expectations of what democratic government can deliver.