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

15 Thomas Fuller, “Thai Protests Turn Volatile as at Least 3 Are Shot Dead,” New York Times, December 1,
2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/world/asia/thailand-protests.html?\_r=0

16 “Full transcript of voice recording purportedly of Erdogan and his son,” Today’s Zaman, February 26,2014, http://www.todayszaman.com/news-340552-full-transcript-of-voice-recording-purportedly-of-turkish-pmerdogan-and-his-son.html

20 “Egypt’s Al-Sisi: Muslim Brotherhood Is ‘Finished,’” Sky News, May 6, 2014, http://news.sky.com/story/1255779/egypts-al-sisi-muslim-brotherhood-is-finished http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/10662452/Italy-has-one-last-chance-with-Matteo-Renzi-or-the-clowns-will-be-back-in-charge.html

TRUMP, BREXIT, AND FAREWELL TO ALL THAT

Reconsiderations:

The Revolt of the Public was first published in June 2014. I intended the book to be the description of a conflict that was sweeping the world yet remained invisible to most observers. The development of new information technologies, I believed, had shattered the categories we have inherited from the industrial age. Powerful political forces were unleashed, strange and uncouth players gained ascendancy, and much mayhem resulted—but our minds were turned in the wrong direction, and all the chaos somehow transpired beneath the horizon of public awareness. Hence I used the words subterranean and tectonic to characterize the struggle.

Events since publication changed all that. The election to the presidency of Donald Trump, in particular, had the effect of a volcanic eruption that thrust into the open, for everyone to see, the fractured and mangled pieces of the old status quo. The June 2016 “Brexit” referendum that determined Britain’s breakaway from the European Union was only slightly less of a jolt. The keepers of established wisdom now know they got reality terribly wrong, even if they are too dazed and disoriented to work out just how. Beyond the howls of pain and rage, many elements of the struggle I identified in 2014 have entered the general conversation.

A mobilized public, elites bleeding out authority, the failure of government and the catastrophic collapse of democracy: are there themes, post-Trump, that absorb more obsessive levels of attention?

In the clear light of hindsight, I’m amused by the unease I felt about utilizing dramatic language to tell my story. I thought long and hard about nihilist and nihilism, for example. The terms fit the evidence before me. Individuals and groups had been spawned by the conflict that combined the total negation of the established order with a predilection for random violence. They considered the mass murder of strangers to be a form of progress. In parallel, a rhetorical style elaborated on the web relied entirely on rage and repudiation, making every online political dispute likely to self-destruct in a “shitstorm” of personal abuse and death threats.

That was the reality of the case. But analysts have scruples: and I was concerned about sensationalizing a subject that held plenty of drama on its own account.

Today, everyone’s a nihilist. President Trump is a nihilist, many times over: Andrew Sullivan, who writes of “Trump’s mindless nihilism,” describes the president as “careening ever more manically into a force of irrational fury.” ¹ For his part, Eugene Robinson warns in the pages of the Washington Post: “We will all pay a price for Trump’s nihilism.” ² The president’s former strategist, Steve Bannon, was accused of fostering “the uncontrolled release of rage . . . it is nihilism, a desire to burn it all down and damn the consequences.” ³ But Trump’s predecessor in the White House, Barack Obama, turns out to be a nihilist too— and at least one bewildered commentator has proclaimed (again in the Washington Post), “We’re all political nihilists now.” ⁴

I also wondered whether I had exaggerated the weakness of liberal democracy, and, by harping on the voices of negation, had myself contributed to a loss of confidence in our system. I need not have worried. Since electoral calamity overtook the elites in 2016, shouting your loss of faith in democracy from the rooftops has become fashionable. “Our democratic republic is in far more danger than it was even a few weeks ago,” E. J. Dionne exclaimed in a bad week of December 2017. ⁵ Yascha Mounk accused President Trump of being “on the verge of staging a coup against independent institutions and the rule of law.” ⁶ Mounk had previously warned of a “rebellion against multiethnic democracy in the United States,” then had expanded the disaster zone: “[T]his is not just the problem of particular societies, but one that affects virtually every liberal democracy around the world.” ⁷ Other observers perceived a “worldwide crisis” driven by “illiberalism” and “populism.” ⁸

Parallels were drawn between the US today and the Weimar Republic that spawned Adolf Hitler. Barack Obama, for one, took up the theme. Comparing the present moment to Hitler’s “Vienna of the late 1920s,” the former president added ominously: “And then 60 million people died.” ⁹ In keeping with the temper of the times, the Washington Post devised a new, appropriately apocalyptic motto: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” For many in politics and the news media, the darkness was already here.

On democracy, as it happened, mine had been a small, uncertain voice in the crowd’s deafening roar.

The aim of this chapter is to extend my analysis to the events that caused such an uproar. Beyond the existential shock Trump and Brexit represented, I must, at some level at least, come to grips with a world of troubles: the collapse of mainstream political parties in France and Germany, the failure of popular young leaders in Italy and Greece, the slow-motion crack-up of the European Union, the rise and fall of a blood-drenched “Caliphate” in the heart of the Levant, the viral diffusion of terror and random slaughter. Then there’s the vexing question of populism—a term that implies much more than it explains.

Though the word “Reconsiderations” appears on the title, I don’t believe—with one important exception—that there’s much to reconsider. On the whole, the thesis I put forward in 2014 has held up pretty robustly. The public, if anything, is more alienated and angry at authority than I supposed. The elites, forever astonished by events, oscillate between panic and moral outrage. The institutions that hold up the status quo are falling to pieces around them. Rough, ungainly characters, devoid of institutional loyalties, tramp impatiently in the wings. In the US, Hungary, and the Philippines, they have gained power and strut on center stage.

Elected officials in democratic nations seek to curry favor with the public by distancing themselves from the democratic process. Donald Trump achieves this with his tweets. France’s Emmanuel Macron has dreamed out loud of an Olympian presidency. Less stable democracies have lurched, in plain daylight, toward authoritarianism. Venezuela and Turkey, while retaining the forms of liberalism, have become virtual dictatorships.

The great unraveling of the institutions has proceeded faster, further, and deeper than I imagined possible in 2014. Here is the exception I mentioned above: my reconsidered analysis. I think I identified, roughly, the forces driving the tempest forward—but I failed to reckon the speed with which it was advancing. It was a significant omission. In a few short years, the political landscape has been transformed into a bedlam of irreconcilable factions. Violent and profane language is routinely used that would have been unthinkable in 2014. Vital communities of interest constituted and empowered by the web have degenerated into online mobs and war-bands that exist purely to attack. The nihilist, killer of innocents, has materialized among us over and over again.

Should we then yield to the doom and despair of the moment, and come to terms, somehow, with the passing away of democracy? That question will haunt, specter-like, every thought and theme in this chapter. The fate of democracy, I believe, is inextricably bound to the fate of the elites in democratic nations. The current elite class, having lost its monopoly over information, has been stripped, probably forever, of the authorizing magic of legitimacy. The industrial model of democracy is dysfunctional and discredited. That is the current predicament. Every step forward must start there.

We need to understand more clearly the conditions of legitimacy under democratic rule. The revolt of the public is out in the open. The focus of analysis must move to a crisis of authority that has infected our sources of information— think “fake news” and “post-truth”—and rattled our political class into postures of panic and paralysis. The question agitating every defender of democracy is: How can this be reversed? A more precise phrasing would be: How are legitimate elites selected in a democratic society? The answer, let me suggest, will go a long way to resolve, for good or evil, that haunting question about the death of democracy.

ETERNAL SURPRISE OF THE ELITES, OR THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN

On Tuesday, November 8, 2016, 135 million Americans took part in one of the great democratic rituals in the world: the election of a new president. The outcome had been foretold with rare certainty. Hillary Clinton was a former senator and secretary of state, and was a chieftain and leading fund-raiser of the Democratic Party. Donald Trump shared none of these attributes. He had gained fame as a rich real estate developer and reality TV personality, but his experience in government at any level added up to absolute zero. Clinton had money, endorsements, an organization in every state. Trump lacked all of these advantages. He fought with and fired his staff, divided Republican loyalties, and went out of his way to alienate the articulate elites—notably, the news media. The New York Times gave Trump a 15 percent chance of winning. Others offered worse odds. ¹¹

11.1 An impossible president ¹⁰

Nearly unanimously, the country’s political and media elites expected Hillary Clinton to be the next president. The voters decided otherwise.

The shock dealt by the election of Donald Trump to the structures these elites controlled was therefore extreme. More than a year on, balance has yet to be restored. Trump’s victory was in reality a highly improbable event; but to many, then and now, it felt like a pure impossibility, a violent attack on settled truth. While announcing “the most stunning upset in American history,” talking heads on television stammered and wept. ¹² Suddenly, every aspect of social and political life seemed up for grabs.

The sense of impossibility was compounded by the strangeness of the man. Trump was a billionaire who rode a golden elevator to his Fifth Avenue penthouse, yet he claimed to speak for “the forgotten men and women of our country.” For all his celebrity, he had been a minor player on the national stage. He lacked political alliances, an ideological following, institutional connections. He said and did things that should have blown up his campaign many times over. He was a favorite of the evangelicals, even though he’d been married three times, and, in an unguarded moment, had boasted of grabbing women “by the pussy.” His signature issue was a hard line on immigration, yet his mother and two of his wives had been immigrants.

Even after eight years of Barack Obama’s condemnations, Trump’s was an impossibly dark vision of US society. In his inaugural address, the new president cast his eye over the “American carnage” he had inherited:

Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system . . . which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. ¹³

The nation as a graveyard: remarkable imagery from an occupant of the White House.

Among those viscerally hostile to Trump—above all the elites and the institutions, but also Democrats and the left generally, and some conservative intellectuals—his election was received as a moral and political impossibility, a malevolent absurdity that could only be explained in terms of lies and conspiracies, whose legitimacy must be rejected and “resisted,” without compromise, at all costs. Some called for members of the Electoral College pledged to Trump to vote for Clinton instead. ¹⁴ Almost immediately there was talk of impeachment on various grounds and of removal for incapacity.

The guiding principle of the opposition seemed to be that a sufficient volume of rage would wash away the election results and restore reality to the status quo before Trump. Following the election, thousands took to the streets in angry “Not my president” protests. Participants shouted “Donald Trump has got to go,” even though, strictly speaking, he hadn’t yet arrived. On the day after inauguration, millions across the country joined in a “Women’s March” against Trump’s perceived misogyny. Many demonstrators wore hats in the form of female genitals—early indication of the president’s uncanny ability to drive his antagonists into behavior even stranger than his own. Additional protests followed in April and May. Every week found fresh cause for outrage and scandal. Every day was doomsday for democracy. No one felt the slightest need to come to terms with this impossible man.

The fracturing of reality had a discernible cause. I will dwell on it before I’m done. Here, though, I want to pose the compulsory cosmic question: What in the world had happened? Or if you prefer: How is President Trump, disturber of the odds, object of so much fear and loathing, to be explained?

I don’t believe in single answers to complex puzzles: and an election with 135 million voters swirls along a massively complex causal stream. Two elements, however, are in my opinion necessary to any answer. The first is simple and generally acknowledged. The second made the first possible, but is a bit more obscure.

I said that Trump is free of any taint of government or political experience. He’s also ideologically formless—a member of his campaign staff described him, generously, as “post-ideological.” ¹⁵ He has been for and against abortion in his time, for example. His supposed nationalism, on close inspection, dissolves into certain rhetorical preferences and the vague demand that the US get better economic deals from the world.

The why of Trump’s election is simple enough. A candidate that innocent of qualifications and political direction can be elected only as a gesture of supreme repudiation, by the electorate, of the governing class. From start to finish, the 2016 presidential race can best be understood as the political assertion of an unhappy and highly mobilized public. In the end, Trump was chosen precisely because of, not despite, his apparent shortcomings. He is the visible effect, not the cause, of the public’s surly and mutinous mood. Trump has been for this public what the objet trouvé was for the modern artist: a found instrument, a club near to hand with which to smash at the established order. To compare him to Ronald Reagan, as some of his admirers have done, or to the great dictators, as his opponents constantly do, would be to warp reality as in a funhouse mirror.

The right level of analysis on Trump isn’t Trump at all, but the public that endowed him with a radical direction and temper, and the decadent institutions that proved too weak to stand in his way.

The US public, like the public everywhere, is engaged in a long migration away from the structures of representative democracy to more sectarian arrangements. The public craves meaning and identity. From its perspective, late modern society, including government, exists to frustrate this desire. Caught in the collision between extraordinary personal expectations and feeble but intrusive political institutions, the nation-state, here and elsewhere, is splintering into sociopolitical shards that grow less intelligible to one another by the moment. To a Hillary Clinton, peering down from the heights of a very steep pyramid, the distant mass of Trump supporters could only look like “a basket of deplorables.” Otherwise they were impossible to explain.

The political professionals who once managed the system and protected against such eruptions from below are gone with the wind. Trump’s candidacy was conventionally viewed as a grassroots revolt against the Republican establishment. ¹⁶ But that turned out to be a nostalgic fiction. The 2016 primary season revealed a Republican Party bled dry of coherence and authority as an institution. The party “establishment,” under any description, had cracked to pieces long before Trump arrived: only the word remained like an incantation. Jeb Bush’s risible impersonation of an establishment champion only proved the point. Bush lacked a following, barely had a pulse at the polls, and could claim nothing like an insider’s clout. He had been out of office for nine years, “a longer downtime,” one perceptive analyst wrote, “than any president elected since 1852 (and any candidate since 1924).” ¹⁷ The Republican worthies who endorsed him had been out of office for an average of 11 years. If this once had been the party’s establishment, it was now a claque of political corpses.