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

In what follows, I’m not endorsing or resisting Donald Trump. I’m performing analysis. I’m going to compare the president’s actions and policies to the accusations and condemnations of his opponents. Note that I’m also not endorsing or resisting the other side of the equation. What I’m after is a thesis that explains Trump’s part, if any, in cranking up the decibels of a gigantic chorus of gloom.

We now have more than twelve months of incumbency behind us. The Special Counsel’s investigation of collusion with Russia grinds on as I write this. I won’t pre-judge the matter, other than to note that, as a path to dictatorship, “Vladimir Putin put me here” makes for a very strange choice. Beyond that, there’s really nothing. Hillary Clinton wasn’t prosecuted. As Michael Barone writes, “We have no political prisons full of reporters.” ⁷⁴ The president’s travel ban remains bogged down in the courts—in that case, his instincts have been less autocratic than those of Andrew Jackson, never mind Mussolini. The wall he promised to build on the Mexican border is still unfunded by Congress, part of a thoroughly conventional tussle over immigration in which the Democrats are winning serious concessions. The attempt to “repeal and replace” Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act foundered on the structural reality of the Republican Party, a beast with too many heads and too many contradictory voices.

I don’t see how, on the evidence, a case can be made that the United States is stumbling towards authoritarian rule. But I want to expand on that point. As I look over the world’s democratic nations, I find little support for the thesis that their governments are becoming more violent or authoritarian. Among the old democracies at least, the opposite is closer to the truth. Democratic governments are terrified of the public’s unhappiness. They understand the crushing existential burden placed by the public on mere politics, and the likelihood of failure, and the certainty that failure will be digitally magnified. Their behavior is the opposite of authoritarian. It’s a drift to dysfunction: to paralysis.

Weakness, not a will to power, accounts for the fall of Tsipras in Greece and Renzi in Italy. Paralysis seems like the right term for the government of Spain. Dysfunction describes the muddle in post-Brexit Britain, the decline of Merkel in Germany, the collapse of the political parties, the slow-motion disintegration of the EU and of the nation-state. A mass movement like fascism would be difficult to sustain in the age of social media. A garden variety authoritarian dictatorship would require the unlikely cooptation of military or security forces —something visible only to the large and growing body of conspiracy theorists.

The peril to democracy under present conditions of information isn’t any of these things: it’s the spread of nihilism in the public and the demoralization of an elite class that has lost any claim to authority.

The August 2017 events in Charlottesville fit this pattern. Nazis and white supremacists were there in insignificant numbers when compared to, say, the huge anti-Trump protests that followed the elections. They and their “antifascist” antagonists exemplify the public’s escape to exotic islands of identity: they are evidence, therefore, of the fracturing of American politics, not its takeover by violent mass movements. Yet these groups did take over the streets in Charlottesville. The cause was the abdication of the authorities. Elected officials in the city hesitated between their wish to oppose the racist protesters and their duty to preserve the peace. The police, which could have overwhelmed any disturbance, felt that its presence would actually incite violence. A single school crossing guard was posted at the intersection where the car attack occurred. She was soon removed out fear for her safety. An independent review of the events, commissioned by the city, stated baldly:

[T]he City of Charlottesville protected neither free expression nor public safety on August 12. The City was unable to protect the right of free expression and facilitate the permit holder’s offensive speech. This represents a failure of one of government’s core functions—the protection of fundamental rights. Law enforcement also failed to maintain order and protect citizens from harm, injury, and death. ⁷⁵

Here was the crisis of authority, writ small. The space abandoned by the democratic elites was immediately occupied by sectarian war-bands. None of these, by definition, were organized along old-fashioned fascist lines. That is the structural reality of our moment. So far as we know, the 20-year-old who plowed his car into the crowd at Charlottesville wasn’t acting on orders from his führer or from anyone else. He acted on an impulse: the urge to kill and destroy. Rather than chase after Nazis or other phantoms of history, those concerned with the future of democracy should fix their attention on that young man: on the nihilist who believes, with passionate intensity, that destruction and slaughter are by themselves a form of progress.

The nihilist impulse—the wish to smash down whatever stands—was to a considerable extent responsible for Donald Trump. As a candidate, Trump said and did outrageous things. He trampled on every taboo sanctifying the presidential election process. This worked to his advantage. He was perceived as a worthy club in the hands of millions of “deplorables” who wanted to strike a blow at Hillary Clinton, political correctness, and the ruling elites.

The question is whether President Trump, in office, has continued to be an agent of negation and a vector for the nihilist impulse. The president, we know, is an idol-smasher and establishment-basher. But for the case to be proved, he must be shown to have wielded the massive power of the state, in a sense, against itself: to have battered, with casual abandon and without regard for the consequences, the institutions over which he presides.

The answer will depend entirely on whether you are observing the administration’s behavior or parsing the president’s rhetoric.

A year in, it’s fairly clear that the actions and policies of the Trump administration are little different from, say, what a Ted Cruz or even a Jeb Bush administration would have implemented. From a Republican and conservative perspective, such actions and policies appear to be perfectly within the mainstream. On immigration and tax reform, in his judicial appointments and anti-regulation zeal, the president has followed prescriptions habitually endorsed by Republicans and conservatives before him.

Much the same can be said of foreign policy. Except for a strong tilt to protectionism, the Trump way on NATO and the UN, say, or China and Afghanistan, adheres pretty closely to regular Republican practice. He has been less interventionist than George W. Bush, but more aggressive—with ISIS, Iran, and North Korea, for example—than Barack Obama. And for all the talk of manipulation, he may well be tougher on Russia than his predecessor at this point in his tenure. ⁷⁶

The reasons why the anti-establishment Trump has pursued traditional Republican conservative policies need not detain us here. I simply want to establish the fact. To do so, I could cite effusive praise from pro-Trump conservatives—Newt Gingrich and Victor Davis Hanson come to mind—but I find it much more persuasive to turn to another source. “Never Trump” is a movement of conservative intellectuals forged during the elections. These thinkers share, in spades, the loathing of the elite class for the president’s character. Many “Never Trump” conservatives supported Hillary Clinton. Most remain unreconciled.

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Their grudging testimony on the administration’s policies is therefore valuable.

Noah Rothman, who has written of the “damage done by Trump’s big mouth,” nonetheless accepts that the president is governing “not as a populist firebrand but a conventional Republican.” ⁷⁷ Ross Douthat, a “Never Trump” voice in the New York Times, has observed with some surprise that the administration’s Middle East policy is “close to what I would have hoped from a normal Republican president.” ⁷⁸ Yet another member of the “Never Trump” tribe, Rich Lowry, has conceded: “It’s hard to see how a conventional Republican president would have done much better.” ⁷⁹

Two observations follow from these assessments. The first is that the Trump administration’s policies are not an instance of the state destroying itself. It isn’t nihilism at work. For better or worse, it’s Republican conservatism in power.

The second observation concerns the words “normal” and “conventional” used by these anti-Trump intellectuals. The words are striking because they have never been used to characterize Donald Trump the man—not by anyone, of any persuasion. For this, there is good reason: Trump has said and done outrageous things. He demands, and receives, impossible levels of attention—and he cashes it in with rhetoric that is not normal, not conventional, not mainstream, and in fact beyond anything previously experienced from a chief executive.

Trump has mastered the nihilist style of the web. That, to me, is the most significant factor separating him from the pack. His opponents speak in jargon and clichés. He speaks in rant. He attacks, insults, condemns, doubles down on misstatements, never takes a step back, never apologizes. Everyone he dislikes is a liar (see “Lyin’ Ted Cruz”), a thief (see “Crooked Hillary”), a “bimbo,” “bought and paid for,” the equivalent of a child molester. This is American politics portrayed as the last circle of hell: treachery by the people, from the people, against the people. Taken literally, it would mean that not a single pillar of our institutions deserves to be left standing. Coming from a president, it has the feel of the state devouring itself.

Such rhetorical onslaughts would have destroyed political careers just a short time ago. They can succeed today only in the context of the great struggle that is my theme. The public, recall, has mobilized in a spirit of negation and repudiation of the status quo. It isn’t interested in a positive program of reform. Because the impetus for revolt was born in the digital universe, it has inherited the style peculiar to the web—a place where every political dispute ends in obscenities, and, not infrequently, death threats. The public has absorbed this language of outrage. It too speaks in rant.

Trump’s rhetorical excesses appear remarkably in tune with this environment.
But there is also a political gambit being played on his part.

Politicians swept into office by the anti-establishment flood face an immediate dilemma. Once in government, they can continue to smash away at the institutions—but this will damage the economy and consequently their popularity. Alternatively, they can move to the mainstream and compromise with the elites—but this will demolish their credibility and alienate their base of support. Few have found a way out of the labyrinth. Alexis Tsipras tried each approach in turn, and failed at both.

The bizarre schizoid style of the Trump administration becomes intelligible as an attempt to escape this dilemma. Elected as an agent of negation, President Trump must now promote positive policies and programs. Any direction he takes will alienate some of his supporters, who are bound together largely on the strength of their repudiations. A predilection for the mainstream will alienate most of them.

Against this background, the loud and vulgar sound of the president’s voice becomes the signal for a mustering of the political war-bands. The subject at issue is often elite behavior unrelated to policy: “fake news” in the media, for example, or an NFL star kneeling during the National Anthem. Those who oppose Trump can’t resist the lure of outrage. Their responses tend to be no less loud or vulgar, and are sometimes more violent, than the offending message. ⁸⁰

Groups on the other side of the spectrum, now stoked to full-throated rant mode, rally reflexively to the president’s defense.

I have described this process elsewhere. ⁸¹ It’s a zero-sum struggle for attention that rewards the most immoderate voices—and, without question, Donald Trump is a master of the game. His unbridled language mobilizes his anti-elite followers, even as his policies appeal to more “conventional” Republicans and conservatives.

Politically, it’s a high-wire act without a net. Trump was never a popular candidate. He’s not a popular president. To retain his base, he must provoke his opposition into a frenzy of loathing. Ordinary Americans, inevitably, have come to regard the president as the sum of all his rants. For our confused and demoralized elites, who have no clue about the game being played, Donald Trump looks something like the Beast of the Apocalypse, a sign of chaotic endtimes. Writes the normally reflective Ian Buruma: “the act of undermining democratic institutions by abusing them in front of braying mobs is not modern at all. It is what aspiring dictators have always done.” ⁸²

But dictators don’t deal in tweets. Trump is in the style of our moment: a man from nowhere, with no stake in the system, ignorant of history, incurious about our political habits and traditions, but happy to bash and to break old and precious things in exchange for a little attention.

So I come back, one last time, to my question—only now the answer lends support to the alarmists. The predicament confronting liberal democracy, however, isn’t a resurrected Hitlerism or a manipulative Putinism. It isn’t even Trumpism, except as a sort of thermometer reading. The trouble is in us: in our readiness to generalize from the web levels of hostility and aggression inconsistent with the legitimacy of any political system. By embracing Trump in significant numbers, I mean to say, the public has signaled that it is willing to impose the untrammeled relations of social media on the fragile forms of American democracy.

FAKE NEWS, POST-TRUTH, AND MAKING THE WAY STRAIGHT FOR THE NIHILIST

The election of Donald Trump can be said to have demolished the intellectual foundations of the news business. The pretense of objectivity had been abandoned for a higher cause. The claim to furnish “all the news that’s fit to print” was now refuted by the failure to grasp the shape and outcome of the contest. No one who followed the news understood the forces at play. None guessed what was coming. Continued consumption of news seemed to lack any justification, other than amusement or habit.

Dazed and demoralized, people in the media sought haphazardly to explain the disaster. They were not good at the game: a profession that is literally in broadcast mode shouldn’t be expected to excel at self-scrutiny. Some wished to reclaim the mantle of authority by launching expeditions to that dark continent, Trumpland. “As The Times begins a period of self-reflection, I hope its editors will think hard about the half of America it seldom covers,” wrote the New York Times’s public editor on the morning after. ⁸³ Others remained unreconciled. “I blame my profession for failing to inform the public it serves,” tweeted Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor and by no means the only author to assume that “information” was the antidote to “Trump.” ⁸⁴

The self-critical mood didn’t last. Eight days after the elections, Buzzfeed posted a long, sloppy analysis piece that made the following assertion:

In the final three months of the US presidential election, the topperforming fake news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others . . .

Of the top 20 fake news stories, “all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton.” The piece said nothing about the effect of fake news on public opinion, but did sound an ominous note: “This new data illustrates the power of fake election news on Facebook.” ⁸⁵

Four days later, the New York Times picked up on the subject: “How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study.” ⁸⁶ The case involved a false story on Twitter that sought to discredit anti-Trump protests in Austin, Texas. There followed an extraordinary flowering of media exposés about fake news, most of them implying, without quite ever affirming, that fakery had helped Trump win the election. This was capped by a Washington Post article purporting to have uncovered the hand of that master manipulator, Vladimir Putin, in the diffusion of fake news favoring Trump.

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump, and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation. ⁸⁷

An anonymous expert was quoted as saying, “It was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign . . . it worked.”

If fake news deluded the masses into electing Donald Trump, and sophisticated Russians who hated democracy were responsible for the fake news, then an explanation for 2016 had been found that absolved the news media. The question was never asked why people would believe fake news over the real stuff. Trust in news as an institution had imploded. News as a business had been the first casualty of the public’s assault on the hierarchies of the industrial age. Information on the web existed in a state of nature, and on social media was structured by murky algorithmic priorities. All of this emptied “news” of meaning as a category of information: but none of it merited much consideration.

The prevalence of falsehood and the importance of Russian conspiracies in the election became canonical. The news industry felt justified in taking the last logical step: in effect, a leap out of mediation over the edge to advocacy.

In a private session with the network anchors, Trump was asked what surprised him most about becoming president. “The fact that you never changed your coverage,” he replied, ever attentive to media attention. “The fact that it never got better.” ⁸⁸ He was right. Negative coverage of the president has hovered consistently around 90 percent. According to one study, the top issue covered by mainstream news sources in 2017 was collusion between the administration and Putin’s Russia. ⁸⁹ The tone of coverage was even more one-sided. It was the media, of course, that gave us the caricatures of Trump as Hitler, Mussolini, and a white supremacist. It was the media that made every day into the last day of democracy in America. The rage that was once the monopoly of online politics —and poisons so much of the president’s own rhetoric—now poured out of the inky pages of old-fashioned newsprint.

A side had been chosen: the other “half of America” was to be discarded. At least in the short term, it’s proved to be a sound business decision. President Trump delights in tweeting about the “failing New York Times”—but since his election, subscriptions for the paper have increased tenfold over the previous year. ⁹⁰ Viewership of cable news networks, some of which had struggled to find an audience, exploded in 2016 and continued to surge in 2017. That was true across the board: Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. ⁹¹ Half of America is a big customer base—and Donald Trump, that political peacock, always seems to sell. There was even an uptick in trust in the news, from less than 20 percent to around 27 percent, as Democrats and other opponents of Trump perceived a reliable ally in the media. ⁹²

But the news as an institution in a very real sense has ceased to exist. The media elites, like elites everywhere, are driven by a fever dream of undoing the outcome of the 2016 election. They desperately want the status quo before Trump back, and they are willing to bash away, Trump-like, at their own standards and even the democratic process in pursuit of that aim. I don’t see how it’s possible, from a posture of radical reaction, to reclaim the ideal of the news media as an honest broker of information. I don’t see how journalists can be taken seriously by independent minds when they criticize President Trump’s truly destructive rhetorical outbursts. All they can do is oppose one kind of tribal aggression with another, nihilism against nihilism.

Howard Kurtz sums up the conflict: “Donald Trump is staking his presidency, as he did his election, on nothing less than destroying the credibility of the news media; and the media are determined to do the same for him.” But credibility, in this case, isn’t necessarily a question of either-or: both the president and the institutions, including the media, have stripped themselves of authority down to a fig leaf of rage and negation. “This is, at bottom, a battle over the truth,” Kurtz concludes. ⁹⁴ But it’s really a battle for dominance, fought on a darkling plain where truth, when encountered, is used strictly as a weapon. The media became obsessed with Russia and fake news to undermine the president’s legitimacy. The president, more adept at this sort of thing, stole the phrase and now applies it liberally to those news outlets—the New York Times, CNN—that seem to him indistinguishable from his political enemies.

I don’t wish to elide past the empirical question whether sophisticated Russians actually tried to manipulate the election with fake news. I take it for granted that they did, and that the consequences were close to nil. The kind of “sophistication” the Washington Post article insisted on—the word shows up three times—is entirely specialized and technical. It can get a lot of clicks for a story about Hillary Clinton’s terminal illness, for example. It has nothing to do with persuasion—with changing minds. For all the sound and fury about fake news, not a shred of evidence exists that they influenced the election outcome.