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

Liberal democracy predates the industrial world and is now struggling to survive it. It must shake off many of the forms and the rhetoric of the past 150 years in the manner of a snake shaking off its skin, and for the same reason: in order to grow. The digital universe has brought into being an overactive public whose numbers are unprecedented in human experience. Political room must be found for it somehow. The current elite class is probably unable and certainly unwilling to entertain this transformation. So far as the public is concerned, the elites have forsaken their function and thereby lost any claim to legitimacy.

Yet democracy in a complex society can’t dispense with elites. That is the hard reality of the situation. Much more is involved than a need for specialized or esoteric knowledge. Today’s tastes may run to egalitarianism, but across history and cultures the only way to organize humanity, and get things done, has been through some level of command and control within a formal hierarchy. We are probably hard-wired to respond to this pattern. The pyramid can be made flatter or steeper, and a matrix of informal networks is invariably overlaid on it: but the structural necessity holds. Only a tiny minority can be bishops of the church. This may seem apparent when it comes to running a government or managing a corporation, but it applies with equal strength to the dispensation of certainty and truth.

If my analysis is anywhere close to the mark, the re-formation of liberal democracy, and the recovery of truth, must wait on the emergence of a legitimate elite class.

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How does one group replace another at the top of the pyramid? The study of social change is burdened with many preconceptions regarding the primacy of economic factors, the exploitation and liberation of minority groups, the rise and fall of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, and so forth. By a stroke of luck, I lack the erudition to take a stand on any of these weighty subjects. Instead, I’ll revert to an old analytic trick and pose a simpler question.

How is a legitimate hierarchy formed?

In Invertebrate Spain (1921), the great Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gasset argued that such hierarchies occur quite naturally and spontaneously. In every group and occasion of life, Ortega observed, there are individuals who appear admirable to the rest. By the rightness of their feelings, actions, and expressions, these individuals become “exemplars”—they are “selected” by the majority as models of humanity. Psychologists today speak of “social mimicry” or “mirroring”: the body language of the dominant person in a room tends to be unconsciously assumed by everyone else. Ortega insisted that the dynamic transcended mere imitation. This wasn’t a question of hairstyles or clothing fashions. In all that counted, he claimed, it was a reorientation in the depths. The highest conceptions of public and private life were manifested in living persons, not abstract principles. The many who hoped to lift up their lives aspired to be, in some fashion, like these superior few. ¹⁵²

On this account, hierarchy arises out of a natural impulse to self-improvement, and is legitimate when, in an almost Darwinian manner, it is “selected.”

Ortega held the process to be the driving force of history. The “reciprocal action between the masses and select minorities,” he wrote, “is the fundamental fact of every society and the agent of its evolution for good or evil.” Ortega’s masses we now call the public. By “select minorities” he meant the admirable few: elites who, at their best, lavish their creative energies on the effort to sustain and enrich the fabric of contemporary life. These are the truly superior artists and technologists, preachers and politicians.

In the right relation between elites and the public, the former act as exemplars to the latter. They embody and live out the master narratives. We can think of George Washington returning to his farm after the Revolution as a striking example. Abe Lincoln in his childhood log cabin and Tom Edison chasing the perfect filament also fit the type. It almost didn’t matter what these historic figures were like in person: whether they were lovable or jerks. The outline of their lives had displayed magnificently admirable traits, and previous generations of Americans agreed with Ortega on the power of exemplarity to raise human life to a higher plane.

The quality that sets the true elites apart—that bestows authority on their actions and expressions—isn’t power, or wealth, or education, or even persuasiveness. It’s integrity in life and work. A healthy society is one in which such exemplary types draw the public toward them purely by the force of their example. Without compulsion, ordinary persons aspire to resemble the extraordinary, not superficially but fundamentally, because they wish to partake of superior models of being or doing. The good society, Ortega concluded, was an “engine of perfection.”

In a sickly society, the force of exemplarity is reversed. Elites seek to flatter and imitate the public. They make a display of popular tastes and attitudes, even as they retreat behind barricades of bodyguards and metal-detecting machines. This, of course, is what I meant by distance: a moral alienation felt even more keenly than the structural divide.

Relations between top and bottom, Ortega asserted, were “reciprocal.” Elites are in some sense selected by the public. If we were to ask how that selection works, Ortega would reply: by aspiration. When elites fail the test of exemplarity— when, as is the case today, they repel rather than attract—they are unselected. They are stripped of legitimacy and authority. A vacuum is created that strange new archetypes will seek to fill. As Donald Trump’s teleportation from his Trump Tower elevator to the White House shows, the change can occur with astonishing rapidity.

President Trump, however, is a prisoner of the public’s repudiations, of the attempt to impose a narrow symbolic framework on sprawling reality. The president, I stated above, perceives the world from a fractured place. That’s another way of saying that his life has shown the opposite of integrity. He is not the one we have been waiting for. Legitimacy depends on a shared interpretation of events: and to be shared, to be perceived equally by contradictory perspectives, a story must go light on raging at symbolic phantoms in favor of the demonstrable and the concrete.

To the extent that Ortega has accurately mapped the path to elite legitimacy, we are afforded a glimpse of the way forward.

The present need is for a re-formation of the system and the restoration of authority. The practice of democracy must accommodate the existence of an enormous and super-opinionated public. Political action must approach the speed and proximity expected by an electorate that lives, works, and shops on digital media. The change can occur in many different ways, but a few hard truths are apparent from where I stand. The top-down political style, a relic of the last century, today appears false and fraudulent even when it is sincere. The extension of social distance as a reward for political success is perceived, rightly, as contrary to the democratic spirit. The elites now directing our great institutions are unalterably wedded to top-down control and increased distance from the rabble. Their resistance will make the necessary changes very difficult to achieve.

As members of the public, we—by which I mean you, reader, and I—are not helpless. We are not inert. We retain the power to select and unselect, and we wield that power constantly—not only in our political participation, our votes and donations, but in the books we read, the television we watch, the performances we attend, the products we purchase. If, as I believe, Ortega’s framework of legitimacy was broadly correct, we can replace a failed elite class with another that is worthier of our aspirations. Fundamental change is possible, and can come peacefully and quickly. That’s the good news.

The big question is where to find a “select minority” that embodies the set of virtues required to lead democracy into the digital age, and can draw the public, by force of example, toward those virtues. Here political turbulence may lend a hand. Trump and Macron, for example, brought in tow a host of new faces, ordinary citizens previously disengaged from political activity. The two presidents love bigness and Olympian distance, but from the ranks of the new crowd may arise exemplars who can teach the public how to do democracy without negation or nihilism. Others may emerge out of the tremendous churning of new people and new modalities agitating our social life. Innovation’s lightning may strike new domains: religion, so far, has remained singularly untouched. The selection of elites seems semi-Darwinian in nature. Many are called, but few will be chosen.

It may be more useful to specify exactly what virtues will be required under a new dispensation of liberal democracy. That, needless to say, will take us out of the realm of speculation into pure opinion. Since I am coming to the end of my story, I will, in all diffidence, offer mine.

Modern government’s original sin is pride. It was erected on a boast—that it can solve any “problem,” even to fixing the human condition—and it endures on a sickly diet of utopian expectations. We now know better. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have understood that even the most brutal application of power cannot redeem the human lot. For exactly that time, electorates in democratic nations have, in effect, lived a lie—of which the post-truth era, for all its weird pathologies, is only a second-level effect.

The qualities I would look for among elites to get politics off this treadmill are honesty and humility: old-school virtues, long accepted to be the living spirit behind the machinery of the democratic republic, though now almost lost from sight. The reformers of democracy must learn to say, out loud for all to hear, “This is a process of trial and error,” and, “We are uncertain of the consequences,” and even, “I was wrong.” Elected officials must approximate the ability of scientists and businessmen—and, for that matter, ordinary households —to identify failure and move on. Honesty means that the relationship to truth, as truth is perceived, matters more than ambition or partisan advantage. Humility means that the top of the pyramid looks to the public as a home it will return to rather than a carnivorous species from which to hide. Truth must be spoken even when it hurts the speaker or the audience. Distance must be reduced to a minimum, even at the risk of physical danger.

So I would borrow one more virtue from The Wizard of Oz: courage.

Is this scenario realistic? Who knows? Stranger things have happened. Infections stimulate their own specific antibodies. The era of post-truth and the rant may induce a powerful demand for simple honesty and humility. I’m not forecasting the rule of saints any time soon. That isn’t necessary. Nor am I expecting a revolutionary transformation, in which, say, the president of the United States governs in his pajamas while sitting at his laptop. History doesn’t work like that. The forms and ideals of Enlightenment democracy are still alive in the industrial model. Many aspects of this model will survive and evolve in any future iteration of democracy. The crucial move if we are to surmount our predicament isn’t transformation but reorientation, a turn in direction away from top-down control, bureaucratic power, and the high valuation of distance as a reward for political success. Such a reorientation strikes me as perfectly possible.

In the end, everything will hinge on the public: on us. If Ortega was correct, then we have lost the right to rant about our rulers. Instead, we must go about the job of selecting their successors. We can lavish our attention and our energies strictly on politicians who seem unwilling to lie or simplify or distort to advantage. We can identify and raise up those who refuse to climb above us. That’s one fork in the path ahead: another leads to nihilism. Either way, the choice is ours.

CHAPTER NOTES

1 Andrew Sullivan, “Trump’s Mindless Nihilism,” New York Magazine (October 13, 2017), at http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/10/andrew-sullivan-trump-mindless-nihilism.html

2 Eugene Robinson, “We Will All Pay a Price for Trump’s Nihilism,” Washington Post (November 27, 2017), at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-will-all-pay-a-price-for-trumpsnihilism/2017/11/27/2be5d924-d3b1-11e7-95bf-df7c19270879\_story.html?hpid=hp\_no-name\_opinioncard-f%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm\_term=.1794f9c0be5c

3 Harriet Sinclair, “Steve Bannon Says Trump’s ‘Insurgency’ Will Rid Republican Party of Its Cronies,” Newsweek (November 19, 2017), at http://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-says-trumps-insurgencyscaring-mcconnell-action-716267

4 Peggy Noonan, “The Nihilist in the White House,” The Wall Street Journal (November 21, 2014), at
https://www.wsj.com/articles/peggy-noonan-the-nihilist-in-the-white-house-1416533660 , and Aaron Blake,
“We’re All Political Nihilists Now,” Washington Post (April 6, 2017), at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/04/06/were-all-political-nihilists-now/?
utm\_term=.c140b82029be

5 E.J. Dionne, “Our Institutional Crisis Is Upon Us,” Realclearpolitics (December 11, 2017), at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/12/11/our\_institutional\_crisis\_is\_upon\_us\_135736.html

6 Yascha Mounk, “The Real Coup Plot Is Trump’s,” The New York Times (December 20, 2017), at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/opinion/trump-republican-coup.html

7 Council of Foreign Relations, “End-Times for Liberal Democracy?” Interview by Zachary Laub, Yascha Mounk, Interviewee (December 28, 2016), at https://www.cfr.org/interview/end-times-liberal-democracy

8 Sohrab Ahmari, “The Worldwide Crisis of Illiberalism,” Commentary (June 16, 2016), at https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/illiberalism-worldwide-crisis/. See also Human Rights Watch, “The Dangerous Rise of Populism: Global Attacks on Human Rights Values,” World Report 2017 (2018), at https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/dangerous-rise-of-populism

9 CNN, “Obama Invokes Hitler Era in Warning to America,” YouTube (December 9, 2017), at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z\_FWptVoBWg. See also Richard Cohen, “The Echoes of Weimar Germany Should Not Be Ignored,” Realclearpolitics (December 6, 2017), at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/12/06/the\_echoes\_of\_weimar\_germany\_should\_not\_be\_i

10 AP photo. John Minchillo, photographer.

11 See Josh Katz, “Who Will Be President?” New York Times (November 8, 2016), at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html, and Natalie Jackson, when we are a nation of 1.4bn cold hearts?” The Guardian (October 22, 2011), at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/22/china-nation-cold-hearts