Book Review - Martin Gurri - The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

In “The Revolt of the Public” ¹, Martin Gurri (@mgurri)looks at the global events of 2011 and the increasing polarization of the electorate from the perspective of dying “legacy” institutions and an increasingly vocal and networked public.

What is “the public”?

Gurri tries to get to a definition of “the public” via the “via negativa”, i.e. by defining what it is not.

Public is not masses

The masses functioned as the anti-public. More precisely: the masses impersonated the public for the benefit of the hierarchy, while stripping it of all spontaneity and repudiating its authentic interests. In the marketplace, for example, the mass consumer was created by stripping away all particularities and recognizing only certain universal needs and tastes: those satisfiable by mass production.

Public is not the people, but likes to pretend that it is

The public is not, and never can be, identical to the people: this is true in all circumstances, everywhere. Since, on any given question, the public is composed of those self-selected persons interested in the affair, it possesses no legitimate authority whatever, and lacks the structure to enforce any authority that might fall its way.

The public is not the crowd, but the two are in a relationship

The public mediates the transformation of the crowd into a symbolic force. It can seize on an event, like demonstrations in Istanbul against the demolition of a park, then mobilize its organs of opinion on behalf of the demonstrators, in the process adding sentiment and meaning that may not have been present in the actual event.

2011 as Phase change

The events of 2011 in Egypt, Spain, Israel and the US testify to a phase change in the relationship of public and “legitimate authority” for Gurri. The triggers for these “revolts” where very diverse. From living under an oppressive dictatorship in Egypt, over having been robbed of the future by an economic crisis in Spain, to simply not accepting a longer commute due to an increase in housing costs in Israel. Regardless of the diverse “sparks”, the reaction was eerily similar: a form of nihilism that would rather erase the whole system and structure completely, no matter the consequences, than tolerating flaws in the system. All of these movements lacked positive demands, probably due to the reason that any demand would have been seen as a betrayal. These movements are sectarian in their psychological makeup and are attacking the center of power, but they are incapable of consolidating or holding power, because there simply is no substance above and beyond their dislike for the current holders of power. Revolution, in 2011, meant denunciation. Actual change was left for someone else.

A crisis of authority

Authority flows from legitimacy, derived from a monopoly on information. To some indeterminate degree, the public must trust and heed authority, or it is no authority. Authority is expected to deliver certainty in an uncertain world. It is supposed to explain reality in the context of a shared story of the group. For this it must rely on persuasion rather than compulsion, since naked force is destroyer of trust and faith. This leads to a propensity for visible symbols of authority. Those who wield authority it wish to be recognized for what they are. For a rather long time, “the authorities” have been the only actors in the social drama and the only subjects of history: the public was an audience to be acted upon. Authority was the active human element in an otherwise inert population.

Current structures of authority are a legacy of the industrial age. When the public needs answers, it turns to institutions rather than to charismatic individuals. These institutions have been subjected to a Taylorist process of rationalization: they are, without exception, top-down, specialized, professionalized, prone to ritual and jargon. To enter such an institution a long and costly accreditation precess needs to be gone through. Members of these institutions believe themselves to be masters of their domain. They monopolized information, and for a long time the public could not question their announcement. Authority has been closely associated with money and power. Persuasion has always trumped compulsion or bribery. The public generally assumes that failures of authority must be explained by a collusion of money and power. The crisis of authority hollowing out existing institutions didn’t arise because these institutions prostituted themselves to power or money. That was an explanation after fact, one that happens to be believed by much of the public and many experts.

The painfully obvious gap between the institutions’ claims of competence and their actual performance has always been there and is a function of the limits of human knowledge. What changed was the public’s awareness of it. The battleground of the assault on authority is everywhere and has expanded to virtually every point in the social landscape where an established hierarchy confronts a public in command of the new platforms of communication. Empowered by new technologies like blogging, podcasting and social media platforms, the public has seized the great strategic advantage of occupying the heights of information and communication. And from these heights, the public tries to break the monopoly held by an accredited elite. It’s MOOCs vs. universities, shopify vs. shopping malls, open science vs. scientific establishment, social media vs. newspaper, cryptocurrency vs. central banks.

Even venerable institutions like “science” have taken a hit. I think it’s fair to say that the handling of the pandemic did not help too much with universally creating trust in it. Peer reviews has become progressively less able to guarantee the integrity and legitimacy of research. And the costs of journals has become prohibitive. Only institutions can afford them.

Politicians in peril

While it was possible in the 60s for the institutionalized media to convert JFK’s failure in the Bay of Pigs into a “learning” experience, the failure of Obama’s reforms in 2010 have cost him authority, sparked the Tea Party and crippled his grandiose, positive government. After that, he reverted to the role of community organizer and proclaimed the illegitimacy of the system from the very summit of power. He criticized the country’s ruling institutions and voiced, without equivocation, his own doubts about their legitimacy. Gurri portraits him as a representative of the sectarian temper in power. Something, which has not existed before.

Governments are aware that the public could swarm into the political arena at any moment, organizing at the speed of light, hurling attacks on the reputation of politicians. Political elites in democratic countries have become thoroughly demoralized. Whether this was deserved or not is a separate question. But the crisis of confidence among established politicians has precluded the possibility of bold action, of democratic reform. Which is of course fueling the people frustrated by the democratic process and wishing to see it being swept away. The sowing of the seeds of distrust in the democratic process has been the most profound consequence of 2011.

Like money and marriage, legitimacy exists objectively, because vast numbers of the public agree, subjectively, that it does exist. Or that it doesn’t. The “high modernism” of the post-ware era portrait itself as the engine of progress towards perfection, today’s “late modernism” promises happiness. It feels bound to intervene anywhere it has identified groups that were somehow victimized, disabled, troubled, below average, offended, uncomfortable - actually or potentially unhappy. Government today desperately wish to be seen doing something, anything, to help and be recognized for its good intentions. Assured of the public’s wrath, elected government have acted, or rather failed to act, motivated by a terror of consequences.

Politics in peril?

Even if government claims have been excessively ambitious, it may be that government capabilities can achieve some level of success on some of the great issues that have troubled democratic politics for a century, and so satisfy, to some degree, the heightened expectations of the public. If that’s the case, then pointed questions about the competence and good faith of democratic governments must be asked. If it is not, however, we face an even more disturbing possibility: that democratic politics are fought over issues that democratic governments have no power to resolve.

Gurri contrasts states to companies. Companies intend to survive, indeed to thrive, and act on those intentions. They research the market environment, draft strategic plans, seek to maximize their advantages and minimize their weaknesses. Yet, ultimately, their failure rate is “virtually identical” to the random pattern of animal extinction. This leads some credence to the conjecture that it’s very difficult or even impossible to predict the consequences of decisions in any meaningful sense for systems above a certain level of complexity. And when the complexity on the scale of companies is too complex, what does that tell us about the scale of nation states?

Rulers everywhere are pale, trembling prisoners of their own rhetoric. Democratic rulers, for purely historical reasons, are condemned to propose ambitious projects and assert extravagant claims of competence. Politicians most promise the impossible to get elected. But elected officials must avoid meaningful action at all costs to not get swept away for any failure to deliver by the public.

An important difference between companies and governments is that while failing companies get out of business, government accumulate failures. And distrust accumulates over time. Gurri observes that there are zombie institutions that cling to life and still wields power, but have 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.

Gurri is 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. 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. Government, in high modernist mode, imposed a bargain on the silent masses: surrender your personal sphere in exchange for social perfection. But it didn’t deliver.

Nihilism

Gurri identifies a growing group of nihilists as threatening to democracy. This is fueled by a public that has judged government of government’s own promises, but that suspects bad intentions as reason for the failures of outcome.

The illusion is that 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.

The disquieting truth about his emergence is where he comes from. The threat of the future, if there is such, originates in the past. The nihilist benefits from the system he would like to smash. He is not a sufferer in any sense. He is 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.

Mass man accepts the gifts of the system as his due, but will tear up the system root and branch, present and past, if the least of his desires is left unfulfilled. Radical ingratitude describes the feeling that makes the nihilist tick. He expects perfection. He insists on utopia. He has “no experience of his own limits”, at least not as something he should accept in good grace. Fortified by the conviction that he deserves more, he feels righteous in his ingratitude - a feeling sometimes validated by late modernist governments bent on the promotion of universal happiness. In the clouded mind of the nihilist, the “more” stretched infinitely toward utopia. Though he never descends to details, he assumes that by symbolic gestures and sheer force of desire, they could refashion the complex systems of democracy and capitalism into a personalized utopia.

Gurri’s way out

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 revolt of the public against authority can be framed as a contest between two disparate ways of looking at the world: the institutional and the practical. Institutions can perceive only generic abstractions like the unemployment rate or the GDP. They are blind to the accumulation of detail that is everyday life. Practical knowledge fills that gap: it consists of local idiosyncrasies that are impossible to generalize. This can be as simple as knowing which car dealerships in the neighborhood cheat on repairs and which medical practitioners go by the book rather than the patient. The failure of government has proceeded in parallel with the devaluation of practical knowledge.

For Gurri, the most effective alternative to the steep pyramid of industrialized democracy isn’t direct democracy or the Athenian model or cyber-democracy. It’s a return to the practical, personal sphere: the place where information and decision 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 trails and error. But of course this is contra to the growing tendency to politicize every minute personal decision.

He advises to be more honest in our expectations:

The president can’t handle the economy. Advisors don’t know best or even better and have rarely “skin in the game”. Politicians should be rewarded for modesty of their claims, rather than the heroic ambition of their rhetoric. Sitting officials should be applauded for discarding the pose of papal infallibility and speaking about uncertainty, risk and trade-offs. The more people we elect to office who grasp the concept of trail and error, which means nothing more than learning from mistakes, the happier we should be. We cannot demand certainty of complexity, or expect that statistical formulas and numbers, accessible only to a chosen few, will have the power to ordain the future. We should not pour a corrosive stream of rejection and negation on a democratic system that has struggled, and mostly failed, to meet my impossible demands and expectations.

Gurri also suggests that governments can opt to participate in their realignment with the public and retain a measure of control by becoming an open government. It has to move information online in ways that are legible to the bottom of the pyramid. The production process of government can be made manifest at every step by opening the books, making drafts accessible, tracking all changes, inviting comments. If the government wants to efficiently communicate with the public online to any extent, it will have to radically change its official language in style and length, of course. In short, governments can opt to become open.

Summary

For Gurri, democracy is in peril, because the grandiose claims of control over the future are falling apart under the scrutiny of the networked public. Nihilists, believing in the all encompassing power of the state, if it were only used correctly, are disillusioned, frustrated and angry. They are willing to tear the whole structure down, even though they have no clue what could replace the system. If we want to protect the good parts of this structure, which has generated unprecedented amounts of material prosperity, we will have to change our expectations of and approach to politics.

“The Revolt of the Public” is an interesting perspective on the ubiquitous loss of trust in institutions and its possible, maybe even probable disastrous consequences. Unfortunately, we see it often: entrenched elites, fearing for their status, which was bestowed upon them by having followed the long road to become credentialed, try to insulate themselves and - what’s even more problematic - the public from possibly error correcting information by trying to censor alternatives. We have seen it during the pandemic, when ideas that were not championed by the right elites were banned from social media platforms. Most of these ideas proved useless, some might have helped. “This might be harmful” is the battling cry of censors around the world. Cut of from feedback, experts become activists. They stop error correcting and start myth creating. They might be rationally irrational in doing so, because this can help to maintain their elevated position within their peer group, “side” and society at large. If their faults are not corrected, they can retain their status as sages. But while it helps to bolster the ego, status and income of some, it really does not help society.

Conjecture and criticism is what drives the growth of knowledge. Building a “learning culture”, where it is normal try and fail, but be audacious enough to try, will be major task for us.