Book Review
It’s rare to come across a book that captures a cultural climate and social atmosphere so perfectly. The Revolt of the Public by the journalist and political analyst Martin Gurri was originally published in 2016.1 Given its publication date, it’s evident that Gurri was not surprised by Brexit, the Trump phenomenon and the MAGA movement, France’s Mouvement des gilets jaunes and other oppositional movements against the established political order. Gurri examines political protest movements in the digital era and the significant realignment in the relationship between large swaths of a dissatisfied public and the elites and institutions claiming to govern them. “The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age.”
Gurri argues technological innovations in communications have had the tendency to undermine existing power structures, leading to downstream political and social movements. He refers to the emergence of smartphones and social media as the “Fifth Wave.” The first four waves—the printing press, mass newspapers and telegraph communication, radio and television, and the early internet—expanded who could produce and share information, undermining the power of elite gatekeepers and incumbent institutions. However, the Fifth Wave seems to have brought about unprecedented scale to this dynamic—practically universal, as anyone with a smartphone can participate. The Fifth Wave is marked by an extraordinary amount of user-generated content, real-time sharing, and the collapse of traditional editorial gatekeeping. Gurri posits that the widespread availability of information has undermined the authority of elites (the professional expert class) and the institutions they work in—government agencies, established media, multinational firms. These institutions, which once controlled the content and distribution of mass media, have lost their monopoly in a digital age where ordinary citizens can easily access and disseminate information. As a result, there has been a widespread erosion of trust in elites and established institutions, with growing alienation and dissatisfaction among the public. Smartphones and social media have ratcheted up the intensity of these movements. The speed and scale of production and distribution are unmatched in history. Moreover, the lack of gatekeeping leads to extreme, emotional rhetoric rising to the top. Thus, when a “revolt” takes place, it is not merely the frustration of citizens who feel that their concerns are not being addressed by the establishment; rather, it resembles a wholesale rejection of elites, institutions, and the power structures they represent. Gurri argues that this revolt is a major driver behind the rise of populism and the fragmentation of traditional political parties and ideologies. He draws on examples from around the world to demonstrate how this revolt has played out in various political and social contexts, from the Iranian Green Movement and the Arab Spring to the Spanish Indignados (or the “15-M Movement”) and Occupy Wall Street, and the massive public protests in Turkey, Ukraine, and Brazil. In the later edition he also touches on Brexit, on the rise of populist parties in Europe, and Donald Trump’s 2016 election—framing them as part of a broader “revolt of the public” against established elites and institutions.
Gurri’s analysis of the Fifth Wave also reveals a major weakness of Jonathan Rauch’s argument in The Constitution of Knowledge. It isn’t just new technology in the hands of “bad actors” that threatens knowledge production and undermines the liberal democratic order. Misguided overreactions aimed at preventing disinformation and misinformation have only highlighted the institutional biases of the elites running media and educational institutions. At this point there is no putting the genie back in the bottle without massive state censorship, amounting to state-controlled media. In Gurri’s view, something more fundamental is happening—trolls and cancel culture are just noise, not signal.
Generally, I don’t take issue with Gurri’s view that technology both encourages and enables opposition movements, but I think it’s important to point out this is political science and not history. Comparisons to the Wars of Religion simply don’t work for many reasons, chief among them is that it’s highly debatable how much the printing press contributed to organized violence. Furthermore, the disruptions of the twenty-first century have tended to be short-lived, and in the case of the early internet, I’m not certain it caused any considerable political disruption besides one-off examples, such as online recruitment to terrorist groups. Moreover, one could argue that all technological innovations are eventually co-opted, reinforcing the status quo of elites and their institutions. Nevertheless, Gurri’s focus on technology isn’t reductive; he acknowledges societal, cultural, and economic undercurrents in every popular revolt. For Gurri, the sheer number of these uprisings matters more than the specific issues protesters claim gave rise to them. This is not to say that the spread of new digital technologies in the hands of the public is epiphenomenal relative to public revolts. The point is the Fifth Wave may be a necessary condition for the revolts and rebellions of the twenty-first century, but it’s not a sufficient one.
As to those underlying causes, Gurri mainly analyzes how things are but only occasionally speculates about why things are. This isn’t a criticism. Gurri is a political analyst, and his project is to diagnose our contemporary governance situation. The Revolt of the Public studies many examples of recent opposition movements, and argues they share an essential, common element: they are driven by the politics of negation, or pervasive nihilism that rejects liberal democratic capitalism. Gurri writes, “the system bearing the weight of so many imperfections—representative democracy-began to lose its authorizing magic.” Rightly or wrongly, liberal democratic governments became guarantors of providing citizens meaningful, contented lives—an impossible endeavor that led to significant segments of the public becoming alienated and lashing out in revolt. However, compared to the American civil rights movement or opposition to the Vietnam War, these opposition movements are more than just people feeling alienated from unjust laws and state policies. When you consider the cash value of what these disgruntled citizens seemingly demand, there is no practical, realizable vision of how the world should be, no coherent ideology or pragmatic morality to guide in reforming or renewing the state and society. Still, contemporary revolts insist upon dramatic change—the overthrow of incumbent elites and established institutions, to be replaced by New Men in a New Order. For “the nihilist is merely reacting, as all human beings must, to the pressures applied by his environment: which means, in this case, that he is acting to destroy his environment.” Regarding this pervading nihilism, Gurri alludes to José Ortega y Gasset describing “mass man” having “radical ingratitude” for modern society, similar to the nihilist in that “[h]is political and economic expectations are commensurate with his personal fantasies and desires, and the latter are boundless. He expects perfection. He insists on utopia.” Note that ingratitude is also central to Jonah Goldberg’s thesis in Suicide of the West: it is both symptomatic and catalytic of cultural criticism, social discontent, and political revolt.
As far as explaining why there has been an outbreak of political negation, Gurri considers Francis Fukuyama’s argument in his famous book The End of History. With the end of the Cold War there were no more viable alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism and therefore, Fukuyama argues, we have reached a “final form of human government.” Gurri points out this argument fails to consider “the nihilistic rejection of the established order, regardless of alternatives or consequences.” In Gurri’s analysis, Fukuyama was “half right” in that there are no viable ideological alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism, but the end of the Cold War meant the loss of an external threat that had served as an ordering principle for Western society. “Lacking a shared enemy and the urgency of a war footing, public and authority discovered they stood on the opposite sides of many questions.” The advent of the Fifth Wave exacerbated “the bleeding out of legitimacy and living death of many democratic institutions.” Finally, while Gurri isn’t predicting the collapse of Western civilization, he warns that it is a distinct possibility.
Nihilism is dangerous in that the power hungry can take advantage of rootless political movements by simply being oppositional figures bent on overthrowing elites and demolishing established institutions. Those successful in seizing power are most likely to instigate whatever “feels” best to the revolting masses—inevitably, nationalist, populist, and/or socialist policies, all of which degrade liberal democratic capitalism. Perhaps it should go without saying that Donald Trump’s political reign is the most glaring example of this. But we can also imagine what a government based on Occupy Wall Street would look like. Under its creepy brand of far-left discontentedness, the country would quickly devolve into something akin to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, where individual liberty is suppressed, and millions die in the name of egalitarian zealotry.
Despite those dangers, I think it’s a bit careless for Gurri to equate political activism with political negation. Granted, the vast majority of movements calling for radical change strike me as useless and idiotic. However, support for these kinds of movements tends to dwindle over time. It’s unwise to overreact to public opinion—not just because of the recent shortcomings of polling surveys, but because people are complicated. They change their minds, overreact, lie, and obfuscate. Americans have tended to have complex relationships when it comes to their public personas and their private beliefs and opinions, as Sarah Igo explored in her book The Known Citizen. I have my doubts about the sustainability of all of this resentment and outrage—I even have doubts about its magnitude. (“America has never been so divided,” declared the bien-pensant man at the urban wine bar. To which the heroic historian asks, “Really? What about the Civil War?”). I also believe people will grow accustomed to social media, smartphones, and other digital innovations, and, eventually, signaling your political tribal affiliation will grow stale. People will move on to other things.
I also remain uncertain about Gurri’s argument that the politics of negation arose from the end of the Cold War. Historically, the Cold War ebbed and flowed in its intensity, so I tend to doubt its power as a forty year raison d’être for Western civilization. Perhaps Gurri misinterpreted Fukuyama—who was more than just half right (though I don’t buy his teleological analysis). The End of History calls out the innate need humans have for recognition which can lead to bad outcomes. People lacking a deeper purpose may adopt movement politics as a kind of quasi-religion that could ultimately destroy liberal democratic systems from within. Along those lines, Ross Douthat’s description of The Decadent Society combined with Fukuyama’s caution may offer a stronger explanation: economic stagnation, political sclerosis, cultural exhaustion, and other signs of decadence lead to predominant boredom, restlessness, ungratefulness, and perhaps even unfettered nihilism among demi-elites, wannabes, and has-beens. Granted, out of a lack of anything better to do, people without specific political aim have the propensity for protest, resistance, and even open rebellion. Still, while they may be steeped in critical theory, malcontents are as addicted to the creature comforts of modernity as anyone else. Social justice would never come at the price of losing all they have, much less risking three squares a day and the roof over their heads. Their unrealistic, poorly conceived ideas about what might come after dismantling existing institutions and power structures only serve as feel-good posturing. In the end, I’m just not sure how threatened anyone should feel about occasional, benign overreactions that arise from the public. While I’m anything but Hegelian, there seems to be a certain dialectic at play: the “BLM Summer” of 2020 was followed by the “vibe shift” that followed Trump’s election and, Gaia-willing, in the coming years liberalism will prevail in a synthesis between the two.
I only read books like Gurri’s from time to time. His book joins Goldberg’s Suicide of the West, Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge, and Douthat’s The Decadent Society in exploring the causes and consequences of various threats to liberalism and democracy. As someone working to become a historian, I do my best to look beyond personal political preferences when analyzing an author’s arguments, but I should also be forthcoming about my priors in case they weren’t obvious. On the one hand, I love the idea of everyday citizens uniting to topple corrupt, authoritarian regimes—like Mubarak in Egypt, Yanukovych in Ukraine, and, hopefully someday, Iran’s Ayatollahs. More than anything else I hope for successful popular revolts in Russia, China, and North Korea. However, unsurprisingly, with the exception of the short-lived Green Movement and Arab Spring, the revolts of the public have taken place in liberal democratic countries that afford people the right to fuck up their own civilization. At their core, most of the oppositional movements Gurri describes share an illiberal streak that clashes with my radical individualism, so I find myself not just questioning but actively opposing them.
- Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2018). ↩︎