“The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium” by Martin Gurri was first published in 2014, and then the author added a rather extensive chapter entitled “Reconsiderations” in 2018. The addition didn’t revise or change anything from the 2014 book; it simply updated the information with the events of 2016 and after. And it is a very compelling, and disturbing, book to read in the first quarter of 2021.
A former CIA analyst specializing in global politics and global media, Gurri’s thesis is relatively simple: that the age of information has seriously undercut traditional elites and hierarchies, to the point where trust and credibility by the public are gone. He delves into example after example – the Arab Spring of 2011, the presidency of Barack Obama, whose election repudiated the traditional elites in the Democratic Party (as Barnie Sanders almost did in 2016); Brexit, there the British public turned a deaf ear to the elites in government, academia, business, culture, and the media; the election of Donald Trump, which repudiated both the Democratic Party and the traditional elites of the Republican Party.
Over and over again the public, armed with the staggering amount of information available on the internet, questions, rejects, repudiates, cancels, and ignores the traditional authorities created during the industrial age. Information networks and hubs have replaced hierarchal authority and experts. The problem is that networks can’t govern a nation state or even a region. But neither can the former authorities who longer have the consent of the governed.
What Gurri is arguing certainly helps explain the paralysis that has characterized government in Washington, D.C. Politics increasingly exemplifies paralysis. People in political parties no longer trust anyone in the other party; they often don’t trust people in their own. This idea of trust is critical. Resolution will only come when the public settles on new elites to govern, and that is a process that may take generations.
To be clear, Gurri is not talking about the public as the mob taking over parts of Seattle, rioting and burning in Minneapolis, or invading the U.S. Capitol. (In fact, he finds fault with a news media constantly amplifying tiny groups of people as representative of larger crowds.) No, the public is us, the people who read books, manage businesses, plow farms, drive trucks, work in hospitals, teach, sell cars, run factories, belong to and lead unions, and do a million other jobs. The age of information has taught us to mistrust authority, seek people of like minds in echo chambers, and increasingly think of opposing views as those of the enemy.
And, he says, we may be floundering for a while. It’s really strange to be reading Gurri as he talks about the worst thing that threatened elites can do – repression – and see exactly that happening on the internet, in the news media, and leading American progressives talking about the need for re-education camps.
Gurri makes it very clear that he is anything but a supporter of Donald Trump. But he understands what gave rise to Trump and his predecessor, what created Brexit, what’s tearing at the fabric of the European Union, and what continues to create strife in the Western democracies. "The Revolt of the Public" is not an easy read, but it’s an important one for understanding the times we’re living in.
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From the Publisher
Themes explored in Revolt of the Public
- The new path we'll need to take if we want to preserve democracy
- The impact of media, broader access to information via technology, and visual imagery on our democracy
- Why the public today holds a powerful force that can be used to shape our democracy
- How and why he saw major political events and movements coming, including Brexit, Arab Spring, and the 2016 election of Donald Trump
- the implications of these political events and movements on our democracy
An excerpt from Arnold Kling's foreword
I read the first edition of The Revolt of the Public in early January of 2016, after Virginia Postrel cited it in her column. Since then, it has been the book that I recommend whenever I am in a conversation that turns to the Trump phenomenon or the disturbing state of politics in general.
Because Martin Gurri saw it coming. When, without fanfare, he self-published the first edition as an e-book in June of 2014, he did not specifically name Donald Trump, or Brexit, or the oddball political figures and new fringe parties that have surged all over Europe. But he saw how the internet in general and social media in particular were transforming the political landscape.
About the author
Martin Gurri is a geopolitical analyst and student of new media and information effects. He spent many years working in the corner of CIA dedicated to the analysis of open media-from that privileged perch, he watched the global information landscape undergo a transformation so radical as to seem unprecedented in the history of our species. Wise heads noted that the change was bound to cascade down to all of society, very much including politics. So indeed it has: witness the 2016 presidential elections. After leaving government, Mr. Gurri focused his research on the motive forces powering the transformation. The child of this labor is The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, first published in electronic form in 2014 and now republished in 2018 with a chapter or reconsideration's. Kind reviewers claimed that the book had predicted the rise of Donald Trump. It did no such thing, but attentive readers would not have been surprised by the events of 2016.
About the publisher
Stripe Press publishes books about economic and technological advancement. Stripe partners with hundreds of thousands of the world’s most innovative businesses-organizations that will shape the world of tomorrow. These businesses are the result of many different inputs. Perhaps the most important ingredient is "ideas." Stripe Press highlights ideas that we think can be broadly useful. Some books contain entirely new material, some are collections of existing work re-imagined, and others are republications of previous works that have remained relevant over time or have renewed relevance today.
Other titles by Stripe Press:
- High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil
- The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop
- Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen
- An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson
- Get Together by Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh, and Kai Elmer Sotto
- The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming
- Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal
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A Meticulous look at how the world ended up here!
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