Originally released without much fanfare in 2014, this book got a second life in the early years of the Trump era, as word spread among legacy media types that it had predicted the rise of Trumpism. That led to this 2018 edition with the lengthy new chapter updating the book for the Trump era. The thesis that was credited for presciently envisioning things like Brexit and Trumpism is important, and while the reviews saying it's long-winded and not especially original have some merit, I think they're overblown. I haven't seen the thesis put forward with quite this level of clarity in any earlier books, even if similar ideas were in the air, and I actually appreciate that the first 4 - 5 chapters repeat the thesis through different historical iterations, which helps show its durability. Unfortunately, that still only carries you halfway into the book, at which point the author's libertarian ideology basically undermines the whole project.
To summarize the useful thesis: all societies are managed by an elite class who must control the flow of information from which people can build their explanatory narratives about the world and politics. In modern societies, this is a loose coalition of academics, journalists, and career politicians that people have long called "the deep state," though that term has now taken on resonances of far right conspiracy theory that it didn't used to have. Gurri's insight as a CIA analyst is that the internet has basically exploded the elite's ability to manage the flow of information, and so the public of various societies are now able to form new narratives of the world and politics at will and by whatever principles they choose undermining the population's trust in the credibility of scientists, journalists, and government experts. But far from creating the sort of unifying vox populi envisioned by tech utopians in the 90s, the public fractures into a mosaic of niche communities of interest. Any story you want to find is out there, so the anti-vaxxers have their channels of information, the anarchists have theirs, the blue wave Russiagate people are siloed off in their communities, etc. The effect is that the elites lose their ability to manage society because they're constantly fending off revolt by coalitions of different interests that constantly shift, dissolve, and remerge as the whims of various microcommunities align and drift apart. This leaves the public unable to replace the elite as managers of society, and the result is just constant destabilization of social institutions.
Gurri's examples in 2014 of capricious anti-system uprising are Occupy, the Tea Party, the Arab Spring, and the Indignados, to name just the most prominent. The model accounts pretty compellingly for a lot of what happened with those movements, and you can see why the book was credited with predicting Trumpism and Brexit. If that was the entirety of the book, you'd have a decent amount of useful insight on your hands, but you'd also only have half a book.
In the second half, Gurri's ideological commitments as a writer for a libertarian think tank really show through, to the detriment of the project. Once he's established his model with all those other historical examples, the back half of the book is basically a screed against Obama's presidency that barely maintains coherence. Gurri is so determined to make Obama the avatar of everything wrong with 2010s politics that he at points aligns him to the out-of-touch technocratic elite and at other points to the fractious, ideologically incoherent anti-system public-in-revolt, and sometimes figures him as both at the same time. Gurri even acknowledges that he's moving Obama around in these categories but attributes this to some unique facet of Obama's self-positioning that no other politician before or since has achieved. It...doesn't make a lot of sense. And it goes on for like 150 pages. The obvious way that Obama fits into Gurri's model is as textbook elite, a person with unfounded faith in the stability of the institutions he runs, unable to effectively deal with revolts from Occupy or the Tea Party because he doesn't understand them. The fractious public energized by online chaos is obviously channeled by Trump, who the Obama elite proved similarly unable to predict or manage.
So you might hope the new Trump chapter redeems the book, but it only makes matters worse. While all the original edition's content is clearly written from the position of a CIA analyst, a person interested in advising the elite on how to more effectively manage society from destabilizing threats, in the new chapter where Trump is the destabilizing threat, Gurri's sympathies almost entirely flip. While it's clear that he disdains Trump's more outrageous rhetorical impulses, the new chapter very obviously sympathizes with the insurrectionary impulses of Trumpism when the original book was all about the threat posed by an unruly public. Instead, in the new chapter, the elite are heavily criticized: politicians for their inability to respond to the public needs Gurri feels gave rise to Trumpism, and journalists for supposedly overblowing the threat Trumpism presents to democracy.
In other words, this is a book that's come to prominence at the recommendation of academic and media elites who saw it as a prescient warning about the existential threat Trumpism presents to democratic stability, and the updated chapter the author writes instead presents Trumpism as a defensible response to a corrupt and ineffective regime. I'm a bit surprised that none of the reviews mention that Gurri's ultimate conclusion is that we need a Trump-style politician who can restrain some of Trump's more outrageous rhetorical flares. The second to last page literally suggests that if American democracy can weather the threat posed by the public revolting online, it will probably need to do so with an alum of the Trump admin at the helm. I don't think most people who had this book recommended to them were expecting to hear that Ron DeSantis or a Mark Meadows acolyte are the antidote to our democratic destabilization. If it was already weird in 2018, that take has aged like sour cream after J6.
So, the first half of the book is four stars, the second half and new chapter are one star.
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![The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by [Martin Gurri]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/414lZg+LS7L._SY346_.jpg)
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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
About the author
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I bought this and opened it up and found out the cover was falling off. Well crap happens sent it back to amazon which was fairly painless. Just got a replacement exact same problem. I think they may have a defective batch of books. I was looking forward to reading it guess that won't happen as I am sending this one in for a refund rather than an exchange this time.As far as how good of a read it is I couldn't tell you sorry.
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