"The Revolt of the Public" by Martin Gurri

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. 

 

Martin Gurri

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.

R.R. Reno’s “Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society”

Perhaps the first thing one should note about R.R. Reno’s Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society is that he’s not calling for a return to some imagined Christian government for the United States. The title might lead some to believe that, given it’s a presidential election, year, and given that it’s this presidential election, with people talking of whom they’re voting against rather than whom they’re voting for.

No, Reno, editor of First Things Magazine, isn’t writing about a Christian government. He’s writing about the idea of a society informed by the values of justice, mercy, and protection of the weak, as opposed to what the United States has become – a society informed by social Darwinism; a political, cultural, and economic elite that makes the rules for everyone except itself; and a culture of nonjudgmentalism that permeates our education system. Among other things. Among a lot of other things.

Reno completed this book before the political primary system got fully underway. And so it’s surprising to see just how well he anticipated, without once mentioning their names, the rise of the anti-elitists in both major parties – Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party and Donald Trump in the Republican Party. He has much to say about America’s elites – corporate elites, political, elites, cultural elites – and none of it is good.

“Visit the poorest neighborhoods of a major American city or an impoverished rural town and you’ll quickly discover a misery more profound and pervasive than simple material want,” he says. “Drugs, crime, sexual exploitation, divorce, fatherlessness, streams of expletives, pornography, violent images – they are everywhere. The sheer brutality and ugliness of the lives of countless Americans – not only poor but middle-class as well – is shocking.”

And the worst impoverishment of all, and the one he lays at the feet of American elites, is spiritual impoverishment. Through actions like movies, news media, corporate CEO’s lobbying on social issues, social engineering in public schools, and more, American elites ridicule the values of family, honesty, hard work, caring for the weak, and decency – while often typically practicing those very same virtues in their own families.

It’s fine to make often ridiculous rules and issuing directives for the children of the middle class and poor when your own children are in private schools and will be exempt. It’s normal to contemplate major changes to Social Security when you yourself have another pension system (Congress) and won’t be affected. (Those brilliant legislators in California – the ones so sanctimoniously passing gun control legislation – are exempting themselves from the bill because, as one of them explained, “We need protection.”)

R.R. Reno

What Reno is doing here is tearing away the hypocrisy of what passes for elite thought – right and left – in this country. One small example: “There is a far greater range of moral and political opinion in American churches than in a typical newsroom or editorial board.”

Reno’s suggestions for change recognize the difficulties of that change. It’s relatively easy to pass rules or make bureaucratic decisions out of the public spotlight; it’s quite another to change hearts. And it’s hearts that must be changed. It doesn’t take a “moral majority” to do that, either, for Reno understands something else, something profound: It doesn’t take a lot salt to ensure sufficient seasoning. A small number of people, standing with moral authority of doing what is right, doesn’t need political judges, people rewriting laws behind closed doors. And the hysterical rants of newspaper editorial writers to create change.

If you want to understand what is happening in this wild and crazy political season, and why there is hope no matter who wins the White House, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society is a good place to start.

Related: Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic.

Photograph by Martin Birkin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.