Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri
Gurri’s Revolt of the Public offers an explanation for a lot of what makes the world seem so strange right now. Published in 2014, it foreshadows Trump’s 2016 Presidential victory. But Gurri’s thesis explains much more than just the Trump phenomenon. It applies equally to the Arab Spring of 2011 and the recent rise of Socialist ideas in the US. The simplified version of Gurri’s thesis is as follows: The information age shows us the flaws of our leaders, leading to disillusionment and ultimately threatening democracy. But you really shouldn’t shorten Gurri’s thesis. He takes great pains to include nuance and qualify his arguments.
Here is my less simplified version of Gurri: He starts with the premise that the power of the elites is limited. Elites are the small group of people who run society though politics, business or other positions of power. To gain power or win elections, elites are forced to make big promises. They are destined to fall short because society is made of complex systems like the economy or the federal government. Complex systems are inherently unpredictable. For example, the chairman Federal Reserve cannot control the economy, no matter how brilliant she is. In the past, the media shielded elites from their failures. For example, the press gave JFK favorable coverage after the Bay of Pigs disaster. This was possible because media was dominated by a small number of institutions. Today, diverse information sources enable us to see the failures of our elites. This leads to disillusionment with government and our wider social system.
Before diving deeper, it is important to understand Gurri’s definition of “the public.” He is clear to say the public is not the people. The public is a group who have interest in an issue, but cannot directly influence it i.e. they are not elites. The public can unpredictably coalesce around specific issues, and disperse just as easily.
What has created this new information age? It isn’t only the internet. It is all the diverse new sources of information. Cable news plays a big role. Gurri describes how Al Jazeera covered the Arab Spring when state-controlled media was censoring it. The internet is special for two reasons. First, it allows amateurs to provide an alternative to elite consensus. This can be a blogger opposing a dictator or a reddit poster peddling conspiracy theories. Second, social media enables interested groups to organize into a “public” around specific issues. Gurri profiles Wael Ghonim, a key figure in the Egyptian branch of the Arab Spring. Ghonim was not powerful or connected, but was able to spark a revolution using a Facebook group.
Gurri’s examples come from a remarkably diverse set of groups. In just the US, he profiles groups from opposite ends of the political spectrum: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. Other groups are products of completely different political contexts across the globe, from the Middle East to Western Europe. Reading about these protests in real time, I had a sense they were somehow related, but I never heard anyone make a clear connection. Gurri makes a strong case they are part of the same “revolt of the public.” These groups share a few key traits that differentiate them from previous political movements. Each is rebelling against the elites. They don’t have strong ties to existing political parties or ideologies. For the most part, they don’t even pose a clear alternative – they just oppose the status quo. This last part is especially concerning to Gurri.
Gurri sees dark consequences from this loss of trust in elites. This is not some new golden age of participatory democracy. The revolts are about demolishing the existing system. The example groups do not pose credible alternatives. Most are unwilling to even name leaders.
This process begins to threaten democracy when politicians attack the system for personal gain. Gurri uses Obama as an example of a politician who ran against the establishment. His analysis of Obama feels a little forced to me. However, his analysis eerily describes Trump two years before he was elected. Trump’s run for president was an out-of-sample prediction test for Gurri’s hypothesis, and it passed with flying colors. He argues that a politician can leverage discontent with the system to get elected. Once elected, they will have no program or real ideology. All they can do is continue their opposition, even as they are in charge. This inevitably erodes trust in the fundamental institutions of democracy.
Gurri then suggests some potential solutions. The crude version of his solution is simply expecting less from government. Society, as a complex system, cannot be fully controlled by anyone. If we expect less from government, we won’t revolt in disappointment. The more nuanced version of his solution is about returning action to the personal sphere. The personal sphere consists of the everyday events that individual people can see and influence. The personal sphere is more manageable because it is not a complex system. Actions lead to predictable, or at least comprehensible results. To delegate to the personal sphere, government should increase transparency. Transparency will empower all individuals to relate policy to their personal sphere.
Revolt of the public is a great book. It pulls together disparate threads from the Arab Spring to the Tea Party. It analyzes trendy topics without getting caught up in hype or buzzwords. He avoids the trap of blindly blaming everything on social media. I appreciate how Gurri consistently highlights the uncertainties and limits of his analysis.
I don’t fully agree with his characterization of experts or government. I think he undervalues both. I won’t litigate that here. Even if he does underrate government or experts, it doesn’t damage his thesis. His thesis only requires experts and government to have limited powers. This is certainly true.
What about economic inequality? Numerous other analysts have blamed economic inequality for the trends described by Gurri. Inequality has a few things going for it as a possible explanation. First, there is a clear causal mechanism: inequality increases the distance between the upper middle class and the elites. Second, the timing fits: Inequality has increased in the last few decades. Finally, inequality was a major grievance of several groups provide by Gurri, including Occupy Wall Street. I personally think inequality is a problem, but Gurri’s work has convinced me it is not the main explanation here. Inequality fails to explain analogous right-wing movements like the Tea Party. Gurri’s thesis is more powerful because it has explanatory power across the political spectrum. Our new information environment creates the conditions for a revolt of the public. Inequality is merely one issue the public will coalesce around when they revolt.
I found myself frequently contrasting Gurri’s work with Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. Both authors offer compelling explanations for the disfunction in modern American politics. Klein identifies polarization as a key issue. Who is right? I see their approaches co-existing: Klein explains Mitch McConnell, while Gurri explains Trump and Bernie Sanders. In other words, Klein’s polarization explains why traditional parties will not or cannot compromise to get things done. Gurri explains the emergence of radicals who reject the parties altogether. On the surface, these trends look similar. Trump certainly polarizes people. But Trump is not fundamentally a radical Republican. He is a radical against the system.
I’m not convinced by Gurri’s proposed solutions. Maybe I didn’t fully understand them. I also think this is a hard problem with no simple answers. Gurri deserves credit for articulating it. I believe he has identified an existential threat to modern democracy. To solve this, it is important to remember Gurri’s lesson on complex systems: they are inherently unpredictable. I believe experimentation is the only path forward. We, as a society, will have to try a wide range of potential solutions to find the few that actually work.
[1] Non-native English speakers, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_joke.
[2] Oops! I mean “bears.”
[3] I have a libertarian background myself; I wish the Free State Project success, and I don’t relish the Free Town Project’s failures or feel outraged at its participants’ views or anything. In this review, I’ll try to describe what I learned from the book, not defend libertarian ideology or accuse the Free Towners of not being Real Libertarians™.
[4] You can also place this book in a larger tradition of writing about intentional and utopian communities, where many of what Esperantists might call samideanoj choose to move en masse to a single spot and make life the way they think it ought to be. The United States is the undisputed world champion in intentional-community-forming, and there are huge numbers of interesting accounts of the fates of the different communities. Hongoltz-Hetling describes a prior episode in Grafton history in which Unification Church members (“Moonies”) also led a mass influx to the town, altering its culture and provoking anxiety among other residents. Other examples today include the several entire Yiddish-speaking towns in New York state founded by Orthodox Jewish denominations and, of course, the Amish and other Anabaptist communities that have tried to live mostly apart from the larger society for centuries.
[5] A possible counterexample is tort liability for actual injuries, possibly coupled with a requirement to carry insurance against such liability. But this is easier in cases like car crashes than something like transmission of a disease, where direct causality and responsibility may not be apparent at all. It’s certainly not typical for the estates of people who die of transmissible diseases to try to identify and sue the individuals who served as the vectors of their infections.
[6] Some people who are building a politically eclectic kind of squatter camp or temporary autonomous zone in the nearby woods actually do start to put up some anti-bear walls. They aren’t all that effective, but I feel like you just want to cheer for the forest dwellers’ efforts. Or, in any case, at least refer to their walls as bearicades?
[7] The chronology gets a little muddled here. The book made me think the Free State Project migration and electoral successes were all later than the main events of the book, but Wikipedia suggests they were mostly contemporaneous. However, Hongoltz-Hetling focuses on the “trigger” declaration in 2016 in which a Free State Project founder publicly called for everyone who was part of the project to act on their pledges to move to New Hampshire. I think the Free State Project had already accomplished a great deal before that and the 2016 event was sort of a declaration of victory.
[8] Other sources suggest it was more like 100 miles, but I can’t resist my mental image of the bear singing: “Just to be the bear who walked a thousand miles / To fall down at your door...”
[9] At one point he starts investigating an incident in which a group of town residents—not necessarily all or mainly libertarian newcomers—reacted to a bear attack on a human by forming a clandestine hunting posse and illegally killing a substantial number of hibernating bears, in clear violation of New Hampshire state hunting regulations. The reaction to his inquiries about this is pretty sinister, as various people imply in different ways that the hibernating-bear poachers might be happy to switch to nosy-journalist poaching.
[10] If you’re, say, a secular urban European social democrat, I fear you may think every single character in the book, including the “moderates” who express skepticism toward the Free Towners, is stark raving mad.
[11] le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche - the knight without fear or blame (French)
[12]https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/homelessness/
[13]https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/1832-1914/the-growth-of-the-asylum/