Commentary on Martin Gurri – Revolt of the public and the crisis of authority in the new millennium
“What we have here is a failure of the relationship between the public and the elites” would be my alternate title for this book. Gurri offers an explanation of the present state of our world (without the pandemic) mostly focused on politics because he claims that this is his personal interest but also relevant to other areas such as science and education. The book was first published a few years ago, but now updated shortly after the 2016 election because I assume the author thought his analysis would offer insights into the rise of Trumpsters, the decline in the acceptance of science, dissatisfaction with education, and related examples of relationships between the public and traditional sources of authority.
Gurri defines a human hierarchy of a type consisting of the elites, the public, and the people. The public is defined as those individuals interested in a topic (e.g., government). Gurri argues that online social media has created a great change in the relationship among these groups in what used to be a hierarchy. Social media has offered the public multiple sources of information and a platform for discussion and comment such that on any topic there is far too much information to process. I would add cable television and talk radio to this argument as a way to focus on a perspective on an issue. What the overabundance of information encourages is a focus on consumption that makes careful analysis impossible. Gone are the days of everyone reading an authoritative newspaper or a given news program as a common basis for conversation.
Elites (government officials, academics, economists, etc.) deal with complex issues and probably know the difficulty of using their knowledge to produce change within this complexity. As an academic, I would explain this to others by noting that nearly every research study published ends with some variant of a request for additional research. To note this is a kind of joke to some, but also a reflection of the limits of carefully controlled research in suggesting generalities that work in other environments. I am making the assumption that other “elites” working in other domains face the same reality. What happens with a public addressing recommendations to what might be described as “informed” trial and error is that it is very easy to find fault when informed recommendations don’t work out. A little knowledge makes criticism quite easy and the mass of criticism when passed on to the general population makes it appear that the qualifications of the elites are useless. Why listen to expertise when everyone has an opinion and it might seem that one opinion is no different from any other?
Gurri speculates that politicians are in this situation and over promise even when they know their insights are only good guesses. This creates a higher level of dissatisfaction because of the higher failure rate and what you get are elections bouncing control back and forth between one party and the other.
Gurri proposes that the public is far better at destruction than the generation of proposals that are legitimate alternatives. The danger is that a country sink into a nihilistic state focused on pessimism and rejection of any form of expertise.
A couple of other arguments from the book – Gurri had far more to say about Obama than Trump due to the times (the most recent version is after about a year into the Trump Presidency). Gurri claimed that Obama’s expertise was as an organizer and as such was better prepared to criticize the lack of solutions to obvious problems. When his expertise as a leader was shown inadequate (Gurri focuses on the failure of the bailout following the financial crisis Obama inherited), his reaction was to resort to his expertise as a critic. What I think Gurri misses in his analysis is the impossible situation Obama found himself in with the leader of the Senate openly claiming that Obama would be prevented from getting anything done. In this situation, about all you can do is complain.
So much of the support for Trump struck me as illogical. To me (not necessarily Gurri), the support of a public for someone who would seem not to be working in their best interest (health care, increasing income disparity) can only be explained by a burn it all down sentiment (nihilism).
Gurri does make some attempt to offer suggestions for improvement, but to me they require a willingness to change on the part of the elites (be more honest about the limits of experience/expertise in addressing great complexity) and the public (understand that improvement requires a certain amount of informed trial and error). How do you create such circumstances? No actual recommendations from Gurri. I would suggest this is part of what education is for.
Another review [https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2019/02/book-review-revolt-of-public-by-martin.html]