The Revolt of the Public: And the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Author:Martin Gurri [Gurri, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781732265141
Google: qD-1vAEACAAJ
Publisher: Stripe Press
Published: 2018-11-15T23:33:37.571928+00:00

How Brasilia and Cabrini Green became Dodd-Frank and the EU Constitution

The claims made by governments today, and possibly even believed by them, were inherited from their predecessors of the industrial age. The same applies to the public’s expectations of government. The public looks past the feeble figures of their actual rulers to the towering ambitions of the industrial age. These ambitions, I note, were almost never realized, but that doesn’t matter. They were impressive and persuasive, they were articulated at a time when government controlled the means of communication, and they have become, without much thought or discussion, the default setting of democratic politics today.

So any attempt to examine the claims of government against the reality of what is possible must necessarily begin with a bit of history.

What James C. Scott has called the twentieth century’s “high modernist” approach to government routinely gambled on colossal projects designed to bring perfection to the social order.22 Authoritarian examples of such projects were Stalin’s collectivization of Soviet agriculture, Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” for China, and Julius Nyere’s “villagization” of Tanzania. Democratic examples included the building of the city of Brasilia, “urban renewal” housing projects like Chicago’s Cabrini Green, and the various “wars” waged by the US government against poverty, crime, drugs, and cancer.

The purpose in each case was to engineer perfection in social relations by the application of political power. High modernist ideology was a utopian faith: it assumed that rational planning and scientific knowhow, if imposed on a gigantic enough scale, could eradicate the miseries of the human condition, from tyranny and inequality to hunger and disease. The enemy was history, mother of superstition and disorder. The hero was the expert-bureaucrat, who could wipe the slate clean. We have met this character before: Lippmann’s “specially trained man,” magically wielding his “wider system of truth.”

High modernism suited the hierarchies of the industrial age. In politics, this was true for dictators and elected presidents, left and right. The appeal was structural. Everything cascaded from the top down. Only the elites possessed the technical and scientific training to rationalize society. The public at that time was still considered a formless mass—carrier of the imperfections which it was the ambition of government to eliminate forever. The ruling elites wished to raise this human mass closer to their own higher state of being. Their ambitions were altruistic. Their intentions were pure. If they were ruthless in their means—these included, at different times, forced relocation, intrusive surveillance, even incarceration and death—it was because they believed, with an unwavering conviction, in the justice of their cause.

Under the spell of this ideology, governments defined conditions like economic backwardness as “problems,” and focused on some immediate solution with an almost manic intensity. “The clarity of the high-modernist optic is due to its resolute singularity,” Scott wrote. “Its simplifying fiction is that, for any activity or process that comes under its scrutiny, there is only one thing going on.”23 The tendency to political gigantism followed naturally from this mindset.

The construction of Brasilia can stand as an example of the stupendous ambition of government in the last century.

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