Revolt of the Public
Who are the Elite? Why should we care?
Revolt of the Public
I’ve just finished reading “Revolt of the Public” by Martin Gurri. I had never heard of the author, but the book was recommended to me. And I guess I’m recommending it, too. I’m unsure about it as, almost paragraph by paragraph, I at times fully agreed, and at others fully disagreed with Gurri’s observations.
How is that possible? It certainly is unusual. Let’s start with what I agreed with. Since approximately the early 1990s, media credibility has been sinking. Today, there is essentially no media credibility left. I have had thoughts about why, and have commented in other posts about it. Gurri largely supports my conclusion: With the advent of the internet, major media no longer controls the narrative. Simple folks, such as myself and a few hundred million of my closest friends, can communicate information directly. We no longer are limited to only what the media elect to tell us. My millions of friends and I can communicate concerning what has been misrepresented, and what has been left out by major media. I ask younger readers to contemplate a world, unknown to them now, in which the public heard and read ONLY what the leaders wanted us to know. This is unheard of today, but it was reality then. Frankly, it took some time for people like me to become truly aware of the degree to which we were being purposely misled. And then we started comparing notes, and started becoming our own news sources. Just as one small example, while the media have shown perhaps 30 minutes of video of Jan 6, the internet shows countless hundreds of hours, all by amateurs. Put aside your own opinions about that day, and contemplate the HUGE effect of The Public in making the news available outside of preprogrammed media segments. There are countless similar examples. Media and governments call this “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and even “hate speech”. Uh, huh. I’ll claim here that these claims are largely aimed at discrediting those who dare to go counter the narrative. You can read others of my posts for more specifics. Also, you can read Sharyl Attkisson, “Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism” . Sharyl is a recognized television journalist who is not kind in her assessment of television journalism. It appears that I, Gurri, and Attkisson have reached pretty much the same conclusions, independent of each other. We have been led by “leaders” who expect us to be unquestioning followers. Before, we had little choice. Now, we do.
Hold that thought. But now let me discuss what I find perplexing about Gurri’s writing. Let’s start with the obvious one. He uses the term “democracy” with little concern for what it means. As time goes by, I am less and less tolerant of people who use the term “democracy” as if it is synonymous with freedom and legitimate government. That is NOT the meaning of democracy. Democracy is majority rule. What about the minority? Good question. It’s a good question that is seldom asked. What about the slaves in the nineteenth century? Whites were the majority, and they voted for slavery. So, that’s that. Right? If that doesn’t satisfy you, then you DON’T accept democracy. Good government might dabble in democracy, but it must be democracy under control of ethics and integrity.
Hold THAT thought. Gurri speaks frequently of the elite. Where he and I part company is that Gurri seems to have some respect for the elite. He seems to feel that the elite, if left to their own devices, will do the right thing. OK, so what’s the “right thing”? Who is in charge of deciding? Are the elites in charge of deciding, and then we peons wait anxiously outside the doors of government to find out what they’ve determined? Gurri indicates that it is so. I say, screw that. Put aside the idea of democracy and contemplate the idea of freedom and self-determination. If you accept freedom and self-determination as legitimate, then the elite should be following OUR lead, and not the other way around. That’s what the constitution is getting at, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist on my constitutional rights. I expect to be able to speak, and I expect to be able to be heard. I expect to be able to LISTEN to whoever the hell I care to listen to. The elites mean nothing to me. They are in my way. They oppress my sense of freedom. There are 330 million of us. We will never all agree. It was never previously presumed that we would. But the elites do not want us working things out among ourselves, they want us doing as we’re told. Screw ‘em. If we must have elites, I insist on elites who listen. How often do elites listen? I mean, LISTEN? Essentially, never.
Gurri seems almost schizoid in his contemplation of a fully informed public and the elite. He points to numerous instances in Egypt, Turkey, Venezuela, Tibet, etc in which social media communication was able to topple governments, or failing that, profoundly influence the future of government.
Gurri--“The street protests of 2011, while ostensibly political, were part of a global assault on the guardians of authority across every domain of human activity. The protesters stood in the same relation to government that bloggers and social media did to newspapers, YouTube to television, Napster to the recording industry, massive online courses to universities, Amazon to shopping malls, the open science movement to the scientific establishment. From the commanding heights of the information sphere, the public sought in each case to break a monopoly held by an accredited elite.”
Interestingly, his book was written in 2014, so he has nothing to say about Donald Trump or the COVID pandemic. Regardless of which “side” you are on, contemplate what you would know or not know, if the only things you heard came from established media and “elite” leaders. It is a different world. The old guard is being pushed out. Their “system” is all but dead. What will we replace it with? I don’t know. Gurri readily acknowledges that he does not know. Attkisson never brings it up. What will we replace it with? Two possibilities are that an informed public runs its own governments, probably sloppily and in fits and starts, but still for the best overall. The other is that we will all live like they do in totalitarian China, fighting for scraps of truth, wondering what it would be like to live in a China of individual self-determination instead of totalitarian control.
Since the 1990s, we have moved away from a pubic who only knew what we were told. Now, we are a public that is as fully informed as we care to be. I can state for a fact that there is much that I know that my senators and congressman do NOT know. That they SHOULD know. (Perhaps they do know, but the official position is to ignore and deny.) And that is sad. And scary. But it was always our job, as citizens, to be informed and to call the shots. And to call the shots based on information, knowledge, and reason. Our federal government, our constitution, was built on that premise. If we don’t do that, it is not the founding fathers who have let us down, it is we who have let THEM down.