TMI AND THE CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY: My latest Bloomberg View column looks at Martin Gurri’s book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. Gurri argues, convincingly in my view, that ideologically diverse political movements that are usually treated as separate, or at the very least attributed to economic unrest, are actually manifestations of a crisis of legitimacy brought on when abundant information meets excessive expectations.

“Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust,” Gurri writes. Someone somewhere will expose every error, every falsehood, every biased assessment, every overstated certainty, every prejudice, every omission—and likely offer a contrary and equally refutable version of their own…

As information becomes abundant, he writes, “the regime accumulates pain points.” By this he means that problems like police brutality, economic mismanagement, foreign policy failures and botched responses to disasters “can no longer be concealed or explained away.” Instead, “they are seized on by the newly empowered public, and placed front and center in open discussions. In essence, government failure now sets the agenda.”

Yet the public’s expectations for government are at least as great as before. And those high expectations—not merely for justice or prosperity but for happiness and meaning—engender even greater anger.

“The public now takes it for granted that government could solve any problem, change any undesirable condition, if only it tried,” he writes. “The late modernist urge to intervene, with its aimless meandering, has been interpreted by the public as either tyranny or corruption — never, somehow, as the ineffectual pose of a kindly uncle.” In short, “The public has judged government on government’s own terms, but added bad intentions.” The result is a crisis of legitimacy.

Read the whole column here. I also recommend the book, which is complex and wide-ranging but fairly short and only $2.99 (ebook only).