How Elite Institutions Lost Their Legitimacy
Arnold Kling talks to Martin Gurri about how social media has accelerated the erosion of public trust in elite institutions
Martin Gurri doesn’t like to make predictions. But if you were lucky enough to read his groundbreaking 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public, when it was first published, you’d have an excellent guide for understanding much of what subsequently happened in the United States and around the world. Gurri’s thesis—that information technology, particularly social media, has helped to dramatically widen the distance between ordinary people and elites—has proven invaluable in explaining not only the election of Donald Trump, but other recent populist events around the globe.
Arnold Kling was one of the first people to see the importance of Gurri’s book. He’s also written his own influential contribution to our understanding of recent social and political trends. In 2013’s The Three Languages of Politics, Kling shows how three different political tribes in the US—liberals, conservatives and libertarians—have been speaking past each other, rather than to each other, helping to increase political polarization.
On Jan. 31, Kling sat down with Gurri at the Mercatus Center to discuss the latter’s views on the push and pull between the public and elites, focusing on three institutions: the academy, journalism and politics.
Gurri, who is a visiting research fellow at the Mercatus Center, worked for many years as a media analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. He currently writes a monthly column for the Mercatus Center’s online magazine, The Bridge. Kling, who is a senior affiliated scholar at Mercatus, is a housing economist who has worked both at Freddie Mac and for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In addition to The Three Languages of Politics, Kling has authored a number of other volumes, including Specialization and Trade, and is a regular contributor to The Bridge.
This transcript, as well as the audio of the conversation between Kling and Gurri, has been slightly edited for clarity.
ARNOLD KLING: We have a bunch of things in common. Some of them quite random, but one of them is that each of us put an e-book out that we self-published, and each book was kind of ahead of its time. Mine was called The Three Languages of Politics, and I put it out in 2013, and it eventually got picked up by Cato and there’s now a print edition. And that talked about the psychology of political tribalism, and now everyone’s into that. I just noticed that Ezra Klein’s latest book is on that topic. I was on a panel a few weeks ago with Jonathan Rauch, and he spoke first and he said everything you need to say about political psychology, and I said, whoa, what am I going to say after that?
And Martin’s book, he put it out in 2014, right? It was The Revolt of the Public, and that’s about the restlessness of people worldwide. Now I think everyone has noticed that it’s happening in more than one country, these populist revolts. So we kind of have that in common. Anyway, Yuval’s book is about institutions and the decline in institutions. He starts out with every institution has seen this decline in trust, based on polling data. That there has been an information revolution. Am I right that you measured it somehow? At some year there was so much information available, and then in that year it basically doubled?
MARTIN GURRI: Some scholars said U Berkeley tried to measure the total amount of information in the world. This is the year 2003 or something. They came up with—and they measured it in various different ways, in bits—the fact that in the year 2001 information was produced at a volume that was double that of all previous history going back to the cave paintings and the beginning of culture. All right. 2002 doubled 2001. That has more or less been maintained. If you chart it, it looks like a stupendous wave. So you’ll hear me talking about an information tsunami. That’s only partly a metaphor. When you chart it out, it really kind of looks like this enormous wave of information that has crashed on the institutions and is not a revolution, but a turbulence, I would call it.
KLING: Two to the 10th is 1,024. I figured that out before I came here. So that means if there was this much information in 2000, there was 1,000 times in 2010 and a million times that today. I have a different water metaphor—a tsunami. Sort of imagine in 2000 information was the Mississippi River. You knew where it was coming from, you know where it’s going, stays at the same level. And now you’re in the middle of an Atlantic storm, waves coming from different directions, 30 feet high. You have these boats that were built for the Mississippi River, and they find themselves in this storm, and that’s kind of where we are. But that’s not the only aspect of it. I would say the distribution of who has the most information has changed, right?
GURRI: Right, this enormous upswing of information comes from below. Information always used to come from above. And our institutions—political institutions, businesses, the media—were used to a world in which their little cone of information was pretty much controlled by them. I mean, there was some leakage back and forth, but pretty much controlled by them. So they controlled the story that they wanted told. In this Atlantic storm that we’re in, or a tsunami, basically, that’s no longer possible.
And a lot of the legitimacy and almost all of the authority that these institutions had in the 20th century has been swept away. Basically, every error, every lie, every confusion, every silly statement, everything that you said today that wasn’t like what you said two years ago, the kinds of things that in the 20th century was kind of papered over because we tell the story the way that makes us look better, all of that is out there now. And it has completely eroded trust in our political institutions, including democracy.
KLING: So let’s start with journalism. When we were growing up, if it was me against the New York Times, the New York Times had reporters in the field, photographers in the field, wire service subscriptions, access to government officials, probably better access to academics. Now we can both look at Google and see kind of the same thing.
GURRI: Well, illustration: The New York Times in a very strange kind of… roll the drums, please… the winner is type of endorsement of the Democratic field, came up with two, somehow—[Elizabeth] Warren and [Amy] Klobuchar—and it was “yawn.” Nobody cared, right?
Joe Rogan, totally unaffiliated podcaster whose audience dwarfs not only the New York Times by many, many factors, but any newscaster on television, endorses Bernie Sanders, and it’s controversy for a week, right? It’s people yelling… That mattered. New York Times, nobody cared. It’s a changed world.
From Discourse Magazine, here.