All across the developed world, citizens are rising up in anger at their governments. Here in the USA, we have Donald Trump, elected with a mandate to tear everything down. The British blamed their problems on the European Union and voted to leave. The French are beset by the gilets jaunes who are basically against everything. The Italians elected a government with a mandate to say “No!” to just about everything. The Greek government is still struggling with the consequences of past financial idiocies. Only Germany remains fairly placid — although their local “shut everything down!” movement, the Alternative for Germany, is doing surprisingly well in polls.
Why all this anger? And why is it so widespread? Despite different political and economic conditions, citizens in many different countries are “mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it any more!”
One big clue is the object of their anger. There’s one phrase that keeps coming up in every country that represents what they’re rising up against: “the system”. It’s the system that’s ruining everything. If you ask them to be more specific, they’ll name politicians or political parties or corporations or capitalists or technology or anything big and powerful — but it’s “the system” that keeps creeping into their ranting.
Moreover, their anger isn’t right-wing or left-wing, conservative or progressive. People on both sides of the spectrum are furious at “the system”. They can’t really put their fingers on exactly what’s wrong with “the system”, but they’re adamant that “the system” is the cause of their troubles.
So what IS “the system”? I think that it’s everything about modern life. It’s the technology, the crowding, the information overload, the political yelling and screaming, the obscene wealth of the very wealthy, the inability of the middle class to prosper, and a million other things.
The confusing thing, at first, is that governments are indeed attempting to address the problems. They’re not doing a great job of it: America continues to permit the wealthy to gobble up most of the pie. But here’s the rub: when you get down to specifics, most governments truly are taking a fairly rational course. America definitely needs to increase its top marginal tax rate, which is indeed scandalously low. And it desperately needs to fix its idiotic policies on global warming. Although these screwups will likely be corrected after 2020, I think that the sense of vaguely-directed fury will remain. Because the problem, I suspect, runs much deeper. We have made our civilization too complicated for its citizens to understand.
We have been seeing this phenomenon growing for at least 40 years, and only now is it reaching a crisis point. One of the earliest stirrings of the phenomenon was the opposition to nuclear power. Nuclear power scares people, because it involves radioactivity, a mysterious, invisible, deadly force that can kill you without any warning. (Of course, electricity is also a mysterious, invisible, deadly force that can kill you without any warning, but we’re used to electricity.) Nuclear power sits at the point of convergence of big government, big business, and big science, and Americans are especially wary of anything big, so nuclear power has three strikes against it from the getgo.
All over the developed world, people are lashing out against the complexities of modern civilization. They simply reject science that they don’t like: whether it’s evolution or climate science or vaccines or genetically modified foods, they don’t like being told that they’re wrong. They’ve had it with science and now they’re simply refusing to listen anymore.
Economics is even worse. Modern economies are immensely complex; even the people who dedicate their lives to studying economics admit perplexity at some of the most complex manifestations of the dismal science. Yet economists also give us plenty of strong, clear advice. Just about every economist warned us that Donald Trump’s notions of economics would be catastrophic, yet 60 million Americans voted for him nonetheless. They warned us that tariffs are ultimately detrimental to the economy, yet Mr. Trump went ahead with his trade wars, and millions of Americans applauded him. In France, Mr. Macron levied a new tax on car fuels, which was an appropriate way to bring down carbon emissions, and the French citizenry erupted in fury.
Experts tell us that immigration simply isn’t a significant social problem in America, yet millions of Americans demand a wall to protect them from nonexistant hordes of invading Mexican rapists. Experts tell us that the best way to combat climate change is with a revenue-neutral escalating carbon tax, yet those on the left insist that subsidies to renewable energy forms are the way to go.
James Carville, a Democratic strategist, once quipped that, when he died, he wanted to come back as the bond market, because he could intimidate everybody. How many people understand why the bond market is so intimidating? How many people understand the relationship between the bond market and the stock market?
The complexities of modern civilization are utterly baffling to the average citizen. If you cannot understand why civilization does what it does, you cannot appreciate why some things happen. It is the nature of humanity to accept the good things without comment and complain about the bad things in life. And if those bad things are inexplicable, the only thing to blame is “the system”.
Ultimately, what we’re seeing is a revolt against civilization itself. Citizens are rising up in revolt against a civilization that appears to be out of control. It isn’t, of course, but the levers of power are highly indirect and must be handled with great finesse. When the Federal Reserve decides to raise interest rates by 0.25%, that decision will affect millions of Americans without them understanding why. Impatient with these complexities, citizens demand direct, immediate solutions. They don’t want complex fiscal policies, they want a law that will make them get higher pay.
If citizens of a democracy cannot understand how their civilization functions, they cannot effectively govern their civilization. In their frustration, they’ll end up installing authoritarian leaders who promise simple solutions — which of course will only make matters worse. Such a civilization necessarily spirals down to its own destruction.