The Revolt of the Public

I think to no fault of the author, and instead as a testament to present times, this book felt a bit obvious. Gurri, a former CIA analyst and current geopolitical thinker, published this book in 2014, far before the Trump election. The book correctly diagnoses one of the critical and fundamental cultural shifts of our age: a resentment of expertise and the elite class, a popular assault on democracy, and a nihilistic tendency towards the burning down of our cultural, government, and geopolitical democratic institutions without an agreed-upon proposed replacement to them. Reading the book in mid-2019, however, most all of Gurri’s supporting evidential facts and anecdotes — the Arab Spring and Wael Ghonim, Egypt, Israel, Greece, and others — are now second-hand knowledge integrated into the modern fabric of political decision making. It is a jarring attestation to the chaos of our present age that it only took 3 and a half years to make a book with such an (at the time) new thesis (dare I say) almost pedestrian and self-evident.