The Prophet Of The Trump Era – TK News by Matt Taibbi
Published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public may be alone among the countless books about the Trump years to correctly peg its core destabilizing problem. While conventional pundits blame everyone from Russians to white nationalists to fake news for all that currently ails us, Gurri focused on the inherent problem of authority in the digital age. If you follow his thinking, the specific forms that recent revolts have taken Brexit, Trump, etc. have been far less important than what he describes as the nihilist impulse behind them, the wish to smash down whatever stands. In America, this impulse found Trump, not the other way around. It also could have (and has, in other countries) come from the left instead of the right. The relentless focus on Trump as the center of all evil on earth has mostly served to deflect from a broader narrative about distrust of institutional authority that far pre-dates Trump.
Cf. Bari Weiss’s article below.