In 2016, when Donald Trump won the first time, a little-known book became an unexpected phenomenon. It was “The Revolt of the Public,” self-published two years earlier by a former C.I.A. media analyst, Martin Gurri. Gurri, who is now a visiting research fellow at the Mercatus Center, argued that a revolution in how information flowed was driving political upheavals in country after country: The dynamics of modern media ecosystems naturally created distrust toward institutions and elites, and this was fueling waves of revolt against the status quo. The problem, though, was that though these dynamics could destroy existing political systems, they could not build enduring replacements.Gurri’s book has been on my mind over the past year. In some ways, it explains 2024 better than it explains 2016. But time didn’t just change Gurri’s book; it changed Gurri. After refusing to cast a ballot for president in 2016 and 2020, he voted for Donald Trump in 2024. And in his writing for The Free Press, The New York Post and elsewhere, he’s been arguing that Trump’s second term might herald the mastery of this new informational world and the emergence of an enduring new political system.I found myself more convinced by Gurri’s old theory than his new one. So I asked him on the show to talk about it.(Also: If you’re interested in joining Ezra Klein on his book tour in March and April, you can see the stops and get tickets for the events here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/p/abundance-tour)Book Recommendations:Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers by Andrey Mir.Why Most Things Fail by Paul OrmerodNot Born Yesterday by Hugo MercierThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is Martin Gurri's theory about media and political upheaval?
So if you wanna come join us in person, come check that out. From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. Back in 2016, when Donald Trump won the first time, there was this book, it was self-published by a former CIA media analyst named Martin Gurry that became a kind of phenomenon in Silicon Valley. The book was called The Revolt of the Public.
And what it did was describe these informational dynamics. It described the way that politics was changing because media was changing, because media and information got from scarce to abundant. And that had created constant recurrent crises for whoever was in power. The ability to control a narrative was gone.
And in this world of fractured media, there was always an incentive and always an ability to show what was wrong with whoever was ruling. And this was, Gurry argued, fundamentally unstable. It knew how to destroy. It did not know how to build. Gurry has in his own politics evolved.
He didn't vote in 2016 or 2020, but he voted for Trump in 2024, and he's become much more positive about Trump this time than the first time. He's a visiting scholar at Mercatus, and he writes for the Free Press and Discourse and City Journal, among others. I watched him come to the view that actually maybe Trump is building something more stable and
Maybe this revolt of the public is not merely negation, but that what Trump and Musk represent and are doing is actually the creation of a positive agenda that might endure. So I also thought his argument was worth hearing out. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Martin Gurry, welcome to the show. Great to be here. So in 2014, you published this book, The Revolt of the Public.
Lay out the basic argument you were making about attention and media and publics.
Well, the argument of the book goes back to my days at CIA, where I was one of the least sexy jobs you could have. I was an analyst of global media, and it was a relatively straightforward job. I mean, you could—if the president asked you, how are my policies playing in France, you went to two newspapers that were considered, those sources, authoritative. That's what we called them, right? Right.
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Chapter 2: How has the digital revolution affected trust in institutions?
Around the turn of the century, this digital earthquake generated this tsunami of information that was essentially unparalleled in human history, all right? And there's numbers backing that up. And we just got swamped. The first response, of course, of somebody who deals with authoritative information is, what's authoritative in this? infinite mass of stuff.
The second part was, what's the effect of it? All right. What is the effect of going from a world where information is extremely valuable to one that is so abundant that you don't know what it's worth? And there was a tsunami of information that we could track it as different countries digitize. And right behind it, we could see ever increasing levels of social and political turbulence. Okay.
So the book It's trying to explain that. What became very clear was that our entire 21st century set of the institutions that hold up modern life, the government, the media, business, academia, were shaped in the 20th century. very top-down, very hierarchical, very I talk, you listen.
So what the internet did, what the digital revolution did, was essentially create the possibility of this gigantic information sphere that was outside of the institutions, all right? And it turned to the institutions, and the first one it turned to was your business, media, right? It was this big fight between the blogs and the mainstream media was the enemy, right? And
Sure enough, when that happens, you can find many errors and many mistakes and some bad faith in the institutions. And I think it's institutional failure and elite failure that sets the information agenda on the web. I mean, that's pretty clear.
It can be any number of things, but the total effect of that is a gigantic erosion of trust in the institutions, which then builds up this digital world that is non-institutional even stronger. Yeah. So it's kind of an inversion of what had gone on before. Before you had the Walter Cronkite of the world, very respected, most trusted man in America.
Think of a journalist such as yourself being voted the most trusted man in America today. It's not even a joke.
Give me time.
Okay, Walter.
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Chapter 3: Why did Martin Gurri change his political stance?
Well, all I can tell you is I see this as the application of the human AI mind to the analog world. And let's put the legality aside. It allows for the identification of things that can be cut way faster than the analog minds can follow. And I have to ask you, if you want to be an authoritarian, Are you going to cut back the government? I mean, let me tell you, I have lived under authoritarians.
Cutting back the government is not what they do.
See, but I don't think that they're cutting back the government. I think they are trying to take control of it. I have heard this AI thing from a couple of people, and I follow it closely, and I am open to the idea that one thing Elon Musk wants to do is bring AI into the federal government. I am not super open to the idea that that's what Doge is doing.
Now, for one thing, like with the word efficiency, it's always efficiency for what? AI for what? Every AI system has some kind of value function, some kind of prompt you have to be giving it. The question of the prompt is really then the important question. Like, yes, you could, in theory, unleash AI on the entire range of Treasury payment data. What are you trying to get it to find?
If you're trying to get it to find fraud, fine. How is fraud defined? Like, what do you say is fraud? I don't even think really, to be honest with you, that's what you think they're doing. Like, you wrote a good piece, I think just not from my perspective, about why you thought it was good that they were getting rid of USAID. What was that argument about?
My take on USAID is that, what was the point of it? What was the point of it? And you look at a lot of the programs that were doing it, there clearly was no point to it. They were trying to find some point of it. We give aid, what do we give aid for? Well, in the old days, yeah, it was, you know, we fought the commies and if we could bribe some government or some movement or something,
to fight the communists along with us. We didn't care how corrupt that was. It was good. Now they're on our side. But now we're not in that kind of a world anymore. So these people are not sophisticated thinkers of what to do with government mission. And what you were saying, which is to what end, is the ultimate key, all right? So I am with them so far.
but because the government is just such a monstrous bloat that honestly what they're doing is fingernail bearings. But to what end? Do any of these people in the Trump administration have an image in their minds of once we've taken the government and we squeezed it and we broke it and we reshaped it, and now it's going to do... What? And I am not sure. I have not seen that anywhere.
Some maybe marginal people to the Musk minions. There's this sub-sec person, mysterious, called Echo. I don't know if you've read his stuff, E-K-O. He's sort of like as close to an ideologist. and maybe this is a fantasy world, but he persuades you that with AI, the president has basically the entirety of the government becomes intelligible.
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Chapter 4: What are the perceived dynamics of free speech under different administrations?
And if you lose the mantle of reform, I think it's very hard to win in American politics.
Today, for a fact, and I think that's true on both sides. I think there is a core of people who have, because just of the accident of fate that the Democrats, or even more the Democrats, the anti-Trumpism has been identified with pro-institutionalism. There's a core of people who then will stand up. I mean, there was a... There was a woman, as I said, Ubered here.
There was a woman standing in a street corner here in Washington with a sign that said, God bless the federal workforce, you know, just standing there with that sign, right? So, you know, God bless her. I was one of them. But honestly, the vast majority of Americans at the level of the publics or the various mosaics want reform, want change, want against, right? They are not for the institutions.
They have no faith in them. So I would say that For the Democratic Party to regain its mojo, I mean, what they need is, what is it that they would like to change to bring government, this enormous construct, modern government, this enormous, towering, daunting construct down to the level of a human being? How do you humanize that thing, right?
In some bizarre way, that's what Trump is trying to do without thinking about it very much. But the Democrats aren't even thinking.
Here's what I worry about with Trump. I mean, among many things, I have many worries about Donald Trump. But one is that the ways humanizing it is through himself. And you were saying earlier this question of for what? What is at the end of all this breakage? What steady state are they trying to achieve? I found the Eric Adams thing extremely, extremely alarming and telling.
Because here's a guy who is under investigation for what appear to be pretty clear acts of corruption. He's a Democratic mayor, right? He's not somebody who Donald Trump needs to be loyal to.
And it seems like what they saw was the ability and frankly what Eric Adams saw was the possibility that if he would signal to Trump that he would pledge allegiance, he would be in Trump's pocket, Trump would take the heat off of him. When I look internationally, I see a sort of similar thing.
You know, the countries that are willing to tell Trump he's great and show they're on his side, be that Russia or anybody else, they can get the deal. And if you're not willing to do that, you can't get the deal. The thing on the other side of this is patronage, is a personalist regime where what you do doesn't matter. What matters is who you pledge fealty to.
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