Let a Thousand Mussolinis Bloom

You can skip David Brooks entire column, with its habitual Cleaverisms and pining for some Atlantean age of Anglo-Protestant ascendence and Jim Crow responsibility and social cohesion, because when heated and boiled, the icky sediment that remains is just three words in the penultimate sentence: crisis of authority. And that is where the steaming bullshit meets the sawdust. The crisis of authority is the failure of authority, not the failure of our authorities, to be solved by reconstituting the same authorities in different arrays and formats, but the failure of Authority in . . . well, David, in a philosophical sense. Good god, I feel like erstwhile dominatrix and Marlboro spokesmodel Ayn Rand for saying so, but authority is anti-life. Authority is coercion, whether it is the city council or the sense of the Senate. The reason that people hate and distrust it is that it fails to enrich their lives. It circumscribes choice in the name of all kinds of security, but life feels no less precarious because of it. It's opaque and incomprehensible. Its institutions are of a deliberately inhuman scale. There is no social compact. For all the still-mouthed platitudes about participatory politics, people understand that they have no choice in the matter. We don't get to negotiate this contract. There's no mutuality. Crafting some new gaggle of distributed, "decentralized" dictators is not a solution to a category error.