Reddit reviews The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Martin Gurri has some thought provoking answers to this in The Revolt of the Public: The Crisis of Authority in the New Millenium. He argues that social media and other new interactive 21st century information technologies constitute a sea change of similar caliber to the arrival of the printing press. Across the world, the new technologies make it relatively easy for ordinary people to both find damning information about elites, get the word out, and spontaneously organize. This, Gurri argues, is a huge change from just 30 years ago, when the relatively meager information, communication, and organizing resources available to the public made it much less likely that they would challenge those in authority.

Gurri points to a broader pattern than just populist nationalism — easy to see in some of the examples you cited — in which politics is increasingly against. Even those who get elected (He actually argues Trump and Obama are part of this same phenomenon!) cast themselves in the role of David struggling against the Goliath evil elite establishment. In an era in which it’s become cheap and easy to crucify elites, those who make everything about that which they oppose gain an advantage. And those who instead speak clearly about what they stand for expose themselves to an entire internet full of people/actors who would love to take them down, no matter what they stand for.

I'm reading a book called The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium that predicts more protest of this nature, and in some ways predicted Brexit and Trump.

The basic idea is that the Elites (Governments, institutions, people, etc.) used to be able to control information, so that narratives that attacked their legitimacy weren't able to be spread. With the advent of the internet there are too many sources of information to control.

Information is subversive of any narrative - even if the narrative is true. As more information becomes available, one can find examples and evidence to disprove any narrative. So as the amount of information available approaches infinity, one can find just about as much evidence to support a narrative as there is evidence to refute it. At that point, we are all susceptible to a charge of "cherry picking" our data (observation bias) to create a false narrative and everyone has their own truth based on the facts they chose to incorporate.

To further aggravate the problem, the public has a bias toward nihilism. It's much more attractive for the public to be against something than it is to be for something. Most of the protest have a firm grasp on the problems they want to attack, but there is less agreement on how the problems should be solved. We are way to quick to tear down when we don't have a suitable suggestion on what to build to replace.

So to sum it all up, the information age causes us to question the legitimacy of our elite institutions, and we have so much information that we can create a narrative to prove virtually any point. Because the public tends toward Nihilism, we should expect the public will use the information to tear down our institutions without being able to offer any realistic replacement or alternative.

Scholars have published about this effect.

His book: https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143/ -- it is on LibGen as well.