Decades of spectacle and technocratic excess produced publics turning against their elites.

Evidence

One of the first to classify the new movements of the 2010s as a form of antipolitics was the French legal historian Jacques de Saint Victor. In 2014, he saw in Beppe Grillo’s rise as the sign that a “new chapter seems to be turning in the history of our democracies.” “Twenty years of ‘politics as spectacle,’ mockery and technocratic excesses,” Saint Victor argued, “have produced an aggrieved populace who, whether hyperactive or apathetic, out of protest or sheer disgust, are turning above all against their elites … whom they accuse of having betrayed and abandoned them.” — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 185

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Elite ideological battles can pass almost unwitnessed by mass publics — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 1970