Democracies, Dr. Putin Will See You Now
An "88%" landslide for a tyrant is yet another wake-up call
A noted sustainability expert told me recently that he had been very surprised, when reading my book Green Swans, to see that I had included democracy in my trio of systems needing disruption. Our three challenges, I wrote, were to transform Capitalism, Democracy and Sustainability. But anyone in any doubt that democracy now has a problem, worldwide, isn’t paying attention.
We have been in a “democracy recession” for some time, according to Freedom House. Indeed, you can see a repeating pattern across the Capitalism, Democracy and Sustainability realms. It tracks back to an insight suggested by the economist Hyman Minsky.
In so-called “Minsky moments,” we lose control of our financial systems because investors come to expect that the money world will continue in rude good health regardless of what inane risks they take based on that assumption.
Now the evidence suggests that we see similar dynamics in the realms of Democracy and Sustainability. It takes an existential shock to rediscover that our assumptions do not reflect—let alone constitute—wider reality.
Given that Putin, who has been in power for 24 years, had banned any criticism of himself and of his war, had blocked opposition candidates from running, and had his most powerful opponent, Alexei Navalny, eliminated in prison, it hardly needs saying that this was in no sense democracy as the wider world understands it.
As the Financial Times puts it this morning, “a fifth term for Putin is a threat to Europe, and the world. Not for the first time in Russia’s history, repression at home is running hand in hand with a more belligerent policy abroad.” The paper also notes that Putin has also squandered the opportunity to channel the country’s gushing revenues from fossil fuels into the modernisation and diversification of the economy.
As I pack my bags to fly to Brazil, where I am due to speak at the South Summit event in Porto Alegre later in the week, I am pondering the growing risk of what I dubbed an incoming “sustainability recession” when I spoke at the annual Ecovadis event, Sustain, in Paris last week.
My point was not that our change agenda is about to slam into reverse for the foreseeable future, but that the wider economic, social and political contexts mean that we have to reinvent sustainability on the fly.
In his victory speech, Putin slammed the U.S. version of democracy, saying: "This (US) is just a catastrophe, not a democracy—that's what it is." In comments thought to be referring to the multiple court cases against Donald Trump, Putin jeered: "Is it democratic to use administrative resources to attack one of the candidates for the presidency of the United States, using the judiciary, among other things?"
Grim though these latest tidings are, at least Putin—who there world now seems stuck with, at least theoretically, for another six years—has done us all a favour by forcefully reminding us of the vulnerability of the political systems which so many of us take for granted. Systems, too, which provide our only longer term chance of tackling the interlinked challenges of the geological epoch which the world’s scientists once again recently decided not to call the Anthropocene.
In the end, perhaps it doesn’t much matter what we call it. A growing array of Minsky moments will disrupt and corrode our sense of reality. As a result, growing numbers of us will wake up to the urgency of transforming not just capitalism but also the sustainability agenda.
Then, in turn, we may finally understand the multiple ways in which democratic systems must now be rebooted if we are to have any hope of making sense of the new scientific paradigm—in which one species, our own, dominates the planet, but has yet to understand the full implications.