How hope can be thwarted
There is a familiar but crass social media reaction that accompanies the death of someone famous, if that person has been out of the limelight for some time. To be blunt, it is a variation on ‘‘I didn’t know that person was still alive’’.
We saw a lot of that this week after former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev died in Moscow at the age of 91, and the reaction was fairly understandable. He was a figure of world-historical importance but for a fairly brief time and with mixed results.
There has been plenty of reckoning with his legacy and there will be more to come. The short version might say he ended the Cold War but destroyed his country in the process. The sense from obituaries is that he was a great Russian leader, but not for the Russians. He made the world safer by dragging his country back from the very serious threat of nuclear war. Despite the failures of economic reform and the chaotic decade that followed his resignation in 1991, he will be remembered as standing for an idea of hope and the possibility of change.
At the most basic level, his political career is a lesson in how easily hope can be thwarted and change reversed. That the former leader who deconstructed the
Soviet Union’s military ambitions died just as Russian President Vladimir Putin is undertaking a brutal war to rebuild a lost empire is a savage irony lost on no-one. But for a time, an unsafe world was made safer. It seemed as though freedom and democracy might triumph. The victory of freemarket liberalism over other forms of government was hailed as the end of history. That was a shortlived delusion.
The New York Times reported last month that democracy is under threat across the globe and the trend is accelerating. The paper cited a Swedish monitoring institute called V-Dem whose 2022 report found ‘‘the level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2021 is down to 1989 levels’’, and ‘‘the last 30 years of democratic advances are now eradicated’’.
Liberal democracies peaked a decade ago, with 42 countries. That has dropped to 32. Meanwhile, dictatorships now control 70% of the world population, or 5.4 billion people.
Right-wing populist leaders in
Turkey, Hungary, Brazil, the Philippines, India and Poland were among the case studies.
Even established democracies are threatened by the new wave of extremist, nationalist populism, as US President Joe Biden explained in a speech in Philadelphia that pitched the ideological gulf between liberal, democratic traditions and ‘‘MAGA Republicans’’ as nothing less than an existential battle for the soul of the nation. Biden appealed to reason and a shared history. It was telling that a speech about polarisation was quickly written off as polarising by the same rightwing media forces it was trying to reach.
In both the US and the UK, populism has endured like a weed that cannot be eradicated. Its leaders seem impervious to shame. In the UK, departing Prime Minister Boris Johnson has not ruled out an attempted return to the top job. In the US, former president Donald Trump said he would consider pardons and apologies for those involved in the January 6, 2021, attack on the
Capitol if he is elected again.
We could yet see the return of the political narcissists.
Perhaps we need to go deeper than talking about ‘‘ideologies of hate’’ or ‘‘rivers of filth’’, whether the location is Washington or Wellington, and think harder about why people turn to populism, or are fooled by scapegoats, fake news and easy solutions. Demonisation, or talk of one’s fellow citizens as ‘‘deplorables’’, doesn’t help.
What are the real-world causes? Economic insecurity may not be the main driver of populist thinking, but it plays an important part and is easily exploited. After all, the disastrous decade that followed Gorbachev’s heroic but failed reforms led directly to Putin, who at least promised economic stability.