Peak polycrisis? Why Trump’s midterm drubbing gives us reason for cautious hope |
For the better part of a decade, reading the news has felt like watching a pile-up in slow motion. A pandemic. Wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan. A cost-of-living squeeze that never quite eases. Wildfire smoke settling over Canadian cities. And the climate numbers keep setting records nobody wanted: according to the EU’s Copernicus service, 2023 to 2025 was the first three-year stretch to average more than 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels.
Scholars have a word for this tangle of overlapping, mutually reinforcing shocks: the polycrisis. It’s an accurate and exhausting word.
Read more: ‘Polycrisis’ may be a buzzword, but it could help us tackle the world’s woes
So let me say something in the aftermath of the midterm elections in the United States that may sound naive. I think we may have passed peak polycrisis.
Not because the problems are going away. Most of them will get worse. Climate change does not negotiate, wars do not end on schedule and the next pandemic is a question of when. What I think may have peaked is something else: the political dysfunction that made all of this so much harder to govern.
A long view of bad times
Humans have always lived with shocks they did not choose. Plague, famine, war, depression. What has varied across history is whether societies could pull together to manage them. The institutions built after the Second World War in 1945 were not designed by people who thought the world was safe. They were designed by people who had just seen how bad things could get and decided co-operation was worth the trouble.
That capacity to work together is precisely what’s eroded over the past decade. Right-wing populism spread across........