Why do democracies seem so fragile in the face of shortages?

Within days of the commencement of the war that has enveloped the Middle East — and that continues to severely disrupt global energy supplies — a familiar pattern began to emerge in some of the world’s most prosperous democracies. Much as they did at the outset of the pandemic, people began stockpiling. Then, it was toilet paper and food; this time, it’s fuel. In cities across Australia, long lines formed outside petrol stations and tensions flared as motorists seized their opportunity to fill not just their cars, but jerry cans as well.Since then, the fears that motivated this behaviour have only heightened as the war goes on, petrol prices sharply rise and “not in use” signs appear on petrol pumps. The federal and state governments have already introduced measures designed soften the economic blow of significantly more expensive fuel. And while the prospect of rationing fuel reserves remains some distance away — at this stage, at least — the Prime Minister is nonetheless urging Australians not to use “more fuel than you need”.It is nonetheless telling that the mere possibility of fuel rationing has seemingly sent a chill down the nation’s collective spine. The prospect of government restrictions on petrol is tailormade to the exacerbate the underlying conditions of distrust, division and resentment, and to make the parties who are most adept at harnessing that resentment, that distrust, more attractive still.There is something here that is eerily reminiscent to the popular backlash to US President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech to the nation, with its modest request for voluntary sacrifices in the face of a similar energy crisis:“And I’m asking you for your good and for your nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense — I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”Carter’s exhortation proved wildly unpopular then, and there is every reason to wonder whether similarly voluntary measures would be politically costly now.This presents us with a dilemma. We’ve long known that liberal democracies are averse to sacrifice, and that the basest yet most effective commentary on federal budgets divides the population into “winners” and “losers”. We know that economic growth is the precondition of political stability. Does this mean that liberal democracy is, fundamentally, a politics for times of prosperity? Is the corollary, then, that, during times of scarcity and sacrifice, the majority of the electorate revert to being populists?For John Rawls, one of the defining features of a society dedicated to “justice as fairness” is the agreement among citizens to bear each other’s burdens, “to share one another’s fate”. The challenge, then, is how to inculcate those just dispositions — we could call them the habits or virtues constitutive of democratic morality — such that, during times of scarcity, we do not turn habitually to fear, envy and self-interest. For when that happens, citizens soon become competitors, and neighbours become threats.There is every reason to believe that intermittent energy crises will be a feature of our common future. If our social commitments are this fragile in times of prevailing prosperity, what will become of them in the face of shared hardship?Guest: Melanie White is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales.

One of the words we use to describe political authority gone wrong is "autocracy": which is to say, the concentration of power in a unitary figure who then exercises that power without countervailing constraints and for its own sake. To borrow an expression of St Augustine, autocracy is a form of political authority that curves in on itself.Because most citizens have a clear sense that governance ought to be for something beyond political self-interest or naked self-enrichment, we rightly take a dim view of politicians who are unmoved by the interests and opinions of their constituents. But, of course, only tyrants are prepared to present themselves as wholly disinterested in the lives of those over whom they rule.Autocrats don't claim to be in it for themselves; they typically insist that they represent, serve and fight for "the people" — but "the people" politically defined as those who truly belong to the nation, those who build and contribute, those who are loyal and patriotic. In short, those who can be encompassed by the political pronouns "us"/"we". Accordingly, autocrats also claim to be defending the nation and its interests against "they"/"them", who have no part or place in the nation's life and are therefore no voice in the conversation of politics.What is corrupting about autocratic rule, then, is not simply that it is "corrupt" in the conventional sense of using the affordances of political office for private gain. Rather, it is the way autocracy throws off the basic constraints that define political authority in a representative democracy, and thereby betrays its character.In democratic life, we are constantly being reminded of the contingency of political authority and its fundamental accountability. When autocratic power lays claim to the necessity of an unconstrainted mode of executive decision-making — most often in the face of some "emergency" which suspends the normal functioning of democratic scrutiny — it corrodes the conditions of democratic life, precisely because representative democracy reveals what political authority really is: contingent, correctable and inherently contestable.As George Kateb writes in "The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy": “political authority is suspect when undivided and thus untroubled by antithetical voices … when it moves too easily or takes shortcuts to accomplish its ends, or when it prevents appeals and second thoughts, or when it closes itself off in secrecy or unapproachability.”It is no stretch, then, to say that autocracy is a politics of contempt. It is contemptuous of deliberation and mutual accountability; it is contemptuous of expertise and the constraints of precedent; it is contemptuous of any notion that the source of one's legitimacy could be extrinsic to one's own self. Which is why, ultimately, autocracy is a form of contempt for the people.It is for this reason, perhaps, that autocracy depends so much on the aesthetics of power: spectacular performances of force mask the lack of substance beneath, designed as they to eliminate accountability and overwhelm deliberation.This episode of The Minefield was recorded in front of a live audience at Customs House in Brisbane as part of the University of Queensland's "Dialogues Across Difference" event series.Guest: M Gessen is an acclaimed and multi-award winning Russian-American journalist, author and activist, known for their influential writing on authoritarianism, human rights and LGBTQ+ issues — most notably in their columns for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and their books Surviving Autocracy and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

One of the words we use to describe political authority gone wrong is "autocracy": which is to say, the concentration of power in a unitary figure who then exercises that power without countervailing constraints and for its own sake. To borrow an expression of St Augustine, autocracy is a form of political authority that curves in on itself.Because most citizens have a clear sense that governance ought to be for something beyond political self-interest or naked self-enrichment, we rightly take a dim view of politicians who are unmoved by the interests and opinions of their constituents. But, of course, only tyrants are prepared to present themselves as wholly disinterested in the lives of those over whom they rule.Autocrats don't claim to be in it for themselves; they typically insist that they represent, serve and fight for "the people" — but "the people" politically defined as those who truly belong to the nation, those who build and contribute, those who are loyal and patriotic. In short, those who can be encompassed by the political pronouns "us"/"we". Accordingly, autocrats also claim to be defending the nation and its interests against "they"/"them", who have no part or place in the nation's life and are therefore no voice in the conversation of politics.What is corrupting about autocratic rule, then, is not simply that it is "corrupt" in the conventional sense of using the affordances of political office for private gain. Rather, it is the way autocracy throws off the basic constraints that define political authority in a representative democracy, and thereby betrays its character.In democratic life, we are constantly being reminded of the contingency of political authority and its fundamental accountability. When autocratic power lays claim to the necessity of an unconstrainted mode of executive decision-making — most often in the face of some "emergency" which suspends the normal functioning of democratic scrutiny — it corrodes the conditions of democratic life, precisely because representative democracy reveals what political authority really is: contingent, correctable and inherently contestable.As George Kateb writes in "The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy": “political authority is suspect when undivided and thus untroubled by antithetical voices … when it moves too easily or takes shortcuts to accomplish its ends, or when it prevents appeals and second thoughts, or when it closes itself off in secrecy or unapproachability.”It is no stretch, then, to say that autocracy is a politics of contempt. It is contemptuous of deliberation and mutual accountability; it is contemptuous of expertise and the constraints of precedent; it is contemptuous of any notion that the source of one's legitimacy could be extrinsic to one's own self. Which is why, ultimately, autocracy is a form of contempt for the people.It is for this reason, perhaps, that autocracy depends so much on the aesthetics of power: spectacular performances of force mask the lack of substance beneath, designed as they to eliminate accountability and overwhelm deliberation.This episode of The Minefield was recorded in front of a live audience at Customs House in Brisbane as part of the University of Queensland's "Dialogues Across Difference" event series.Guest: M Gessen is an acclaimed and multi-award winning Russian-American journalist, author and activist, known for their influential writing on authoritarianism, human rights and LGBTQ+ issues — most notably in their columns for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and their books Surviving Autocracy and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

The Minefield helps negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictions and complicities of modern life.

One of the words we use to describe political authority gone wrong is “autocracy”: which is to say, the concentration of power in a unitary figure who then exercises that power without countervailing constraints and for its own the sake. To borrow an expression of St Augustine, autocracy is a form of political authority that curves in on itself.Because most citizens have a clear sense that governance ought to be for something beyond political self-interest or naked self-enrichment, we rightly take a dim view of politicians who are unmoved by the interests and opinions of their constituents. But, of course, only tyrants are prepared to present themselves as wholly disinterested in the lives of those over whom they rule.Autocrats don’t claim to be in it for themselves; they typically insist that they represent, serve and fight for “the people” — but “the people” politically defined as those who truly belong to the nation, those who build and contribute, those who are loyal and patriotic. In short, those who can be encompassed by the political pronouns “us”/“we”. Accordingly, autocrats also claim to be defending the nation and its interests against “they”/“them”, who have no part or place in the nation’s life and are therefore no voice in the conversation of politics.What is corrupting about autocratic rule, then, is not simply that it is “corrupt” in the conventional sense of using the affordances of political office for private gain. Rather, it is the way autocracy throws off the basic constraints that define political authority in a representative democracy, and thereby betrays its character.In democratic life, we are constantly being reminded of the contingency of political authority and its fundamental accountability. When autocratic power lays claim to the necessity of an unconstrainted mode of executive decision-making — most often in the face of some “emergency” which suspends the normal functioning of democratic scrutiny — it corrodes the conditions of democratic life, precisely because representative democracy reveals what political authority really is: contingent, correctable and inherently contestable.As George Kateb writes in “The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy”: “political authority is suspect when undivided and thus untroubled by antithetical voices … when it moves too easily or takes shortcuts to accomplish its ends, or when it prevents appeals and second thoughts, or when it closes itself off in secrecy or unapproachability.”It is no stretch, then, to say that autocracy is a politics of contempt. It is contemptuous of deliberation and mutual accountability; it is contemptuous of expertise and the constraints of precedent; it is contemptuous of any notion that the source of one’s legitimacy could be extrinsic to one’s own self. Which is why, ultimately, autocracy is a form of contempt for the people.It is for this reason, perhaps, that autocracy depends so much on the aesthetics of power: spectacular performances of force mask the lack of substance beneath, designed as they to eliminate accountability and overwhelm deliberation.This episode of The Minefield was recorded in front of a live audience at Customs House in Brisbane as part of the University of Queensland’s “Dialogues Across Difference” event series.Guest: M Gessen is an acclaimed and multi-award winning Russian-American journalist, author and activist, known for their influential writing on authoritarianism, human rights and LGBTQ+ issues — most notably in their columns for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and their books Surviving Autocracy and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

One of the words we use to describe political authority gone wrong is “autocracy”: which is to say, the concentration of power in a unitary figure who then exercises that power without countervailing constraints and for its own the sake. To borrow an expression of St Augustine, autocracy is a form of political authority that curves in on itself.Because most citizens have a clear sense that governance ought to be for something beyond political self-interest or naked self-enrichment, we rightly take a dim view of politicians who are unmoved by the interests and opinions of their constituents. But, of course, only tyrants are prepared to present themselves as wholly disinterested in the lives of those over whom they rule.Autocrats don’t claim to be in it for themselves; they typically insist that they represent, serve and fight for “the people” — but “the people” politically defined as those who truly belong to the nation, those who build and contribute, those who are loyal and patriotic. In short, those who can be encompassed by the political pronouns “us”/“we”. Accordingly, autocrats also claim to be defending the nation and its interests against “they”/“them”, who have no part or place in the nation’s life and are therefore no voice in the conversation of politics.What is corrupting about autocratic rule, then, is not simply that it is “corrupt” in the conventional sense of using the affordances of political office for private gain. Rather, it is the way autocracy throws off the basic constraints that define political authority in a representative democracy, and thereby betrays its character.In democratic life, we are constantly being reminded of the contingency of political authority and its fundamental accountability. When autocratic power lays claim to the necessity of an unconstrainted mode of executive decision-making — most often in the face of some “emergency” which suspends the normal functioning of democratic scrutiny — it corrodes the conditions of democratic life, precisely because representative democracy reveals what political authority really is: contingent, correctable and inherently contestable.As George Kateb writes in “The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy”: “political authority is suspect when undivided and thus untroubled by antithetical voices … when it moves too easily or takes shortcuts to accomplish its ends, or when it prevents appeals and second thoughts, or when it closes itself off in secrecy or unapproachability.”It is no stretch, then, to say that autocracy is a politics of contempt. It is contemptuous of deliberation and mutual accountability; it is contemptuous of expertise and the constraints of precedent; it is contemptuous of any notion that the source of one’s legitimacy could be extrinsic to one’s own self. Which is why, ultimately, autocracy is a form of contempt for the people.It is for this reason, perhaps, that autocracy depends so much on the aesthetics of power: spectacular performances of force mask the lack of substance beneath, designed as they to eliminate accountability and overwhelm deliberation.This episode of The Minefield was recorded in front of a live audience at Customs House in Brisbane as part of the University of Queensland’s “Dialogues Across Difference” event series.Guest: M Gessen is an acclaimed and multi-award winning Russian-American journalist, author and activist, known for their influential writing on authoritarianism, human rights and LGBTQ+ issues — most notably in their columns for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and their books Surviving Autocracy and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

It’s like déjà vu all over again. After launching a devastating but limited series of strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and against the nation’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists in June last year, the United States and Israel recommenced hostilities against Iran at the end of February.The objectives of this ‘war’ are similar — to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities and remove the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic regime — but its implementation is more thoroughgoing, more open-ended, more uncontainable, and more problematic in terms of its basis in international law.There is near consensus among international law experts that the US-Israeli attacks on Iran come in violation Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. And yet neither the United States nor Israel seem interested in justifying their actions in terms of their legality (unlike their “middle power” allies, who are intent on using the language of “collective self-defence”). In its place are assertions of power, of unassailable might, of moral legitimacy, of “good and evil”, of an “intolerable threat” posed by Iran.The casual way that international law has been cast off in the conflict that is spreading across the Middle East raises pressing and pertinent questions about the moral considerations that undergird international law itself.Guest: Tamer Morris is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, where he focusses on international law, United Nations peacekeeping and international humanitarian law. You can read his penetrating article on the illegality and (il)legitimacy of the Iran war on ABC Religion and Ethics.

If there is something inherently suspicious about political appeals to “the heart” — which is to say, attempts to exploit unreflective prejudices and reactive emotions — then it is also true that a form of politics that is unresponsive to heart-felt appeals to a common humanity, to compassion, to decency, is dangerous.How can we maintain the precarious balance between a politics that trades cheaply on emotion, and one that both comes from and appeals to the heart?Guest: Christos Tsiolkas is the author of eight novels — Loaded, The Jesus Man, Dead Europe, The Slap, Barracuda, Damascus, 7 ½, The In-Between — and the short story collection, Merciless Gods. He is a playwright, screen writer, essayist, radio host and currently a film critic for The Saturday Paper. In September last year, he delivered the 2025 Ray Mathew Lecture at the National Library of Australia, on the topic “Fence-Sitting”.

Over the course of this Ramadan series, we are exploring the contours of a cardiocentric conception of the moral life. The notion of the primacy of the heart goes back three millennia: it finds expression in the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, and in the philosophy of Aristotle; it pervades the pages of the sacred texts and subsequent traditions of Judaism and Islam — and even now, its remnants persist in our everyday speech, as if to remind us of an older wisdom.In this broader conception, the heart is a kind of physio-spiritual organ which, at once, coordinates the body’s movements by providing its orientation within and opens the person to moral realities without. A central feature of “the heart”, then, is its capacity for moral responsiveness. The heart is not all there is to the moral life — there is moral reasoning, and there are moral obligations — but it may not be a stretch to say that “the heart” is the moral life’s indispensable element. In a hadith, Muhammad is reported to have said: “There is a piece of flesh in the body if it becomes good the whole body becomes good but if it gets spoilt the whole body gets spoilt and that is the heart.”Last week, we touched briefly on the fear that is often expressed in Islam of the heart being “sealed off”, rendered impervious to divine wisdom or moral appeal. Within the Jewish tradition, this fear is expressed in terms of the heart being “hardened” (literally “toughened” or “strengthened”). In both traditions, this condition is most particularly associated with the figure of the Pharaoh of Egypt (see, for instance, Exodus 7:13, 22; 8:16; 9:24; Qurʾān 10:88). He is not, and cannot be, responsive to the divine appeal — and for that reason, he is damned.Because the worst thing that can happen to a heart is for it become hardened, Pharaoh acts as a cautionary figure (see Deuteronomy 15:7). Through his repeated refusals, his heart toughens to the point that it grows impervious — at which point, his heart is given over to what is called in the rabbinic tradition “the evil impulse”. As Rav Assi puts it in the Talmud (Sukka 52a): “At first the evil impulse is as thin as a spider’s gossamer, but in the end it is as thick as a cart-rope.”It is unsurprising, then, that in the we often find prayers in the Jewish tradition (which characterises prayers themselves as “work of the heart”) asking to be kept from having a “hard heart” and to be granted “an understanding heart” — literally, a listening or responsive heart).In a time like ours, when the temptation to refuse or fail to see others as fully human — as making some claim on our sympathy, our compassion, as requiring from us some hesitation — is everywhere apparent, what would it mean to cultivate an “understanding/responsive heart”? What can we do to avoid a “hardened heart”?Guest: Avril Alba is Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation at the University of Sydney.

Sometimes the language we use every day, often unthinkingly, contains within it traces of a much older wisdom. Consider the phrases “I’ve changed my mind” and “I’ve had a change of heart”.The first thing to notice is activity described by the verbs: one is something that we do — as the result of learning new information, or having experiences that alter our values or view of the world; the other is something we undergo, something that happens to us — we see something we couldn’t see before (as though the light shines differently upon it, as Wittgenstein would say), or the same person or phenomenon evokes a different feeling from us.Perhaps it’s accurate to say that changing one’s mind is like taking a different path or going in a different direction, whereas having a change of heart is more like changing one’s compass bearings. But does that mean we are simply passive when it comes to such a reorientation of heart?In this Ramadan series, we are examining what we’re calling the cardiocentrism of the moral life — which is to say, the vital importance of cultivating the inner disposition of what we most often call “the heart”: the faculty which stands for both our inner-most selves, and that which makes us receptive to moral realities or truths outside of ourselves.The heart can act as a kind of moral compass which responds to moral realities we’d prefer to evade or avoid. Consider the pivotal moment in J M Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, when the eponymous character responds to demands for reasons or “principles” that would ground her horror in response to the mass killing of animals for food: “I was hoping not to have to enunciate principles”, she says. “If principles are what you want … I would have to respond, open your heart and listen to what your heart says.”So perhaps we can’t change our hearts, but does this suggest it is incumbent on us to maintain a certain “openness” or sustained “exposure” to moral realities we’d rather ignore — and that such openness is a precondition for undergoing a change of heart?Guest: Claire Zorn is the multi-award-winning author of five novels and the author/illustrator of two picture books. Her most recent book is Better Days.—UPCOMING LIVE RECORDINGWhen: Tuesday, 10 March 2026, from 1:45 pm to 3 pmWhere: Customs House, The Long Room, Brisbane City, QLD“The Aesthetics of Power: Why Authoritarianism Needs Spectacle”As democratic norms erode around the world, the performance of political power has become increasingly theatrical. From militarised displays to orchestrated media moments, authoritarian movements rely on spectacle to project stability, legitimacy and inevitability.In partnership with the Brisbane Writers Festival and as part of the University of Queensland’s Dialogues Across Difference series, this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield brings together acclaimed journalist and New York Times columnist M Gessen with co‑hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens. Together, they will explore why modern authoritarianism depends on spectacle — and how aesthetics shape the public imagination and the conditions of democratic life.Attendance is free, but registration on Eventbrite is essential.