It’s been a bad year for rogues and disruptors. Long may it continue

The biotechnology fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is sentenced to 11 years in prison. The Supreme Court orders Donald Trump to hand over his tax returns to Congress. The West, inspired by the resilience of the Ukrainian people, finally takes a meaningful stand against Vladimir Putin. All are part of the same evolving narrative: an attempt to reassert a rules-based economic order, a rules-based democratic order and a rules-based international order.

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood-testing start-up Theranos, came to personify the “fake it till you make it” ethos of Silicon Valley, which raised a middle finger to corporate orthodoxy. Trump has trashed democratic norms, believing he could not only defy the physics of politics but remain beyond the reach of justice. Putin has continually flouted international law. All end the year weaker than when they started it. Indeed, 2022 has been something of an annus horribilis for disrupters, rule-breakers and rogue players.

2022 has been a bad year for disruptors.Credit: Fairfax

The backlash against Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is part of the same story. Many of those migrating to rival platforms such as Mastodon are simply tired of crazy. Perhaps the failure so far of Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse to capture the public imagination is a rejection of the creed that powered the rise of Facebook: to “move fast and break things”. Previously beneficiaries of the Zeitgeist, Musk and Zuckerberg now look more like its casualties. The prevailing mood is for steadiness and solidity.

Something similar is happening in the currency markets, where crypto has crashed and the dollar has become a safe haven. The greenback has risen in value against other major currencies by nearly 20 per cent since the start of the year, while Bitcoin has plunged by about 70 per cent from its peak last November. Then there is the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which began the year valued at $40 billion and ended it filing for bankruptcy. So much, then, for crypto ousting the dollar to become the reserve currency of the new age. Investors prefer the reliability of the old.

The markets killed off the prime ministership of Liz Truss after she unveiled an economic plan centred on mammoth unfunded tax cuts that violated numerous articles of fiscal faith. In this moment of freakoutonomics, as the pound plummeted and the cost of government borrowing soared, traders demanded rule-abiding rectitude.

Boris Johnson’s subsequent resurrection campaign, aimed at returning him to Downing Street only weeks after his ignominious departure, failed because the parliamentary Conservative Party viewed him as too much of a chaos merchant.

Too much of a chaos merchant? Madame Tussauds marks Boris Johnson’s victory in the London mayoral election by giving him a post-party makeover in 2012.Credit: AP

In the US midterm elections, the overarching message from voters was that they were weary of mayhem. “Big lie” true believers, who propagated the Trumpian myth that Joe Biden stole the presidency, were roundly rejected. The Republicans’ worse-than-expected performance was correctly diagnosed as Trump fatigue.

While much of the coverage inevitably focused on the success of his potential rival, the Florida governor Ron DeSantis, it is worth noting that the Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, achieved an even bigger landslide. DeWine’s victory is germane because he has built a reputation on being boring – as his lack of name recognition underscores.

Trump and his MAGA movement are not dead and buried. Yet his prime-time presidential announcement fell flat and the Republican Party now looks less like a cargo cult. There was a symmetry, then, in Musk’s decision to allow Trump back onto Twitter. Both this disruptive former president and disruptive social media platform look like they are in decline.

Over the last decade, nostalgic nationalism has been a big driver of populist politics. It leant resonance to Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again. It provided much of the impetus for Brexit. My sense, though, is that nostalgic nationalism may be giving way to nostalgic normalcy: a yearning for a more stable time when the world does not seem to be hurtling towards hell in a handbasket.

This nostalgic normalcy is evident on both sides of the Atlantic, from Mar-a-Lago to Margate. Not only is Trump on the nose, as the UK economy has plunged into recession, polls suggest that Britons are experiencing record levels of buyer’s remorse over Brexit.

Australia is part of this global story. At the 2022 federal election, voters sacked Scott Morrison partly because they didn’t much care for his small “t” Trumpian truth-twisting. His secretive multi-ministerial power grab provoked so much outrage because it so flagrantly violated democratic norms. In an excoriating report released last week, the former High Court justice Virginia Bell described his appointment to additional ministries as “bizarre” and “corrosive of trust in government”.

In contrast to Morrison, Anthony Albanese has become an unexpectedly reassuring presence in The Lodge. His deliberative and unhurried approach seems to chime with voters. Nor is it insignificant that Albanese is renowned in Canberra for his encyclopedic knowledge of parliamentary procedure. Here is a prime minister who places a premium on orderly process and rules, which is why his decision to move a motion censuring his predecessor over the secret ministries scandal cannot simply be cast as a crude partisan play.

New order: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with his dog Toto at The Lodge in Canberra.Credit: Fairfax

Normal is not about to dislodge abnormal as the global paradigm. The liberal order is under too much stress from Putin, China and Trump. Populism, as the far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently demonstrated in Italy, is not a spent force. Part of the reason why the tumble of global events is so frightening is because of the fear of even greater economic, environmental and geopolitical dislocation. Yet at least the year is ending on a mildly encouraging note. In this world of disorder, rules evidently still matter. Hopefully, the moment is ripe for leaders who move slowly and mend things.

Nick Bryant is a senior policy fellow at Sydney University.

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