2026 – About Potatoes and Pitchforks
We are entering a period in which multiple systemic crises intersect rather than unfolding one by one, and the usual crisis jargon falls short. Overlapping conflicts, tight energy markets, deteriorating social contracts, national debts leaving little room for maneuver, and an agricultural sector teetering on the brink of a perfect storm. This is not a single emergency that can be managed by a single agency. It is a polycrisis, and it comes at a time when the Western world is arguably the least equipped to respond. The institutions that should be coordinating the response have been hollowed out. The public trust needed to call for shared sacrifices has vanished. What remains is a landscape of fragmented authority, depleted reserves, and a population that believes the leaders do not understand the physical world they are supposed to govern.
Even more than the energy crisis that dominates the headlines, agriculture and food could ultimately be the spark that sets the world ablaze. Rising costs for fertilizers and energy, coupled with a predicted “Super El Niño” later this year, will disrupt harvest cycles on multiple continents. Hunger likely awaits many who have never experienced it before, writes Ashes of Pompeii .
This occurs in a situation where the political class has largely squandered the credibility it had (inexplicably) still retained. Popularity ratings are at a historic low, and that decline extends across party lines. Nor is there any credible opposition ready to take over. The old political machinery has lost its connection to daily life and functions more like closed ecosystems than representative bodies. Political parties operate outside or above the communities they are supposed to serve, and governance has become an exercise in internal maneuvers rather than problem-solving. That vacuum has been filled by a different kind of currency: networks, patronage, and the ability to navigate bureaucratic corridors. Real competence, the kind that builds things, maintains infrastructure, and understands material systems, has been sidelined. The result is a leadership group that may be adept at managing internal relations and virtual perceptions, but is completely incapable of dealing with physical reality.
This gap between management and materiality is deep. Many of today’s leaders rose through the ranks in an environment shaped by MBA logic, where success is measured in quarterly reports, presentations, and optimized spreadsheets. In that world, a problem is solved by allocating a budget, renaming an initiative, or restructuring an organizational chart. But rules in an Excel sheet are not reality. Pixels on a screen do not grow wheat, repair transformers, or refine fertilizer. Raising a food security budget makes no sense if the agronomists, transportation networks, and energy to run irrigation systems are no longer there. You cannot manage a physical shortage with a financial instrument. Yet that is precisely the toolkit with which so many decision-makers have been trained. The result is a management class that can talk fluently about strategy but remains baffled when a port runs aground, a harvest fails, or the power grid falters.
The erosion of practical knowledge extends to education. Graduates are increasingly leaving school without basic skills, and enrollment in STEM fields has declined in much of the West. Meanwhile, countries like Iran now produce as many STEM graduates as the United States. This is not just a statistic. It points to a shift in who will possess the technical knowledge needed to sustain complex societies. At the same time, the legal system is being dragged into political conflict. Lawfare is now routine in both America and Europe, and is used to harass opponents, delay policy, and wear them down. This tactic discredits the judiciary and invites escalation, turning courts into a new front in the culture war rather than a neutral arbiter. Despite the lawfare, some of the targets will come to power – Trump is the prime example of this. And it is to be expected that those who were prosecuted or indicted in the past (depending on your perspective) will use similar tactics in the future. That is not a good sign for governability in the future.
Trust has been eroded elsewhere as well. The media landscape has fragmented into competing narratives, each claiming authority while losing the trust of the public they purport to inform. People have retreated into separate information ecosystems, making it nearly impossible to establish a shared reality. When media institutions that were once widely trusted present matters as facts that can be demonstrated as untrue or highly misleading with a few simple mouse clicks, all credibility is lost.
Without agreement on the basic facts, coordinated action becomes inconceivably difficult.
Meanwhile, economic stagnation and the erosion of industry have widened the gap between those in a secure position and those in a precarious situation. Poverty and inequality are at generational highs. Record levels of debt mean that the old way out—spending our way out of trouble—is largely closed off. But even if the money were available, the underlying problem remains: money is no substitute for capacity. A leader trained to view budgets as levers might not understand that you cannot allocate resources to a product that simply does not exist. If the fertilizer plant is idle, if skilled technicians have retired, if the energy for production is unavailable, no fiscal stimulus will conjure it up. Whereas a crisis like that of 2008 was financial, the basis of the current crisis is physical.
All this raises a difficult question. How do you navigate a complex emergency situation when you cannot agree on exactly what the emergency is, let alone who should take the lead in the response? Sacrifices are inevitable. Supply chains will become tight. Living standards will decline. Hard choices will have to be made regarding resource allocation. Yet, the traditional path of democratic consensus, in which leaders explain the threat, a large part of the public accepts temporary hardships, and everyone moves forward together, is simply not available. The trust required for that social contract has been exhausted. Expecting unity under these circumstances is not only naive; it distracts from the work that actually needs to be done.
If consensus is no longer feasible, if financial instruments cannot create physical capacity, and if those responsible have never had to demonstrate that they can do more than merely steer public perception, what remains? We are left with a series of acute problems and a governing class that lacks the credibility, the skills, and the shared factual basis to address them. The polycrisis does not wait for our institutions to recover. It is progressing according to its own timetable. The first question is not how to solve it. The question is how to start at all, if precisely the mechanisms for collective decision-making have failed. Sacrifices will have to be made, but how do we decide what, who, and where, if we cannot agree on what is real, or on who has the right to ask?
In 2008, President Obama said the famous words to a group of CEOs of ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions: “I am the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.” This time, there is no one, nothing, that, when it comes down to it, could defy the pitchforks. Is 2026 finally the year of Obama’s pitchforks? In the meantime, we should put them to good use to plant potatoes; they might still come in handy this coming winter.
https://www.frontnieuws.com/2026-over-aardappelen-en-hooivorken