Depending on your politics, the monsters are everywhere. Perhaps you see them in the form of tech billionaires and the artificial intelligence they’re developing. Perhaps you see them in the bin fire of social media they bequeathed us before that, or the legacy media that refuse to tell you “the truth”. You might see them in the manosphere, or the institutions teaching our kids gender fluidity. Maybe you see them in the migrant youth wielding machetes in the suburbs, or the refugee attempting to behead someone on a Belfast street. Or perhaps you see them in the violent anti-immigrant mobs that torched houses in response. If so, you’ll likely see them in the March for Australia or the Unite the Kingdom rallies, organised by far-right groups but attended by many more besides. You’ll almost certainly see them in at least one of Hamas, Israel or those local advocates at each other’s throats over the Middle East. I suspect you’ll see them in Russia but that can no longer be assumed. And I’d guess that you’d see them in at least one political party with a significant share of the vote.
Something in that paragraph probably outraged you. In which case, you’re probably seeing monsters in whoever sees different monsters from you. It would be easy here to make a point about polarisation. But I want to look at the deep disquiet that lies underneath.
Within the commotion of our times – Trump or wokeness or Zohran Mamdani’s stunning win in New York – is a common verdict that the conventional order has failed. It cannot be reformed, or tweaked to fulfil its purpose. It is more that the promises it made have been fundamentally broken, that it is simply incapable of delivering the good life. Perhaps it never was, perhaps it can no longer – the flavour of the rejections vary but the terminus is the same. The disillusionment does not stem from the sense that we’re going through a rough patch or that conventional wisdom isn’t delivering. It’s that it can’t deliver.
Speaking to the Monthly about inflation and the cost of living, the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, says “all of these rolling shocks for 20 years have been cumulative. And every time it feels like ordinary people are going to get off the mat, something else arrives.” It’s a perceptive diagnosis, but to describe things more fully it needs to acknowledge that these rolling shocks span the economic, social, political and cultural realms.
Consider even a cursory list … September 11 and the “war on terror” placed security front and centre. The 2005 London Tube bombings raised the spectre of homegrown terrorism, triggering all sorts of social anxieties. Wars in Afghanistan and especially Iraq revealed the limits of western military power and undermined trust in governments that either imagined or invented weapons of mass destruction. Then came the urgent awareness of climate change, which variously evoked existential dread and threatened to phase out entire industries on which depend economies and communities. Soon followed the global financial crisis, which caused millions around the world to lose their homes and life savings and revealed the edifice of our global economy to be more a house of cards than a cathedral. Then came Islamic State, reviving the spectre that began the century in the crudest, most brutal form. Next, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump – both previously unthinkable, both smashing all manner of orthodoxies, thrilling or terrifying according to taste.
The dust hadn’t even settled when Covid-19 arrived, shuttering economies and lives, inflicting psychological torment, radically expanding state power. It drove us into isolation and on to our phones, where we argued over lockdowns and masks and vaccines – seeding growing suspicion of authority, whether political or medical. Social media became ever more present and polarising. Covid abated but inflation took off. Then Hamas slaughtered Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, and Israel annihilated Gaza in response with relative impunity, yielding unfathomable human suffering that ricocheted through cyberspace and into visceral local antagonism in societies around the world. Trump was re-elected and launched a trade war on the world which he called “Liberation Day”. Then, in Australia, came Bondi. And while all this was happening, artificial intelligence emerged exponentially, developing faster than we could comprehend and threatening everything from swallowing up jobs by the million to unleashing killer robots.
Broad, deep, relentless. And what matters most is the compounding effect: a near-constant sense of crisis in almost every sphere of life. It is not something likely to be finessed with policy. At a certain level, this isn’t even about policy any more. Take immigration, perhaps the issue most clearly associated with One Nation. It’s true that Pauline Hanson’s supporters think immigration is too high, but this hardly sets them apart: up to 60% of Australians agree. More instructively, in the words of Redbridge’s Simon Welsh, “there’s a massive chunk of One Nation voters that immigration isn’t particularly important to”.
“It’s not ideological, it’s not about moving right, it’s not even necessarily about policy,” Welsh says. “They’re coming across because it is the vehicle for this fury that is directed towards the major parties because of this very long sense of neglect and social economic disempowerment that has become so profound.” It’s not that this brand of politics offers no doctrines. It does, gathering around stronger borders, a bigger military, a dismissal of climate change and a rejection of political correctness. It’s just that the doctrines are not the main game. The aim is not a policy win. It’s to break the system.
There have always been those of us who think the past was better or the future will be worse. But in our lifetimes they have been the curmudgeonly exception – nostalgics and Luddites, mostly ignored while everyone else got on with things. Now they’re the majority. In their experience, the pandemic isn’t a low point in our lives, it’s merely a way station on a path of terminal decline. It turns out most of us no longer believe in progress.
When people stop believing in progress, it quickly becomes a crisis for societies like ours. Our political order was built on the promise of expanding wealth and greater control over our lives. It said we could dream big, then pursue those dreams, and that if we didn’t achieve them, maybe our children would. It assumed each generation would live longer and be more comfortable. Partisan combatants might have labelled themselves conservative or progressive, but both made this same fundamental offer. The conservative-progressive divide was mostly about the best way to deliver constant improvement and who was best equipped to do so. There might be winners or losers. There might be the odd speed bump or correction, but the direction of travel was clear.
As disillusionment sets in, there is no shortage of culprits. One possibility is to tell a story about capitalism, which generates gaping inequalities and destroys the planet. This becomes primarily a tale of economic pain and survival anxiety, which is why the roots of the populist right are in the working class. Another story blames the depredations of the internet: the torrents of misinformation and disinformation, the incessant polarisation, the unleashing of extreme hate-filled rhetoric that has us holding each other in contempt while we collectively lose our minds. There’s truth in both these accounts but I suspect they pull up short. Beneath them lies a master concept so fundamental we often don’t stop to name it: liberalism. What’s most fundamentally changing is people’s relationship with this underlying philosophy.
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Liberalism defines almost our entire social and political order in the west. Much of this is institutional: a free press, an independent judiciary, the separation of powers, governments hemmed in by constitutions, the sovereignty of the people. Some of it reflects philosophical commitments: individual freedom as the foundation undergirding specific freedoms of speech, association, conscience, religion and trade; a belief that government rules by the consent of the governed and that all citizens are equal. And the overarching character of this arrangement is clear: less hierarchy, fewer hang-ups, fewer social mores, more and easier diversity. A world of choice, and ever-proliferating choices. And, taxes aside, it’s progress without sacrifice or serious restraint. Each individual person pursuing their individual dream would make life better overall.
The various modes of upheaval we’re seeing – conservative, progressive, victorious and vanquished – are all reactions to liberalism, often explicitly. Understanding them all as “post-liberal” allows us to make at least some sense of the chaos we’re seeing. It also helps us assess whether and to what extent liberalism now finds itself in a state of disrepair. Post-liberal thinkers clearly think that case is closed. Occasionally, they declare liberalism – the old world – not merely dying but already dead. I’m not convinced of that. But I do think liberalism is in trouble for reasons it often fails to understand.
Normally, the term “post-liberal” is applied to conservatives, because many conservative critics of liberalism have themselves used and embraced the term – think the US vice-president, JD Vance. And while woke politics comes from a different place again – a radical strand of postmodernism – it attacks liberalism’s tensions and contradictions no less stridently. That is why we experience several of these movements as radical. Monsters, if you like. That’s why it probably feels like the world is ending. But if anything is ending, it’s a particular version of the world that has broadly held sway in western democracies since the end of the second world war and had been developing for centuries.
