By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

With the world beset by deepening inequality and displacement, you might expect the “left” to compose a compelling change narrative of reform and renewal.

An acknowledgement that three decades of neoliberal tinkering has left some with no house of their own while others have acquired several – all concessionally taxed. 

Inspiring progressive options could include a reimagining of the very role of government, redrawing the tax and transfer system with ideas like a universal basic income, the inclusion of dental treatment in Medicare, and a visionary plan to kick-start a wave of prosperity through fast economy-wide decarbonisation.

How about a genuine “education revolution” in which the poorest public schools are brought up to excellence and vast new investments are made in higher education and R&D?

Why leave it to the far-right to capture imaginations? Across Europe, the Americas, and in Australasia it is the hardliners on the right expounding dramatic change and lending voice to those feeling left behind.

It is a perverse truth that when change is desperately needed, the right is stepping up and getting brasher, whereas the left – even where it holds office – has become defensive, proceduralist, boring.

Increasingly, conservatives have stopped sounding conservative. And erstwhile radicals have stopped being brave. This could be fatal. In these attention-fractured times where rhetoric and facts duke it out for airtime, the worst thing you can be, far more so than being rude or wrong, is boring. 

Yet that is where parties like the ALP, British Labour and America’s Democratic Party have steered. Consequently, voters are inclined to see them as part of the problem, defenders and adjusters of a discredited status quo.

It is now the right which seeks to tackle establishment power and provide hope – or more accurately, revenge – with its counterfeit promise to dethrone cosmopolitan elites and take back the country.

Even their constituencies have largely been swapped. Donald Trump’s Republican base is determinedly blue-collar and his pitch, seems firmly anti-establishment (despite his own obscene wealth and shady billionaire donors).

This repositioning explains the allure of the right in Georgi Meloni’s Italy, Christopher Luxon’s New Zealand, as it did the popularity of Boris Johnson.

It may also explain support for Peter Dutton next year because, make no mistake, his strategy involves flipping Labor voters, not chasing votes his party lost to the Teals in 2022.

In 2023, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the observable deterioration of the user experience on big-tech social media platforms. They start out well and then become “shittier” as advertising and algorithms corrupt their reach and stifle their initial promise. He originally identified “enshittification” in TikTok but the process is common now to all, especially ex-Twitter owned by the execrable Elon Musk.

Across the nominally liberal world, the political equivalent to enshittification might be the hard right’s project of “ensmallification”. This is the narrowing of horizons and the withering of human capacities for compassion, expansion, and diversity. It involves the rejection of the international in favour of the national, and frequently, in favour of an “authentic” nation as defined culturally and ethnically. A frightened world with strong borders and weak ethics.

In France, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany, ultra-right parties which have toiled away on the margins through successive elections, have suddenly secured major slices of the popular vote – invariably by spruiking populist anti-immigrant policies in language unutterable just a couple of years ago.

The times have come to suit them.

When French President Emmanuel Macron called a snap election for the National Assembly in June, French voters evacuated the middle, leaving Macron friendless. He was forced to compromise with leftwing parties to close out Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in the second round.

In Austria just days ago, the Freedom Party led by the far-right fantasist Herbert Kickl secured a chart-topping 29 per cent of the vote putting him in the box seat to govern although the current Chancellor Karl Nehammer has ruled out a deal with someone who subscribes to “conspiracy theories”.

Tellingly, voters aged 35-59 had been among those “most likely to back the far right, and marginally more women than men” according to early analysis reported by the BBC.

During the campaign, Kickl thought nothing of reviving a term used in neighbouring Germany in the 1930s (by another Austrian) to brand himself the “Volkskanzler” or “people’s chancellor”.

Immigration and refugees were the dominant themes of the contest with the Freedom Party pledging to scrap the right to asylum and even to revoke the citizenship of those whose words or actions rendered them undesirable.

In state elections in Germany last month, the anti-immigration AfD or Alternative for Deutschland triumphed in Thuringia – the far-right’s first such win since WWII – and came a close second in Saxony. 

This feels epochal, because it is. The idea of an internally borderless Europe created after the horrors of the 20th Century is one of the great advances in human affairs.

Now, it is crumbling with the territorial invasion of Ukraine and member states including Germany re-instituting border controls amid public concerns of being swamped by Muslims, Africans and others.

"The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time,” the British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey had remarked on the eve of WWI in 1914. 

It is easy in Australia to miss the extent to which Trump’s message repeated at rally after rally channels this fear of migrants. The former president who used his 2017 inauguration speech to warn of “American carnage”, has become even angrier and more aggressively racist in his 2024 re-election bid.

Trump’s stump speeches refer to American cities as “hell-holes” as he openly blames migrants for making them “a crime-ridden, gang-infested terror-filled dumping ground” which are “full of blood-thirsty … savage gang members” who will enter homes and “slit your throat” or “shoot you” where you buy your bread.

On it goes. Peter Dutton’s language is mild by comparison. So far. But he is not above a spot of dog-whistling against African gangs, Lebanese Australians, Palestinians, and the Chinese.

Such divisiveness in rhetoric and policy does not come from nowhere. It reflects what these political figures are picking up from constituents.

The public mood is bumptious, impatient and unsettled. Electorally, this is not a good time for incumbents. 

To survive in 2025, Anthony Albanese’s first task is to win the attention of disillusioned blue-collar voters by showing them he has exciting plans for a fairer, bolder, and happier Australia.

In the mid-1920s and well before its first electoral successes, the mastermind of propaganda, Dr Joseph Goebbels, deliberately staged brawls and riots to attract newspaper notoriety for the fledgling Nazi party. “Berlin needs a show like a fish needs water,” he observed cynically.

There was no downside.

A century later, few understand this lesson more consequentially than Trump, who sprouts obvious lies and risible exaggerations explicitly because they spark liberal media outrage and bring him enormous free exposure. He has admitted this.

This is what centre-left governments are up against. 

In a world where fiction and fact, entertainment and politics, so easily bleed into each other, offering a marginally better version of the status quo is a movie that will only play to half-full cinemas at best.

Meanwhile, the beer halls across main street will be overflowing.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.