By Mark Kenny

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

A depressing feature of the post-truth polity is the way words are brazenly flipped to mean the opposite.

In politics viewed through the looking glass, things are reversed. The Voice becomes racism, anti-transgender and anti-abortion campaigners become the feminists.

In the US, the same Donald Trump who pressured electoral officials to “find” him the necessary votes, denied the national election result, and then fomented a deadly insurrection, is the saviour of democracy.

When Peter Dutton delivered his tawdry negation of the referendum question, he claimed it was because the “Prime Minister’s Canberra Voice” would divide Australians. Dutton would re-unite them.

Let’s be clear, these were all lies. It is neither the PM’s Voice nor a Canberra Voice. It is a Voice ‘to’ Canberra, not ‘from’ or ‘in’ Canberra. Misrepresenting for political advantage, this product of exhaustive ground-up consultations over years, and agreed in the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, is deliberately divisive and grotesquely dishonest.

Having walked out on the Apology in 2008, and skipped the introduction of the referendum bill, Dutton has now walked out on First Peoples all over again. And walked out on an historic chance of a harmonious national future.

He did this knowing the Voice is backed by a clear majority of Australians but regarding this support as a soft consensus. One able to be wrecked with fear. All so he can claw back ground from Anthony Albanese.

His method, gleaned directly from Trump and like-minded authoritarians, is to declare himself the great unifier, while feverishly dividing Australians. It may be brazen and hypocritical but Dutton is nothing if not attentive.

Facing multiple counts of business fraud, Trump told his cult base (AKA the Republican Party) that had the Department of Justice and FBI not colluded to protect the “criminal” Bidens, he would have won in 2020.

“It would have been in our favour, not my favour, our favour, because our country is going to Hell” he told devotees gathered at Mar-a-Lago, the tasteless site of an FBI raid last year to recover top secret documents.

“The only crime I’ve committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it.”

As he so often does, Trump casts himself as the persecuted one – the victim of “millions of votes illegally stuffed into ballot boxes and all caught on government cameras”. His supporters lap up this infantile and contradictory patois as if they too face possible jail time.

Behold the terminal phase of democratic decay where reason, evidence, logic and objectivity lose their purchasing power against an emotionally charged victimhood felt by vast swathes of the population and packaged back to them by a cynical demagogue. Up becomes down, truth becomes lie. Facts are twisted or ignored in a self-serving confidence trick plain to some, yet invisible to others.

In Australia, the hard right adopts the same approach.

At rallies against transgender rights, bigots parade t-shirts declaring “let women speak” – declaiming themselves the true feminists, the only real advocates of women.

They maintain this bilious charade even as neo-Nazi man-boys prance about at their rallies doing Hitler salutes in their dinky black outfits with their faces hidden.

“Why do you hate women,” organisers chime back at any critics of this shallow dishonourable theatre.

By smugly appropriating terms they abhor, (feminism, democracy, liberalism) adherents bask in the cheap satisfaction of turning mainstream society’s “elitist” lexicon against it.

This crude inversion is at the heart of claims that a constitutionally enshrined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice would create “black apartheid” in Australia.

Consider an uncorrected sample of the Twitter responses to those questioning Dutton’s motives:

“No future in an apartheid state” declared one trenchant opponent.

A further anonymous soul came up with “Racism is not the future. Don't be an enabling coward. The Voice is racist.”

Always prominent in such discourse is the reliable taunt, if-you-don’t-like-it-leave: “I'm sorry you don't agree with a decision not to support Racism or Apartheid. Perhaps go to South Africa?”

“This Voice is Racist & would set us back 200 years in Relations with each other!” asserted another. There were many, many, more.

This is how dog-whistling works. Dutton benefits from such absurd arguments without the risk of having to express them so crudely himself.

He gains from the sheer bluntness of it even though nobody who bothered to understand the undiluted evil of Apartheid would ever draw such a comparison.

Neither can the Voice be branded racist - a pejorative term exclusively used to describe discrimination (usually systematised) by a dominant group over less powerful persons based on skin colour, ethnicity, or cultural/religious heritage. Racism is about power. Always.

As a nation founded on violent dispossession for which it has not atoned, compensated, nor even adjusted its Constitution or flag, Australia already does racism. Addressing that reality is not racism, but rather, a step towards ending it.

When someone called MrMagoo1900 writes “Our future is racism? I hope not. Vote No to Racist Voice,” we see how close we are to falling through the Trumpist looking glass.

At least some Liberals see the danger, even if nobody with any seniority has been prepared to put their career at risk.

Should we be surprised at Dutton’s brash unchallenged authority? The installation of the LNP’s hard man was always a perverse response to the centrist rejection of Scott Morrison’s reactionary Pentecostalism. Especially as Dutton was thought by colleagues to be unelectable in 2018 when he nominated.

Nothing has changed, except they have since handed him the keys. Hopes that he would temper his own ideology have been rudely dashed.

Said NSW Liberal moderate senator Andrew Bragg of his party’s humiliation in Aston: “There has been a tendency on the fringes to try and Americanise some of these culture wars here in Australia … and I think that has been nasty at times.”

Fred Chaney, a former Liberal leader in the Senate slammed the decision to block the Voice as “sad and pathetic” and as a “sell out” by people “desperately looking for political advantage”.

Amid those currently in Parliament, Bragg and fellow backbencher Bridget Archer stand out for their moral clarity.

History will judge Dutton’s “moderate” enablers harshly indeed.

Mark Kenny is a professor at the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.