By Mark Kenny

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

WE’VE been hearing it now for years. The persistent right-wing complaint about political correctness is that it incentivised victimhood and spawned a progeny of identity politics.

Like when a hard-right male backbencher hit back after rolling a female frontbencher for the safest position on South Australia’s Liberal Party senate ticket.

“The gender card is nothing but a grievance narrative,” explained an unrepentant Alex Antic. He said feminism’s victim status had no basis in social reality and was instead a fad of an “activist media and a disgruntled political class”.

In general terms, this “class” can be taken to include ‘establishment’ parliamentarians, journalists, creatives, economists and educated professionals within the knowledge economy.

In other words, not merely left-leaning progressives, but big business, big health, big media, big science. Corporate do-gooders and academically trained social justice “warriors”.

Now, however, the tables have turned and things in the victim-claiming stakes are getting murkier than the river Seine.

On the populist right, an eruptive victimhood has become central, both to working class identity and electoral strategy.

The new, ‘legitimate’ grievance? That a hegemonic social and economic market-based consensus has betrayed ordinary working-class people - folks whose jobs have disappeared at the hands of what the American political commentator David Brooks calls “the creative destruction of modern capitalism”.

Originally conceived along class divisions between capital and labour, orthodox right and left parties are ill-suited to this new binary which frames politics as a contest between insider elites and a big majority of “forgotten” outsiders. The white working class.

Writing in the New York Times last week, Brooks noted that “across the Western world, right wing parties have ceased to be parties of business elites and have become working-class parties”.

“MAGA (Make America Great Again) is the worldview that accords with this shifting reality”.

Peter Dutton is getting with the zeitgeist. Since assuming the leadership, the defiantly suburban Queenslander has been consistently pulling his erstwhile business-based Liberal Party away from southern capital sensibilities. “I’ve said repeatedly that the modern Liberal Party is the friend of the worker … we’re not the party of big business, and I don’t pretend that we are” he said late last year.

Whether you agree with them or not, Dutton, Antic and their ilk are speaking effectively to a self-describing movement of anti-elite, even anti-intellectual nostalgia rising within most liberal democracies.

This tide is coming fast. It was only desperate eleventh-hour sandbagging by bickering centrist and leftwing parties in France a fortnight ago, which saved that country from Marine Le Pen’s extremist and xenophobic National Rally (for now).

In America, a populist surge is assuming tsunami-like proportions.

To Australian eyes and ears, the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee was crass and counterfeit. Its happy-clapping zeal and unsubtle evangelical allusions to an Earthly second coming by its flawed saviour, rang comically hollow.

Yet to the GOP’s MAGA devotees, these Old Testament allusions were supported by observable fact: a fabled third nomination, an inevitable second presidency and, on the eve of the convention, a real-world resurrection. It was a miracle that Donald J Trump survived, and yet here he was to lead them out of the woke morass of migrants and multiculturalism, transgendered toilets and befuddling pronouns.

And if you remained unconvinced, he was there to lay it all out in the first person, like a boasting teenager recounting a heroic story to his transfixed younger siblings.

He'd been crucified figuratively by the left-liberal press, impeached (twice) by his enemies, hounded by false allegations and convicted by “radical left Democrat-aligned” courts.

And when that didn’t stop him, an assassin gave it a shot for real. Through it all, he’d suffered for them. Taken a bullet for them.

“They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you,” Trump told them, ignoring the absurdity of a self-declared bully-billionaire representing the poor and most marginalised.

His journey to the nomination convention was a script that would have strained credulity in the trashiest airport novel, yet Americans had witnessed it with their own eyes. Fierce critics crumbled in the face of his power, desperate for the Messiah’s favour. Nikki Haley had called him unhinged but now kissed the ring. Ditto Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz and countless others.

So transformative was this redemption-saviour parable, that even among the most pious Christian moralists, it cleansed this slum landlord’s feet of the squalid iniquity he’d spent a lifetime treading through.

So dismissive of orthodoxies was it that it became trite to marvel at how the favourite for the White House is a jury convicted fraudster who fomented a deadly insurrection at the Capitol after the last election.

In any other democracy, this alone would render a candidate ineligible.

Eight years ago, Trump was a vulgar gate crashing ex-Democrat donor who stole the Republican nomination. Now, no less vulgar, he owns them all – his many critics, either purged, cowed or seduced.

Of course it helps that Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden, lacked the self-awareness to plan for this eventuality. He, more than any Republican, has enabled Trump’s unlikely reprise.

The most devastating headline I saw in recent days was “Democrats in disarray as GOP unites behind Trump”. The way had been cleared for him. Thanks to Biden’s stubbornness, the advantage of incumbency had become a liability as the failing president’s credibility crashed.

Finally on Sunday, July 21, the 81-year-old Biden relented, but the way forward remains perilous for Democrats who must now decide whether to avoid an open contest for the nomination or agree to anoint VP Kamala Harris. This late in the game, each option is far from optimal.

It had been Biden’s age and state of decline which had rendered comparatively viable Trump’s own return. Now he may be unstoppable no matter who is the Democrats’ choice of candidate.

Trump’s pick of the 39-year-old protectionist-isolationist and bestselling author J. D. Vance as running mate has been widely lauded as strategically smart. Like Haley, Vance is a former “never Trumper”, turned fawning acolyte.

Now he’s in line to be the GOP’s next populist miracle – rising from “hillbilly” to White House.

That’s as long as he doesn’t outshine the King – which many think he will because Vance is far better educated, more telegenic, more organised and perhaps even more ambitious than his boos in his lust for power.

On paper, their previously untested duumvirate looks inherently unstable. If Trump’s past working relationships are any guide, big ructions are certain. Keep your eye on that seismometer.

In the immediate term though, Vance has come to heel as obediently as the rest of the party and nobody inside the show questions his conversion. Indeed, Republicans are uncommonly united and have surged ahead in the polls – a position they have not enjoyed in any July of an election year since George W’s winning campaign of 2000.

Perhaps we should not be so surprised at this open duplicity. As the TV cameras panned across the gleefully gullible audience in Ohio, it seemed every second face was surgically altered. Many with confronting effects. Yet few baulk at this narcissistic subterfuge.

Like in no other modern culture, presentation in evangelical America is a game of mutual deception embraced with equal verve by presenter and viewer alike. Fake hair, fake teeth, fake tan. It works because they want it to. It works because the object of the exercise is not merely to convince, but to show you care enough, and earn enough, to try. The parallels with the mutualised theatre of World Championship Wrestling were patent even before Hulk Hogan stepped up to tear off his tee-shirt and introduce “my hero”.

These gawdy theatrics help explain the believability of a conference which so frontally eschews policy discussion in favour of uncool rockstars and giddy lines of wet terracotta complexions, back-lit teeth behind widened smiles, and permanently delighted eyebrows.

In a culture which refuses a mature reckoning with maturity itself, flip-flopping from sworn critic to pious disciple becomes its own kind of virtue. A form of revelation as quintessentially American as apple pie, born-again Christianity, and being simultaneously pro-life and pro-gun.

Somehow the Canadian singer Leonard Cohen described this more than 30 years ago in his classic song, “Closing Time”.

“And I lift my glass to the Awful Truth
Which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth
Except to say it isn't worth a dime, And the whole damn place goes crazy twice
And it's once for the devil and once for Christ”

Many around the Western world worry that a second Trump ‘coming’ might be “closing time” for American democracy too.

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